258: Non-Beta Data
25 Jan 2018HomePod’s imminent release and the previews of iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4.
Episode Description:
- Follow up: Battery replacement reticence
- iOS 11.3 battery health messaging
- macOS Spectre and Meltdown fixes go back to El Capitan
- HomePod preorders and ship date announced
- iOS 11.3 preview
- tvOS 11.3
- macOS 10.13.4 and the end of 32-bit
#askatp- Unifying 3D Touch and long presses (via Todd Vaziri)
- What is AirPlay 2? (via Alex)
- John's spines (via Andrew Lymn-Penning)
- Post-show: BMW are money-grubbing jerks
Sponsored by:
- SRC, Inc: SRC is hiring digital, software, systems and test engineers. Explore your career options today.
- Betterment: Rethink what your money can do.
- Casper: Get $50 toward select mattresses with code ATP. Terms and conditions apply.
Chapters
- Follow-up: Battery replacements
- New battery-slowdown switch
- Meltdown/Spectre patched
- Sponsor: SRC, Inc.
- HomePod shipping shortly
- Sponsor: Betterment
- iOS 11.3
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- iOS 11.3, continued
- macOS 10.13.4
- tvOS 11.3
- #askatp: 3D Touch vs. long press
- #askatp: What is AirPlay 2?
- #askatp: Book-spine preservation
- Ending theme
- Casey’s New Year’s Complaint
Follow-up: Battery replacements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking the Mac Pro design speculation, that could be pretty much any time before WBDC probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time, every day is Mac Pro speculation day.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, f*** me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking too, like I probably, like we probably have done too much Mac Pro stuff recently so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we could use it like a few weeks break from that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should start with follow up. Peter Van Broekhoven has some thoughts about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s hesitation to do battery replacements. And he writes in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the reasons that they really don’t like to do battery replacements is that if they can’t get the battery out cleanly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then they’ll replace the whole phone, but they’ll do it for the cost of just that battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey replacement. So he said he had an older phone, I think he said like a 5S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, that he still was running on the original battery, went to the Apple store, he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked them to replace the battery, they botched it, and so he got himself a brand new 5S for 90 whatever dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or $30, whatever the cost is now. And that explains to me anyway, why they’re super reticent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be doing battery replacements unless they’re really sure it’s necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that, you know, even if you’re willing to pay, like, oh, you know, just take my money, I’m willing to pay for the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John replacement. It’s like, yeah, but this battery replacement could change from even from an $80 bill
⏹️ ▶️ John with the old price into something that costs Apple, you know, several hundred dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John to give you basically a brand new phone because they couldn’t get the battery out. But it could be argued, well, I have all your own stupid fault
⏹️ ▶️ John for making phones that you can’t get the batteries out of without destroying them. So maybe the next time you design a phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John make it easier to get the battery in and out. And they probably have, because he’s talking about a five S and there’s been many phones since
⏹️ ▶️ John then. And so designing, designing phones for serviceability is, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John something that Apple has been, I think it’s probably like an arc. Like the first ones were probably reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ John serviceable just because they were simpler. And then they probably got a lot less serviceable as they got
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner and more complicated. And I feel like now they’re going in the opposite direction of, yeah, we want to make them thin and
⏹️ ▶️ John compact, but also try to do the best we can for serviceability. So really Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, they’re just making problems for themselves. If they continue to make things that are always glued together and
⏹️ ▶️ John have little ribbon connectors that are all taped and glued on with adhesives that age and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything like that’s, that’s their own fault. So I feel like they have to either just eat this cost or do better
⏹️ ▶️ John about making serviceable phones because they’re the ones servicing them.
New battery-slowdown switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, we have some news about iOS 11.3, which we’ll talk about later. But one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that’s come out over the last week is that 11.3 will let users turn off the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance throttling. And I don’t really understand this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like if the choice is your phone spontaneously dying or just being very slow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll go with very slow. But I say this from the position of not really had a phone that’s gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this performance throttling. so maybe I don’t really understand how unbelievably unbearable the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throttling is. But regardless, 11.3 will add new features to show the battery health
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and recommend if a battery needs to be serviced. That’ll be found in settings battery and are available for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 6 and later. Furthermore, users can now see if the power management feature that dynamically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manages maximum performance to prevent unexpected shutdowns, which was introduced in 10.2.1 is on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they can choose whether or not to turn it off. This feature can be found in settings battery as well and is also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available from the 6 and up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is not a great fix to this problem or solution to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to users. It is possible that they needed to do it this way, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that off switch for some kind of legal or lawsuit or regulatory compliance reason. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten a lot of crap for this from a lot of different places, a lot of different countries, but just as a user experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a switch to let your phone randomly shut down seems very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco un-Apple-like and not a great experience. But ultimately, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seems like this is very much a like, you know, Steve Jobs, you’re holding your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 4 wrong kind of response from Apple. You want a free bumper? Fine. Take a free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve heard it from a lot of people. Why don’t you just give everybody a case?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, great. Let’s give everybody a case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like it there their general response and tone with this is not good that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interview Tim Cook gave It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the Steve Jobs tone don’t you think because he was actually pretty obnoxious and snarky and everything every communication
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen about this has been fairly Magnanimous and understanding he made the feature itself may
⏹️ ▶️ John seem snarky But I don’t think the communication has been Steve Jobs level you want a bumper fine. Here’s a free bumper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I thought the the the Tim Cook quote about it in that interview a few days ago was pretty bad
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, people not understanding yet. Tim Cook had a couple of statements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the media, but like… Honestly, Tim Cook should not talk to the media. Like, I really…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he does… I’m honestly, I’m serious. Like, he does not come off well in these kind of interviews.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whenever he’s asked anything of substance, it does not come off well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, usually his problem is that he’s just bland and doesn’t say anything, right? So that’s… But this is a rare case where
⏹️ ▶️ John he showed a little bit of teeth and was like, I just think maybe people just didn’t really understand or weren’t paying attention.
⏹️ ▶️ John attention. It was just such BS. Like that’s why he should not open his mouth. But most of the time it’s merely what he says
⏹️ ▶️ John has no new information and it’s just kind of platitudes. Right? So yeah, right. The platitudes one isn’t harmful. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s actually a good way to communicate with the people in those venues. It’s not like Apple fans, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like whoever is watching, you know, CNN or whatever, whatever, you know, news network he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on at that moment. I think that’s a fine communication. It’s boring. We’re not interested in it. And he’s not gonna say anything new.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, the snark shows little personality but not when he’s, you know, off base. But I think that the strangest
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of communication this actually started in follow up as a story about Tim’s communication and changed into now that
⏹️ ▶️ John we have the actual release notes for the 11.3 beta into, you know, more concrete story. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the the original story was, Tim Cook was on a new show. And yeah, he did his normal platitudes that he normally
⏹️ ▶️ John does just sort of saying speaking in generalities about stuff that close Apple followers already knew.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then he mentioned something about being able to turn off the battery throttling. And that’s not what Apple’s press release said
⏹️ ▶️ John like way back when when they talked about this the press release said oh we’re gonna have new battery information and you know all the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John but didn’t say anything about being able to turn it off so I was like is he like misremembering what they plan
⏹️ ▶️ John to do maybe they talked about having an off switch and he’s just misremembering it so it’s like no he’s much more controlled to that
⏹️ ▶️ John but then he’s like essentially breaking Apple news on a random cable news channel
⏹️ ▶️ John like he pre-announced features of the iOS 11 3 beta like a
⏹️ ▶️ John couple days ahead of time which is weird for Apple. So the original story was going to be, is he misremembering
⏹️ ▶️ John or is this a thing they’re going to do? But now the story is Tim Cook is breaking news about Apple on cable news
⏹️ ▶️ John shows which is weird. Well I mean I think that’s his
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah no it’s totally up but it’s definitely a change and it makes me wonder like is that like the new version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the controlled leak to the Wall Street Journal where they just send Tim out and tell him to say that? I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not the first time that an Apple executive has like broken some news in an interview like this that that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty clearly you know planned that way I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minor news is not big news but still honestly that is minor news I mean it like the big news was the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all the how they’re how they’re solving it in this various ways is fairly small news but I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though just going back to this to the the actual feature and solution here I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is quite enough what this is basically saying is if this is happening to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will now display that in this settings battery panel that nobody ever knows about or goes to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll display it there, and so you’ll be able to check there to see if it’s happening. That’s not good enough, because most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will never think to check there, or won’t know how to check there, or won’t, you know, like they just think my phone is slow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to buy a new one. So really, I think users need to be notified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way when their phone reaches a state in which this setting is turned on for them. And I tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this earlier, a lot of people misunderstood, I wasn’t clear enough. I’m not saying that like every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time the CPU gets throttled, they should get another notification. That’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be a lot of dialogue boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, what I’m saying is that at some point, when your phone has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reached some kind of metric as measured by the battery or whatever, at some point, this setting gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turned on for you without you knowing, that needs to be a user notification when
⏹️ ▶️ John And it might be like, to be clear, we don’t know that that’s not happened. Just the release notes just say that there’s a setting. For all we know, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a notification And there is a battery indicator in the status bar. Those things could both be true. They just, you know, might
⏹️ ▶️ John not merit mentioning here. So the only way, unfortunately, the only way we’ll be able to find out, unless there’s a way you can do this in simulator,
⏹️ ▶️ John is for someone to have a phone that’s on the threshold between like, they’ll go to the battery setting screen and they’ll say, ooh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m right on the border of where it’s gonna yell at me if they show some kind of bar graph or something, and then just abuse the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John until it crosses that threshold and see if you get an alert of any kind.
