281: My Private Siri
02 Jul 2018Apple’s upcoming Maps updates, a new Duplex demo, rumored new headphones, and air-conditioner optimizations.
Episode Description:
- Home repairs: Window air conditioners
- Computer repairs
- Casey repairs Erin's MacBook Air... maybe.
- Marco's iMac wants to be like Casey's
- Follow-up:
- Reporters got to talk to Google Duplex
- A A A A Very Good Song lives on?
- Duplicate-file managers:
- Gemini 2, also on the App Store (via Gualtiero Frigerio)
- Photo Sweeper
- Mojave
LaunchServicescan launch flat-style app bundles - Google Home impresses John
- Apple Maps is getting a whole lotta love
- AirPod (and headphone!) rumors
#askatp- Mojave and autiomatic dark mode (via Ishan Sharma)
tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to not dark mode
- Back to the... iOS? (via Scott Nourse)
- If the Millennium Falcon was a car, what would it be? (via Brent Billings)
- Mojave and autiomatic dark mode (via Ishan Sharma)
- Post-show: Neutral
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Rethink what your money can do. Get up to 1 year managed free.
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Visit http://squarespace.com/atp and enter code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Casper: For a limited time, save up to $225 off your order! This special offer expires July 9, 2018. Terms and conditions apply.
Chapters
- Home repairs
- Computer repairs
- Duplex press demo
- A A A A Very Good Song
- Duplicate-file finders
- Flat-style app bundles
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- John’s Google Home
- Apple Maps update
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Apple headphone rumors
- Sponsor: Betterment
- #askatp: Mojave auto-dark-mode
- #askatp: Marzipan to iOS
- #askneutral: Millennium Falcon car
- Neutral: Casey’s Car Corner
Home repairs
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s air conditioner season again. Get that noise reduction thing going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very proud of myself right now because I made my air conditioner quieter. I actually fixed my air conditioner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by drilling a hole in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Many modern air conditioners, in order to eke out a little bit more of an energy efficiency rating, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t drain their water out. They instead try to… So the basin of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fills with water intentionally because then I think that I mean people will have to write in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and correct me if this is the if this is totally wrong but I the gist of it from what I’ve picked up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that if they sit the compressor in water it is slightly more energy efficient at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cooling so most of the new efficient ones which is almost all of them because people buy them based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on efficiency will basically allow the basin to fill with water the problem with this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes it make it make a bunch of weird noises as if it’s It’s like, you know, moving a water wheel through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dipping it in and out of water. It’s it almost sounds like it’s raining inside your air conditioner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason why is because it’s filled with water and parts are moving. I don’t know what the hell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it maybe it’s the fan or the blower. I have no idea. Something touches the water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. Yeah. So I fix this problem by drilling a drain hole in the bottom of the basin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now all the water flowed out and it’s working just as well. It cool in my room. Maybe it’s costing me slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more money per month. but it is now way quieter and the noise it’s making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is at least an expected fan plus compressor noise as opposed to sounding like somebody is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trickling water throughout it as a fan is blowing over it.
⏹️ ▶️ John How old is the air conditioner?
⏹️ ▶️ John You sure it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have a rubber
⏹️ ▶️ John gasket on the back that you pop right out that lets the water drain?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 100% positive. The entire reason I knew to do this is because all of the reviews of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air conditioner cited this as a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What, you didn’t get the wire cutter recommendation? Every modern air conditioner I have has that little drain plug, and so you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got the wire cutters quiet recommendation, which I think their main one might have been out of stock, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got their like, you know, if that’s out of stock, get this. It’s the Frigidaire Gallery series.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know more about it. That’s all I could read from across the room, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John very quiet. I do my drain plug things, and you don’t, like, I only drain it
⏹️ ▶️ John when, if and when it fills with water. drain plug out all the time because there is that extra efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John you know but when it gets really humid yeah it fills with water so you gotta do the drain plug but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s better than drilling in it but now the I don’t know if this is the fault of their recommendation
⏹️ ▶️ John but my main I think I’ve talked about this another podcast my main complaint with air conditioners is they have a compressor
⏹️ ▶️ John inside them in a fan and the fan is usually fine it’s just a spinny thing it makes fan noise but whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re usually very large but the compressor, you know, it vibrates and shakes
⏹️ ▶️ John and the air conditioner itself, if it’s a window unit, is stuck in the window frame
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty well. And so you have a vibrating thing in the window frame and
⏹️ ▶️ John those vibrations need to go somewhere. And normally where they go in every air conditioner I seem to buy is
⏹️ ▶️ John they shake the plastic cladding that’s on the outside of the metal box that is the air conditioner. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like when a cruddy car has too much bass and it’s very large speaker system and the
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic shakes and makes that buzz. Yeah, that is the major source of noise in all of my air conditioners. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John the compressor, not the fan, but the plastic body cladding buzz of
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic, you know, the plastic bits when the compressor’s on. When the compressor’s not on,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not there, but it’s a terrible buzzing noise. So now I’ve just been like taping and
⏹️ ▶️ John wrapping and squeezing all of my air conditioners to make all the plastic parts not buzz.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like I’m not trusting any air conditioning review that does not include an
⏹️ ▶️ John extensive section on whether it has plastic body buzz or what can
⏹️ ▶️ John be done to stop it. Or if they just said this is the model where the plastic parts don’t buzz, I would buy that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I can tell you mine does not have that problem, but you probably can’t buy it anymore because these things change like every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this this one’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so you never know, because like I said, it really depends on how wedged it is in the window
⏹️ ▶️ John and like how it’s seated in there, right? Because if it can, if it can shake, if you, if like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s in a position where that vibration has someplace else to go, then it won’t transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John to the sort of the body of the car, so to speak, it will go elsewhere. But however, I have my things wedged in my
⏹️ ▶️ John window, there is no place for that vibration to go. And so it comes out the plastic body pits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That must be hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John They, you know, they’re all taped up. They’re all, they all look like they’ve been injured in a cartoon, you know, where you get like tape all over
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah. We had seven different kinds of tape to try to keep it from buzzing. The thing is, if you leave
⏹️ ▶️ John one little bit of like one little bit on tape, you tape all the parts that were buzzing, the buzz just finds another way out, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you need to make sure that there’s nothing that can buzz. In fact, this year, last year was fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this year I found a new way to buzz, you know, the little, uh, the little filter, the air filter, the intake air filter
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can slide in and out and they want you to clean out and everything like that. That, you know, that goes into like a slot,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That thing was vibrating in the slot back forth back and forth making a buzzing noise. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was the only place left on my thing for the vibration to go. All the plastic body parts could not shake so it’s like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one loose plastic bit. it’s an amazing, amazing device.
