276: Observing a Black Hole
31 May 2018iOS 11.4, what we hope to see at WWDC, Marco’s beach problem, and Casey’s car problem.
Episode Description:
- App Camp for Girls fundraiser: Live Near WWDC
- iOS 11.4
- Messages in the Cloud:
Settings→ {Your Name} →iCloud→Messages
- Messages in the Cloud:
- WWDC
- Marco's 🏖️💻 problem
#askatp- What is the best way to "accidentally"
stalkfind us at WWDC? (via CW Bennett) - How do we maintain multiple development environments? (via Pat Murphy)
- What is the best way to "accidentally"
- Post-show Neutral: Casey is a sad panda
Sponsored by:
- Casper: Get $100 off your Wave purchase with code atp100. Terms and conditions apply.
- Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi, that works. Use code ATP for free overnight shipping to the US and Canada.
- Squarespace: Make your next move with a beautiful website. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
Chapters
- Cookies 🖼️
- Server-side language?
- App Camp For Girls event 🖼️
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- iOS 11.4
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- WWDC wish list
- Sponsor: Casper (code atp100)
- Beach computer problem 🖼️
- #askatp: Us at WWDC
- #askatp: Multi-Mac development
- Ending theme
- Neutral: RIP BMW
Cookies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, how about let me bring it back together then. What would you buy if not a Tesla? I feel like we might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have covered this at one point, but sitting here today, what would you buy?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hold on. Tiff just brought me a plate of freshly baked cookies and wants me to taste test to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see which one is better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love my life. Important, important business is happening here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Top four cookies that Tiff just brought you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco two, so. That doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we spotted the problem. You need two more cookies. I have to take a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this. You rank them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The cookies that are still in the kitchen will be your honorable mentions.
Server-side language?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This does not by any means have to make it in the show, but Espressoly had an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting question in the chat. What do you think the best server-side language would be? Use Windows and.NET
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for ease of deployment and all that, or try and pursue Swift? I can tell you with some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confidence, perhaps a lot of confidence, that Swift on the server is not a good idea because it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ready. But with regard to what one should do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s so many great answers to that question
⏹️ ▶️ John Neither of which is Swift or.NET.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not so sure.NET is not the right answer because… .NET is not the right answer? No, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold on. A couple of years ago, it was absolutely not the right answer. And I’m out of the game, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be clear. I haven’t written any.NET code in at least a year, maybe two now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco .NET is such not the right answer that it fired you from web development.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that was SharePoint more than anything else. You ran screaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into mobile development.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s that’s that’s ish true. So what what what I hated about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dotnet was really all the things around it. So like Visual Studio was pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s ugly. It’s not as ugly as Android Studio or you know any of the equivalents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all the Eclipse based IDEs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still ugly. But it’s Windows that drove me away from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows and like the whole IIS pipeline internet information servers, basically the web server.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All that just drove me nuts and I didn’t want it. But they now have.NET Core, which is new since,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was starting to be developed or was just coming out when I left this world. And.NET Core is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a subset of.NET that’ll run on pretty much anything. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think that could be a reasonable answer. I’m not saying it’s the best answer. I’m just saying it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be a reasonable answer because you can have all the good parts of.NET and C Sharp, which C Sharp is a great It has its warts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like every other language, but it’s a great language. But it’s the rest of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ecosystem that’s garbage. And so if you can eschew the rest of the ecosystem, then you’re in pretty good shape.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I mean, I think that it’s really, obviously, it depends on what you’re trying to build and what its purpose is and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what your team or you know. But I mean, I could make a decent argument for PHP, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even an ancient-ass language from the Stone Age like Perl, depending on what you were trying to do. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is no good answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think doing anything on the web using Windows or any Windows Adjacent
⏹️ ▶️ John technology as your back end is like the path of most resistance
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t don’t do that using using open technology whether it’s PHP or Ruby or Python.
⏹️ ▶️ John what dotnet core is Yeah, I know but then you then you’re losing all the other stuff. You’re losing all the stuff that you liked about Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get to use fancy Windows IDE that knows how to do all this stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John I asked like deploying having that be your your deployment target instead of like the bazillion deployment targets for
⏹️ ▶️ John all the different languages. It’s just better to go with something completely open open source and much more popular
⏹️ ▶️ John on the server than anything windows related.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s as bad as you say. But I also don’t think you’re wrong either. Like I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows or whatnot windows I think.net is a more reasonable answer than you’re giving you credit for. But I agree with you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the other answers you’re giving are probably better
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you know, just look at the biggest companies out there doing things on the web. How are they
⏹️ ▶️ John doing them? What are they hosting on? What kind of languages and technology stacks are they using?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Windows stuff is still in the minority. Not as big a minority as Swift, which I assume
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody’s using, probably not even Apple, but you know, of the ones that are existing
⏹️ ▶️ John and fairly well established.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the problem with Swift and the server is that it violates a number of my best practices for server-side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages, one of which is they should be old and boring, but another one is that you should never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any risk of being the largest installation of it. And I feel like if I ran like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose I converted all of Overcast website over to Swift, that might be the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift server-side installation. It probably isn’t, but it might be. And therefore, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run a major risk of running into bugs and limitations and scaling problems that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one else is running into or that too few people are running into where that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it hard to get past them or it might be a make things become my problem that shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be my problem and that’s not a recipe for happiness when you’re running server side stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also if you get into server side stuff and you end up learning of the windows stack or the dot net stack
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you learn the open cool open source one job prospect wise you’re going to be doing the stuff that you were doing Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John which is working on people’s crappy the intranets or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, like you’re not, you’re without question, you are not wrong, but it is not as guaranteed as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey painting it to be. Like, for example, you know, at work, we were straight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up windows.net the whole way for the server side APIs. And then we had PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the front end, which was weird, which isn’t PHP isn’t really a front end language, but we were basically using PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to consume.NET APIs, it’s weird. But anyway, I bring all this up to say that we have actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started moving everything away from Windows and onto.NET Core so we can deploy to any,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within reason, any Linux-based server setup. To be fair, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking a little bit, more than a little bit out of my comfort zone at this point because I’m out of that world now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to point out that CAM25 is lighting me up in the chat room in a nice way, and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vapor, which is one of the Swift server-side things is really good, which very well may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they said, it’s only, you know, me saying C-sharp is better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than Swift, it says Cam 25, that’s only true because Swift is so new and people are being scared to adopt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s exactly why you don’t wanna be, this is what Marco was just saying, like you do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanna be on the bleeding edge on server-side stuff. And I’m not doubting that Vapor is very good and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably going to be very, very, very good in the future, but you do not wanna be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tip of the spear, or one of my favorite Clarkson lines of all time, you do not want to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prow of the good ship Progress when it comes to these sorts of things. As Marco said, you want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the boring old technologies that everyone’s been using for a long, long time.
App Camp For Girls event
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess this is sort of kind of follow out. Uh, we wanted to call attention to, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is in a pretty much annual occurrence, the app camp for girls fundraiser slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live near WWDC concert jam with James Dempsey and the break points.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you are not familiar with this, and we’ve talked about this in the past, James Dempsey is an ex Apple employee and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also a pretty talented musician. And he writes songs that are very catchy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and very good, but the lyrics are all about writing code. And this sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it may not be enjoyable at all at first glance, but it’s actually really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really good. And so ATP is one of many sponsors of the Live Near WWDC 2018
⏹️ ▶️ Casey benefit concert for App Camp for Girls. Now, it’s App Camp for Girls. We’ve talked about this many times in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a sort of tutoring camp sort of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for girls and other underrepresented groups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially in the like middle school age group and We are all we have supported them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP supported them for a long time Many of the members of out camp for girls are dear friends of ours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most especially Jean MacDonald who is one of their founders They are an unbelievably good organization that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has done tremendous things to push it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to push young girls and young women forward into the you know into stem sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of of paths through life and teach them that they too can write code. And despite what all these jerky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boys around them say, it’s actually just as easy, if not easier for a girl to write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code as it is for a boy. And so if you are in the WWDC area
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next week on Wednesday, I strongly encourage you to come and hang out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, hi. I’m pretty sure all three of us will be there for at least some amounts of time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not the whole thing. You can buy tickets for $35 which are which is a donation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effectively to app camp for girls There will be an open bar with I’m told top-shelf liquor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is very exciting And even if you’re not at WWDC, you know what you could just donate you can be you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a cool kid and just donate I’m good with that Marco and John are good with that. Just donate. That’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we just want to call it to your attention We’re trying to raise 25 grand for app camp for girls and I could not say enough good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things about that organization So if you have the means, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strongly encourage you to throw a few bucks their way whether or not you’re going to be there. And if you are going to be there, it’ll be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all the follow-up, right? I didn’t think it was, but I feel like all the other follow-up disappeared while I was
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it didn’t disappear. It was never there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Turns out Elon Musk and unions are not controversial at all. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John actually weren’t. We didn’t actually get that much feedback on that. I didn’t think we We would and we didn’t. You know, like five,
⏹️ ▶️ John five people, but that’s, you know, that’s nothing.
Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Eero. Finally, Wi-Fi that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We all know by now that one router doesn’t cover a lot of our houses all the way. There’s always gaps or slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spots or dead zones. What you need is what businesses figured out a long time ago. You need a distributed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi system that broadcasts from multiple physical points and they overlap and they make a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big blanket mesh of fast, even coverage. Now business systems are really hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use and pretty expensive. Eero brings this to everyone with a great value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with the easiest setup I’ve ever seen of a wireless router. So here’s what you do. You start out with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the base station and you plug this into your network connection just like any other router. Then you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Eero beacons. These are additional little units that you can plug in at different points around your house and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they broadcast the Wi-Fi too. So they all work together and they communicate with each other via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a back-end mesh network so that it’s all wireless. you don’t have to run wires everywhere if you don’t want to, if you can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They all communicate with each other and they form this huge, even fast blanket of wifi
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco two beacons plus one base station. And these, these are all high grade wireless gear, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top radios, top speeds, everything you’d expect from, you know, a high powered router and it’s all controlled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco via their app. And it is not only beautiful, but so easy to use. It is, again, the
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco coverage area by using these beacons. And you can see for yourself, see the reviews. You’ll see, it isn’t just me saying this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reviews speak for themselves. This is a very highly rated item. Look on Amazon, look at all the review sites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll see for yourself. So check out Eero, go to eero.com. And at checkout, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco select overnight shipping. And if you do, enter promo code ATP to make that shipping free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the US or Canada.
iOS 11.4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So once again, go to Eero.com. That’s E-E-R-O.com. And for free overnight shipping to the US
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Canada, select overnight shipping at checkout, and then enter promo code ATP to make it free. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you so much to Eero for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 11.4 is out and I am happy to tell you the long national nightmare is over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPlay 2 and Messages in the Cloud are here. I have tried neither of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these things. So I am useless. I have nothing constructive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to add, really, other than to say I have seen people throwing up screenshots of their iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage usage after engaging messages in the cloud and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeing the messages line item at like 20 plus gigs. And as someone who does not pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for extra iCloud storage, because I don’t use iCloud photo library, and I don’t back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to iCloud. Wait, hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re on the free plan? Yeah. You don’t pay the dollar a month. What do
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God. Who buys batteries? Yeah, who buys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John batteries? I’m gonna say that
⏹️ ▶️ John every time. Yes, I am gonna make that same joke every time someone doesn’t pay for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store. You’re a power user. This makes a big difference in how your device functions. How, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How? In what way? What does that buy me up until this?