Meltdown/Spectre patched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in a surprising stroke of good news for John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your ancient cheese grater is running El Cap, is it not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is. And you got a little present recently. Tell me about this. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get it because I haven’t installed it, but Meltdown Inspector fixes have been backported all the way
⏹️ ▶️ John back to El Capitan and Sierra, and of course High Sierra, which is, I think standard. What
⏹️ ▶️ John they usually do is they backport it to a few recent versions. If you’re much farther back than that, you don’t get the fix.
⏹️ ▶️ John I almost don’t want to install the fix just so I can get that extra speed which I so desperately need in my 10
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco old computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this will push you over the edge. Yeah, but I haven’t installed it yet. But anyway, in case you’re wondering,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, the fix is backported. I already have the Safari update, which I feel like is maybe just as important
⏹️ ▶️ John because the main vector through which unknown software runs on my computer probably the web browser.
Sponsor: SRC, Inc.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco SRC is hiring digital software systems and test engineers, along with a slew of other positions.
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HomePod shipping shortly
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we got some news over the last few days. We’ve gotten some news about iOS 11.3, but we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about that a little later. But perhaps more interestingly, he says with little confidence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the HomePod has been officially, officially announced. It will start shipping on February
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 9th. The pre-orders will open, or I guess it’s not really pre-orders, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, the orders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will open this coming Friday, which at this point may have already happened by the time you’re listening to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we don’t really know a whole heck of a lot else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the kind of product that theoretically I should be excited about. Many of us, I think, should be excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. But it just seems like it’s had such a clumsy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release cycle and we know so little about it it’s really hard to get excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because it seems like it’s you know it’s coming out late and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some key features are not launching yet they’re coming you know later this year or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we still don’t really know much about it there’s still no reviews there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s been no like you know hands-on or anything there was a very brief press demo last last summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at WBDC when they announced it but it was extremely limited there was no speech it was just music playback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s some really big question marks about this product that we just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know yet. Now we could listen back to this in a few weeks when people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and it’s amazing and we could listen back to anything we say now and be like, lol they were so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong, we were so wrong, I can’t believe that we all thought this product would be weird or suck. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could turn out amazing, we don’t know yet. But it’s just weird that there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product that I think a lot of us thought would be a major product launch that is kind of just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stumbling out the door in this clumsy fashion and it’s going to launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incomplete. And it stayed on launch day. There are so many missing features and limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think the potential market for it is not going to be that big. Now over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they lift these limitations, we’ll see. You know, it’s probably going to get popular eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might not, but I think the chances are more likely than not that it will work long term.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just weird that it’s launching in such a clumsy fashion and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in such an incomplete state and I still question why it had to be announced last summer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t question it that much because this is a market that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is late to. Its other competitors, Amazon Echo was obviously the first, let’s all talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to our cylinder, And it was out there for a while before Google launched its clone. And
⏹️ ▶️ John now Google’s been out for a while. And finally, Apple handles. And those are the big three tech companies. And Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, took the longest to decide, yes, we’re going to make a cylinder that you talk to that connects
⏹️ ▶️ John to our streaming music service. And so everyone else has a big head start on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone else was shipping. A couple of companies have had multiple revisions and multiple products and diversified
⏹️ ▶️ John their product lines. Google has a big one and a little one now and an even bigger one that sounds fancy,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So other companies have not just done the product for longer, but I’ve had more revisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is a case where it just seemed to me that Apple, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is very often late to market, right? But in this case, Apple, it seemed like it felt self-conscious. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re late, but we want you to know that we are, we do want to compete in an argument, but we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John ready yet. So they had to like pre announce it. Now I think that pre, they didn’t expect it to be this late,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So you make your bet, you’re like, oh, we can announce this now, we think it’ll be ready, you know, not that
⏹️ ▶️ John long from now, like within the window of like reasonableness. But obviously they’ve missed that window and it’s pretty darn late
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point. And you know, how can it be late if they never told you exactly when it would be available? Just in terms of, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, practically speaking, if you have a such a limited pre-announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John of a product and then say nothing about it for like six months, it’s, that’s not good timing, it’s not good
⏹️ ▶️ John PR. You want to get people interested about a product and slowly dole out news building up to a launch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not show people barely anything and then don’t say anything about it for many, many months. That’s just bad PR.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why we say it feels like it’s late. If you had a choice, that’s not how you do
⏹️ ▶️ John a PR rollout. So why did they announce it so early? To me, my read
⏹️ ▶️ John on that is they felt pressure to
⏹️ ▶️ John get their foot in the market ASAP, put their quarter on the video game machine or whatever is I’ve got next right
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna be there and not just like in a vague way but here’s the actual thing we’re gonna ship it looks like this
⏹️ ▶️ John it sounds like this it probably does other things but don’t ask us now right and
⏹️ ▶️ John they had an opportunity to announce that and so they did and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is you know it’s a sign it’s an acknowledgement that Apple agrees with
⏹️ ▶️ John us that they are behind and late in this market versus a a more confident Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John that could say, yeah, other people have done stuff, but we think all the solutions they’ve done are crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John and we don’t feel any pressure to tell you that we’re going to enter this market. We’re going to show you our awesome thing
⏹️ ▶️ John when we’re ready to see it. It doesn’t matter how late we are. That’s the other strategy that could have taken and they have with many other
⏹️ ▶️ John things, but not with this, with this one, they said, we really feel like we need to tell you that we’re going to be in this market with this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So that is not a confident move. That doesn’t, that doesn’t project confidence
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. And what they had to demo was not like they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have anything to say or demo that knocked our socks off either. So it was kind of weird. And now,
⏹️ ▶️ John now that they’re going to roll this thing out, it’s like a major new product line
⏹️ ▶️ John that will end up rolling out without Apple ever having gone up on a stage and told us
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that this product can do. they went up on a stage and told us very limited things about this
⏹️ ▶️ John product, specifically about the audio, but not much else. And then many, many
⏹️ ▶️ John months pass. And then here’s the product, right? And people will get you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews, I’m sure there’ll be reviews coming out of the thing around lunchtime or whatever. But never did Apple go up in
⏹️ ▶️ John any side of special press presentation or anything and say, let’s just run down everything about this they do with all the phones
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the iPads, even with most of the Macs, here’s all the features, all the specs, here’s all the things about this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what it can do. They never did that for this product, which is weird. Even something
⏹️ ▶️ John like a hobby product like the Apple TV, they went up on stage and said, here’s Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this is what it does. This is what it looks like. This is how much it costs. It runs, you know, Mac OS 10.4
⏹️ ▶️ John inside. Don’t tell anybody. It’s Mac OS 10 10.4. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John too many 10s. They didn’t do that this product at all. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’m kind of the same mind of Marco, this could be awesome. And everybody could love it. And in particular, if I’m trying to think
⏹️ ▶️ John of how ways that this product could be awesome, that we are underestimating right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John is potentially the hardware that the stuff that Apple has shown, they’ve shown
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, it’s got speakers and microphones and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blah. Well, and like their engineering in regards to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio and sound quality in recent years has been awesome. Like they have dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improved the speakers in most of their products that have speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Including the phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, including the phones. Like they’ve really done a lot in the areas of audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and speaker engineering recently. So I have full confidence in their proclamations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is going to sound amazing. That it is gonna be super advanced in the way it measures a room and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bounces sound off of walls. I bet it will sound amazing. but that is just one aspect of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this product and there are so many other ones that either sound kind of bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that are just giant question marks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and like the thing about this product is, I’m trying to think of, you know, it does this track
⏹️ ▶️ John with like the Apple TV. The thing about the Apple TV is they didn’t get the hardware right for a
⏹️ ▶️ John long time. They took the wrong approach, the wrong OS, the wrong size, the, you know, the really early
⏹️ ▶️ John one was like a little bit too early. The puck, I think they hit on with everybody else. the
⏹️ ▶️ John better size and price for this kind of a product. Then they took too long to come up with 4K,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now that they’ve settled down, like, hardware-wise, it’s reasonable, especially now that
⏹️ ▶️ John they have frame rate matching more on that in a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John With this product, I feel like it’s possible that they have more or less gotten the
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware right on the first try, that the sound output looks impressive
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, can justify the price because it’s got a lot of little speakers and a lot of hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to do all the magic to make it sound good. I think it also has a lot of microphones
⏹️ ▶️ John and it hopefully does a good job with them, which is the other important part of this hardware. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John taken a clear stand about what it’s supposed to be, you know, not having a screen of any kind. It’s basically speakers and
⏹️ ▶️ John a microphone. The software side is where we know they have gaps because
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the features that they sort of talked about aren’t even going to ship until later, but it is possible
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple can essentially slowly catch up without actually revising this hardware, but
⏹️ ▶️ John merely by shipping regular software updates to make this thing more and more capable and improving Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other stuff behind the scenes. Like in other words, do you think after the ships,
⏹️ ▶️ John there will be some kind of pressing need for revised HomePod? I think this hardware could potentially last
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time. They just have to update the software. So that’s not it’s not ideal, But it does
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that if they can sell these things and then improve them
⏹️ ▶️ John over time, they can build up some loyalty by people, yeah, I bought this product and it was limited and