Computer repairs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s totally fine when your iMac turns off randomly, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, 100%. Don’t worry about it. Actually earlier tonight I was lamenting in Relay Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Aaron’s MacBook Air ran out of disk space, which was unexpected to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say the least. And so I thought, I know how to fix this. I’ll boot into recovery mode. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go spelunking in the terminal and find something to get rid of, probably on my user account,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’ll fix it. So I rebooted in recovery mode and the menu bar allowed me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to select a language and do nothing else, which I’ve never seen before. I could do like the window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey popped up that showed, you know, disk utility and use Safari and one or two other things. I forgot. I would reinstall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think she’s on Sierra. I forget what she’s on, but anyway. But I couldn’t get to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terminal. And so I was like, well, crap, now what? And I ran out of ideas short of doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a bootable USB key or something like that. And so I thought, well, screw it, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just reboot. And I mean, hopefully it’ll have enough free space somewhere to Oh, no, and I did I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to do a repair, a volume repair when I was in the recovery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. But that failed because of HFS plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so I reboot Did you try spilling liquid into it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Previously, but not tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it didn’t work this time? No, it did not help the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Before it before you continue, you had a disk where it’s full or something’s weird with So you tried to run
⏹️ ▶️ John disk utility repair. Disk utility repair failed. And now you’re just plowing bravely forward,
⏹️ ▶️ John figuring that disk is okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s HFS+, what do you expect?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but yeah, but if repair fails, like if disk utility can’t repair it, it finds something
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong, but can’t fix it, you shouldn’t continue in that state. You should, as quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible, get any data that you don’t have backed up off of that thing, and either get
⏹️ ▶️ John it repaired or reformat it and restore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that sounds like it could be like, you know, disk failure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or or, you know, or HFS plus corruption severe enough that you’re going to lose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So I mean, tonight was not the time to work this out because I have to record and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have things going on the rest of this week, like tomorrow as we record is my last day at my job. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have I have a few things on my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Can we throw you like a last day? I love like all the all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the language of people quitting or being fired from jobs is the exact same language as dying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tomorrow my last day. He’s not with us anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Last. Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so I have a few things on my mind so so as I was saying I just blindly, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know plowed into the night rebooted in a you know to just let the thing boot regularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and When I was successfully booted everything seemed fine I go and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a DF to figure out how much free space I have answer 25 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John So that makes me think Bad things are going on on your desk I mean it could just be
⏹️ ▶️ John that it cleaned up a bunch of files somewhere But it also could be that you just lost a whole swath of that disk So try it run
⏹️ ▶️ John run disk utility and verify when booted from that thing and see if that passes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. I wonder if it’s that thing that I ran into a few months ago on my iMac where my iMac was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running low on space and it turned out that there was I forget the term for it, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing where time machine saves local backups because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it thinks snapshots. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. And I had like a gazillion gigs on my iMac of local snapshots and I did not verify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was the case with the MacBook Air, but it smelled a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that sort of behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, operating system will clean those up on its own eventually for you. So that could possibly explain
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But there’s also a command you can run from the command line that will you can delete them manually. And then there’s one that will like thin them
⏹️ ▶️ John to free up a certain number of space and you can give it an amount of space and bytes or kilobytes or something and it
⏹️ ▶️ John will delete snapshots until you recover that much space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was one more thing though. My iMac actually did randomly turn off twice yesterday while I was working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, really? So did you burn the whole thing down?
⏹️ ▶️ John The dust was an essential part of the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Put it back. So if one thing hadn’t happened, I would assume, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap, I moved it. I brought it to the beach. I broke it. But one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing happened that actually makes me breathe a sigh of relief. That is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it did this once a few days before I left.