⏹️ ▶️ John You do your iCloud backup. So you have a cloud backup of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but why would I need that when I have it on my computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have it in one more place. You also do it on
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Why do you need any backups? They’re just copies of what you already have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s useless, why bother?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s so redundant, you guys. I’ll make another copy, what’s the point?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I just, I’ve never really had, I’ve never felt like I’ve had the need. And I’m not saying I wouldn’t get use out of it, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never felt like I had the need. But now, now this is the moment, this is the moment when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m probably going to have the need. Because I would like to do messages in the cloud, I think. thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it is clearly going to require me to spring for some amount of iCloud storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or maybe I’ll just play the slow and lazy procrastinators game. Hello, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And maybe at WWDC next week, I will get some more free storage. And that would be lovely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who wants to bet against that? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey will. I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John But all kidding aside, I mean, you still won’t have enough. You should just, yeah, you should just pay for it just so so you can back
⏹️ ▶️ John up all your devices like forget about the messages in the cloud thing just just so you can back up your devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no real argument here. But either way, I have not tried any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these things. And John, did you get a home pod? I don’t recall because Mark when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not have them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do I have a home pod.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so have you tried to play to
⏹️ ▶️ John how would I go about doing that? What do you mean? How? I don’t know. I’m asking you asking an honest question. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe under iOS 11.4 if you AirPlay to a HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I think an Apple TV, you know, the app model or forward,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that should I think automatically use AirPlay 2. Except if you’re streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast, which is part of the reason why I now had to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a f***ing HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well you really should have bought two of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know it’s not too late for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually did buy two of them. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Like, that’s the whole point. Like, the
⏹️ ▶️ John features that it gives, multi-device audio and stereo pairing, I can’t use with my single HomePod. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if I did AirPlay 2 to it, I’d be like, great, it sounds just like it did before because music is going over the air. I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John I might notice like less lag in the controls, but other than that, it never even occurred to me to try because I just have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me you bought white ones. Please tell me you bought white ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They happen to be white. No!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like grayish.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the best time of my life. This is fantastic. Did you play any Dave Matthews on them by chance?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and The Long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word, okay, so how do they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco sound? It was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. The second one I haven’t hooked up yet. It was literally tonight that I finally got to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. Do they sound good or does it sound good? It sounds good, yeah. It doesn’t sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as mind-blowing as people have said. I honestly expected it to sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit better than it does, but it does sound way better than the Amazon Echo. And it’s, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size, it sounds good. They are certainly doing a whole lot of bass, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at lower volumes, where you’re less likely to notice. I think the bass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is dynamic by volume level. Bose has done this for a long time, where basically at lower volumes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use more bass than at higher volumes, and it makes lower volume sound better to most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, but without having the bass be too boomy overpowering when you turn it up. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re doing on it. Anyway, it sounds pretty good for its size, but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is nothing new. I got it because I have to finally… basically I was kind of gambling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like AirPlay 2 seemed like it was maybe never gonna come or gonna come like later this year and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I thought I had time to move my audio engine to it and I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just keep doing other things until it was clear that it was gonna actually happen? Well, it actually happened, so now I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to test it. And I’m going to be traveling a lot back and forth to the beach this summer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I bought one for there and one for here. So I can actually test it, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chunk of my summer work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Powell We should note, though, and make it plain, that these things, AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Messages in the Cloud, they were both debuted or teased at WWDC 2017. Jared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Polin They were announced, not teased. They were announced. fair. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is now less than a week away from the keynote that kicks off WWDC 2018.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just in the nick of time, for you know, just by the skin of their teeth, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have gotten this in in time. And it makes me wonder, is it that there this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really and truly fully baked, and it was a happy coincidence? Or is this getting shipped a little sooner than they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want just so they can check the before 2018 checkbox? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John something clearly went wrong here. I hope people who have access to press that have access to Apple during WWC
⏹️ ▶️ John week ask this. Not that it’s, you know, like some deep WC here, but I feel like if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a year since when you announce something and when you release it, something has gone wrong and it’s worth some kind of answer. Hey, what went
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong? Apple’s just probably going to say it took longer than we thought, but I feel like it is something that
⏹️ ▶️ John needs, it’s a question that needs to be asked and answered. We can’t just pretend like, oh, just sometimes this happens. They announced
⏹️ ▶️ John something and it doesn’t come out for a year because then like, what’s the point of announcements anymore. This wasn’t like a preview
⏹️ ▶️ John or a sneak peek or a thing that we might be working on. It was like, here are these things and some
⏹️ ▶️ John things are available now and some things will be all two weeks from now. Some will be available a little bit later and a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit later turns out to be a year. That’s no good. No good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, I haven’t turned off turn the feature on yet, even though I do pay for storage, Casey, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I’m a little scared to be one of the very first people to turn this on. I think it’s very telling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple has not enabled this for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet and has not enabled it by default on iOS and has kind of buried the setting that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of makes me it kind of looks like I don’t know maybe they’re not that confident in it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that’s the reason I did enable it just because I was the future one of the features I was most excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about last year and I’m like fine I’ll wait for a delay I’d rather have it work than not work and it was like sort of half
⏹️ ▶️ John released in betas a couple times then pulls back and like, well, whatever, they’ll get it worked out. But at this point, I’m like, look, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John had a year. This thing better work. I’m enabling it. So I enabled it. It was buried. I was thinking of why it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t appear to be enabled by default. It’s hard to tell because like I know I did probably I don’t did I
⏹️ ▶️ John play with it during the beta’s I remember it was so long ago. It’s the problem of waiting a year. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people have a surprising amount of data in their messages, right? So if they enable it by default, it would blow everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John free five gigabytes just like Casey, right? Because you may you You know, you may not have a lot of cloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ John and other stuff you might have hanging around, like the photos don’t count towards it or whatever, I think, right? Or I don’t know, I can’t keep
⏹️ ▶️ John track of what, or maybe music doesn’t count towards it, but photos do. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can check if you go into settings on your phone and then go into iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John and then look at, go to Manage Storage and then look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John Messages row. And you may not think you have a lot of messages, like, that’s just text messages. How big could it
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly be? but you send video to people, people send you stupid multi-megabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John GIFs that are probably MPEG-4 if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey lucky. What do you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stupid? GIFs are stupid. GIFs are so incredibly massive. He said
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Yeah, if you actually get a legit GIF, I don’t even know if this is possible. Is it possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to get an actual GIF in messages or does it like back-end convert them all to MP4s like Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, they’re actual GIFs. I shouldn’t say this with such extreme confidence. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fairly sure that they are not converted because if you, you know, save that from your messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, it’s being saved as a gift. It’s not being saved as an M4.
⏹️ ▶️ John GIF is give animations are not space efficient. Let’s just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey despite the fact that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. Um, so my messages, uh, so it says 4.6 gigabytes and because I
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for tons of storage, it’s not a big deal. So I enabled it. It’s not, the new version of
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac iOS is not out yet. what is it gonna be, 10, 13, 15 or something is gonna have it enabled, and we’re on 14 now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Something like that. So that’ll probably be out in a couple days. I’ve only enabled it on one device because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the only device I’ve upgraded. And when I tap on messages, it says 4.6 gigabytes. When I tap on messages,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, fine, fine, now you’re gonna tell me. It has a little thing that says conversations, and it says 2.18 gigabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John All day, it has said conversations, zero kilobytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Despite the fact that the thing I just tapped on that’s 4.6 gigabytes. So anyway, now when I go in, 4.6 gigabytes, I go in, it says
⏹️ ▶️ John conversations, 2.18 gigabytes. And then I go into the next screen, and my top conversation is negative
⏹️ ▶️ John one byte, and my second conversation is negative six bytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re sorted, they’re sorted, but you’re right, so. Something is a little bit wacky with their calculations
⏹️ ▶️ John of exactly how much storage things are staying up, because I’m pretty sure I have no conversations that are negative bytes
⏹️ ▶️ John in size. So, it hasn’t destroyed my messages, everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John all my conversations on my phone, I continue to see there, but I have also not using
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual feature yet, which is so your messages should be the same on all your devices. In theory, if you go into your
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, it should be the same. You go into your iPad, it should be the same. I will try that out as I upgrade my devices. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t upgrade my Mac, so I’ll never really see it here, but I’ll see it on my wife’s
⏹️ ▶️ John 5K iMac. So yeah, I’m taking a bullet on this one. I’m like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John had a year. I really want this feature. It better work. So I enabled it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I am not that but leaving aside the iCloud storage issues, which are self
⏹️ ▶️ Casey created. I am not bold enough to do this quite yet. And I don’t think I will be until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after I’m back from WWDC. Because even though I do have some issues with iMessage from time to time, like messages coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of order, and so on. I don’t want to mess with any of that until I’m back from WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to make sure everything’s kosher.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the main the main reason to enable this You’re like, why, why do I, I never had these bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would I enable this feature? If you’re saying that this feature might be, but it’s self buggy. I never have the problems
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s supposedly solving. I think it’s mostly for the same reason. Uh, you would have
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of iCloud integration and you’d want some kind of iPad integration. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, another backstop against losing stuff. So maybe there’s some conversations that you have that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John have sentimental value or you have tons of videos and images or whatever. and that you may
⏹️ ▶️ John be schlepping them along from device to device, but don’t really have a good cloud backup of it for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John reason, Casey. This will give you a cloud backup of all your conversations
⏹️ ▶️ John or it will destroy your conversations. This is the deal we make with these cloud things. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ John scary feature could just like, everything’s been fine on my phone, you know, but in theory, if everything works
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you will now have all your conversations in more places than you used to, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if I think like most of us, You have some conversations that are on your phone, but aren’t on your iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John or are on your Mac, but aren’t on your phone, but aren’t, you know, like, it’s not the same everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John This, in theory, will make it the same everywhere, and will also make sure that that sameness is also stored on Apple’s server
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. That’s the way I hope it works, and it’ll also make your messages
⏹️ ▶️ John go in order. So, I’ll let you know if it destroyed. I don’t have any particularly sentimental
⏹️ ▶️ John iMessage conversations, given how long it was before I even got an iPhone. And if I
⏹️ ▶️ John did messages on iPod Touch, I don’t even remember. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was using AIM. All my sentimental conversations
⏹️ ▶️ John are on AIM. Or maybe some on ICQ, but I don’t even remember my number anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey One, two, three,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five, seven, two, what’s up?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don’t even know if I have my ICQ number in email anymore. I probably could dig it up in an email archive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s all lost. Of course it’s all lost. All the- all those Ytalk conversations.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So WBC is coming I don’t know how we want to dig in on this I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular format because we’re not as clever as upgrade with their draft and all that nonsense which I adore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t it frustrating how clever they are with stuff like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So annoying. So annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jason on the podcast, you know, there’ll be a draft. That’s how it works. Give me on a podcast, you know, there’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John follow up and you Jason on a podcast, there will be drafts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a lie. There’s neither follow up nor draft on robot or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s true. The whole show is follow up. That’s my secret, Casey. It’s all follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reference acknowledged. Reference acknowledged. All right. So how do we want to start this? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, do we want to just start spitballing things we’re excited for, hopeful for? I mean, I guess the— I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco statement. Oh, sure. Please. All right. So, I’m excited about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we really know almost nothing going into it. Like, as of this recording—
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my opening statement, too. As of this recording, we know almost nothing. We have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real credible rumors. We have no hardware parts leaks or anything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. we really have no idea what we’re getting and maybe that’ll change over the next few days like a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on Monday morning stuff will leak, but for the most part I you know we really don’t know anything and that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of concerning on some levels, but mostly just very exciting that like this will actually be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full of surprises for us. For me the the big thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking for and like like on connected this week they were talking about how like like rather than kind of predictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there they were basically making lists like what would make them happy. What would make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me happy is when I look at Apple today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see a company that’s mostly doing pretty well has a bunch of stuff that’s mostly pretty good. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a couple of problem areas. I think the major problem areas to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the Mac and Siri and it’s not that they suck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or are broken, but it’s in the case, well, Siri kind of does, but, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so Siri needs a lot of help. Um, the Mac, it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tell what the Mac, whether they are just neglecting it horribly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether there is some big new direction that it will be taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just isn’t ready yet. You know, this is always a problem with when looking at Apple and with Siri, you can kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of say the same thing, maybe to some level, like maybe Siri is as bad as it is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re working on a better Siri that hasn’t launched yet, who knows, right? So what I wanna see this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all we’ve seen from the few little trickles of rumors and stuff that we’ve gotten are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people saying that, oh, big stuff’s in the work for the Mac with various cross-platform slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new UI framework kind of things, and other people saying no, it’s not, or mostly saying it’s not ready yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe it’ll be ready next year. What I want to see this year is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of indication of this kind of major motion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Mac and in Siri. I want to see some kind of indication that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these aren’t just sucking like they are sucking now forever. That Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS and that Siri, even if their major upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are coming next year, I want to see a sign of life this year that they will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have major upgrades. And if the major upgrades are ready, that’s even better, but it sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re probably not. So I just want to see a sign of life that the lull that we’re seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in these two major problem areas right now is not because they’re just being neglected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever, but because bigger stuff is coming, but it just isn’t ready yet. That’s what I want to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what would that look like? I don’t, it’s hard to know. It’s hard to really tell. like, you know, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early feature like or code or API shifts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of like suggest something that might be coming down the road,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John not even not even like Apple announcements but like, you know, things where they don’t say but here are size
⏹️ ▶️ John class like that type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, certainly, like, I would consider that kind of like the bare minimum, right? And, you know, with Apple, like a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of times, observing Apple is kind of like observing a black hole. Like you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, you can’t see the thing you’re looking for but you can try to observe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effects of things around it that might indicate that it’s there right so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that indicates that there is a next generation of Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or of UI development on the Mac or or you know or Siri getting significantly better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just something to indicate that this work is going on and is progressing rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it looks right now in a lot of ways is they just aren’t doing any work on these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? And so even if we don’t get any official announcements, I just want to see a sign of life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that’s the direction they’re going in rather than just letting these things slowly wither and die.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think you’re gonna be too happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John If we’re talking about like the things that before we get to preview slash prediction we’re just talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about like what would you like to see what would make you happy. Um, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, uh, well, let me just give the quick one out of the way. A Mac pro teaser would
⏹️ ▶️ John make me happy, but I’m not holding my breath. But anyway, um, I,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of on board the train with the, uh, I haven’t even remembered his rumor rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John or announcement or whatever that Apple was trying to like slow down, right. And like pull features out of iOS 12
⏹️ ▶️ John and move things to more of a two year cycle and that kind of slowdown right and
⏹️ ▶️ John I am what I what would make me happy to see is that this WWDC reflects
⏹️ ▶️ John a slowdown which means like wouldn’t that be bad that means it’s like boring stuff and we’d be talking about oh they don’t have anything to announce except
⏹️ ▶️ John for like boring stuff that you know there’s nothing exciting at this show there’s no new harbor there’s no amazing new software
⏹️ ▶️ John and even though we didn’t think there was gonna be anything it’s kind of disappointing but I would take that as a sign
⏹️ ▶️ John like that the slowdown and philosophy is in effect and is bearing fruit. The less they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, uh, the more I will expect the things they do announce
⏹️ ▶️ John to actually work and be useful. So all the new things that were, I think we should
⏹️ ▶️ John start off talking about the things we know they’re going to announce anyway. Hopefully they’re boring and they’re reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re predictable and they have fewer bugs than their equivalents in the past couple of years. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and longstanding bugs that are bother everybody end up getting fixed like
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of a slowdown which sounds boring but is kind of what I would like
⏹️ ▶️ John from from Apple now to sort of to regroup because there’s lots of potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John very large things happening in 2019 including the Mac Pro but you know also like all the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John with the cross-platform stuff that really is for next year or like the next big move on
⏹️ ▶️ John on watchOS or whatever I don’t need that stuff this year like I don’t need the big big revolutions in any of these areas,
⏹️ ▶️ John take the time to roll that out next year and have this year be like a rebuilding year
⏹️ ▶️ John where there aren’t any earth-shattering announcements but everything that is announced ships on time,
⏹️ ▶️ John works better than you would expect for the state that it’s in, all the products come out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the gate when they actually get their .0 releases, more solid than usual, and
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of little bugs that have been around for years and years get fixed. That would make me happy. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good one. Oh, it would make the press flip out, of course, but you know, whatever. Who cares about the press? Yeah, we’re not the press.