⏹️ ▶️ John now it gets better and better as I use it. And a year from now, they could be selling the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John exact same HomePod and it could be a way better product than it is now. Because I don’t think that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some essential hardware feature that this doesn’t have and especially if the audio is really good,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could, you know, certainly it will have better sound Like the hundred dollar things like an echo or a cheap Google home.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’ll even have better sound than an even more expensive Sonos it’s just a matter of them getting their software
⏹️ ▶️ John story together and They can do that not at their leisure, but they can do that
⏹️ ▶️ John Without revising this product, you know, essentially those are gonna get one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I was just about to say like I’m sure knowing me I will end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up buying one because this is the moment as always I say I don’t really think it’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John have to because we all have cylinders but you so you’re cylinder less so you need to system Marco of Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll have Google and you’ll have Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also like until I have a way to interact with it as a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’m gonna buy one because there’s not a place in my life where this makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense right now and and of course that might change but right now like given its current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limitations like one of the big things is yeah maybe you can replace your TVs these speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it, well you can’t have a stereo pair yet, right? So like, because AirPlay 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which we’ll get to in a little while, AirPlay 2 is not yet shipping. So one of the things you can’t do is have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stereo pair of these things acting as, you know, two stereo speakers. So that rules out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that already. And it also, there’s no line in. Like, the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way you can receive audio is either via Siri playing things from Apple music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or via AirPlay and right now just AirPlay 1 which has some limitations and everything but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one limitation by the way is a fixed two-second latency so even if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do some kind of crazy thing where you have something beaming other audio like from your other home theater components via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of AirPlay bridge to this thing it would be able to latency would be too high even for TVs to compensate for it so there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically no good way to get the rest of your audio from your TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this. The Apple TV can allegedly AirPlay to it and use it as speakers and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably going to be nice for, you know, AirPlay 2 when that comes out, that’s going to be low latency and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s so like you could do it if the only input that to your TV, like if the only source
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sound that you want to hear from this is an Apple TV, you could theoretically have that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup. But if you have anything else, a game console, other streaming boxes, a DVD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player, a Blu-ray player, like if you If you have anything else that you wanna plug into this, you’re out of luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A Sonos Connect bridge maybe. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s like. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John people use the competing devices? Because I would never think about playing my TV through this. I also wouldn’t think about playing
⏹️ ▶️ John my TV through an Amazon Echo or through a Google Home, even the big speaker one. I
⏹️ ▶️ John also wouldn’t play my TV through any of the little Sonos things. Yeah, Sonos makes a soundbar that I’d play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonos makes a soundbar and the soundbar can also use little Sonos speakers as satellite speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can’t, and people do that. So Sonos has solutions to this. Other speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, I feel, and you know, Amazon and Google Home, I feel like the kind of speakers that they sell in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume don’t really lend themselves to this. They’re too small, but it doesn’t really matter because like they’re more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made for like a kitchen or a counter or something like that. But if you’re gonna have a larger and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive speaker that focuses on sound quality, one of the big places you’d put it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your TV. Like you’d replace the speakers for your TV. This isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that much bigger though. Well, it’s not. Like I’d say it’s in between, I don’t even think it’s as big as
⏹️ ▶️ John the Google big speaker, whatever they call that one, the big rectangular Google one. I think it’s smaller than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m trying to recall seeing a WWDC and I think I was struck by how much smaller it was than I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John Certainly bigger than an Echo and also bigger than the like traditional
⏹️ ▶️ John little Google Home thing, not the mini but the regular size one. The air freshener. But I don’t think it’s as
⏹️ ▶️ John big as the Sonos Play 5. I don’t know. When Casey gets this, we’ll ask him to measure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But regardless, so like for the market they’re selling to, which is sound quality and middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of the middle of the price range there. I think a lot of people would want it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be that home theater role and it can’t do that. So again, that limits the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also limits the market that it only supports Apple Music and not other streaming services so far and other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming services can airplay to it, but so far they won’t be able to do Siri. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of wonder if I’m ever going to get overcast Siri intents because anything that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enable overcast would also enable Spotify. And maybe they don’t want that for the HomePod. Maybe they want to sell the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only for Apple Music and lock that together to boost the sales of Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like the… We talked about this before with the cylinders and stuff, but this is like the omnivorous box TV
⏹️ ▶️ John problem all over again. What consumers want is a speaker,
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of speaker thing that they buy that they can talk to that can also play any audio
⏹️ ▶️ John from anywhere right and nobody offers that it’s all a bunch of a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of islands you know some some of them come close like I think the sonos can play a lot of stuff but can’t can
⏹️ ▶️ John it do apple music by voice command I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes oh wait no but it can do that music I don’t think you can do it by a voice command yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s it’s a weird integration the the sonos product has weird
⏹️ ▶️ John limits but but someone else is getting closer because sonos doesn’t have a dog in the streaming service fight. So like whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll play Amazon service will play Google play music will play Apple music if all those companies will let us. But everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else has their own preferred streaming service and is varying degrees restrictive, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re not letting each other play in each other’s stuff. So it’s not like you can just pick the speaker you like best,
⏹️ ▶️ John right and say, I’m just gonna pick this speaker as I looks looks the best and it sounds the best, which would be good for Apple. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to compete on audio, they could say, Look, we have the best sounding speaker, best balance of speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John performance and price $350 for something that sounds better than a $500 Sonos buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it also comes with Oh, but the only things you can hear over it are this very, very
⏹️ ▶️ John limited set of things we allow you to hear no no, like you said no line in and stuff like that. Although, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think that it’s not an intended purpose for this thing to be a TV speaker, but a stereo
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker like hey, this is the sound system for my small apartment, and I could play my music on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s think like if they’re going to promote it as as audio quality, you can’t connect like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or like your record player. Yeah, like honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is truly going to appeal to people who can drop $350 on a speaker who wants something cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nice and hip for their for a part of their home that isn’t their TV. A lot of people would want to connect a vinyl
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player to it like or people want to connect other you’re still doing vital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John play. I can’t pay for that if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it as a joke.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think you’re not sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s a Oh my god, Marco. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week at Marco’s Vinyl Arc. They don’t have corners, so the arc. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, people want to connect other components
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to something, to really good speakers. Sure, not all people, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m saying is basically like this market is being limited by the limitation of this device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think pretty severely. I think this device is very boxed in right now with its limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s appealing to people who like to listen to streaming music via voice, but only Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the voice service is probably gonna be a little bit iffy because that’s how Siri has been.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s gonna be probably a mediocre voice service. It’s not gonna have a lot of integrations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with other things that we tend to use these for, like various smart home devices and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. It’ll have some, but it’s not gonna have as much as an Echo or things like that. It’s not gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost any third party services that can integrate with it. Anything you ask it to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not playing music is probably going to fail mysteriously in weird ways because that’s how Siri tends to operate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if you get it just for Apple Music or for air playing stuff to it, which is going to be clumsy for the next six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so, this is for people who are okay spending that amount of money on it, who don’t already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other kinds of speakers that also sound good, and who don’t want a stereo pair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it can’t stereo pair yet. So it’s like you care about sound quality, but not enough to have a stereo pair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s just again, it’s just more and more boxing in, boxing it in, boxing, boxing. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s going to start out pretty slowly. And maybe in a year, it’ll have all these features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’ll be much better. And maybe there’ll be another model that’s a different price or a different size or something that would expand the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more. But I think it’s going to have a really slow start.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, some of the other Apple specific features like already so granted, we don’t have all third-party stuff of what can it do that no
⏹️ ▶️ John other device can do aside from you know obviously very tight integration with Apple Music and of course Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John handing off your phone call to the HomePod is apparently something else you can do obviously from your iPhone only but if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on a phone call that you start on your iPhone and you come into the house and you want to hand it off to the iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John for a speakerphone conversation which I think is a good application of a good speaker and a good set of microphones
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can wander around talk and pace like an important executive as you discuss things
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s That’s something other devices don’t have. And of course, they’re playing up the privacy angle of like, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to upload every single thing you say to our servers and keep it there forever and all that business. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they do try to tout, uh, that anyone can talk to it and that it
⏹️ ▶️ John can play things from Apple music, even if you’re not there, which is something so absurd that I wouldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John think about it until Apple reassured me that it’s not the case. Like, Oh, I guess they could have done that boy. That would have been done, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but there is a big question mark on that though. It can play Apple Music when you’re not there, but apparently it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the Siri processing on the phone, on the phone that’s paired to it, and it’s only one person’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, of course. So the question is, how much can it do if that phone, like, suppose the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone that’s paired to it is your spouse’s phone, and your spouse leaves the house. How much does this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco function? We don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is also the question that a lot of people had, people like me, who are not yet in the streaming music world
⏹️ ▶️ John but who have their own music collections. So I have my music collection on my phone which consists of
⏹️ ▶️ John things ripped from CDs plus things purchased from iTunes. My wife has her collection. My kids have their collections.