⏹️ ▶️ John How does that make you feel any better? I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey understand it makes you sound like You didn’t break it by
⏹️ ▶️ John transporting it, but it doesn’t make it, yeah, the, your computing situation any better, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So the, the symptom is that it just turns off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has done, it has dabbed on this three times, uh, once before I left and twice yesterday while I was working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, it, I leave it on all the time. It never does it unattended. It has only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done it while I’ve been heavily using it. So I’m guessing it’s something either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peak power related or here’s the other thing it’s not a total power off like you unplug it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually a kernel panic is when you reboot it it says something went wrong you know you should in your computer is a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever and then if you look at the system report it says it’s actually a kernel panic and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t I don’t know enough about the system report data to be able to tell any more than that it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t look like anything obvious to me like in the system report it’s not saying like hey your GPU driver is throwing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this problem or whatever that would might it might indicate like GPU thermal issues or something like It’s not anything like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I could find, but I’m not an expert in digging information out of those things. But it is resulting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a software kernel panic, it seems. And it is usually while I’m doing things in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode, very heavy Xcode work. So I actually think it might be software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco related. Xcode does all sorts of weird stuff to enable development. I’m running a beta version of Xcode, trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco debug code on beta iPhone and beta watch. So it’s probably doing all sorts of weird stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with low level system functionality. So I’m not worried yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it might not be software related, but I’m certain, and boy am I so glad this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened once before I left. But still, I’m not happy about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I was also working today, it didn’t happen at all today, so I don’t know. And I’ve been monitoring thermals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iStatMenus and thermals seem totally fine, totally in line with both CPU and GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like where they should be. So I don’t think it’s that. It could be the weird power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I thought it might be the weird power in this beach house. That’s what I was gonna ask. But it did the same thing at home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a really nice UPS. Ah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s why I think it’s probably not that.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, my thunderbolt monitors were all wonky. I’d get the same symptom, kernel panic,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s in response to some hardware thing that ends up doing something that the kernel doesn’t expect. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John still thinking maybe hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m not ruling out hardware yet, but because it has never happened unattended, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least, it seems at least to be like load related. But the load I’m putting on it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been Xcode. And you know, and Xcode, I’m doing like, you know, I mentioned last show, like I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of stuff that maxes out all the cores, like doing big builds and stuff like that. And so you know, all the cores are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peaked for a minute, but it doesn’t seem to be doing it then. It’s doing it like at places where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode sometimes crashes. When things like the source editor tries to do syntax highlighting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just explodes, and Xcode crashes. Casey, you know about this from running Swift. Oh yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s, it’s, it could be something like that. I don’t know. To answer Hadva
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the chat, no, the iMac Pro is not running Mojave. I don’t run beta Mac OS’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess run all the betas on my iOS devices like a crazy person.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re saving the kernel panic reports and filing radars for them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been hitting the send to Apple button instead. I figured this is their problem, not mine. Well, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their fault. It’s my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I had my Thunderbolt thing was doing it, I saved every single one and I just kept piling them on a radar.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco How long that works. Someone
⏹️ ▶️ John something is, I mean, they will. Colonel Panic is one of the types of radars that people will look out. And there
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you have a report, you’re hoping someone will look at it. Who knows what, you know, we’ll say, aha, I see what that
⏹️ ▶️ John is that, you know. But if it ends up being a hardware thing, they’re never going to do anything about that. It’s going to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, that should never happen. Your computer is probably broken. They won’t tell you that. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I assume is going on when the reports tell them nothing about some kind of software glitch. They just
⏹️ ▶️ John look random or look like they’ve encountered an exceptional condition that should never ever happen and it basically means that your hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, in other news, TIFF has totally stolen my laptop, so I kinda no longer have a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not really surprising to be honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Turns out, people like computers. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who knew? So you’re gonna buy another one of these ancient laptops?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, at this point, I just, I gotta wait till the new ones come out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, mark this moment, listeners. We’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, you know what’s really nice? Having a Mac with multi-user support and having an operating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system and a platform that supports multiple users correctly. When Tiff needed to do some work here on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vacation and I had my laptop and I’m like, hey, I can just set you up a user account. You can log in as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all your iCloud stuff shows up. And like, it was amazing, like just how well it worked. And I forgot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this thing that computers have had for like 30 years, I forgot like how nice that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on modern hardware, because we don’t have that on our iOS devices, or almost anything else, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But to have proper multi-user support, where you can literally just like, all right, create user TIF, log out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Marco, or even leave Marco logged in, for that matter. You know, switch over, you get the big rotating cube animation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, that’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a thing. Yeah, it’s still there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s awesome. All you people who have one computer per person in your house, forgetting
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s not the way you, all our computers have all accounts for all four people in the family, because we share our computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, we’ve got the two computers, right? You share your Mac Pro? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one uses my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, okay. But there are four. No, the reason they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John is because my disk is full. But there are four accounts on it. My wife has an account here, both my kids have accounts on this computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we definitely share Tina’s computer because it’s got more room on it. But yeah, we’re constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John switching accounts. It drives Tina crazy because every time she gets down to her computer, it’s logged into somebody else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s one of those like appreciating old technology for the first time in a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time kind of things. And yeah, I just wanted to throw it out there. Like, yeah, multi-user Macs are still a thing and they’re really awesome