⏹️ ▶️ John If we were the press, we would have press passes. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we could flip out. Well done. Yeah, you know, I think the number one thing on my list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is having now experienced the comparative bliss that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the Amazon lady in a tube, it is just ever more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparent how awful Siri is. Just this evening. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking to Aaron my phone in my pocket, and I don’t remember what it was I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but all of a sudden I heard my pocket talking and Siri was saying something about my mother
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, I wasn’t which I wasn’t really clear on and definitely startled me and I looked at my screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and my screen said call mom I don’t know how Siri heard the wake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word because I didn’t say anything that even vaguely sounded like a hoi telephone and And I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even, I wasn’t even talking about my mom at the time either. Now in the defense of my phone, it wasn’t my pocket, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is the first time I think I’ve ever had that brutal a misfire with Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but all that said, Siri has been ever more frustrating, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I go for my run. And I think I talked about this a couple of months ago, but when I go for a run in the morning, I go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with just my watch and my AirPods and I’ve actually taken The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve gotten into the habit of turning Bluetooth completely off on my phone before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I run Because if I don’t do that Then apparently from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I can piece together The watches is stretching so hard to try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be able to contact my phone So it can do all the Siri related things that I occasionally ask it to do like play a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey album or even turn up The damn volume or whatever, but it can’t quite get there via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bluetooth so it just sits and spins and sits and spins and sits and spins and no it doesn’t fall off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the already active cellular connection it just sits and spins and sits and spins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and eventually it will just give up so that actually doesn’t have a lot to do with Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s just something I thought about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that is driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a related thing is on my watch OS wish list which is that you know because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tries Bluetooth as much as possible that also means that when an app tries to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files or data to the watch, it will prefer Bluetooth if it’s available at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when it’s on its charger, because it doesn’t want to power up the Wi-Fi radio to save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power. But this means that if you’re transferring a podcast over Bluetooth, it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. Or trying to download a file off the internet over Bluetooth, it takes forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Powell, MD, PhD I don’t think that’s true. I think forever is considerably shorter than the amount of time it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco takes. Because I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lived this life and you are 100% correct. It is heinously slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s the thing is that just like you said, there’s no reason in theory that this couldn’t use wifi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or hell even cellular if it wanted to, for those of us who have cellular watches that pay too much money for them, not that I’m bitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, it insists on using Bluetooth for reasons that are beyond me. And again, on wifi, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, excuse me on battery. I can sort of understand that, but like you said, Marco on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the charger, come on. Like that’s just no, no, that’s just a poor choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why would you like the batteries are so big these days? Like why not prefer Wi-Fi and cellular until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery is down to like 75% or 50% and then start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth? Like there are much better solutions and I mean the way it feels to me like from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the API level, it just kind of feels like this is how it was with watch one and they just never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revisited that decision since then. So hopefully they will, but I don’t know. That’s one of my watch OS wish list items.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is just the kind of boring change that you can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John demo. You just have to kind of say, like, improve battery life and radio handling. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John if you go to that session, you learn that they’ve changed the priority. But it’s the kind of like small, longstanding
⏹️ ▶️ John issue that is only issue in certain situations, but it has been annoying people for a long time. And fixing
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not gonna get you into the keynote, right? Like, it’s not something you can even brag about or demo. And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it doesn’t even make it to a big word background on a slide. but we all want it fixed, right? This is the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing that we would hope would get fixed and you’re just waiting patiently for it to get fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the year to do it. If there’s not gonna be anything super exciting, do all the boring things and
⏹️ ▶️ John people will grumble, but eventually will love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, what am I looking for? I’m looking for Siri improvements first and foremost. I would like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the Mac not dead. I am less worked up about it than the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you guys are, but I am worked up about it. I would like to see any mention of the Mac doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. That would be lovely. Um, I, I wouldn’t mind new hardware, new Mac hardware, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I’ll believe it if I see it. And, but the other thing I’d like, which are two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things I’d like. I’m not entirely sure if either will happen, but I’d like to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some notification improvements, you know, some more in a Mike has been banging the strum for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think he’s, he’s right. some more granular controls for notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, on Upgrade this week, I don’t recall if it was Mike or Jason, but one of them said, hey, what about like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey geofencing your notification preferences? I think that was on Upgrade, maybe it wasn’t. But anyways, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at work, I want these notifications, at home I want these notifications, or whatever the case may be. Or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we group things more intelligently? Can we do something to make this better and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preferably have more granular controls over what does or does not make it through the kind of the barrier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, I would love to have either. Third-party watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faces, which we’ve all been banging that drum for a long time, or I would just think, I think it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be really excellent to be able to have third party Siri watch face,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like widgets or whatever those are called,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually, I have, I use the Siri watch face when I’m at work because it’s a really nice way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kind of see what your day is, what’s in front of you for the day in a very lovely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and easy to scroll nice way. And it would be awesome if I could have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a weather report inserted from carrot weather when it thinks it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to rain, you know, at four 53, Oh, it’s probably going to rain or something like that. And I’m not even sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what other ones I want, but I feel like this is something I want in my life. So those are my three, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would really love these things to happen. And, and so it’s general Siri improvements,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, Siri watch face, like widgets for third parties. Again, I’ll ask for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey third-party watch faces, but I feel like this is my Gene Munster TV moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And then finally, and finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notifications improvements, I think would be lovely. But again, I’m not sure I’m expecting any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John In terms of the secrecy and us not knowing at this late date much of anything, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the usual read on that in the modern Apple era is that hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is much harder to keep secrets and software stuff, especially software stuff that only happens in California. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John that argues for no hardware of any interest, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that probably would have leaked by now if it’s in any state to be announced. But software stuff is always
⏹️ ▶️ John completely up for grabs because Apple has shown that it can keep that really, really secret, even when it’s something huge
⏹️ ▶️ John like Swift or whatever. They usually can’t keep secret the idea that there is a project
⏹️ ▶️ John underway to do something about this, but they can keep secret of what year will it be released? When will it be announced?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would if this is gonna be anything remotely dramatic I have to think it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John software which is kind of a shame because there’s a lot of sort of again boring Rebuilding
⏹️ ▶️ John your style hardware that they could put out like slightly revised laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John to address some of our concerns Right. They’ve had a long time to do something with the keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You know Some kind of device besides an iPhone 10
⏹️ ▶️ John that likes a home button So pick one of the iPads and make a swipey version of it, right? Maybe with face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John or I don’t know like there’s all sorts of things it small iterative non-revolutionary
⏹️ ▶️ John things They could do with their current hardware line and announce but just seems like if any of that was in the cards We would
⏹️ ▶️ John have heard leaks from it already. So I’m not holding my breath for any of that I’m also not holding my breath for
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri improvements just because of like I I mean, history
⏹️ ▶️ John and the fact that they’re still hiring important people to help work on Siri. It’s like if you’re just hiring
⏹️ ▶️ John important people to help on Siri, we’re not going to see the fruits of those labors anytime soon. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John next year. But who knows? Again, Solve Our Stuff is secret. Maybe they’re bringing new people on board, but maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John second or third generation Siri has been in the works for two years now, and now it’s coming out here. We never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, it does often seem like they just kind of woke up to the Mac having a major problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last spring and to Siri having a major problem this spring.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I hope I really I mean, the evidence shows that that probably is the case with the Mac. But I really hope it’s not true,
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri, because that’s that’s their bread and butter. That’s the that’s their product that they’re supposedly care a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John about. And it’s a flagship feature. And I don’t like I think it is incumbent
⏹️ ▶️ John upon everyone in leadership at Apple to own all of their competitors devices so they
⏹️ ▶️ John and products so they know what everyone else is doing like is it conceivable that these people
⏹️ ▶️ John like had no experience with any of the other voice assistants for years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John like I find that I find that hard to believe and it would be bad if that was the case so I think they should have known
⏹️ ▶️ John how far behind Siri is and maybe maybe it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John they knew they were behind they thought they were working to improvement but to improve it but it turns out they need an entirely different
⏹️ ▶️ John approach and maybe they just discovered, you know, the spring that they need an entirely different approach. And
⏹️ ▶️ John prior to that, they had been like, we’re improving, we’re trying to improve it and just not recognizing that they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John making progress fast enough, or they’re barking up the wrong tree. I don’t know. That’s the kind of question that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple won’t answer. It’s like, why is Siri not better? You know, they always do improve it every year.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just the improvements have not been keeping pace with the competitors improvements. And that’s been true for many years. And now the gap is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the basic flaws remain. It’s still unreliable, inconsistent, slow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and too cutesy. Like those have been the problems since the beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And not smart enough. Like I mean, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John meme on Twitter where people post like it’s the it’s the blessing and curse of Apple that when
⏹️ ▶️ John you talk to your phone, it gives you the little transcript of what Siri thinks you said and then Siri’s response.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s perfect for screenshotting. And that is definitely a genre where someone
⏹️ ▶️ John asked some question or tried to say something to set up some kind of appointment and Siri was unclear about something
⏹️ ▶️ John so I said do you mean uh you know Thursday the 28th or Friday the 29th and the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John was 29th and Siri said I’m not sure what the weather is on blah blah blah I was like
⏹️ ▶️ John what what like it just it clearly understood the 29 and it had just asked a question about 28
⏹️ ▶️ John or 29 but could not map that 29 back to you know so you just take a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ John of this absurd conversation there should be fewer of those over time not more
⏹️ ▶️ John you know and it’s it’s much more dang like audio because you’re like well maybe you didn’t understand me or misinterpreted
⏹️ ▶️ John what I said but it puts on the screen what it thinks you said and it just asks you a question about the 28th or 29th you say 29 it puts the
⏹️ ▶️ John 2 and the 9 on the screen as what it understood you to say
⏹️ ▶️ John and then goes off the rails stuff like that just can’t happen right so I hope to
⏹️ ▶️ John see those type of screenshots either go away or become situations where it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well you can’t expect Siri to have figured that out that is actually complicated and nuanced but
⏹️ ▶️ John the the brain dead stupid ones should go away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like imagine like if you look at the incredible amount of access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri has to us to our devices to our information to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our bodies Siri has the like privileged access spot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the highest profile, best mobile devices. Now we have the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Siri, we have, of course, iPhone and iPad, we have the Mac with parts of Siri, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple TV with Siri, we have the HomePod with Siri. These could be amazing products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this could be an amazingly useful assistant if it was not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, but merely good. But it’s not even that yet. And now that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re seven years into it, it’s really concerning that it isn’t better than it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. So that’s, and this is, I just want so much more from Siri, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want Siri to be better than Alexa, better than Google Assistant, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than Cortana, I don’t know anything about Cortana. I don’t need it to be better than those. I just need it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost as good, even. It doesn’t even approach that. You know, it’s not even almost as good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s barely in the game at all compared to the other ones. and like I needed to be where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alexa was two years ago. Like that’s where I need Siri to be. That would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a huge upgrade from where it is now and that’s sad. Anyway, with Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specific requests, I do have some of those. What I really hope, of course, for Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really hope for a SiriKit audio intent. This is something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still don’t know if it’s necessarily likely. There’s obviously a lot of work involved in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building some kind of system for Siri to like index what is available from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music app. You know, there are ways in SiriKit, which I now know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use SiriKit in my Swift teaching walking map app, but there is, so now I know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of how the basic intents API works, and there is a provision there for the app that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being called upon to provide vocabulary words to Siri that the user might be using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So things like names of their, you know, notes or names of their playlists or whatever else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, So I could provide those for Overcast. I could say, all right, here’s the podcast you subscribe to. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the list of things they might be saying and try to match that and let me know what you find. But something like Spotify,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a little bit harder for the Spotify app to provide a list of strings that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be any band they could be possibly asking for and any song title. That could get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty extreme pretty quickly. So for the audio intent system, there would have to be some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different and more complex, maybe asynchronous or offline, like indexing process,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like what Spotlight does on the Mac, or some kind of web search API, which would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably unlikely for Apple to use. So I see the complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an audio intent. I also see the possible competitive pressure for Apple to never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add it, because now Apple Music is the only thing you can use, you can call it by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name from Siri on your phone, which is useful in the car, or from a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod. So that boosts Apple Music subscription. So I can see why they might not do it. I think those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad reasons. I think they should do it anyway because I think the value it provides to the platform and to their hardware products is better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than whatever they’re making from Apple Music and whatever effort they’re saving. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a SiriKit audio intent would be very, very good and that would make me very happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also think, you know, currently the SiriKit intents are very narrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in focus and in scope. So most apps can’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involve Siri in their interface, from their usage. Most apps have no use for Siri because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most apps are not note-taking apps, workout apps, reminders apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco payment, like cash payment apps, or ride-hailing apps. I think those are most of the, and to-do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. Those are most of the SiriKit intents. Like, if your app is not one of those five or six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that they have these little narrow intents for, not only is there nothing for you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, but you aren’t even allowed to like fake it because app review will you know I think if you try to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I try to say oh yeah Overcast is a notes app so if you say like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add play to my ATP note like that I could try to fake it and make that work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’d be rejected pretty fast. So what I want to see from SiriKit is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just like two or three new narrow intents. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really want to see is less specific generic intents that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be used more broadly for lots of app types, even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t necessarily as sophisticated or as good as specialized intent for a narrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing could be. So this could be as simple as do blank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in app or tell app to blank blank with like an action
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and an object. So tell app to action object or action object
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in app or do action in app. And then the app can provide through the vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API, sir, you know, a small set of actions and object vocabularies that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could be asking about. This is something that the Mac text to speech API had like a billion years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not a new concept. And doing speech recognition with a limited vocabulary is really accurate and really easy these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like that is not going to be as smart as you know something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more you know like a multi-step kind of here what do you want your message to so and so to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well where do you want to hail your ride from the Lyft app like it doesn’t those the great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they exist but there’s this massive number of apps out there that currently can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing with Siri and that hurts everything that hurts series usefulness it hurts developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it hurts users ability to use apps through Siri that they might want to use. So just some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generic action that can just map a generic list of verbs and objects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the system and have the system respond to basic commands like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many apps could use that that yeah, it isn’t as fancy as as the narrow intense,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s better than nothing, which is currently what we have and what it seems like we’re going to have for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John And incidentally, that kind of change is exactly the kind of thing that happens year over year at WFDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’ll announce an API and it will be very limited. And there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be a bunch of use cases that it doesn’t cover. But the ones that it does cover, it covers well. And it has, you know, maybe has