⏹️ ▶️ John fish collection. Right. What if you want to play something from one of those collections that doesn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple music? Is there any mechanism for that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think your only option is to airplay it from iTunes or your phone. But you can’t the HomePod can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call it up via voice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But Apple, in my case, since I’m an iTunes match describer, Apple has all of my music in the cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John and it knows it belongs to me. but I’m pretty sure the HomePod has no idea that I’m talking to it. Like that feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re in the services division. That’s the world of walls and silos. That’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your iTunes match silo is over there rotting in the corner with really big thick walls nobody can get into. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they built this new silo over here for Apple Music and other stuff and God knows what’s gonna be next. It’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t expect any of this stuff to talk to each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so, but we don’t know what all the limitations are, but it seems like there’s a lot of them. But I still
⏹️ ▶️ John keep coming back to if they got the hardware right and of all all the speakers and the microphones are all great
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no reason they can’t knock down these limitations one by one and eventually have a competitive product and i keep
⏹️ ▶️ John comparing it to apple tv because they didn’t have the choice with apple tv they got the hardware so wrong in the beginning it took them
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time to get it right uh and now i feel like they’re finally at the you know
⏹️ ▶️ John the the fat part of the curve of the apple tv where they’re going to start knocking down the software features and you know becoming and competitive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, they’re premium price, but now they have some, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have four K support. They have, you know, features that video files care about, like the frame rate matching.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have an application ecosystem. Um, you know, they’re, they’re improving in that area. And then this,
⏹️ ▶️ John this home pod, like best case scenario, it launches, it sounds really
⏹️ ▶️ John good, but it’s super limited and not a lot of people buy it. And then over the course of the next year, all they do
⏹️ ▶️ John is make the software better. And you know, it’s it might take a while. Like how long
⏹️ ▶️ John did it take? You know, Google Home just I think last year or so got the feature where it understands
⏹️ ▶️ John that there are different people talking to it and it can understand who that person is. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully it won’t take Apple as long as it took Google to do that. But I see,
⏹️ ▶️ John I see potential as long as the hardware is right. But all that I’m not running out to buy this hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John only Casey is so you
⏹️ ▶️ John Lot of people are gonna wait until they have the complete story and not just buy it based on the promise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they should So I’ve been thinking about this a little bit Over the last couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of days since this news is broken and I am NOT ordering a home pod immediately I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably knowing me order one not too long after immediately because the FOMO will get to me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I think the thing that appeals to me in principle is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I do trust Apple to make really clever and good choices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to audio fidelity. And although I am perfectly happy listening to music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or podcasts on speakers that are truly and utterly terrible, that doesn’t mean I don’t also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciate some really, really great speakers as well. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I have in our home theater is not great. is sufficient. I don’t even know what it is. It was like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Denon, Denon, whatever it’s called like home theater in a box from probably 10 plus years ago. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sufficient, but I have no doubt that one or particularly a pair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of home pods would be considerably better sounding and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would be appealing to me. But knowing that I won’t be able to play Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily without air playing to Marco’s point. Knowing I won’t be able to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey Dingus, can you play me such and such song by such and such artists without being an Apple music subscriber, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not. Like all of these things make it not terribly appealing. And I don’t also,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have anything connected to HomeKit right now. I have several devices that I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connect to HomeKit via $50 bridges, but I have nothing that’s natively connecting to HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the moment. So- I have a few.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re missing nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, fair enough. I don’t really… Sitting here now, and this is when we’ll play this back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Mark will do the doodly-doodly-do in like three weeks when I say I just bought one. But sitting here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t really see any draw other than just getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really great set of speakers. And that definitely intrigues me, and it’s definitely interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I have a sufficient set of speakers that’s zero dollars because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we bought them 10 years Actually, I think they were a gift. But anyways, they yell that we already have them. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know that one $350 speakers going to sound better than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Enough better to justify it than our quote-unquote free speakers that we have now So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m curious to see what people like real-world people say after these are in the wild But I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the reviews would have to be pretty stellar for me to start saying oh wow I really screwed up on this one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as with every other Apple product. I need one
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me reiterate one last time, do not connect this to your television, it is an inappropriate application.
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iOS 11.3
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some news, as I’ve been alluding to for a while, for iOS 11.3. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a slightly surprising move, Apple has made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a kind of sort of PR site. It’s actually just a news article, but it’s almost like a mini site
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about iOS 11.3. So the headline is major updates to ARKit, messages, and more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming this spring. And they start off by telling us we’re getting a lion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Animoji, we’re getting a dragon, we’re getting a skull, and I thought there was one other. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John am I forgetting?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the dragon an Animoji? This is my problem of not knowing what the plural of Animoji. Including new Animoji.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does that mean more than one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Four new. iOS 11.3 includes four new Animoji, giving iPhone 10 users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ability to express themselves is lion, bear, dragon, or skull.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I see it later, in the later section. The lion is up top, I see.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Okay. Yeah, that’s the most
⏹️ ▶️ John important new feature as far as I’m aware.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey For most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you’re probably snarking, and the thing is, I actually really do still like Animoji, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that being said, I haven’t sent or received an Animoji in like a month or two. You
⏹️ ▶️ John just like knowing that they exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, they’re cute. They’re cute in their little Animoji drawer. They’re waiting for me if I need them. No, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. I was thinking about it even before this announcement that I really do think it’s cute and clever, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t often find myself in a position that A, it’s not socially awkward to create and send one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and B, that I even think to do it in the first place. I really do think it’s a good idea. I don’t fault them for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea, and I like that they’re adding more Animoji. And in fact, I think I tweeted a while back that it would be cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they had seasonal ones, like you could only do Santa when it’s Christmas time or something along those lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it goes back in the Disney vault. You’re a terrible person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seriously! I mean, I hate the Disney vault, but I do think it would be kind of cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, I’m not using Animoji in that kind of… it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John bit sad. Do you show them
⏹️ ▶️ John the deckland? Maybe that’s a new audience for your Animoji.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He does get a kick out of them. Actually, just the other day, he asked me if I could show him the video of the fox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey singing, which is, I think, the Bohemian Rhapsody video that had come out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like one of the first karaoke ones. He really likes watching that and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he had had me pull that up on YouTube just a day or two ago. But anyway, also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new in 11.3, ARKit, which apparently is now understanding what a vertical surface is, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no snark, I guess is a big deal. I don’t really use ARKit for anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s actually, like, being able to recognize vertical surfaces in addition to horizontal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having some other improvements in the kind of surfaces they can recognize and how, it just it broadens the applications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it basically like before it’s like all right finds find a big flat table or the floor or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you can do this cool thing and now you can do cool things with walls and other like so like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just it broadens the possible applications you can make and it improves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco existing excuse me applications or it gives them the chance to be improved and there’s other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements to a our kit too but I’m not really qualified to recognize what’s good about them but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s significantly improve.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the main I think the main story around our kit is that our kit was their first
⏹️ ▶️ John try at this and it was pretty impressive out of the gate like we all tried it and it worked I think better than most of us
⏹️ ▶️ John had any right to expect especially if you have tried any of the previous sort of academic type things and seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John what they can do this was a commercial product that ran on everybody’s phones that works surprisingly well
⏹️ ▶️ John and it hasn’t been that long and they’ve significantly enhanced it so I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John the AR kit team is doing well, their their initial release was good. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not waiting. They’re not even waiting to WWDC for new features like this, because like Marcus said, I think walls is a
⏹️ ▶️ John significant new feature. And there have been like applications, unlike perhaps an emoji,
⏹️ ▶️ John which maybe you’ll get bored by the the applications that you would think you could build with a kit
⏹️ ▶️ John like a thing to try furniture in your room. Like Ikea has an app like that. And guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what it does what they say it does surprisingly well for a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John just runs on your phone and doesn’t require this crazy rig with five cameras slapped together by
⏹️ ▶️ John some PhD student. So I’m very impressed with ARKit and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John impressed that they keep getting better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, what else is in this? Messages
⏹️ ▶️ John things? Messages and iCloud is back.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, this is unexpected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but very unexpected but very welcome, assuming that it works. I haven’t actually tried it yet. Have you guys?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. in this beta? Some things aren’t in this beta. Is the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco animoji not in this beta? I think it is in the beta. Oh, no, the battery’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not in this beta. Yeah, the battery’s not in this beta. The messengers and iCloud, I think… I know it’s prompting people to enable it, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it is in the beta, but it’s… Like, for me, personally, I’m not going to have much use for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this until it also works with my Mac, you know? So, like, that’s the big question mark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. And also, like, if there’s any hint that it doesn’t quite work, that it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully baked yet, then I might be afraid to turn it on for a little while. But they did take so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long to do it that I’m confident that they were probably really conservative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this because it’s so important to get that right. So it’s probably gonna work
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Yeah, but word of warning to everybody, like when you’re running beta software, like this is the reason I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole set of other Apple IDs that are not my Apple IDs for when I was doing Mac OS X reviews.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you’re running betas and there’s some feature that has cloud integration that especially if it wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John take some existing set of data and bring it to the cloud or convert it from one
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud backend to another, they’re betas, they’re not done. They might
⏹️ ▶️ John have bugs, but that’s your non-beta data.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s your real messages and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you don’t want your non-beta data to be potentially hosed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can’t restore that. If something goes wrong with the phone, you can restore the phone back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an old version. you can’t restore your data in the in iCloud back to an old version.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, especially if it gets scrambled or deleted or hosed in some way. So be very
⏹️ ▶️ John careful. And like, I know you’re probably excited, like, I want to try out this new feature or whatever. But beta
⏹️ ▶️ John is not done. And yeah, so that’s whenever I would test beta OSs and do reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John whole separate world of data, which it was free to completely hose. And sometimes it did. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to wipe all my data and reenter a bunch of fake data for it or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John beware. But anyway, it looks like that feature is back after basically entirely disappearing from their website.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now it’s back and like Marco, it really doesn’t fulfill its promise for me
⏹️ ▶️ John until it has a Mac equivalent, which I’m assuming it will eventually, but I’m, I’m glad it’s not waiting until I was 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is this really? But what is it by me this message in the cloud because I still sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get everything coming in kind of obnoxiously, you know what I mean? Like when I start a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac. You’re a lucky person. Yeah, I mean, so basically what it buys you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it should in theory, first of all, it should fix a lot of the inconsistencies people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. Like, so it’s syncing the messages with iCloud rather than depending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this crazy, like, you know, key generation sharing thing between different computers. And like the way it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works security wise is really complicated and pretty impressive, but unfortunately creates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of bugs in practice that cause people to have things like messages appearing on all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but one device or messages appearing in different orders on different devices and things like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this should if if done correctly and if done well this should make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your messages the same on all your devices and it also brings additional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefits of things like if you set up a brand new Mac from scratch for instance and you log
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into iMessage you don’t get all the old messages Also, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete a conversation somewhere, like if you get spam and you delete it in one place, it doesn’t get deleted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all the other devices. It like, you have to delete conversations in every place separately. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of big and small benefits to this if it works correctly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and completely. That is a big if, but if they can pull it off, the benefits are
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and like, what I think of this is aligning messages with the mental model I’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ John had in my head about messages that there is one conversation that I participate in
⏹️ ▶️ John from different devices, but it’s always one conversation, right? In the same way that our
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes document, it’s one show notes document. I can edit it on my phone, I can edit it on my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, I can edit on my Mac at work, I can edit on my Mac at home, and you guys can all do the same from whatever devices you have.