Duplex press demo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, reporters got to talk to Google Duplex. If you recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Duplex was the thing where it masquerades as a human being to call and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make appointments for you and do things like that, which is a quick summary. I think all of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately thought, wow, that is amazing. And then most of us immediately followed that thought with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow, that is super creepy. And there was a huge backlash. And so this was the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time that reporters got to actually talk to Google Duplex, which I know among other people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gruber has been banging this drum for a long time, and justifiably so. Nobody’s really spoken to this duplex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, like what’s going on here? So Google invited the media to Orin’s Hummus, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mediterranean restaurant just a few miles from Mountain View, California headquarters for Demo 2.0.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they got to hear recordings, they even got to serve as pretend,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the reporters got to be pretend employees at this place and answer the phone when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Duplex called them and see what it felt like. And so this was on Recode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who was this reporting? Kurt Wagner reports that Google Duplex, it first identified itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a Google assistant, told me it was recording the call, then asked me to secure group reservation for the following Monday night, July 2nd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The voice sounded like it belonged to a grown man, not a robot, especially over the phone where you can’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the source. So he continues, having seen a few others go through the process already, I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stump the technology. I first asked for it to hold to which it replied, Mm hmm. Then I got back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back on to say there were no reservations available for Monday, I had to repeat myself once as it requested a clarification after my initial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reply. But then Google Assistant kicked me to an actual human, which Google says is the fallback plan for whenever the technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets confused or can’t seem to finish an assigned task, certainly not flawless. None of this is really surprising,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I thought it was interesting that this demo has actually happened at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John They walked it back to a little bit like saying, this isn’t you know this isn’t really near to being a product
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s just technology we’re showing it to you but it’s not like we’re you know like it was a Google I oh
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t make any particular promises about when this would appear in a product but during this demo to reporters they seem
⏹️ ▶️ John to take great pains to say no no no don’t expect us to have a product on this out yet we’re still working
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and it’s in a technology phase so that kind of takes a lot of air out of the the
⏹️ ▶️ John balloon that was blown up in Google I oh so it’s like okay well I guess we can all forget about this until
⏹️ ▶️ John and unless they say we have an actual product based on it.
A A A A Very Good Song
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rene Fouquet writes that the song issue, this is the A-A-A-A Very Good Song,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is definitely not fixed in iOS 12. I’ve been using it since beta 1 and it still plays A-A-A-A Very Good Song every time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I connect to car Bluetooth, and I’m an Apple Music user too. So apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as with all things, we should have learned not to trust Reddit, which I believe was the source of last week’s show’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information. Never trust Reddit. And instead, you should just crowdsource it and go to Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m going to trust this one random person on Twitter because that feels better to me. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like our long national nightmare may not be over.
Duplicate-file finders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Gualtiero Frigero writes, I just heard about this app to find duplicates on the Mac called Gemini 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there’s a link provided. I have not had a chance to look into this, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoping one of you two have. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not a programmer who thinks, hmm, I should write myself a programmer script
⏹️ ▶️ John but you want to find duplicates, apparently there is a commercial program supported by a real company that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can buy and download that will find duplicate files. I haven’t tried this myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t vouch for what it’s going to do to your files, but I would trust it more than a random script you find on a GitHub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We also had recommendations for an app called Photo Sweeper that is more photo specific.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t tried either of these apps, so I cannot vouch for either of them.
Flat-style app bundles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. So Pedro Jose Pereira V8, Pedro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JPV, right? I’m so sorry. macOS Mojave Launch Services now supports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey launching flat style app bundles like iOS. Can we just pause right here? Can one of you explain to me what exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a flat style app bundle?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they used to be skeuomorphic and that went out of style.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done, sir. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. So, you know, app bundles like on your Mac, if you go in your applications folder. If you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at that in the terminal you’ll see there’s a bunch of folders whose names end in .app and inside those folders there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John structure, the bundle structure, where it says contents macOS and a resources folder and all these
⏹️ ▶️ John versions and blah blah blah. It’s basically the bundles from the, well
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re mostly brought from the world of Next, they were changed a little bit for Mac OS X, anyway. It’s a folder
⏹️ ▶️ John full of files, a directory full of files, and there’s a big tree of stuff, even though when you look at it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the finder it looks like one thing. So I’m assuming, this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John guessing and well I’m sure I’ll fall next week or get it wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is right. Flat means,
⏹️ ▶️ John like in many of the formats that share these properties, they just take one of
⏹️ ▶️ John these folder structures. For example, Safari extensions, which I have been recently wrangling, where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a folder that ends in Safari, extz, or something like that. And you just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John make an archive out of it. Either zip it up or XAR, XAR it up, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John weird TAR-like thing, and you get a flat version. So it really
⏹️ ▶️ John is a single file on disk, but all it is is a compressed archive of the directory structure. So
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently on iOS, and this is why I thought Marco would know, the things that you launch on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John are not directories full of files, but instead are these flat bundles, which I assume is a directory
⏹️ ▶️ John full of files put into an archive.