⏹️ ▶️ John a novel design like this does, where instead of just, you know, the brain dead thing where you say words,
⏹️ ▶️ John we turn it to text and we chuck the text over the wall to your application and let you handle it. This, you know, is much more
⏹️ ▶️ John sophisticated and saying, well, because these intents are so specific, we can figure out what they mean. And by the time
⏹️ ▶️ John we talk to you, your app doesn’t have to deal with text. We’ll just tell your app what to do. And, you know, they’re very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very limited, but also very, you know, a novel take, not
⏹️ ▶️ John the most obvious thing that you would do. Right. And then at that WWDC and over the course of
⏹️ ▶️ John the year, they get feedback from developers using it. Okay. I like this about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I can’t use it in this way. Or I like to do something like that. Or it, you know, there’s these common
⏹️ ▶️ John use cases that don’t fit. like Margo was saying, like Spotify, I can’t give you a list of my vocabulary, I have every song in the
⏹️ ▶️ John world, right? And Apple, you know, says, Okay, thanks for the feedback, blah, blah, blah. And then the next
⏹️ ▶️ John year, they come out with an improved version of this API to
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, now we cover more use cases, maybe we have a generic one to cover use cases like Spotify,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe there’s a few classes of applications that we want to cover, not just specific
⏹️ ▶️ John tense, but these classes require a different approach require approach more like Marco described or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that reads mostly as a boring thing, like maybe you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets a mention in the keynote. But if you go to the session, and if you’ve spent the year sending feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John and being frustrated that you can’t use it, and you’re in one of those big new classes, you’re like, Oh, wow, this is great. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is why this is why developers for people don’t understand why anyone would want to go to WWDC. developers get excited
⏹️ ▶️ John when, you know, they go to the keynote, and maybe there’s some fun things, but doesn’t really relevant to their lives. And they go to the sessions
⏹️ ▶️ John that interest them that are related to their work or their app. And in those sessions, they learn, oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to change everything like this new API is what I’ve wanted because now all these things that I wanted to do, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to write my own code for I don’t need to read weird workaround or I’m I’m able to add features that I’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to add that I couldn’t before for app review reasons or whatever. And they get super excited about
⏹️ ▶️ John something that’s buried 20 minutes into an obscure session somewhere. And the fruits of that
⏹️ ▶️ John come out like, you know, over the course of the year applications that didn’t have an ability,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, start getting like if you just talk into the air and have overcast play a specific episode for you
⏹️ ▶️ John and be able to tell it to do things, that’s a game changer. If that’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the case, Marco will find out about it by watching a screen of session next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you’ll find out about it if you’re not listening to this podcast weeks or months later.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will just be
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, they finally added this feature. That’s great. But WWC is exciting for exactly these reasons that they make
⏹️ ▶️ John changes to APIs that seem boring and inconsequential, but have
⏹️ ▶️ John wide-reaching consequences over the course of the year. So I’m actually kind of hopeful, not that
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri is going to get radically improved, but that pretty much exactly what Marco described is entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible for a sort of down year, where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to make Siri magically amazing, but it will be the next major
⏹️ ▶️ John step in the Siri Intents API, which will go a long way to making our apps nicer for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One more thing I would like to have on the intense front is SiriKit default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app settings. The idea of users being able to change the default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on iOS for various system-level things has been on people’s wish lists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the beginning of iOS. People have wanted to be able to set Chrome as their browser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or set Gmail as their mail client. I don’t see those things happening for lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reasons, various system-level integrations and stuff like that. But having SiriKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to say, you know what, when I use a reminders intent, when I say remind me in things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this, can I just have an option that any reminding intent defaults to things or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, insert your app of choice for your intent of choice here, that would go a long way towards, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boosting usage of SiriKit and just making the experience of using it smoother
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the users. I think any advancement to that system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to pay dividends in how people use Siri, how good Siri is, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much they’re able to use it, and just how little friction there is. Right now, I say, remind me in things to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do blah blah, and about one out of eight to ten times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it misses the things part and adds it to reminders for no apparent reason. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just more friction, and I have to remember to say somewhere in the sentence, in things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just, it would be nice if I didn’t have to say that because I never want to add things to the system reminders app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I did, I could say, remind me in reminders to do this. So having a default system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for SiriKit apps, I know a default system for web browsers and emails is too much to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask, probably, but SiriKit seems like a win-win for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John The default app thing is like the one feature that we didn’t get in iOS 8. Like that was the year where we got all the things we
⏹️ ▶️ John thought we were never gonna get. And you could put that in the keynote. Like that is a big applause
⏹️ ▶️ John line in the keynote. They’re saying, you can now pick your default apps, not just for the intense, but OSY. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think there are any remaining reasonable technical barriers for doing it. It’s just a matter of doing the work to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like you’ve had long enough, like we’ve waited. You know, you did third party keyboards, but you didn’t do, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can change to my default mail app. It’s ridiculous, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that needs to come. Maybe it doesn’t need to be this year, but it better be on their radar because
⏹️ ▶️ John people will love it. It’s kind of like the notification stuff. We’re at
⏹️ ▶️ John the point with iOS where there’s not a lot of huge features that everyone’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John use that people feel like are missing, but there’s plenty of features that people use every day that if they
⏹️ ▶️ John were improved, if you said, oh, and by the way, we’re gonna let you change your default mail app, so
⏹️ ▶️ John many people use Gmail or whatever. Definitely a big applause line at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just, it’s one more thing. I found another category of things you feel embarrassed
⏹️ ▶️ John having to explain to people who are not obsessive Apple followers while setting up their phones. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh look at all these great apps and I can use this and that and that. And they’re like, you get the question three weeks later.
⏹️ ▶️ John How can I make it when I mail something using this handy share thing that you showed me,
⏹️ ▶️ John how can I make it so it mails it and sends it in Gmail? And that you can kind of answer them, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John get rid of the mail thing and put the Gmail icon there or whatever. But it’s like, what about when I, like in your case, what
⏹️ ▶️ John about when I tell it to remind me? How can I make it remind me? And it’s like, then you’d have to start explaining. And be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you can’t really do that. You have to always remember to say things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have an unpronounceable reminder application, you’re kind of screwed. Learn to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Tadouist one? Tadouist.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tadouist. I don’t know. Tadouist, right? That’s an embarrassing, long conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe doesn’t come up that often, But it’s a type of thing where I can
⏹️ ▶️ John make excuses for iOS one, two, three, four, five, right? But like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re up into 12 now, it’s time for that to get on someone’s radar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, I think it is definitely a one-year project and it is a big applause
⏹️ ▶️ John line. And it’ll be a big like before and after thing where we’ll be like, I remember when you couldn’t even change the default
⏹️ ▶️ John application on iOS, that was tough. And it will help third-party developers. That’s what you wanna do at WWDC, tell people,
⏹️ ▶️ John you third-party developer have a better opportunity to make more money in the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John because now people will be able to use your application as the default reminders application that will make them use it more and
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pay for it more and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s been a big theme to things that we’ve gotten at previous WWDCs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’ve been very happy with is ways for third-party apps to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the same levels of access and privilege and functionality on the system that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s own apps do. Like giving us the same abilities that Apple’s apps might have. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know like when we got background audio, finally we could have like background like we could have third-party music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and podcast players and they could do all the same things that Apple’s could do. You know stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And over the years Apple really has broken down a lot of those barriers of differences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between what their apps can do and what any app can do. And Siri involvement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is one of those major ones that’s…and default handling of URLs is one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major ones that is still a really big barrier that significantly hinders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third-party apps that rely on these things. And so anything they can do to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level that playing field a little bit is going to be way better for the apps and therefore way better for Apple’s users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just… I don’t think default apps, you know, being able to set a default web browser, to set as a default
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email client. I’m hard pressed to imagine an Apple where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John okay. Third party
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards, Casey. Third party keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John hear you, I really do. That was the year where it was like, Apple’s never gonna do X, and they’re like, guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what, they just did all the X, except for default apps. They’ve done it on Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John for years. It’s not like there is work involved. I understand not doing it in the first,
⏹️ ▶️ John say, decade of iOS or whatever long it’s been, but now’s the time
⏹️ ▶️ John people are saying, oh, there’s no big features, no music from iOS. Right, but there are little ones. There are little ones and they are missing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And most of them you just look at the competition to see what they are, right? I mean, the enhanced notifications and
⏹️ ▶️ John the more sophisticated speech stuff. And yes, default applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s a thing that they’re going to have to do eventually. And if not this
⏹️ ▶️ John year, then maybe next year, but please not 10 years from now because that will be too long. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an embarrassing, it’s kind of like a vestige of the days when Apple didn’t think there would be third party applications at all. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the one year when they had no app store and they’re just like, you know, make web apps or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having the bundled mail app be the default and the bundled reminder app be
⏹️ ▶️ John the default and anytime you say mail and remind, it’s like, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the world we live in anymore and the phone should reflect that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s funny you said, you know, low-hanging fruit because I was going to say myself that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only thing that gives me pause when I say there’s no freaking way they’re gonna do it is that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are running out of obvious low-hanging fruit for Apple to fix, which is good. I mean, that’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. That means iOS is getting pretty mature and pretty robust,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s a good thing. But that is, setting default apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a piece of theoretically low-hanging fruit. Of course, now I’m committing the ultimate programmer sin and saying, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure that’s easy. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John how hard could it be? How hard could it
⏹️ ▶️ John be? There are complications, but like, you know, you’ve had time to deal with the
⏹️ ▶️ John complications. You’ve you’ve had many, many years as I oh, we’re not doing that this year. It’s not high enough priority. There are more important things
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. It’s complicated, right? All those conversations should have happened. Yes, that was the right answer. Then
⏹️ ▶️ John now the answer should be, you know what, that actually is probably the most bad. One of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things we can do that gets the most bang for the buck about it, you know, making third,
⏹️ ▶️ John making it a more attractive platform third-party developers and making users happy with it. Like that’s the level we’re at now
⏹️ ▶️ John with iOS, where it’s like, you know, same thing with more sophisticated, uh, you know, notification facilities. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John a, this is a pain point for users. We’ve had, we have notifications. They’re good. They’ve, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been improving, but there are still a couple of things, uh, that we could change to make them better for our users
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, add a special Apple touch to it. Right. Uh, so we’d, you know, do it slightly better or smarter
⏹️ ▶️ John than Android if you want to be clever with it but our you know our notifications are not
⏹️ ▶️ John as sophisticated and it results in our devices annoying our users in situations that we don’t want it to so
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s you know let’s tackle that now now’s the time for that stuff or or next year you know sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i mean with so much of this stuff i know this probably is not the case but so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many areas of apple’s os’s and so many of of their first party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps appear to have a staff of like one person. Like it just it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they they just make glacial progress in some of these areas and like every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year like the big new thing of the new OS is like something that it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t have taken an entire year for the biggest company in the world to with all the money in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it seems like that’s that’s kind of all you did in a year You know, like, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think another major area that I would like to see Apple improve on, which I don’t expect to happen anytime soon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because by all accounts, it’s actually gotten worse in the last few years, especially under Tim Cook’s structure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of management, is I want to see a sign that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can walk and chew gum at the same time. Like I want to see a sign of them being able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually like hustle a little bit, like pick up the pace, like actually innovate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all their platforms. without two-thirds of them being seemingly neglected all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like actually move forward and use the massive resources they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to maintain all the platforms that they voluntarily launched. It’s not like people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco force them to do all these things. So I just I want to see more hustle. I want to see more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I don’t want to be constantly saying like that’s all you did in a whole year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that like the opposite of my desire for a slowdown?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, your desire for a slowdown is only a thing because it seems like they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update two OS’s with quality. But that’s not the right answer to that isn’t well, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better slow down so you do everything even more glacially. The answer to that is there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some bottlenecks here that need to be fixed. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more like I mean, it’s more like don’t race ahead so quickly that you leave like your messes behind you. Right. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the philosophy of the slowdown is not so much that we feel like you can’t simultaneously
⏹️ ▶️ John but that you’re racing ahead on all your platforms so fast that you’re not you’re not taking time to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of pay down the tech debt and fix the little niggling bugs and all that stuff that’s that’s and behind
⏹️ ▶️ John so i mean i i suppose you could say like if if they sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of improved the baseline quality of all their products and but did it across all of them not
⏹️ ▶️ John just like the iphone you know ios when running on iphone got much better but the mac
⏹️ ▶️ John was still buggy and the and the iPad was still neglected. And I feel like if they
⏹️ ▶️ John can make a noticeable improvement, even if it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John on stability and bugs, but across all of their things, it would show they are able to walk and chew gum
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. They’re just not yet at the point where they can show a
⏹️ ▶️ John noticeable improvement across all stuff and also massively advance all stuff. And you know what I mean? You
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta walk before you can run. I feel like they’re, again, rebuilding. They need to get back to basics
⏹️ ▶️ John and yes, pay attention to everything. Don’t leave anything behind and say, oh, we’re just not doing anything to that this
⏹️ ▶️ John year. But what you do to everything, start small. Just improve quality, minor
⏹️ ▶️ John new features, better stability, removal of old bugs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but do it across everything. I honestly, I think that would be an improvement because it used to be that it would like
⏹️ ▶️ John race ahead as fast as you can, but totally ignore certain platforms. And that didn’t feel good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s just tough because, you know, obviously the best we can do is armchair quarterback and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pontificate about what’s going on inside Apple, but it sure feels like this annual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release cycle, and we’ve talked about this before, the annual release cycle is not compatible with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sorts of things they’re trying to do now. And this perhaps relates to what I was saying a few minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago about there being not a lot of low-hanging fruit anymore. And so, you know, the things that they want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do to iOS and to macOS as well, they’re big complex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that take a long time to do. And if they’re being compelled to do them in a year or less,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure I’m oversimplifying some, but that may not be compatible. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think some sort of indication that Apple is willing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, no, this marketing feature we were really going to hang our hats on for 2018. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just not ready. It’s just not ready. So let’s wait and let’s not say a thing until it is ready. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like Apple used to be much better about that than they are now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we did hear a report, one of you mentioned this earlier, a report a couple of months ago that they are going to go back to doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’re going to have the courage to not release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things if they so desire, which I I think is healthy and good. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s both things, right? Like we want them to move quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the things they can, which is what Marco is saying, but we also want them to have the strength
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of will or courage to say, you know what, this just ain’t ready. It’s got to wait. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of those things can be true.