⏹️ ▶️ John But wherever I go, the document looks like a document. That’s how I my mental model of iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John conversations. I’m conversing with the person, and no matter where I converse with them, the conversation is the
⏹️ ▶️ John conversation. So it’s jarring to me, like it would be jarring to me, like the new Mac setup, to set up a new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and not see that conversation at all. Or to go to my Mac at work and not see
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of messages that I had sent previously on my phone because my Mac was asleep during that time and they didn’t propagate or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now people who don’t have these problems and everything’s in sync, if you limit the number of places you converse,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, and and or if your message if your devices are always online at the same time to accept the
⏹️ ▶️ John propagations and all the propagations work, then maybe you won’t notice that. Um, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the mental model. Most people have that it is that it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s the same conversation everywhere. So that’s the promise of this one. One more feature, by the way, that Apple touts is actually the first bullet point on
⏹️ ▶️ John their little screen is free up space on your iPhone by keeping photos and other attachments in iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John which right now, like you’d be surprised at how how much space your messages thing takes up.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you go to this, you know, because people send you videos and they send you photos and you don’t want to delete things because they’re cute and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you save them to your photo library or whatever. And one of the prompts for the
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS storage screen of like, hey, if you want to save up some space, you can delete small messages. Be like, oh, I don’t want to delete all that stuff. Well now,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently, it will take the biggest actions and put them in iCloud and I guess only when you scroll back to them will it
⏹️ ▶️ John download them on demand or something. So anything that frees up space on our phone by using cloud storage that we’re already
⏹️ ▶️ John paying for it’s good, so that’s another potential advantage. That doesn’t speak to the mental model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. That’s a huge advantage in practice. Lots of people have massive multi-gig
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are just sitting there taking up space in their phone that they don’t want to delete. The upside of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, great, you’ll have this option, iCloud, to store these things in, to free up space in your phone, so you won’t be always running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of space. The downside is, Apple’s still pretty stingy with iCloud storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you’re gonna need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the paid plans and possibly even one of the larger plans. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to make this hurt for a lot of people. But I think at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want a good experience using Apple devices, you’re going to have to just factor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the price of a small to mid-sized iCloud storage plan at least. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re deciding whether to have an iPhone, plan for this because in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality you’re going to need something beyond the free you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five megabytes of space they give you and I I’m not I’m that was a joke not a misremembering the unit it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey megabytes right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey right like it might as well be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might as well be five kilobytes like that like in this day and age with the amount of stuff that’s stored in iCloud that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is kind of insulting but it’s at this point I’m also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve given up on on trying to wish and hope that Apple’s gonna raise the free limit on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud and make the plans all bigger and super price competitive. Like, no, they’re not going to. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a ton of money the way it is now. They’re not gonna change that. So, oh well, factor it in as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cost of having these devices that if you’re going to have this and you want the full experience of having the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luxury of iCloud doing all these things for you and doing backups and everything else, you’re gonna have to pay for an iCloud plan and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And by the way, one of my tips for general happiness using iOS things is like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a problem a lot of people have, like, I’m not paying for iCloud storage, which I understand is expensive. As Marco said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as competitive as it should be, and they should give you more and it should be cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t cost that much money to
⏹️ ▶️ John get more storage. And it will like the the amount of the amount of improvement
⏹️ ▶️ John to your computing life that you will get for $10 a month of actually just paying for iCloud storage. It’s well
⏹️ ▶️ John worth the $10 a month, well, as far as I’m concerned, well worth it, because I hate having to deal with storage
⏹️ ▶️ John problems and running out of room and trying to manage things. And like, you know, especially for things
⏹️ ▶️ John like photos, if you use the photos in the cloud feature, you’re not going to delete your photos, what are you going to do when you run out of storage, you’re just going to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, complain and grind your teeth. It’s like, just just pay for the storage. I know it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And with the family plan, by the way, now that you can pay for storage for your whole family, if you have a family, and they all have
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, the family plan is another good way to not have to have stupid individual bills for like your
⏹️ ▶️ John kids iCloud backup and your other kids iCloud backup and your spouse’s iCloud backup and you’re like now you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John one bill and that will further encourage you to get the big plan for the whole family.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, it costs money, but $10 a month for someone who can afford Apple devices
⏹️ ▶️ John is not that much. It will really improve your life. And it’s I think it’s just mostly a mental barrier. Like, you know, people
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t want to pay for it in the same way they don’t want to pay for applications. But overcome that hurdle here,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would put it this way, you know, for like, people who do tech support for their families,
⏹️ ▶️ John just just buy your parents, like don’t tell them you’re doing it, but just buy them, pay them the $10 a
⏹️ ▶️ John storage plan. Like, that is another great investment of your money, the amount of aggravation
⏹️ ▶️ John you have doing tech support and your parents if you just secretly pay for the one terabyte storage plan and put and put
⏹️ ▶️ John them in a family together and pay for their storage plan. enable iCloud backup and all their devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just don’t even tell them. Just pay for it all. Just do it yourself. It will improve everybody’s life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. Yeah. Like because we always advise people doing that on their parents computers to install like backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or your cloud backup of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John choice. And then just pay for it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just pay. Just do it for them. Pay for it because you know you as like the young adult probably don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The old people won’t pay for it. And yeah. And so it’s like they need this. You know that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t. So you just pay for it. So on computers that’s backblaze on their phones and iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s iCloud storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, your parents who have retired on their astronomical pensions that no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco any generation after them,
⏹️ ▶️ John who are taking vacations to Hawaii and living in luxury and buying fancy cars
⏹️ ▶️ John will never pay $10 a month. What am I getting for that money?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to pay for storage. No, thanks. I don’t need backups. It doesn’t make sense. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the mindset. So, you know, since you’re the one doing tech support, just, just pay for their pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for the $10 a month, they carried you for nine months in their body. Right. So, it’s the least you can
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iOS 11.3, continued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, what else in 11.3? iBooks is no more. It’s just plain books.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not no more. Yeah, they just renamed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I mean, this is the most substantial iBooks update in years.
⏹️ ▶️ John recently. I know they updated iBooks author, I think, recently. But yeah, iBooks
⏹️ ▶️ John was the second thing to get the iBook name after the old
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. And now it’s got its eyes stripped away, joining, what is it joining?
⏹️ ▶️ John Music, what are the other generic ones? Well, numbers I guess, maybe, pages.
⏹️ ▶️ John The generically named applications, now it’s just called books. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as Jason Snell said on Twitter, I wonder if there’s some other hardware product Apple could use the iBook name for.
⏹️ ▶️ John What he’s referring to of course is iOS laptops, which we talked about last show. And yeah, that would be a good use.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it would be like the iBook name coming back home to a laptop form factor, but not a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see. I think that would be cool. I don’t know how likely that is, but that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a really cool, fun reason for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it might be confusing because it seems like iBook is still kind of in living memory, so to speak,
⏹️ ▶️ John of the potential consumers. And to have someone who
⏹️ ▶️ John previously owned an iBook buy a new iBook and have it not be a Mac might be strange. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this change is completely explicable by Apple’s drive to name all of its products like Margo’s
⏹️ ▶️ John products, like the magazine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One product I named that way, one. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You’re right, it is only one, but it looks larger, doesn’t it? Doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it seem like, it seems so significant. What are the other Apple ones I can’t think of?
⏹️ ▶️ John You got numbers, pages, music, books. Movie,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, that hasn’t happened
⏹️ ▶️ John yet. iMovie is an interesting one, you can’t just rip off the eye because that’s just called movie
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly It doesn’t really make any sense.
macOS 10.13.4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so what’s going on in Mac OS? 10 dot 13 dot 4
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably a bunch of stuff. But the only thing that poked out at me is the the the long
⏹️ ▶️ John foreshadowed end of 32-bit which
⏹️ ▶️ John not happening in 10 13 4 but the foreshadowing continues preparing for the end of 32-bit as
⏹️ ▶️ John As Apple says I think this is in the release news to prepare for future
⏹️ ▶️ John release of Mac OS in which 32-bit software will no longer run without compromise.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Without me, it doesn’t say will
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer run. No, not will no longer run without compromises will no longer run without compromise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Starting a Mac OSI CR 1013 for a user is notified at the launch of an app that depends on 30 bit software.