⏹️ ▶️ John just making a single file again, it could just be zipped could be czar, it could be who knows whatever. But the whole point is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not actually different than it’s kind of like, you know, binary plist files and stuff like it’s the same thing structurally,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just packaged in a different way, just so you get a single file.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let me repeat what you just said to make sure I understand. So when I look at an app on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac, I can right click on to it on it and do you know, show contents or whatever. And I see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this full on directory structure, and IPA by comparison on on iOS, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IPA, not IAP, right? Because now I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Okay, so an IPA on iOS is basically the same thing, except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it’s zipped, or maybe it’s some other kind of archiving system, right? But the point
⏹️ ▶️ John is, is the same, it’s a single file,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right. Okay. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John were to if you go to terminal, you’d see one of them as a file, and then one of them is a directory, right? So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the this tweet is pointing out that in Mojave launch services, which is the thing that’s responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for opening, you know, for launching applications now also understands
⏹️ ▶️ John flat style app bundles. So it doesn’t demand that you have a dot app directory with a bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. If you make a flat style thing out of you, zip it up, resort up or whatever it is, it will launch
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the follow up to that is this means you can create universal app bundles that will work on both iOS and macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John using fat maco executables with x86 64 and arm64 slices. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John this is something that we’ve talked about before we knew more about marzipan but
⏹️ ▶️ John even now that we kind of understand what it is it makes sense but in a different way like
⏹️ ▶️ John can you make a single thing a single piece of software that you distribute and it will run on
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad and the iPhone? Yes you can do that for the called universal apps or whatever. Can you make a single thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that will run on on the iPad, the iPhone, and also on the Mac. Technologically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently you can, but maybe not in the way that Apple intends.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because MacO, the executable format that Mac OS X and OS X, gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the names are terrible, uses, lets you make
⏹️ ▶️ John an executable that has different, what they call, slices with different CPU architectures. You can have a 32-bit x86 one, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John have an x86 64, and you could have an ARM64, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will run the right one for the right CPU architecture. It’s kind of like fat binaries and put that 68K and PowerPC
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in them. So if you can take a program
⏹️ ▶️ John and make one of these flat app bundles, so now you’re past the launching stage because both Mojave
⏹️ ▶️ John and iOS know how to launch these flat app bundles, right? And then in the executable,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a slice for x86-64 and a slice for ARM64. When you run it on
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, iOS is going to understand the flat package, look at the executable and say, Oh, well, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John ignoring that x86-64 stuff. I’m just going to run the ARM64. But then when you run that same flat bundle on
⏹️ ▶️ John Mojave, again, it knows how to launch it. When it looks at the executable, it just runs the x86-64. So all you got to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is glue together basically your your marzipan x86-64
⏹️ ▶️ John executable in the x86-64 slice, and then your iOS executable in the
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM64 slice and put it in a single flat app bundle and it will run that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that’s kind of cheating because I mean, as far as I’m aware, those two executables could
⏹️ ▶️ John be totally unrelated. Like one doesn’t have to be a recompiled version of the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can probably glue together two entirely different programs and just rely on launch services to pick the right slice and run
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So it’s not really a universal app in the way we’re thinking. And it relies on the fact that they’re different architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if ARM Macs come out, they would all look at the ARM64 slice and try
⏹️ ▶️ John to run it. And that means that that one binary would have to run on both OSes, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s currently possible. Anyway, this is more like stupid Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John tricks, kind of, and the stupid pet tricks David Letterman thing. I feel like I have to explain that reference
⏹️ ▶️ John so people don’t think I’m saying it’s stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I knew that one, and now I’ll never get credit for
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just explaining it so people think I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that it’s stupid to do these things. It’s not stupid to do
⏹️ ▶️ John them. It’s just a silly thing that you can do. All these people who are experimenting in the guts
⏹️ ▶️ John of new operating systems in Marzipan, this is another fun experiment, which shows that the technological
⏹️ ▶️ John underpinnings of universal applications exist. It’s just a question of whether
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will decide that’s the thing they want to do. Unifying the app stores into a single app store, kind of like they
⏹️ ▶️ John did, well, they didn’t really do with iOS and iPhone. You still have that annoying experience when you’re on
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad and you’re searching for applications and you have to toggle to like
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone only because all it shows you is the iPad applications but some company like Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t supported the iPad yet so you have to switch to the iPhone one. But there are universal
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS applications and maybe someday if Apple wants to there could be universal
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, iPhone, and Mac applications.
Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Casper and their awesome mattresses and they are having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a competitive limited time 4th of July offer. Go to casper.com slash savings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a limited time. You’ll get up to $225 off your order. This special offer expires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco July 9th, 2018. Terms and conditions apply. Casper is the place to shop for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4th of July mattress savings this year. They sell directly to you. This eliminates added costs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this saves you money, especially right now. They have a 100-night risk-free sleep on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it trial so you can be sure of your purchase. If you decide that’s not for you, returns are hassle-free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are not completely satisfied. So, choose the internet’s favorite mattress this 4th
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of July. They have three mattress lines to choose from, the Original, the Wave, and the Essential.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Original Casper mattress combines multiple supportive memory foams for a quality sleep surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with just the right amounts of sink and bounce. The Wave is their high-end model. This features patent-pending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco premium support system to mirror the natural shape of your body. The breathable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design of each mattress also helps you sleep cool and regulates your body temperature throughout the night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We love our Casper. We’re doing a lot of travel this summer and boy do I miss the Casper when we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not at home. I really do. You won’t think you’ll miss your bed when you’re traveling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but trust me, once you have a Casper, you miss your bed. Hotel beds are nothing compared to what you have at home every night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s great. For a limited time, you can get up to $225 off your order at casper.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a limited time only. This special offer expires July 9, 2018.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Terms and conditions apply. Once again, casper.com. To get up to $225 off your order for a limited time until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco July 9, 2018. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to this after July 9, 2018, use our normal offer code.