⏹️ ▶️ John A yearly release cycle doesn’t mean things take a year to do. That just means every year you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco something, right? So I feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ John slowdown, like again, I mentioned this on past shows, like many of projects that come out
⏹️ ▶️ John have been in works for three, five years, right? They’re not one year projects. It’s just that like
⏹️ ▶️ John the the rumor about them slowing down was like, let’s become more aggressive and more honest with
⏹️ ▶️ John ourselves about whether something actually is ready this year, right? So that’s the rumor is things got booted out of
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 12. Like things that you know, two years ago, Apple would have said, we could probably squeeze
⏹️ ▶️ John that into iOS. Now there’s always this, you know, as as new OS approach, you have to decide which features
⏹️ ▶️ John makes the cut in which don’t, which is why nobody inside Apple can remember when anything was released because they’ve all been in the
⏹️ ▶️ John works for years and years and you’re like, Oh, yeah, that’s right. I didn’t even make that release, even though it was almost done. We saved it for the next one, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the change in Apple is when we make that trade off conversation about this has been in the works
⏹️ ▶️ John for three years, is it ready to go on iOS 12? Are we going to save it for 13 to change
⏹️ ▶️ John wherever like the balance point is of like, go no go to say, actually, let’s be even more
⏹️ ▶️ John conservative because we’ve proven to ourselves that wherever whatever balance we were striking before,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were being too aggressive. we would say, well, we could probably get that ready in time for
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC. We could probably ship that in the OS. And then once you announce it, you’re kind of committed and it turns out, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like, so that their balance was a little bit off. So it’s not about projects taking a year or two versus
⏹️ ▶️ John two years or whatever. It’s more about, uh, where you draw the line and where you, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you cut things off. That’s fair point. Uh, and then, uh, on,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, what, one way to think about the slowdown things at the top of the notes here, I had, uh, usually this
⏹️ ▶️ John every day we see and I’m thinking about it in a different way for this one the stuff we kind of know they’re gonna announce
⏹️ ▶️ John like that we and for years we’ve been right in knowing that they’re gonna announce these things like there’ll be a new iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John there’ll be a new Mac OS there’ll be a new version of Xcode right like things that just happened at every WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just a question of what will be in the new iOS what will be in the new Mac OS what will be in the new Xcode what will
⏹️ ▶️ John be announced for Swift which is much easier because it’s all open right but uh i’m wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John if one thing they could do that would be dramatic would be
⏹️ ▶️ John not to have a new mac os this year not to have a new i i mean you probably can’t get away with not having a new ios
⏹️ ▶️ John like like i’m just wondering if if you can if the the standard
⏹️ ▶️ John required suite of things that we know that are at every wwdc is there
⏹️ ▶️ John any wiggle room on that that there wouldn’t be one of them? What if, you know, what if they just did macOS 10.13.16.17.18?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, what if they just just continue that train, right? And add features
⏹️ ▶️ John and in point releases, but if they didn’t have the burden of having a newly
⏹️ ▶️ John named, newly numbered, new major version of all their stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not even new version of Xcode, maybe just an Xcode, I don’t even know what the hell version Xcode is on, but just, you know, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t change the first number, the second number just change the third number.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s likely. I think there will be those those new things. They’ll just be less and different stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in them. But it’s worth considering whether Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John is a prisoner to every year having one of those things. Even if it’s just like a marketing thing, it’s like, well, this is really
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 11 point whatever, but we’re just going to change the first number to 12 and add the two features fix
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of bugs like I don’t I don’t see that on the cards. But I’m I’m thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John what the reaction would be and whether or not it would be a healthier thing to do to Casey’s point about, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you need to the pressure to cut a new major release of all these
⏹️ ▶️ John important components and to be able to have enough marketing features to be worthy of
⏹️ ▶️ John a new name and a new number and a new section of your website that seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John it might influence the decision about whether something is ready to fit in an OS. It’s like, well, we can’t cut that. If we cut
⏹️ ▶️ John that from iOS 12, what the hell? Why do we even get to call it 12? What’s different about it than an 11
⏹️ ▶️ John except for a bunch of bug fixes and minor features? How is this even a 12? That needs to stay in and
⏹️ ▶️ John that can lead you to the path of either shipping something before you should or promising
⏹️ ▶️ John something that doesn’t arrive for a year later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else with regard to software? Are we really expecting anything from Mac OS? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’ll be 10.14 and I think it will have a new name and God
⏹️ ▶️ John knows what they’re going to include. And I suppose there’ll be like metal and AR kit
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Like there’s lots of lots of sort of young frameworks that can kind of carry
⏹️ ▶️ John the weight of new major versions of the OS. It was like, and if you want this new, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John cool AR kit functionality, it’s only an iOS 12 and a Mac OS 10.14 name of California city, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that, it’s not really an OS
⏹️ ▶️ John feature, but it comes with the OS and probably requires the OS. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of major new features that are not a cross-platform UI framework for MacOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’ve even given up asking for OpenGL because obviously that ship has sailed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like it’s just framework stuff, maybe an enhanced version of Time Machine that takes
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage of APFS. But even that, that can wait till
⏹️ ▶️ John next year too. iOS 12, I think we mostly discussed. There are plenty of things they can do on iOS 12 that will
⏹️ ▶️ John be crowd-pleasing, that will have a significant impact on users and third-party developers, and they should do those
⏹️ ▶️ John things. WatchOS, we’ve talked about that as well. Although,
⏹️ ▶️ John have they always had a new version of WatchOS at WWDC? I don’t know. I forget what the timing on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe so. Yeah, they have. Yeah. I mean, WatchOS, I really am curious to see where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that goes, because WatchOS is so weird. It always has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been. made improvements over the last couple of releases, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still not what you want it to be. It’s still not great. You know, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still need to, I think, rethink a lot of what watchOS is and how things are done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like Casey, I would love to see third party watch faces. I don’t expect that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey expect Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to continue to want to lock that down for themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John would be such an insane crowd pleaser. Like, I don’t think they ever have to do that, but boy, people would go nuts for that
⏹️ ▶️ John because talk about things you can sell to people with watches, you can sell watch faces for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course! And you know, it’s just for, you know, it’s a fashion item. It’s already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, kind of awkward that everyone has the same watch. Like, that’s not great for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people’s fashion identities and stuff. You know, they have customizability with the straps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat. But geez, give people the ability to have their own watch face. Like, let them make this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own. And then, ideally, hopefully, the watch faces could be a little bit smart, too and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offering their own intelligent displays of certain types of data or complications. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s lots of ways they could do it. I have a feeling if they did it at all they would probably do it in a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited way and I still don’t expect them to do it at all honestly but if they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the potential could be great if they allow it to be. I would love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see that. I would even just see I’d love to see things like you know in addition to all my other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complaints about WatchKit because WatchKit is horrible. I still maintain that WatchKit should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be entirely thrown away and there should be a UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco framework that Apple uses and developers use. Whether they’re working on such a thing, I have no idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I hope they are. But who knows? And there’s lots of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with audio that I want to see. My number one problem with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch app is that the Now Playing Glance has a volume control from the crown that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls the phone’s volume and I can’t offer that. There is no way for me to do it in watchOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I could offer that, my app could be competitive with the Now Playing Glance. Right now, most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, not most, a lot of people, almost most, who could install the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast Watch app actually delete it off the watch because the Now Playing App will then show and it’s more useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them because it has a volume control. So some kind of volume widget I really want. I also, as I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said many times before and blogged about, I want actual background audio playback through the AV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio APIs, not through the crappy WK audio file player. I want now playing info
⏹️ ▶️ Marco center and remote command center so I can actually make a useful podcast playback experience on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. But also things like just more generally beyond just what I need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the entire system of complications was a miss and needs to be completely thrown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and rewritten.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Steve McLaughlin Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why? Because I don’t think I agree, so convince me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jared Polin All right. So the idea of letting third-party apps integrate into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch faces with complications, that is a good idea. But the current system of complications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, first of all, like the way they’re integrated into the watch faces is way too static, where you just have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, the reason why people like you like the Siri watch face is that it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this. It isn’t static. is dynamically surfacing things as they matter to you. The entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complication system should be doing that. You should have watch faces that can show complications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only when they’re in use. So for instance, I don’t need to see the timer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complication if I don’t have an active timer running. But when I do have an active timer running, I want to see that on the watch face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things like that. You know, basic intelligence. Things like what the iPhone lock screen does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhone lock screen can show a timer when it’s running. it isn’t running it doesn’t say set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of your lock screen it just doesn’t have it there it’s smart like I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch should be that smart it should be as smart as the lock screen on your phone for God’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sake but that’s not that this isn’t rocket science here I also think that the entire API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for supplying complications with their data was built upon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like you know, watch, you know, series zero hardware limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your app really can’t be running almost ever. And also the idea that was added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, I believe, OS 2, which is time travel, where you could spin the crown on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch face and have it advance forward and backwards in time, and you could see how your complications change over time. The entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API is based on that. And that’s really complicated and cumbersome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to program against. It doesn’t make sense for all types of applications, makes a lot of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way too complicated. And I think from the user point of view, the time travel feature failed. That’s why in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next version of watchOS, they turned it off by default. So I think that entire system needs to be scrapped and rethought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both from the display side on the watch faces becoming more smart, and the complication side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer being based on this weird time travel thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. What else about WWDC? TVOS. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah. That’s a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is another OS that they occasionally update. I mean, what I would love from tvOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is if the OS could leap out of that puck and fix the remote. But it can’t. I mean, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s wrong with tvOS now? The most pressing thing that’s wrong with tvOS is not the OS anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the devices that it runs on, specifically the remote. Like, they did the frame rate matching,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I mean, I don’t think their HDR support is up to snuff yet. I don’t have an HDR TV, but I think that that is an area
⏹️ ▶️ John of improvement. but the frame rate matching and the improvements to
⏹️ ▶️ John the playback APIs and everything, so the third party applications can take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, those were the last major features to make the Apple TV a viable
⏹️ ▶️ John video device. The OS, as far as it goes, running the apps and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all right, the performance is all right, the apps are okay. The single sign-on stuff, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing what they can, but it’s kind of like it’s a, it’s more of a third party dependency thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, they, they can improve that a little bit, but like things that I want from the U S
⏹️ ▶️ John that it doesn’t do, there’s not a lot of the obvious stuff left.