⏹️ ▶️ John The alert appears only once per app. So this is kind of like an I think it does an iOS to like for a while 32
⏹️ ▶️ John bit applications would pop up a dialogue that says this may slow down your phone or
⏹️ ▶️ John is not optimized or had some message like that. Yeah. That would translate to if you knew what it was talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about, that it’s a 32 bit app. And then eventually on iOS, it’s like, yeah, no, those aren’t going to launch anymore. This application
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be updated for blah, blah, blah. Right. So the fun thing about 10.13.4 is that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re a developer, you can reboot your Mac with the boot arg minus no 32 exec,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will stop all 32 bit processes from launching. Right. So then you can try to use your app. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John think your app is clean and it’s 64-bit clean, it doesn’t require any 32-bit frameworks, doesn’t invoke any
⏹️ ▶️ John 32-bit commands, doesn’t do anything 32-bit, fine. Reboot your Mac in this developer mode that will forbid
⏹️ ▶️ John any 32-bit stuff from running and you’ll see if it’s broken. Of course, this is a developer
⏹️ ▶️ John mode for people who are developing applications. Users should not do this because half the stuff that you use from
⏹️ ▶️ John day to day will probably be broken, including parts of the OS or other things that
⏹️ ▶️ John are command line programs that have 32-bit parts. You know, put it this way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet there is a surprising amount of 32-bit software lurking in everybody’s Mac at this point. But this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the only way you get to a 64-bit clean world. Apple doesn’t say what
⏹️ ▶️ John future version of macOS where 32-bit software will no
⏹️ ▶️ John longer run, and it also doesn’t explain what compromise they’re talking about. Because if they had just said will no
⏹️ ▶️ John longer run, I’d be like, oh, that’s just what happened in iOS. 32-bit stuff no longer runs. Fair enough, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But compromise makes me think there’s going to be some kind of way to still run 32 bit stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John just because it seems like Apple doesn’t have as much faith in the Apple developer
⏹️ ▶️ John or the Mac developer community to bring everything to 64 bit like there’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John enough of them and they’re just not motivated enough to bring everything so there will always be this really long tail of stragglers were an
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS they’re like look, we’re going 64 bit. If you don’t care enough about your app to port it fine there’s 1000 other
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that take your place, we don’t care. But on the Mac, I don’t know if that’s the case. So I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ John interested to see what the compromise is and how they managed to run 32 bit stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in an OS that more or less doesn’t support it. They could use some kind of VM thing, some kind of weird hypervisor thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows? But you know, my guess is it’s the it’s 1014. We’ll find out the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back a step, I forgot to mention that health records is also new in 11.3. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that completely slipped my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not clear how that works. Like I see the screen. It seems cool. But how does it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what I was curious about, too. And I didn’t know if I just hadn’t read the right documentation yet or something. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thought of having all of my health records from all of my different health professionals all in one spot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all for me to be able to see that genuinely sounds really awesome, but color me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little skeptical that that’ll actually be what ends up happening. Because I mean, look at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pay, which is a seemingly odd analogy to use, but like, I feel like in America, it’s pulling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey teeth to get a retailer to use Apple Pay, and that’s to give them money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And here it’s like, what is going to encourage anyone, insurance companies or doctors or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whomever, to share medical records? I mean, yeah, there are records in theory, since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s our bodies, etc, etc. But I don’t know, I don’t see any real incentive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get health providers or insurance companies or whatever to provide this information to us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there have been government incentives to make them adopt some of the things that would make them potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John closer to supporting this type of feature, but not anytime soon there
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t be. If there’s one thing that’s true in the know, there has been in the past, like the whole meaningful use
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in past years was to try to get, uh, you know, medical, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John businesses in the U S to adopt a electronic health record stuff. Like who knows how effective it was. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, this is one thing that’s true about healthcare in the U S is that getting all of your medical
⏹️ ▶️ John anything anywhere is basically impossible. So it was like, I would love to have
⏹️ ▶️ John all of my medical stop, stop right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of that sentences, unless you are very, very lucky, it’s not going to happen. It’s hard enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to get any of your medical
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you are astronomically lucky and all of your health records happen to
⏹️ ▶️ John be at the tiny subset of medical institutions and providers that are participating
⏹️ ▶️ John in this program, yes, you could have all of your medical records in this thing, but chances are very, very good
⏹️ ▶️ John that some of your medical records will not be participating in this. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just an adoption problem. So I like to see Apple tackling this, and they’re trying to do it in a sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John agnostic way, using standard protocols for interchange. So it’s not like some Apple proprietary thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where Apple has to convince everybody to adopt some standard. It’s just that getting all of
⏹️ ▶️ John medical things in the US to do anything is very difficult, because it’s a very diverse, shall we say, environment
⏹️ ▶️ John of providers and technology expertise and motivation and financial incentive
⏹️ ▶️ John to support something like this.
tvOS 11.3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then John in the gifts just keep coming for you. You have El Capitan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fixes that you’re choosing not to install and TV OS 11.3 has a new gift for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not really good for me because even though I have an older Apple TV It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John hooked up to a television set that I think can even do 24 frames per second Like it’s hooked
⏹️ ▶️ John up to a crappy TV like a bedroom TV, right? So anyway Anyway, the one change that is most interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John to me in tvOS 11.3, which is currently in beta is frame rate matching, which was previously
⏹️ ▶️ John only supported on the Apple TV 4K is now supported on the one that looks exactly like the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K, but isn’t because it doesn’t have slots in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the bottom. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mine. Yeah. So now you get that feature, too. I don’t I also don’t know if you have a television
⏹️ ▶️ John that can do 24 frames per second. Probably not. Almost sure I do not. Yeah. But that was the question before is like, why isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John the support? Is it some kind of hardware limitation? No, they just didn’t get around to it with software. and now they’re getting around to it so thumbs
#askatp: 3D Touch vs. long press
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Some guy I’ve never heard of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Todd Vaziri, writes, with your iPhone X experience, are there any signs that Apple intends to unify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3D Touch and a long press to give the same result or do you feel that they have every intention of keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these two gestures separate and distinctive? I haven’t looked at gesture recognizers in a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nor have I really fiddled with 3D Touch APIs, but as far as I can tell, just as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a user, it seems to me that it’s pretty clearly going to be kept separate. But I don’t know, Marco, have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you been looking through these APIs more recently? Do you have any thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have any thoughts. I don’t think it’s going to be touched in any meaningful way. I think it’s going to stay the way it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, which is basically like, you know, most things are 3D touch or nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And occasionally, one of the app developers, either Apple or third party, will have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good idea. Oh, you know, we should make this available with long press eventually. And then eventually somebody does it. But, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it’s probably going to always be, you know, 3D touch first, kind of like how the clear all notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Remember, it wasn’t that 3D touch first, and then eventually they added long press. It’s probably going to be like that, that kind of pattern. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 3D touches first long press if somebody gets to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But do you think like I think part of this question is like, are the do the API’s make it look like there will ever be a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to like, you know, coalesce them in terms of you’d write an application to handle one kind of event and both of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things that happen on the screen could funnel into one kind of of event, or do you think it will, like the APIs still reflect the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are entirely separate? Entirely separate. I mean, you could write something like in your app that would, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, respond to either one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. And you could write some kind of reusable component to make that easier to do, but as far as I could tell, Apple has not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved in that direction at all. I could be wrong, I could have missed something, but I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John so. Yeah, I don’t think so either. I just, like, my impression from the outside, not looking at the APIs, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at how they’re used, is that I would go so far as to say that Apple thinks there actually is
⏹️ ▶️ John an important distinction between three to touch and long press that should be meaningful in the U. I. And cases where they
⏹️ ▶️ John merely say long presses just an affordance for people who have devices without three D
⏹️ ▶️ John touch are kind of in the minority. Like it seems like, especially as three D touch
⏹️ ▶️ John spreads to more and more devices or at least phones, I know because they don’t have it on iPads. Um, the three D touch is
⏹️ ▶️ John a different thing than long press. Um, and it may still be an optional thing like, Oh, if you happen
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a device that can afford it, you can get this feature, but that is not, it’s not the same thing as long press.
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that a lot of people like wish it was that it was just a more convenient long rest and and using a phone from my perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels different to me I wouldn’t want it to be just an alternate way to do long press because it just
⏹️ ▶️ John it just feels so very different so I think I’m mostly on the same page with Apple here despite the fact that it is somewhat confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John to have to explain to people I I don’t think they’re interchangeable they don’t feel interchangeable to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Andrew.
#askatp: What is AirPlay 2?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex writes, what is AirPlay 2 and why is it so hard for both developers and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to implement it? So I guess, Marco, jump in whenever you’re ready, but AirPlay 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it supposed to be, other than multi-room stuff, which you can’t really do with AirPlay 1 unless you’re using iTunes on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac, is it supposed to be kind of self-sufficient where it’s more like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Chromecast sort of scenario where you just tell it, hey, go play this thing over there and it does it all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by itself or is that completely wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s about halfway wrong. So basically, the way AirPlay 1 worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was kind of like, it’s not that different from how Bluetooth audio works, just done over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WiFi. It is what they call basically a real-time protocol, it’s just a stream. You stream audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the AirPlay 1 device. There is a fixed latency that all AirPlay 1 devices have of two seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything goes over that same stream at that same latency. Audio gets streamed at that rate, commands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like play, pause, or seek get streamed at that rate. That’s why with an AirPlay speaker, If you hit pause on your phone, it takes two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds before it actually pauses. And so it was a simpler protocol. It was launched forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. And back then, things had to be simpler for just technical practicality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. So AirPlay 1, very simple protocol. What you’re alluding to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, how Sonos and the Google Cast protocols usually work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically like the speaker in those cases or like the Casted2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device is controlling and playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the media is itself. It isn’t having a device send it a stream of media in most cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Sonos speaker or Google Chromecast or whatever is given like a URL and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say play the file here and the client applications are basically giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it commands whenever they feel like it of, okay, pause it now, play this thing instead or whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the advantage of a system like that is your phone or whatever is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming the audio from or causing the audio to be streamed is not actually really involved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the real-time playback. So like the example that is often given is like, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go out and take out the trash during a party and your phone is what’s telling Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play this playlist, when you leave your house’s wifi for 30 seconds, the music isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to stop. It’s going to keep playing because your phone is simply giving a command sometimes when you tell it to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t streaming the audio itself. The device for Sonos and Google Class or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is getting the audio itself over the network and only just doing what your phone tells it to when it’s time to make changes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay never worked that way. AirPlay was always being real-time streamed from the source device to the speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John The HomePod literature, whatever PR literature, makes
⏹️ ▶️ John that claim about it that it’s just pulling the music from