John’s Google Home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to casper.com slash ATP and use code ATP for $50 off your mattress.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, terms and conditions do apply. Thank you so much to Casper for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me what’s going on with your Google Home.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I didn’t know where to slot this in. I was going to put it in an Ask ATP question, but I decided not
⏹️ ▶️ John to put that question in. And occasionally I talked to my cylinders at home and I had
⏹️ ▶️ John another impressive cylinder experience. Although I seem
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the only one who’s on board the cylinder train. So we needed to
⏹️ ▶️ John pick up a prescription at the drugstore, but we weren’t sure
⏹️ ▶️ John when the drugstore closed. And so we were having this discussion,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were in the kitchen, And my wife took out her phone to look up, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John when does the Walgreens, how late is the Walgreens open? But as soon as she took out her phone, I said, well, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John we shouldn’t, you know, we shouldn’t be doing that with our fingers like that. Use your hands like a baby’s toy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I said, hey, Dingus, oh, when is the Walgreens on such and such street
⏹️ ▶️ John closed today or something? Like, whatever the first thing occurred to me, again, I’m always testing these cylinders, right? I’m just gonna like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna think about how to say it. I’m just gonna say it, blah. I didn’t know where it was. I don’t know what the street address is,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I know it’s on a road. It’s not like a major road. Like, when does the Walgreens on Main Street close?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And I expected this one to work. I’m still testing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because I didn’t give an address, but it knows where I am, and it knows
⏹️ ▶️ John that that street, in all of the main streets in the world, it’s not Main Street, but in all the main streets in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably the one that’s close to my house. And in all the Walgreens in the world, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the Walgreens on that street that’s close to my house. And so it immediately gave me the answer. Oh, it closes at whatever hour,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And my wife says, no, well, you have fun with your stupid cylinder, but we don’t need to know
⏹️ ▶️ John when the Walgreens close because the pharmacy inside the Walgreens has different hours than the Walgreens itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John So she continues going through her phone, thumb, thumb, thumb. So I said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John Dingus, when does the pharmacy inside the Walgreens on Main Street close? And it told me,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was a different hour than when the store closed. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fancy. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good, Google Home. Pretty, pretty good. I was impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was still faster than trying to look it up on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also just impressed that the pharmacy hours of a Walgreens are knowable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because anyone who’s ever tried to go to a Walgreens pharmacy close to its closing hours would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. They seem to change their closing hours to the pharmacy daily with no rhyme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or reason, just randomly. Oh, it always closes about five minutes before you got there, and especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you really need something for your sick kid.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, we walked to the Walgreens, and there was indeed a person at the pharmacy, and there was no line, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we picked up our prescription and came back home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mission accomplished.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good job, Google Home.
Apple Maps update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All righty, so there was a big story that was released, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was it, a few days ago, it doesn’t really matter. This is from a friend of the show, Matt Panzerino. He apparently got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey invited to Cupertino to talk with Eddie Q and the Apple Maps team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get a kind of a debrief about what Apple is doing with Maps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the short, short version is they’re rebuilding a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, a lot of the underpinnings, including most especially, they’re starting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use, or collect and use, their own mapping data. And I haven’t heard the entire conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve only heard the first maybe 10 or 20 minutes, but Panzarino was on the talk show this week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the brief parts of the show that I’ve heard already have been very good, which is of no great surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the two of them together are great. But certainly this article on TechCrunch is worth reading,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and basically Apple has said, we aren’t in control of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the map data in terms of the roadways and things like that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all coming from like TomTom and other third parties. And so because of that, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of an untenable solution for us, in no small part because Apple loves to own the whole widget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they said, you know, and this is quoting Panzerino, there’s also the matter of corrections,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey updates and changes, entering a long loop of submission to validation to to update when you’re dealing with external partners.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways, and other updating features in days or less,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not months, the days or less thing being if they owned all the data. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Apple saying in a very, well, reasonably public way, hey, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maps ain’t the best, but we’re working on it. And there’s also a lot of interesting information about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s a little bit outside my comfort zone, but about how they’re kind of doing the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of, and maybe not in a literal sense, but in spirit, the same sort of like IR spraying that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Face ID camera does on your iPhone 10 to kind of figure out like the 3D landscape
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a lot of these places. As with all things, the world revolves around Silicon Valley so it’s gonna start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there later this year with iOS 12 and hopefully with the quickness expand out to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rest of the world, you know, where reality is after that. Marco, thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this seems like pretty big news. I mean, it’s, you know, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first saw it, I’m like, wow, they dropped this in the summer? Like, it’s, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like the reason why is because it’s about to start rolling out, they said, I think they said in the next iOS 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably this coming week or the week after that. So, map data is one of those things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has seemed for a long time that Apple just didn’t, that they cared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to get it kind of okay, but that they weren’t really in the game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of getting really good map data. There was a post, I’ll have to dig it up, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was about two or three months ago, I think it was on Medium, where a person familiar with mapping data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically did a really interesting comparison of Apple Maps data and Google Maps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data. Oh yeah, that was great. And even Google Maps data, how it’s changing over time and how it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting really sophisticated at identifying neighborhoods and places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of interest and things like that, and just how incredibly sophisticated Google mapping data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. And that just seemed at the time that there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was no catching up, that there was no way Apple could ever get there. And it also seemed like Apple didn’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seemed like Apple was happy with their okay map data they had before. The best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing about this news for me is that it looks like they are taking it incredibly seriously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what they are aiming to do could be as good as Google’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in some areas, better than Google’s. And that isn’t to say Google can’t do the same thing. Maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already are. I don’t know. I honestly don’t follow the map data world that closely. But the fact that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is taking this so seriously and being so ambitious with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a type of problem that historically only Google has been good at among this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco group of companies, you know, of like sending out cars to photograph street view stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all across the world and having big data sets being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco merged together and applying machine learning and AI to try to figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are and where things are and make things better. That’s the kind of thing that historically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google has been pretty good at and constantly getting better at, but Apple has really not been. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so to have this major effort be seemingly very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prioritized, very well resourced, and that it’s been going on for so long, and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that Apple actually does have good data coming in, you know, like one of the big things about it is that it’s using all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone data, basically, of all the iPhones that are out there in the field. That’s genius
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and awesome and very powerful, and that’s something that Google can do with Android phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s probably, you know, it might be harder because of their relationship with Android and manufacturers and everything else. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be more complicated there. So Apple is really having a, you know, they have a strong asset there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the install base of iPhones. And to be tackling a problem like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple historically isn’t willing to do and isn’t very, doesn’t care that much about and isn’t very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at, that Google is, it’s really cool to see that from Apple. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the, whatever decision was made back when they decided, oh, we need to own our own map data because this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge thing for the world we live in now, that decision was a correct one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it sounds like that was that decision made like four years ago, which is even better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the biggest things I hope for with this, I really hope A, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this pans out and is good. And B, I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re doing the same thing to Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s an interesting point.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not getting greedy. If you go back a couple of years on this show, pretty shards on this show.