⏹️ ▶️ John They really have to get now into the refinement and performance and a new API is and
⏹️ ▶️ John allowing a easier third party integration to a unified experience like that. Kind of like watch us. They
⏹️ ▶️ John really do need to rethink the entire TV OS interface, but the one they have is passable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly people don’t wanna spend time hanging out there. They don’t wanna go into the TV app, the little
⏹️ ▶️ John vestige of their attempted skinny bundle deal. At some point in our future, presumably not this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple video service is coming with all their new TV shows and movies and other stuff that Apple is paying
⏹️ ▶️ John billions of dollars for. That’s coming and that’s the time to totally revamp Apple TV and take
⏹️ ▶️ John your next shot at a grid of rectangular things on your screen or whatever. or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John their interface is gonna be. But for now, I’d be content to just do minor refinements
⏹️ ▶️ John and really what I want is a new remote, but I don’t see that happening at WWDC. So tvOS, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting if you’re a third-party application vendor, like, oh, now I can get my things to show up in the TV
⏹️ ▶️ John app, whereas previously they wouldn’t. That might be kind of interesting for people who use the TV app, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that OS is in a holding pattern awaiting Apple’s video
⏹️ ▶️ John service and awaiting, as far as I’m concerned, a new hardware with new remote.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That reminds me, to kind of bring it back to iOS, are we gonna see any noticeable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey springboard changes this year? And when I say that, I mean in terms of like, the way the home screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks. Do you think we’ll get maybe widgets, which I’m not so convinced are really that useful, but a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of people seem to want them. Will we get widgets? Will we get, I don’t know, something other than a grid of round
⏹️ ▶️ Casey racks? Do you think there’s anything different there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now that got booted out of iOS 12, wasn’t that the rumor? That was one of the headlining features that they said
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was planned for iOS 12,
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m going to say no, don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Yeah, I wouldn’t expect that either. I mean, if so, the only real rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve heard are there’s these cross-platform type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. There’s the marzipan thing where allegedly iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps or iPad apps will be able to run on the Mac in some way, in some form. And And then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing that Gruber wrote about the declarative UI framework, which Mark Gurman says is code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco named Amber or Ultraviolet, that is apparently like a new kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like React kind of UI framework that will go across platforms, I think. Is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like React or Rx? What are those? Which one of those?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure, to be honest with you. I’ve heard descriptions that would make me think either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve heard descriptions that you don’t have to like rerun the app in order to see UI changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is React. I’ve heard that it’s responding to… it’s functionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reactive, which is kind of React, and also definitely RxSwift. So I’m really honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, anyway, it’s like… that sounds like two different things. Mark Ehrman thinks it’s two different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. Either of those would be awesome to get this year. It doesn’t sound like we’re getting either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them based on the little bit of rumors we’ve heard. But But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if either of those things are coming, that might coincide well with a UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overhaul on iOS, which we’ve been talking about for a couple of years now that it seems like it’s due for one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things like maybe a system-wide dark mode for OLED screens, maybe rethinking some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system UI conventions and widgets in light of no longer being able to reach the top of screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very often, and in light of just the iOS 7 look being really dated and there being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of different, you know, various iOS design directions that were good that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple’s own apps have gone in like look at something like maps that has a whole new design vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some like Apple music that’s a different new design vocabulary like it seems like we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed like a design a system redesign is overdue at this point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s a really big job so if they’re we’re truly taking this as like a bug fixing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. And if these cross platform things aren’t ready yet, but might be ready by next year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would seem likely that most of this stuff is probably going to all hit together next year.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot about dark mode for Mac OS. That was the member we talked about the web kit thing with the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The expansion
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s a cosmetic things are always good. If you want to justify a new OS with a new version. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, the screen looks totally different. You can look at these screenshots like an expansion of the dark dock and menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ John to more darkness that is an opt-in for developers with the exact same problems
⏹️ ▶️ John that we saw with the dark menu bar where people’s menu bar icons weren’t showing up because they didn’t correctly handle the dark thing and they’re drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John black on black. That could be a fun thing for Mac developers to wrangle with
⏹️ ▶️ John and that could also be a fun thing for Mac users to experience. It’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, not the most complicated feature in the world and it does make a lot of sort of busy work for developers to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John their applications look good in both dark mode and light mode, but it definitely shows up in screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a thing you can look at someone’s screen and know that they’re running a new version of the OS, which in past years has been
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that has been sometimes difficult. You know, glance at someone’s screen, is that Sierra? Hi Sierra?
⏹️ ▶️ John Which one is that? to tell sometimes.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I have a problem. So last summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the beach, I brought with me my wonderfully hated 2017 15-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro because I had to work full-time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there for like a month and so I got the LG 5k
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought the laptop out plugged it in and was able to work full-time off of that it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close performance to my 2014 iMac at the time so it’s like alright
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this this is good enough for a summertime okay there were a lot of downsides to it ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having the all USB-C lifestyle even when you have four ports was still kind of annoying. Certain things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were like certain peripherals were not reliable or were only reliable when put into a real port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the hub on the back of the monitor or things like that but you know ultimately I got by.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I hated that laptop for lots of other reasons and ended up as we all know getting rid of it, selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and then getting a 2015 MacBook Pro again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh but now you can’t use your fancy-pants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor! Bingo! So alright, so I have a problem is that this summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will hopefully be working there a lot again and I have this big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor out there that my current computer can’t plug into. So I have some options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One option is I can go and get another laptop again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the thing, if they actually announce modified laptops in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know four days or whenever the keynote is if they actually announce new MacBook pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have look I’m not hoping for return to the old keyboard or the old ports. I just want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a changed keyboard. I don’t care how it’s changed just something even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they even if it’s still butterfly switches even if it still has the stupid arrow key even if it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ John that I just run around trying to find your limits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I can always count on you, John. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just any indication like here, here’s a third generation butterfly key mechanism,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even better. Here’s the scissor mechanism from the magic keyboard, which is a nice halfway point between the two fields,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and way more reliable. But hey, I would even accept third generation butterfly mechanism,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Just some indication that they have changed the keyboard because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume that if they if they change the keyboard now it is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be more reliable because it’s hard to make it less reliable but also they’ve had all this time to see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay we have some problems with dust and stuff getting under these keys so hopefully if they change it now it should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be good right so anyway so my option is buy a new laptop that gets announced next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week but that’s of course dependent on if a new laptop gets announced next week and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far we haven’t seen any evidence of that being you know being likely so that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one problem. I could also just use my 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop now, just use it full-time. Lots of people do. I will probably develop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neck and shoulder problems, but I could use that full-time with no external monitor. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t love that arrangement, but I could do it. Another option is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a different monitor for out there, something like either like a 4K
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor, monitor which I there are 4k monitors that work with the old fit with the 2015 laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I do at work that’s my work I actually have two 4k monitors side-by-side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and it is pretty nice like I’d still prefer a single 5k which you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you can also do with that 2015
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco actually obviously you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but well unless if our listeners know if If there’s a 5K monitor that can work at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 60Hz with the 2015 MacBook Pro, I’m happy to hear about it. I don’t think that’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, if it is, I’d love to be wrong about that. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could just get 4K monitors, which even then, it’s hard to find 4K monitors that people will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco officially say, yes, this works at 60Hz with the 2015 laptops, even the ones without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GPU. That’s actually pretty hard to find. But anyway. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can give you one. They’re not great. Well, not give you one, but you know what I mean? Like I have that at work and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitors are sufficient. They’re not tremendous, but they’re sufficient. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thing I will say while I’m thinking of it, just in case you go and do something without talking to me, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that you’ve been known to do from time to time, don’t use HDMI because you will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You have to use whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the other Thunderbolt 2 connector? Thunderbolt 2 slash mini display port. Well, yeah, but then I forget what it is going into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor. Because mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re right, you’re right. Yeah, you have to do that to get 60 hertz because I almost sent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one I have back when we got it at work until I did a little Googling and realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh no, no, I can get 60 hertz out of this, I just need to not use HDMI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So a couple of people in the chat are saying that I can use the Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapter to plug in the 5K to my laptop. I believe they are correct. However, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the Apple stores do with the LG UltraFine being plugged into the trash can Mac Pro, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has the same limitation. If you look closely at those screens, you see it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually running at a reduced quality. What it’s doing, so you can actually do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, because the Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter works bidirectionally. So you can plug the 3 to 2 adapter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the USB-C monitor, then you can take a Thunderbolt 2 cable and plug it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the adapter and plug it into your laptop. And if you do that, What’ll happen is the laptop, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to be that the laptop basically down renders, it renders it to like a roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4K sized buffer and then upscales it at the monitor side, kinda transparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco along the way. So it does appear from far away to be 5K,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like things are the right size for it to be 5K, but if you look up close the pixels are really kinda blurry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little bit off, like it’s just, it’s not quite right because it actually is down sampling and then put it back up. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do that with the adapter, and I have that adapter, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not something I want to do. But anyway, the option exists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to buy a 4K monitor, have it out there. The problem is, once this summer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done, I don’t have any use for that monitor anymore. What am I going to do with it? That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4K monitors aren’t that expensive. It’s one of the cheaper options I have. my initial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco searching looks like I can get like a 4K 24 inch, not 27 inch. 27 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the wrong size for 4K. The right size for 4K is 24 inch. That is correct. But 24 inch 4Ks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look like they’re about like 350 bucks at most. So like this actually compared to some of these other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options is actually a pretty reasonable option. That’s a home pod. Well anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so 24 inch monitor that’s that’s an option too. Probably the most sensible one. Another option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to bring my iMac Pro there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you see? Oh God, where is this? It’s called the LaVolta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac case. Did you see the picture of this with like the hipster walking through? Oh God, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could actually look like this guy with substantially less hair and a little bit more weight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I could look like this guy carrying my iMac with a bespoke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leather and whatever that cloth is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got a little elbow patches on the corners. Isn’t that great? I love that
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t really hide the fact that the stand is just poking out and we’re just hitting passersby.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s just flopping around. Right, and hitting people, it sticks out substantially. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it’s great. But the funny thing is, I looked at various options for iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carrying cases and this thing is only like $60 and to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full size padded one that actually sits around the entire thing is like $200.