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Music, not pulling it from your phone. But it doesn’t currently support AirPlay 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so there’s a few different things here. So that, what the HomePod is doing with Apple Music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, I believe that applies only to Apple Music. And that is because the HomePod does appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what they’re saying to be a native Apple Music client in the sense that you can ask it to play something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple Music. I don’t know if your phone is involved in the Siri request itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but once it is playing it does sound like it can just keep playing without your phone’s presence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that is a separate thing that’s not involving AirPlay 2 though. So what AirPlay 2 does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of just a halfway point between these are kind of like a better AirPlay one. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it lets you do is buffer for much larger chunks of data and what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said in the WWDC session about it they said basically think minutes instead of seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it lets you buffer faster than real-time so you know AirPlay one was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fixed two-second latency everywhere the streaming device supplied the audio in real-time the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing device played it in real-time there’s a two-second buffer on the playing device AirPlay 2 the streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device is asked to supply the audio as fast as it can faster than real time until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the buffer fills up and so your AirPlay 2 client program that’s playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media has to be able to feed the buffer a lot like you know five minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or ten minutes or whatever it is of future audio and then the playing device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintains that buffer and plays it in real time and notifies you of you know what point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has reached in playback. So this changes a bunch of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a really big foundational change to how this works. There are a number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big advantages. So number one is that scenario of taking out the garbage during a party. As
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long as you’re not taking like 20 minutes outside to take the garbage out, in which case I would say you have to think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about your home layout. That’s too much of a trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It should be fine. You should get back inside in time for that, you know, minutes long buffer, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to not have to underrun itself. Also, you know, in in as we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during Euro ads, like a lot of times, like places in your house are kind of Wi-Fi dead zones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you same problem with those like this. There’s lots of like common scenarios where like if you’re airplane, anybody who’s ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done airplay hasn’t, you know, you know this because this probably happened to you at some point where like, you know, the person with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone is walking around somewhere and drops out of range for a second and the music stops or skips or whatever. Also, another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big advantage of this of breaking it out of that like fixed latency model is that commands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change so play pause seek commands those can happen faster than that two-second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buffer those can happen basically as quickly as the as the device receives and processes them so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like any other Wi-Fi command in your house so it can be really fast so way faster way more responsive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playout controls as well as that long super long buffer it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay one did support multi-room audio in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not familiar with the details of how it coordinated it, but I think only iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac could ever really officially be the source for that. There was never a way for it to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iOS device as the source of multi-room audio with AirPlay 1. AirPlay 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is now possible. You can now do multi-room audio with the iOS device as the source of that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s another big change. I don’t really know what has changed with the protocol to allow that, but I’m sure there’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason. Also, because the playback buffering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the media supply has been separated from the command interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like play pause, you can now have multiple devices in your house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to control the play pause type controls of a stream that’s playing from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not them. So like you and your spouse can both have play pause control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the music playing from only one of your phones to the AirPlay 2 speaker. So also, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun stuff. There’s also separation now of phone call status from AirPlay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can, for instance, take a phone call on your phone that is AirPlaying music to a speaker,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the music continues to play back on that speaker while you’re on the phone call. That didn’t happen before. So this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so this is all a lot of major changes, and this is, I think, one of the reasons why this is taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long to, and why AirPlay 2 seems to be the big delay for the HomePod. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is tons of new iOS APIs, tons of new background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processes and changes to fundamental things in iOS to make all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this happen. Also on the device side, on the speaker side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you now have this long buffering mechanism, and that’s much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more complex than before. I’m sure Apple has some kind of component or library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something that they will sell manufacturers to make this easier on them, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automate this for them or be like a drop-in component or something. But it’s more complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than AirPlay 1 was by a lot. And even AirPlay 1, the client implementations tended to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suck that weren’t Apple’s. There was one AirPlay chip that every AirPlay speaker used and it sucked. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was unreliable and it was terrible. So I’m guessing the delay in the speaker availability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because this is more complex and maybe the industry was caught off guard a little bit. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe Apple hasn’t actually really finished it yet and they’re just not saying that. But either way, it’s a complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protocol. And then on the software side, on the iOS side, and probably the HomePod side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is complex. I ran into some of this complexity when I started looking at these APIs for Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the main complexity here is streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the music to the buffer is now disconnected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what timestamp or even like what track is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing at that moment. Because you can read ahead by so far. Before, with the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay 1 model, whatever function in your app supplied the audio to the output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stream could notify the app as that happened. You’re now at timestamp one. You’re now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at timestamp two. And as soon as it played through a track, you can say this track has finished playing. You’re now playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this next track. Now it can buffer so far ahead of real time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the production of the audio in your app, the thing that is supplying the audio has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a separate thing entirely from what parts of your app manage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what timestamp it’s playing at and what track is currently playing and they’ve moved all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that out now to this new like synchronizer object that you need. So like none of this is like difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to deal with, but it’s different. It’s a major change from the way it used to work and there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other things like like for instance if you if your app has like a constant of like a playlist and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an item that is coming up is changed, say the user deletes an entry in a playlist or reorders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a playlist and that part has already been buffered, you now have to tell the buffer thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, and everything after this timestamp is now different. Reload it. So there’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big and small changes like that needed to adopt this kind of model. And none of them are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult or impossible. It’s just a lot of things to deal with. It’s a lot of change,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of potential for new bugs or not realizing that old bugs were really bugs. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like even doing it for overcast is a, is a pretty major undertaking that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m nowhere near done with. I’ve only done like the early stages of it and now I’ve kind of put it on the back burner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because now I know that it’s not gonna be imminent. I have more pressing things I wanna do, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a big change to audio applications and to the systems in iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that manage them. So I think there’s very, very good justification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for AirPlay 2 to be late and for Apple to be running behind. I think they should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have probably anticipated it better and planned for it better, but oh well. All this is just to say that technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking, this is a nice improvement. It is also a really big job. So it’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable for it to be harder than they might have predicted or taking longer than they
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have a fun class of bugs. You could have a bug based on what you described where the speaker is
⏹️ ▶️ John playing a song, but your player application on your phone indicates that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John playing a different song.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So like, you know, it goes to the next track. And like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t do that synchronization thing that you said, oh, by the way, they’ve deleted something, your phone will say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m happily playing song A and you’ll be hearing a totally different song come through the speaker. You’d be like, this thing is totally broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John How does that even happen? Well, now we know how it happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or like, as it starts buffering, if you didn’t do the timestamp, you know, change of how it reports what time you’re playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until, then like, you can have it, if you watch your time thing in the app, you start playing to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker and your time starts racing ahead by like 10 minutes all of a sudden, but you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearing it that fast. Like, there’s so many, or like, it races to the end and deletes the file.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s how it’s played already, gone. Like, there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential for big and small bugs here.
⏹️ ▶️ John In your application, if they change the playback speed mid-stream, you have to invalidate everything that you previously uploaded
⏹️ ▶️ John at the other speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s interesting. Yep, yep, or if they toggle off smart speed, yep. Anything, or if you just seek,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if you, I don’t think it actually does, in the current protocol, I’m not sure it actually does seeking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, and you know, one concern I have too is like, this stuff is all so early and so complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and such a big undertaking. I’m not sure I want to devote a whole bunch of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to changing my entire audio engine to support this before I know that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API is solid. And given that Apple is delaying their own AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, and I’m kind of worried that maybe the API is not done yet or not baked yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s another reason why I’ve kind of paused my work on this for now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it could end up like crashing your application in scenarios where the person’s not even using
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPlay 2 just because of how you had to rejigger the internals, which is not a great thing to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. What are we in the middle of? We’re in the middle of Ask ATP, right? Yep. Okay.
#askatp: Book-spine preservation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, Andrew Lynn Lim Penning writes, could John please detail his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey method for reading extremely long soft-cover books without ruining the spine? Where the hell did this even come from?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John did you talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about this? Some other podcast that I’m on that Andrew apparently listens to, I discuss this. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you two should know about it too and the long history of weird things that I’ve, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was younger, I had a lot of books like paper books before I got on the e-book bandwagon
⏹️ ▶️ John and I had a lot of paperback books when I was younger. And some of them are
⏹️ ▶️ John really thick because I’m a big Stephen King fan and his books are long. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John I got into books as a thing that you can buy like as a sort of a physical object in addition to
⏹️ ▶️ John the words that they contain. In fact, I’m still like that. I read eBooks mostly, but I still like physical books. Often I will
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a physical book, but still read the eBook. Anyway, I got a lot of soft covers and I
⏹️ ▶️ John like them. I got a lot of series, they had cool spines. put them up on my shelf, you know, arranged them, they look nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pretty soon after getting my first collection of paperbacks I decided I didn’t like how the books looked when the spines
⏹️ ▶️ John were broken. If you open a paperback really wide the nice printed spine on
⏹️ ▶️ John it will get a big white, you know, crease or crack on it and if you read the book eventually you have cracks going up
⏹️ ▶️ John and down the whole spine. Anyone who has had a big thick paperback book knows about this. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t like that so eventually I decided I’m going to read all my softcover books no matter how thick
⏹️ ▶️ John they are without breaking the spine and that’s what this question is about how do you do that
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately for Andrew the answer is exactly how you would think you do that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John open the book really wide
⏹️ ▶️ John support the spine with your fingers behind it and you open it a crack and you’d be like how are you gonna read
⏹️ ▶️ John an entire literally 800 page book peeking into this tiny crevice
⏹️ ▶️ John to read the text out of the you know like Oh my word. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ John secret. The technique is put your fingers on the back of the spine so you can feel what’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ John at the back of that spine and open it as wide as you can before it creases. And just be really, really careful.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think that’s a particularly fun way to read. I think people should buy e-books because they’re way better than paper books, but paper books are beautiful,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you should still buy them and collect them and display them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So how do you use an iPhone without scratching it? Well, you keep it in a small felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and you take it in and out of that pouch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single time you use it. You never actually touch it. Well
⏹️ ▶️ John Not every single time, only when you’re out of the house. Only when you’re out of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the house. In the house, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not in the pouch, ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco. What could possibly be more convenient than that? The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I like, here’s the thing about the pouch.