⏹️ ▶️ John I might have gone back into hypercritical. But at any rate, I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ John a historic complaint. Back before we were concerned about Siri and machine learning,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was just more about iCloud, basically. Apple’s not good at server-side stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John The client-side stuff is good, but when it comes to server-side stuff, Apple just doesn’t seem to
⏹️ ▶️ John have its heart in it or understand it or whatever. And I’ve been banging that drum for many, many years. maybe in the early
⏹️ ▶️ John days of this show, one of the things that I felt like was holding
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple back as compared to its big competitors, specifically Google, was
⏹️ ▶️ John that Google from the very early days always seemed willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John take on a very large problem that seemingly had only boil
⏹️ ▶️ John the ocean style solutions. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of books out there that aren’t online. And the Google-style thing is, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just
⏹️ ▶️ John scan every book in the world? And that’s like, well, what do you mean? You’re going to scan every book in the world? That’s stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, let’s think of a clever solution or some way to work on this. But you’re not going to scan every book in the
⏹️ ▶️ John world. And same thing with Street View. It’s like, it would be cool if we had pictures of things to
⏹️ ▶️ John add from the street level to add to our maps. And it’s like, well, that’s great. But it’s not like you can drive
⏹️ ▶️ John cars on every single street in the world. And Google, in both of these cases, And
⏹️ ▶️ John in many similar ones, Google’s like, all right, well, let’s just do the boil the ocean thing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s just take a picture of those drive cars in every single road in the United States. Let’s just scan every book in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes they don’t always work out. I think the book scanning thing ran into some copywriting stuff or whatever, but Google
⏹️ ▶️ John has never been afraid of the brute force solution to problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, of course, there’s a tech component and they get very smart about it and they built custom hardware to do it. And, you know, just look at
⏹️ ▶️ John their data centers and, you know, now they’re machine learning things like, What if we just
⏹️ ▶️ John make our own computers that perform exactly the way we want, and we can get better density out of our rack
⏹️ ▶️ John spaces, and go faster, make our own language, and hire Chris Latner to adapt
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift to work with TensorFlow and Python? They’ll just do it, even if it takes a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John number of people, even if it’s going to take years and years. They haven’t shied away from it. Whereas Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John always been not interested in that type of solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, I imagine if that comes up in a meeting, it’s like, why don’t we just take a picture of every road and then be like, so someone we could partner
⏹️ ▶️ John with who’s already done that. Because that’s just, is that really our core competency? Like do we really want to
⏹️ ▶️ John hire thousands of people to sift through and manually edit map data? Do we
⏹️ ▶️ John want to scan every book in the world? Like we don’t want to do that stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And certain for certain problems, if you do the brute force solution
⏹️ ▶️ John and you embark on and it early enough, you get results, results that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult for someone else to match. So back in the day, Google Street View, I don’t think they were the first people
⏹️ ▶️ John to do a Street View type thing. There are third parties that did that, and maybe they even partnered with them in the beginning, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Google just did it. We’re just gonna go out and do it, and we’re gonna keep doing it, and we’re gonna do it better and better, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the resolution’s gonna get better, and we’re gonna incorporate satellite data, and our own map data, and our own Street View stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they buy Waymo, our own traffic data, And they’re just, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though it was a ridiculous big solution. And so by the time Apple realized that
⏹️ ▶️ John maps were a strategic thing, roundabout, I don’t know, was this like the iPhone 3GS, 3G era?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then maybe sometime around the early iPhone, Apple kind of realized
⏹️ ▶️ John that maps were important. They wanted to do their own maps. And they kicked Google Maps off of the place of honor
⏹️ ▶️ John on their system and made their own maps. And they seemed like they did it in a hurry because whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what they were, they were negotiating with Google over map tiles and Google wanted to keep the good features to themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were like, fine, we’ll just do it ourselves. But of course you can’t just do it yourself because it’s really difficult. So instead what they
⏹️ ▶️ John did was partner with a bunch of third-party mapping companies and slap something together. And they called it Apple Maps
⏹️ ▶️ John and it wasn’t great. And what I had been complaining about all those
⏹️ ▶️ John years is like, there is no substitute for just like, I mean, if you want to look how Google did it, They
⏹️ ▶️ John just put tons of time and energy and money and resources into it. There was no
⏹️ ▶️ John secret. You literally have to drive cars on every road in the United States. And what about the rest of the world? Yeah, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John drive cars there. There is no shortcut. There’s no magic solution. There’s no partner you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to find who does the grunt work. You just have to do it yourself. And then you have to work at it, and you have to do it better and better.