⏹️ ▶️ John actually carrying case. This is why you should all be insane like me and save your original boxes because
⏹️ ▶️ John transport your iMac safely, you put it back in the original box, the original packing material, and guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can transport it safely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know I have mine too, but that’s massive. Like the original box is so big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not that big. It’s tapered.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s yeah, it’s still pretty massive. Anyway, that’s I mean, honestly, like if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to transport this thing safely and not be like worrying about it and like, because this isn’t isn’t going to protect the thing if you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, shove it in the back of your car with a bunch of other crap, you need to put it in something about the size
⏹️ ▶️ John of the original box. That’s it. Like there’s no, there’s no slimmer version that protects your thing just as much as the original box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. So anyway, so that is an option. I could just bring my iMac there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then, but that would, the problem with that besides the fact that I have to look like this guy, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, basically my concern would be what if What if I either damage it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which would be very expensive, or what if I make it less reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way? What if I like slightly… It’s filled with salt air, yeah. Yeah, what if I like slightly jostle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something inside or some component flakes out just a little bit and then it’s like a little bit less reliable for the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few years that I’m trying to use it? I would never forgive myself if that happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would worry more about the salt air than the transport. Honestly, I mean, I guess you probably have air
⏹️ ▶️ John conditioning on and clothes, Like it is a more hostile environment for electronics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no question. Very, yes. No, like everything out there, like anything made of metal out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there dies in like three years. Like everything, like you know, appliances,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, hardware on doors, locks, like everything. It’s like, everything’s crazy out there. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like, I don’t think I want to bring my expensive iMac Pro there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for lots of reasons. So anyway, that option I don’t love. Another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option would be to get a cheap used iMac or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade TIFF now and bring her old one there. Like there are things I could do, but then it’s like, but I don’t want a computer to be sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there all year when I’m not using it. Like the whole rest of the year, there’s no reason for it
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Just sell it at the end of the summer, as is your way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if that’s the option, I might as well do the same thing with a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I mean, aren’t you, like the laptop isn’t just about
⏹️ ▶️ John the monitor connection, it’s also about the thing running hot and making noise and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John downclocking. Honestly, I think if you’re gonna spend substantial time there and you like working on a big screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John that a cheap 5K iMac seems like the obvious answer. And what you do with it when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John done with the season, whether you just leave it there and come back to it the next summer, or
⏹️ ▶️ John have it shipped there and pack it, when you leave the house, pack it up in its original box and shove it somewhere, that
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems better than trying to find some kind of laptop arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna work for you. I don’t know. I mean, especially as like, you know, are you trying to save trying to save
⏹️ ▶️ John money by using your existing laptop with just a monitor and then just leaving it like just just get the
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap iMac. It seems that that’s my vote for the path of least resistance that will make you have the fewest
⏹️ ▶️ John compromises while you’re there. And it’s not that much more expensive. You’re not you’re not getting another
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac pro for it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I didn’t already have the five K monitor out there, I think that that seems like a better option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because I already have it out there, like it seems like, well, what else? Like I don’t have any use for that monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna go out there and you’re gonna sell it. That’s what you’re gonna do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. This, I’m just, like I’m really, I’m mostly just kind of annoyed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if I have to end up buying for this purpose, another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the new laptops that I hate, like imagine like if Casey had to buy another BMW right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like. Cut steep. Right. Cut steep. Yeah, you really don’t want to, right? that might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most sensible option for what your stated priorities and needs are, you still don’t want to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of how I feel about like, ideally, I think the actual option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should take is probably to do exactly what I did last summer, which is buy the highest end 15 inch I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get, use it for the summer and then sell it or hopefully use it as my main one if I can tolerate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I should do, but I just can’t bear to do that. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is why I hope they get updated. Wouldn’t you rather be using an iMac? Like, you don’t need the
⏹️ ▶️ John portability aspect of it, right? Wouldn’t you rather be using an iMac all summer and sell that at the end than use a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop Hydra arrangement?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suppose I would, but I’m still like, my life’s, the needs of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life are, I do need a laptop on a semi-frequent basis. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do need to maintain a laptop. It doesn’t need to be the highest-end laptop in the world, but I do need a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop. So if I’m gonna have a laptop anyway, then I might as well have a laptop that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also serve this role, because it’s just a way more efficient allocation of computing resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and number of systems to maintain and everything than trying to have a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there and a desktop at home and my laptop. That’s getting a little bit crazy. We’ll get to that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the ASK ATP, but I don’t think I want a whole additional Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need three.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got you got a whole additional refrigerator and a whole additional washing machine. You’ve got a whole additional house This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the problem from that. I found the root
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. It’s actually there’s actually two refrigerators in it it came with two One of them was apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used for fish and so we don’t use that So there’s there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second fridge in the living room the fish fridge. It’s really high-class Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we just like leave it closed all the time time because we made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mistake of opening it a couple times and trying to clean it and believe me this cannot be cleaned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we we have tried we also tried giving it away surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John no one wants it fish
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway just put it outside then come back next year it’ll just be slowly crumbling into you know rusty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shards that’s not a bad idea yeah yeah take advantage of the corrosion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway so that’s that’s my beach computer problem this is admittedly like massive first world problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, white wine, et cetera. But I do think it’s interesting to consider and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week, these concerns will become moot as they release the laptop of my dreams. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure how likely that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I think if it were me, I would just get a 4K monitor and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you won’t like it, but it’ll be sufficient. And I looked up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much the one I have at work is and it’s 250 bucks. And I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheap, and even I, if were I in this situation, I would just plunk down 250
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks and call it a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day. Or you could have iCloud storage for like 20 years. Anyway, ask
#askatp: Us at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CW Bennett writes, what would be the best strategy to accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bump into you guys at WWDC? I kept my eyes open for you last year, but had no luck. If you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Marco, go to Southern Policy. If you’re looking for John or, well, if you’re looking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, Social Policy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if it’s evening, the beer and sausage place down the street.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re looking for John, look in the sessions. And if you’re looking for me, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in between social policy and the sessions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possibly layers actually, because I’ll be boinging through layers as well. I’m going to just be like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Tasmanian devil. But yeah, any of those three places are, well, I guess four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you include the beer place, that’s the best bet for the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, I reckon. And I will also reiterate, as we do every year, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen to see one of us in the streets, in a session, in social policy, wherever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case may be, do please feel free to say hi. We may or may not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to talk for more than a moment, especially if we’re running between sessions or something like that. So please don’t take offense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we’re quick, but please say hi. I love it when people say hi and say, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, I really like the show. That makes me feel super good. And this is the one week a year where I get to pretend like I’m famous and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s super fun and then I’m nobody just like always, which is also super fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So please feel free to say hi. I think all three of us will probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have stickers. Is that right, gentlemen?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wanted to talk about that now because I’m going to tweet about this too, but it’s easier to
⏹️ ▶️ John express this without sounding like a jerk. So I’m definitely going to have stickers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you see me and you want a sticker, I will just give you one. I will have ATP stickers. I will
⏹️ ▶️ John also have a small amount of hypercritical stickers, which
⏹️ ▶️ John look like the logo on the website that I never update. I will post pictures of these and the pictures are important because
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t ask for a sticker unless you want the specific stickers that I have
⏹️ ▶️ John because you want to stick it on something. Don’t just ask for one because it sounds like it might be neat to have a sticker,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because I have a limited quantity and don’t feel like you have to take a sticker to be polite.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t want a sticker, do not ask for a sticker. And how can you tell whether you want them? Watch my Twitter feed
⏹️ ▶️ John and I will show you pictures of the stickers and if you don’t want that sticker do not ask for a sticker.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like when you have stickers like oh sure I’ll take a sticker like you feel like you get lots of swag from like vendors
⏹️ ▶️ John and other things like yeah I’ll take a sticker or whatever. Don’t because these are surprisingly expensive and people actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do want them so if you don’t want these stickers because they’re ugly or stupid I will not be offended just merely do not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say the exact opposite. I went to Sticker Mule last year before a couple weeks before the show and bought like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smallest quantity I could which I think was like 200 of them and I still have like 180 of them after a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole year so that’s not the smallest quantity because I got less than that oh well whatever it is by all means if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see me even if you don’t want a sticker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John ask for a sticker and you can take Margo needs to get rid of this yes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have too many stickers so please for the
⏹️ ▶️ John love of God take these yeah and at the live show I’ll probably also put a bunch of stickers out for people to just grab
⏹️ ▶️ John but I would also say like don’t grab them if you don’t want the sticker like some people are not sticker people like I don’t I don’t put stickers
⏹️ ▶️ John on So I’m not gonna take a sticker but other people really are sticker people and they do want them They’re gonna stick them on a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those people should have the stickers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow Leave it to John to have rules about whether or not you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John allowed to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John say like this Sometimes you’ll feel like they have to take a sticker to be polite even though they’re like what the hell am I gonna do with? This and they just chuck
⏹️ ▶️ John it right don’t don’t do that. I will not be offended if you don’t want my stickers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, I mean don’t yeah, don’t don’t take my stickers if you’re sure more. I mean I can throw them away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Save save us the trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, and any other thoughts about where we can be found? I mean obviously we’ll have our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Monday night show, the Relay thing is Wednesday, is that right? Talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show Tuesday, App Camp thing
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll be at all those places. We’ll be at our own live show, surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll all be at the talk show, we’ll all be at the Relay thing. So if you go to any of those things, you will probably see us.
#askatp: Multi-Mac development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. Pat Murphy writes, do any of you use multiple machines for development? And if so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you use any automation for that environment? For example, I understand Marco does most of his dev work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an iMac, but he takes his laptop when he goes out to WWC, and I think he has said he does development while on the road.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you just manually copy your working directories and manually keep all the tool chains in sync, or do you use Dropbox or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud? Gasp, says Pat Murphy, to sync folders, or perhaps just do get syncs across machines?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I do development on my iMac, on my work computer, and on my Macbook Adorable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I basically just use Git and then everything else is manual. That may or may not be the bestest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approach in the entire world, but that’s what works for me. Marco, what do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do for your 13 different laptops that you’re switching out every minute?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the most part, until very recently, I was doing what you do, which is just have a different Git checkout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the local home directory of each machine, like for various projects I’m working on, and just use Git
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the merging and hosting platform to keep everything in sync. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course has the downside of like, you have to commit everything to get it to sync to another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine. So like if you’re on your desktop and you gotta run and you wanna take your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and start working on stuff, you have to make sure everything’s committed and pushed before you can take your laptop. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of cumbersome and annoying and is kind of violating the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purpose of the version control system. Like it kind of messes up the semantics what those things mean and when you should and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t be using them and things like that. So one thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that underscore David Smith told me on Under the Radar forever ago and he said it now it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that’s crazy he said he actually keeps his git checkouts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Dropbox and so he could just pick up his laptop or whatever and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start working on the same checkout he was working on his desktop and it just syncs because it’s Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know still using git for its version control but using Dropbox as the like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync mechanism between his own machines and I thought that was the craziest thing in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think that was crazy? It just seemed like it was like I don’t know it seemed like it shouldn’t work right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemed like it seemed like it was crossing some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John line. It’s just poor man it’s just the the web 3.0 version of NFS mounts back in the old days.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We’d have our stuff in common. We have
⏹️ ▶️ John this mounted on all our machines and it was the same everywhere. And how is this? It’s like a network file
⏹️ ▶️ John system where it’s not here, but somewhere. It’s exactly the same thing. Only Dropbox is like dumber
⏹️ ▶️ John and slower and more loosely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coupled. Well, anyway, I started doing that like last week and it’s really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta say it actually works props to underscore. It sounded crazy, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually really nice. The only downside I found is that like when I when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on the project between my iMac and my laptop because the screen sizes are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different like I get really weird window sizing when the Xcode I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the XC user file whichever one of the project files that you that you would never commit to a git repository but that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like your local like window settings that file is now syncing so it kind of makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird things happen when you go between screen sizes but and I might try to look up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some hack to maybe make that file not sync or or something, but otherwise, it’s pretty cool. Like, being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to just take my laptop and just continue what I was doing without anything, like without any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort, really, that’s really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Word of warning, though, when you’re doing any, specifically with Dropbox, because it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John NFS in the end, in the end it is a different thing with this offline process that’s making your best effort
⏹️ ▶️ John to sync your crap, you will make Dropbox cry if you give it too
⏹️ ▶️ John many files. So, apparently Mark was using it with Xcode and his projects and it’s working out. But I can tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John from experience, if you think you’re going to do node development and
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-trivial NPM install,
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna sync to your other Mac, you’re in for a long, sad wait. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John are limits, and you should kind of know what they are before you commit to putting your
⏹️ ▶️ John substantial Git repo plus your entire node modules directory on Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John and have it magically syncs to another Mac. It will eventually, but you will die waiting for it to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve also been slowly moving as much as I could about my local Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup to Dropbox. So for instance, I use a bunch of tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from homebrew and I now have a shell script that I maintain in Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is like my homebrew setup script to install and configure the various packages and tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I use there. And that way I can run it on any new Mac installation or a new Mac itself and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sets everything up in a consistent way. Also sometimes like when I upgrade my OS, that kind of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets hosed for some reason even though it supposedly shouldn’t, but it just does. And so it’s also really nice to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to uninstall a homebrew on a Mac where it’s not quite working right and just run that script and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it have a whole thing set up perfectly clean again. That’s really nice. Um, similarly, I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now put things like the NGINX configuration, like where you have have nginx include the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list of sites and you have like a bunch of files each with one site configuration in them that sites directory is now in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox for me. So when I have local development where I like you know my local development for overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus like any other like you know little CMS things might be working on I can have all those things be synced up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then finally my my bash profile on each machine that I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I include a file that’s on Dropbox for that too so I can have the same bash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aliases and settings stuff like that on on my machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also worth noting that if you are living in that terrible world that I used to live in where you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all your work in VMs, one thing I used to do years ago when I was bouncing my VMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between computers was just getting like an external hard drive. And at this point, this was before SSDs were affordable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but just get an external hard drive, preferably an SSD, and leave your VMs on there and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just plug it into whatever computer you happen to be working with. Obviously there’s fragility there because if you jostle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that connection even the littlest bit and it falls down, then you’re going to have a real world of hurt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But by and large, if your computers are reasonably stationary when you’re actively using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, that ends up working out really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well too. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Eero.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Talk to you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ We’re too accidental, accidental ♪ Tech Podcasts So
Neutral: RIP BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, Casey, how’s your car doing? Where is your car right now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car has been at BMW since Thursday, maybe Wednesday. I forget exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what day I dropped it off. It went in for a litany of problems. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it went in the day after we recorded, so Thursday. It doesn’t really matter. It went in for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hum at about 75 indicated miles an hour, which is actually about 70 miles an hour. It went in for slow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tire leak, it went in for AC fans not working, it went in for brake fluid flush, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a maintenance item, and it went in for the brakes squealing like hell when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I took off. So I got the call Friday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the damage is $5,000. The car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last I looked several months ago, is worth $10,000 or thereabouts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as it turns out, the brakes are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the brake shoes within the drum brake that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the emergency brake that lives within the disc brakes. So for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, it’s not the case anymore, but for a long time, four-wheel disc cars actually had little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tiny drum brakes kind of within the disc brakes as the emergency brake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Most of these are electronic and they’ll actually, I believe the caliper just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey squeezes the brake disc. And you can hear that whirring on Aaron’s car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you hit the emergency brake here as it’s grabbing the disc. But anyway, for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John brake shoots
⏹️ ▶️ John in— Are you e-braking on Aaron’s car, like drifting it around the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey neighborhood? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no. What time do you have occasion to engage the parking brake while the wheels are spinning? Please tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. No, no, no. It’s not when the wheels are spinning. the parking brake engage. When when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you stop the car and engage the parking brake, you hear the electric motor go.