⏹️ ▶️ John I originally started doing it for the reason you noted, for scratchability, but I have come to appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ John the fingerprint. I don’t ever have to clean off my phone screen, which is apparently things a lot of people have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do, or their phone screens look disgusting, because every time it goes in and out of my pouch, it gets cleaned. Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when it stays in there and it rubs around, like it’s a microfiber thing, it is always cleaning my phone screen. It’s nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So a year of using my jet black iPhone 7 and you know how much it ever mattered, how scratched it was?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not at all. You know how much I ever noticed? Zero. That’s the back, I’m talking about the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Actually, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what? I have a case on it, so I don’t care about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. I actually do have a small problem with the iPhone 10. I’m getting scratches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my screen. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what I don’t know like they’re not like deep scratches But you know when the light hits certain angle you can see them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think I think I heard from a few other people that they were having a similar issue Like I’ve never had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone screen scratches that noticeable I’m getting scratches on my iPhone 10 like already, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they like micro like very micro scratches like maybe they’re just scratches in the the sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John the oleophobic Whatever coating and not like actually in the glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe. I mean, again, they don’t look deep. You can’t see them at all angles. If you turn the screen off,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re pretty noticeable.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s interesting. Anyway, I don’t have any on mine. Pouch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pouch is not the answer,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an answer. It may not be the answer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it is an answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is an answer. I will concede it is an
⏹️ ▶️ John answer. And the back of my jet black iPhone 7, I’m sure, is pristine underneath my leather case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good for it. I’m sure that’s going to really matter long term.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve already decided that I’m not speaking of keeping phones pristine. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to give my my uh any of my kids this iPhone 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John I handed down my iPhone 6 and you know God knows what my son is doing to it, but the 7 I’m like
⏹️ ▶️ John no no we’ll buy you like an iPhone SE used or something but we’re not you’re not getting my 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John I spent all this time keeping it pristine like this is this the iPhone my iPhone 7 I think is in the category
⏹️ ▶️ John of like my SE30 and my 2008 Mac Pro. I really like this phone. I mean, granted, I’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ John had two iPhones, but this is by far my favorite. Like, there’s nothing about it that
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad, even the lack of the headphone port. Like, I’ve, you know, I think the iPhone 7 is great. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John now appreciating it as my last, like, pre-iPhone 10 notch era of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know? Yeah, it honestly, like, you know, as we talked about it in our iPhone 7 exit interview segment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like, looking back on it, like, I don’t want to go back to it because I like the X too much, but that really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a great phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like they really…
⏹️ ▶️ John moment in time. It was a great phone. Yeah, and the 8’s great too and everything, but you know, overshadowed by the X. So they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I didn’t get the 8, right? So I’ve got the 7 and this is my phone that like hit the sweet spot of like the culmination of a long evolution
⏹️ ▶️ John of a particular phone factor before Apple took a hard left turn into iPhone X land.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also like the 8 doesn’t have the jet black finish, and that to me was a critical part of why the 7 was so awesome because it so dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improved and changed the feel of the phone. It gave that awesome caseless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grip that I miss. The iPhone X is better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the previous aluminum ones, but it’s still not as good as the iPhone 7 in grip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I like the rest of it, so I’m keeping it, I guess, even though my screen is scratched. Anyway, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and SRC, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s So that’s Casey Liss, M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Auntie Marco Armin, s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-c-ra-cusa
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to accidental Tech Podcasts, it’s so long
Casey’s New Year’s Complaint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, uh, I really, I do this every year. I guess this is my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my lose weight kind of a new year’s resolution, even though it’s not a resolution, it’s just something I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remind myself of every year and every year, you know, January comes around and I remind myself, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should really be less negative Casey on, on the internet and stop complaining and moaning about things, which I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I do. Overwhelmingly, but I do probably more than I should.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then something like this happens. I see a news report saying BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to charge $80 a year for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a subscription to CarPlay $80 for a subscription to CarPlay that involves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no like cloud services or anything like that of any sort It’s just $80 for them to not cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you off for the thing in your car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a number of angles to this so like a few people asked when this first came out like well Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know like is Apple charging them yearly and we don’t have a firm answer on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apparently somebody heard from some car maker that Apple does not charge fees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for carplay And there certainly is not an annual fee. Apple did say so according
⏹️ ▶️ John is on his website site Gruber says I’ve now received the following clarification from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no fee for OEMs for either MFI or CarPlay integration there never has been
⏹️ ▶️ John and and they never will to my knowledge there are no plans to this change there is no royalty costs or ongoing
⏹️ ▶️ John costs the only cost automakers are those necessary to create the hardware this includes an authentication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip all right that’s good okay so anyway so that rules that out but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this does solve a a problem. I don’t think it solves it in the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, but there is a problem that BMWs, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know Casey from having bought them, especially having bought them used, certain options like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re options at purchase when the car is new and you can’t have them later. CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not much reason, like it’s like a $300 option normally before this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not a lot of reason that they had to charge $300 extra dollars, they’re They’re just doing it because they can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because cars like this, luxury cars especially, they charge money for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every little thing. Anything, if you want, they’ve offered for years now, they’ve offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wireless phone charging, where they just put basically a Qi charger in the armrest and they charge you like $700,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some obscene thing for that. That’s just the game here. When you’re buying a high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car like this, many of the brands will nickel and dime you to death over stuff that does not cost them that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to add, but they have a captive audience. You know, it’s just like buying a beer at a baseball stadium. It’s a captive audience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re already spending a lot of money. They know that they can get more out of people if they do this. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that, I don’t really fault them for charging separately for this. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a crappy luxury experience that not every BMW has carplay. Like a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other manufacturers, all of their cars now have carplay, or all of certain model lines have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW’s not doing that. That creates a problem if you’re looking for a used one, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a fairly minor feature distinction. So if you’re looking at used BMWs, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have acquired a used BMW, it might be difficult to find one that has CarPlay, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might not know until you actually go visit one of the dealer, whether the one you’re looking at has CarPlay or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. There is a problem that they are now solving that now you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can add CarPlay. So I think you can actually, like if a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was sold without it and you go buy it used and you want it, I think you can add it by starting to pay this fee.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not a great solution to that problem. There are way better solutions. Like, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a well-spec BMW costs like over 40 grand most of the time. You can throw in CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at no additional charge. This is the kind of thing like, the brakes aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optional. The air conditioning now comes standard. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think CarPlay is really very quickly becoming one of those features where like, people just expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Like, it’s weird if you don’t have it on a nice car these days. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should really include it on all the cars and not charge you this dumb fee.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the analogies I heard was like, in cheap to mid-price hotels, the wifi is free,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in fancy hotels, they charge you for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They charge you for it at
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like, I’ve heard that saying before, and I have experienced some of that, where
⏹️ ▶️ John the main places I’ve seen free Wi-Fi are not in the fanciest hotels, but kind of in the
⏹️ ▶️ John mid-tier ones. But once you get fancy, they’re like, well, you’re already paying so much for
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, we’ll just add this charge on for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Wi-Fi. Yeah, well, and also, see also iCloud Storage plans, like what we talked about earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a captive audience, right? iCloud Storage sells not because it’s a great deal, but because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you kind of want it, it makes the experience way better, and what else are you gonna do? This is all system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration stuff, and it’s like, if you want this experience in the native first party way that works with everything, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably gonna have to pay whatever they want for it. CarPlay on BMWs is the same thing. Like, you’re gonna have to pay whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want for it, basically. So, I think the solution here is to stop buying BMWs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, exactly. BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John has the problem of like, they do have competitors. Like, maybe there’s no competitor for CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, I want integration with my iPhone in such and such a way, but you can buy another luxury car
⏹️ ▶️ John that has CarPlay that doesn’t charge you this much. and one of the points I’ve seen from people talking about this
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of pricing is like well if you get a three-year lease and it’s 80 bucks it’s still cheaper than a $300 upfront
⏹️ ▶️ John option which is kind of true and like in the grand scheme of things given like you know
⏹️ ▶️ John like how much they charge for the different paint color it’s like an additional $2,500 or whatever like if you add
⏹️ ▶️ John it all up the number of absurd things you’re going to pay way more for for the life of this BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’ll happily pay for because you want the sparkly red paint or whatever dwarfs this car play thing but the
⏹️ ▶️ John car thing just just feels punitive because everyone else is giving it to you for free and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even a hint of a justifiable reason for it to be an ongoing eternal payment.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it just annoys people. So I think BMW will, this is what will either happen. Either BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John will reverse this or every other luxury car maker will do the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s true. It’s true. It’s just, I don’t know. It’s just so frustrating because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know like in my brain that this is a completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unsurprising thing for a luxury car manufacturer to do. Like the things that BMW charges
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, like up until recently and maybe still to this day, they had a tremendous upcharge for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey xenon headlamps or high-intensity discharge headlamps. I guess they’re LEDs now in all likelihood, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years when high-intensity discharge headlamps were a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, BMWs would still have that as an option. Like my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generation, the early 2010s, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco constantly see… Oh yeah. My first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my 3 Series that was that generation, I didn’t get the HIDs. They were too expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. And I will see them constantly to this day. And you can tell, you know, what is HIDs and what doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that seemed preposterous to me. Like, I’m not saying that it shouldn’t necessarily be paid for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but come on, it’s an option? Really? Like, you’re You’re buying a BMW, you’re buying a Mercedes, you’re buying an Acura, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case may be. Like, that should just be part of the car. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, this just seems like such a preposterous, absurd thing to nickel and dime people over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s not as bad as Porsche, from what I understand, who I guess is the kings and queens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of nickel and diming. But it’s just gross. And I think BMW has been heading more and more this way over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it just grosses me out. And here again, I just, I don’t know what car I should get if I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new car, because I’m screwed no matter what. What happened to the ultimate driving machine? They don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that slogan anymore. I love that slogan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be fair, every BMW owner has always had this progression with the company and it just rolls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into different times. Every BMW owner for the history of BMW has always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said whatever happened to the BMW that made my first car?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the ones they make today are crap. Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened to the MacBook Pros with better keyboards? Am I right, Marco? Well, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit different when the failure rate changes so dramatically.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, Kieran Healy or maybe it was him or someone else tweeted a picture of an old PowerBook and all I could think of looking at that
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, look at the travel on those keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard keys. It was before they even started really flattening them out. They look like just full-size mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard keycaps, practically. They probably have more travel than the total thickness