⏹️ ▶️ John thought you heard the wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey spinning underneath the
⏹️ ▶️ John calipers as you engage the parking brake at 30 miles an hour going around a right hand turn.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So so. So yeah, so the brake shoes needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get replaced. And I was told and I’m quoting, not a normal failure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey item, which made me laugh more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I can tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to which my immediate response was, that is everything in this car. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this car has been a not a has been not
⏹️ ▶️ John failure. It sounds like they have a list of items in your car that they expect to fail.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So you should ask to see that list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair. But actually, the reason this is relevant is because they said they needed to wait for those to come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in because they don’t even keep them in stock because they never break. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that so they needed to repair that. I told them to go ahead and do that. The the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blower issue was apparently a warranty. I think it was a warranty fix. I haven’t picked up the car yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is ready is a warranty fix. So I don’t think I was charged for that. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow tire leak is a cracked wheel. What? How?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rim? Apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told them so they wanted $500 to replace that and to which I said absolutely not don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I’ll deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John the slow my Accord’s wheels cost more than $500. That sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bargain. Oh, I didn’t know that. That makes you feel slightly better, but I still don’t want them to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What was the Oh, the brake fluid, you know, whatever, that’s normal wear and tear. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hum at 75 miles an hour indicated is apparently my front differential,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is shot. I don’t know why. I don’t know what specifically I asked what specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I got kind of a in response. It’s filled with metal confetti.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, basically. So I told them don’t fix the front diff don’t replace the wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m not sure what my plan is from here, but I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to either, uh, bring it to CarMax and see what they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give me and, you know, just present it as is and see what they’ll give me. Or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will go to a local non-BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dealer, but like a local BMW quote-unquote specialist, and see if that’s demonstrably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheaper than repairing it at BMW. But my current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intention is probably the moment I come back from dub-dub is to attempt to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sell it as is, and then probably replace it with a brand new Wrangler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, what’s the least you can get out of it? What’s the least you can get out of paying for the current batch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of repairs? I assume you’re going to have to pay for some of these, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, so I’m definitely in for about $750 for the brakes. That’s it? For the brake. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what I said. Yeah, but out of $5,000. Which is preposterous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah. So I’m in for the brake pads, I’m in for the brake fluid, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m in, of course, they insisted on doing a cabin air filter and I’m too lazy to argue with them and that was probably $3,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, so I’m in for like basic wear and tear stuff in the brakes and that was 750 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if I don’t do the wheel and I don’t do the front differential,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still quote unquote saving, you know, what, $4,000 or thereabouts. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so my hope is I can find a way to unload this car. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the way, I’m not entirely convinced it really does need a differential. I think that’s potentially not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But one way or another, I’m going to attempt to unload the car and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take that money and apply it to probably a Wrangler, but I’m not 100% sure that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I’ll end up. But my thought is I am tired of performance cars because I always break
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. I don’t know how, but I always do. German cars are unaffordable to maintain, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t really have a lot of interesting options in German performance cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, because I will end up divorced if I buy another BMW. The Audi is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as fast as I would like. The GTI is, from everything I’m told, pretty much perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s German and it’s front-wheel drive, and I’ll probably drive one before I commit, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ugh. And then the Golf R is no sunroof and also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast in German, and from what I understand, not as good as the GTI anyway, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not happening. I’m not buying a Model 3 because it’s too much money. I’m not buying a Quadrifoglio because it’s too much money and it will always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey break. So my thought is, as we’ve discussed previously, and I will cut it short
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, just eschew all performance and luxury and just get a box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on wheels and enjoy it for what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Well, in that case, you might as well get it on a cord.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better. With a stick shift and it’s fun. Although the new ones are ugly, so I feel for you here. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new ones are not good looking. And I really did kick that idea around for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fleeting moment.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should test drive it. You’re gonna test drive the GTI? should also test drive a stick
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey shift accord if you don’t don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John bother test driving the automatics because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re gross i’ve i’ve been in an automatic turbo accord a brand new one and it was reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick uh i if i could if you find me a stick shift accord to try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in richmond i will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco do it but i’m fine i’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not even gonna bother trying because it won’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it absolutely well i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean look i think what you have here like your current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your problem with your current car are substantial and possibly fatal for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you owning the car that’s fine I’m not gonna disagree with you there I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caution you against rushing into a new choice even though I know you’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waffling about possibly getting a new slash different car for a while now this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like being caused by a sudden impetus that you suddenly need something like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right it right I given how much you care about your car and how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much enjoyment you get out of your car I don’t think you should rush into whatever you buy next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that being said I mean I don’t know how I don’t know what your situation will be like if you take this car home like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how operable it will still remain for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey well if it dies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what do you like can you can you get can you just be a one-car family for a few weeks while you test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive other other stuff like you You know, so you have things like that to worry about. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, you know, you do have a similar problem to my beach computer thing, which is like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really so badly don’t want to buy another one of these new generational laptops if it isn’t fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you so badly don’t want to buy another German performance car. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my best solution is to just buy one of those laptops. And your way to get most of what you want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most of what you want, is to get another German sports car, probably from BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened in both ways. It’s kind of a question like over, like whether you can overcome how mad you are at them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, or your, your like, you know, identity being tied currently to like really hating them. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, how, how bad is it? If I, the, the, the master of the 2015 MacBook pro, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biggest advocate decide in like a month, Oh, I actually need to need a, need a new one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead. Like that’s, that’s, I’m trying to avoid that for lots of reasons, but one of them is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco identity and just how much I hated the previous ones. Right. So like if you’re looking at this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to look at this a little more objectively, like it really does seem like you are jumping through quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of hoops to avoid the option of leasing something, not necessarily from BMW,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but just to consider the option of leasing something because that is how you get high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance cars without having to deal with maintaining them over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s true, but even if I—well, let’s assume I wanted to lease.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not going to lease a BMW because I need a break from it. Even if that is the empirically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct answer, I just need a break from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Great thing about a lease. It’s three years. So you can lease something now, realize you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco missed having a stick shift German car, and go back to it in three years, if you can still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find one. Yeah, I mean, that may be. But even if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have leasing on the table, the only thing I can think of that would maybe re-enter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the discussion is maybe the Alpha, and it’s still more expensive. It’s too expensive for what I want to pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even for a lease. So I don’t think that empirically changes anything. And for Jeep, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey residuals are so damn high, it makes a lease terrible, doesn’t it? Or do I have that backwards?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Paul Morgan A high residual is good. Residual is what percentage of the price it is worth at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the end of the lease. So a good residual is like in the 60s generally. Like you want it to be worth about 60%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its original value at the end of the lease. That means you’re paying over the span of three years 40% of the cost. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like in the goodish range among the cars that I tend to lease. There’s something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better, like something like a Honda or something Japanese, like that probably has even better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco residuals if I had to guess, but I haven’t looked. But yeah, that’s like typically like 60%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing is what you would get on a hard-to-maintain German fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the thing is, a lot of people, as I’ve been talking more and more about Wranglers, a lot of people have been saying, oh, they’re so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreliable, they’re so unreliable. Maybe, but let’s assume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for the sake of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussion. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that that is a fact, which I disagree with. Let’s assume that Wranglers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are unequivocally and unquestionably unreliable. The critical difference that nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to be thinking about is that doing a front differential for the sake of conversation, maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is wrong, but for the sake of conversation, doing a front differential on a Wrangler has got to be like a third the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of doing it on a three 35, because it’s a domestic car where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the parts are here. They’re already here. All the parts are cheaper. The labor is presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either the same or cheaper. And so it’s going to be much, much, much cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even if it’s broken all the time, it’s still going to be way cheaper to fix the way I figure it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, I I understand that may it may or may not be reliable now again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My anic data says that it’s extremely reliable because data said three across 30 years and they’ve all been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super reliable, but admittedly anic data So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in either way, I’ll have a warranty which of course would be true of any new car And that’s actually one thing that’s a pellet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s compelling about the VW’s is they have like a six or seven year Bumper-to-bumper warranty now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a kind of oops from diesel gate So that is slightly compelling about the Volkswagens,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know. I don’t know what I want to do I I need to test drive a bunch of stuff, but I don’t have the time to do it Especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now because I’m about to go out of town but I’m Deeply deeply frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my BMW and and we have crossed the point of no return I think so it is getting sold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sooner rather than later The question is as Marco said earlier Will I jump immediately into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something else or not? and I don’t think that I will. And the main reason I don’t think I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that, just like with the 335, I want a very particular set of options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this hypothetical Wrangler. And when I looked a few days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were precisely three Wranglers with this set of options within 150 miles of me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All three of them, I believe, were spoken for, and they were all more expensive than I wanted. Please say all three of them were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey white. great. No, I don’t know which computer was I looking at this on. Hold on, I can tell you because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I took a screenshot. Yes, I did. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one blue and two gray. Actually, that might be one blue, one light gray, one dark gray, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gray? I don’t know. It’s normal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco gray. Very light gray. It’s not that light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it actually does look fairly reasonable and white, I got to say. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think it looks terrible in white,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only via pictures. I really and truly think that. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think, you know, again, I do think, you know, don’t rush into this. That being said though, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are going, you know, you mentioned you want to sell the BMW and then, did I understand correctly that you might then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not buy something immediately? That you might go down to one car for a little while?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. So my intention is to buy, if I sell, like my hypothetical wherein I sell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the BMW within days of returning back here after dub dub. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I would sell the BMW post-haste so it doesn’t explode on me, you know what I mean? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, here’s the thing though. It’s probably fairly stable. If you don’t drive it that much, it’s not gonna like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco explode in your garage. You are in a much better bargaining position to apply that to a trade-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you are to try to sell it in its needing expense state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anybody. Who’s gonna buy it like that? But if you are in the process of buying or leasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new vehicle, the dealer has a strong incentive to take your trade in. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey even so, I think you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are in a much better negotiating position using that as a trade in than trying to sell it outside of a purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a really good point I hadn’t considered. All right, fair enough. So, maybe it’ll just get parked and collect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dust until I find a replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put it up on blocks in your front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yard. Yeah, right. Yeah, make sure it can drive onto the lot of the place you’re buying it from. That’s all you need to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Drive them to the lot, and then when they go out to check it, you need to start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s it. Yeah, well, and that’s the thing. That’s why it fixed the screaming e-brake, is because the second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you moved the car, it was, eeeh! And so it was clear that that was going to have to be fixed if I wanted to get more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than ten bucks for this thing. So yeah, so we’ll see what happens. I mean, it’s first world problems, but it’s frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco frustrating. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see. Take your time. Test drive everything. And really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I strongly suggest that you consider the option of leasing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know you have a lot of objections to it on principle grounds, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really does solve a lot of your problems. And I think overall, once you could swallow that bitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pill of, damn it, I’m leasing, and it’s against everything I believe in, once you can get past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, everything else about it I think would make you a lot happier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, yeah, but I still don’t know what I would lease. Like, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But your options greatly expand once that option is on the table. Once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leasing is on the table, then you can get quote unreliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brands or brands that you wouldn’t want to be responsible for after they’re three years old. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get that. Things like the warranty stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because reliability and maintenance costs just stops mattering.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but again, I don’t want to get a BMW. So your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lease idea would fix the BMW problem, except I am petulantly refusing to get a BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then I still don’t know what it really buys me. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, obviously that would be the most extreme example of why it would be beneficial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you, because you could totally erase the maintenance headache from the BMW. 100%. But also if you’re concerned about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliability for things like Audi or Alfa or VW, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does help you on those fronts as well. Or even heck, even Jeep. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re known to be unreliable, yeah, they are probably cheaper to service than the BMW, but that’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something you probably want to be dealing with. And so if you can lease one, even better. That being said, if you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy one, I think if you’re going to buy one and your main justification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for buying it is long-term value, you should be buying used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. I 100,000% agree. But the problem I’m running into with the Wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the same damn problem that I box myself into a corner with Aaron’s car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is really two problems. Number one, I refuse to buy a car without CarPlay. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I could do some aftermarket mumbo jumbo, but I am way too old and way too busy and way too boring for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t want to deal with it. Number two, both the Volvo and the Wrangler just got redesigned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I don’t want the old and busted design. I want the new hotness design. But even more importantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than that, because my BMW was bought when the F30 was brand new and mine’s an E90. So I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve bought the old and busted design. And by and large, I stand by it for the BMW. But the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, is that I really would like car play. And the only way to get car play in either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these cars is to get the brand new version and so that’s why I want to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new. That’s honestly that’s a reasonable reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I totally agree with you like you’re not wrong that that buying used is the more appropriate answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just in this especially actually if I were to go BMW because then I could get a CPO BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which would have an even better warranty than a brand new one would but but yeah in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular case it’s not going to work out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well if leasing can help you get what you want strongly consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a fair point. I think the most useful tidbit you’ve given me, though, is to not insta-sell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the BMW. To not pull a Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in a Marco five years ago. That’s a trade-in, not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sale. Because of the condition it’s in and because you do intend to have another car, use that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Use it as a trade-in. No dealer is going to give you jack crap for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a regular purchase from you. But as a trade-in, you’ll get something for it. Yeah, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t want to deal with individuals with that, because then that you’re selling somebody a broken car like they’re going to know like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to it’s going to cause problems for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So you definitely want like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want because when you know when a dealer buys a car as as old as that, they’re not going to keep on their lot and resell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. They’re going to send it to an auction thing and they’re going to get some fixed price for it and that’s it. It’s out of their hands. It’s not your problem. It’s not their problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just gone. It just vanishes and it’s just your trade in value. That’s it. That’s the way to do it. You do not want to sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to an individual or anything like that, like just use it as of trading and then the problem