⏹️ ▶️ John So at some point, I guess four years ago, that conversation finally turned over
⏹️ ▶️ John at Apple and said, you know what? We are going to do it ourself. We’re going to do the hard thing. We’re going to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of vans. We’re going to put a bunch of crap on them. We’re going to collect all the data. We’re going to make our own tools for sorting through it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to do the Google thing. And as far as I’m aware, this is pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John the first time Apple has ever done the Google style solution to a very
⏹️ ▶️ John large problem. Right? And it took them a while to come around to it. And as we know, you know, they’ve been working on it for four
⏹️ ▶️ John years. It’s maybe, maybe it’s the first time we’re doing anything like this for
⏹️ ▶️ John this kind of big data server side thing. And kind of in the same way that I bet Google has never done the
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturing stuff that Apple has done, because Google tends to outsource that and doesn’t really manufacture that many things even when they do outsource
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? Whereas Apple’s like, we’ll buy all the CNC machines in the entire world, and we’ll buy
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the flash memory, you know. So this is the flip side of that. So I’m really happy
⏹️ ▶️ John that that kind of solution, the Google-style big data
⏹️ ▶️ John solution, is now apparently the type of thing that Apple will do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I really hope this project works out for them and doesn’t turn into like a four-year money pit
⏹️ ▶️ John that results in a solution that isn’t actually that good. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John happy about that, but the lead that Google has,
⏹️ ▶️ John like what we’re comparing now is this thing that Apple’s been working on for four years is gonna roll out in the Bay Area soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re comparing that to what Google has for the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire world right now. We don’t know what Google’s working on. Does Google’s current
⏹️ ▶️ John set of cars right around, do they have LIDAR on four corners of the vehicle and are taking
⏹️ ▶️ John higher res images with 3D mapping and everything? Are Google’s tools where the humans get to look and
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly place the number on the right place based on where the number is on the thing in the
⏹️ ▶️ John picture and have humans verifying that the machine learning has read the number correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, or pulling off the the road signs and making sure the symbols on the road signs are the same as on the map, all
⏹️ ▶️ John those things that are in this article, which I encourage everyone to read is lots of good details in there. Is Google
⏹️ ▶️ John either already doing that? Or is the next version of Google Maps already doing that? We don’t know like when you have a lead,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that the nature of the lead is, this is what Apple has been working on for four years.
⏹️ ▶️ John How what has been Google been working on for four years, right? So I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ John lets Apple leapfrog ahead, but maybe it does. Maybe Google are complacent. Maybe they’ve just,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s just been slowly increasing the resolution and think it’s been fine. Or maybe Google is concentrating on an area that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not thinking of. Uh, we’ll see, but I’m, I’m heartened to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is, I’m going to say biting the bullet or giving in or
⏹️ ▶️ John has had a change of heart about problems like this. It’s great that they had the change of heart that they realized they needed
⏹️ ▶️ John on maps because it was so strategically important. But this more broadly, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John approach, let’s do it the Google way. For Google-type solutions, we’ll do it the Google way because
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as we know, there is no other more clever way and partnering just doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And I echo what Marco said. If there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an equivalent to that for Siri, which I’m not sure there is because Siri’s not quite the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but if there’s an equivalent to, to let’s not try to be nimble and cute and partner
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. Let’s just do whatever it is Google’s doing to their assistance that lets me ask it
⏹️ ▶️ John when a pharmacy inside a Walgreens, inside an ill-specified Walgreens somewhere near me
⏹️ ▶️ John closes and it gives me the answer immediately. Whatever is causing that to happen, I want Apple to do that same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of the pharmacy inside Walgreens, wasn’t it Apple that’s been doing a lot with like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside airports? And there’s a term for this probably not as fancy as I think it is. But I thought it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple that was doing a whole lot of mapping inside buildings and like shopping malls and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John things of that nature. Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing inside lots of inside building stuff. I think Apple has more interiors, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still behind Google. Google, you know, again, speaking of things that, you know, Google Maps has already rolled out, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John Google has been mapping interior spaces for several years now. I’m not sure how good
⏹️ ▶️ John it is because I don’t use Google Maps for that purpose. But yeah, like we’ll put a link to that. I think someone put it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the the chat What was it called the Google Maps moat just showing exactly how
⏹️ ▶️ John far ahead Google Maps is this four-year plan that Apple’s doing? It could catch them up Like if you read the article
⏹️ ▶️ John and you say if Apple comes out with this and it’s worldwide and doesn’t take another four years To roll out
⏹️ ▶️ John they will be where Google is now maybe slightly ahead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another interesting thing speaking of worldwide, you know always on worldwide Another interesting thing about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is that one of the things that’s great about Siri is that it supports many more languages than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cylinders are not as fluent in as many languages as Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cylinders are and So it’s funny to me that this is kind of a role reversal in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Google just like you said John Google Maps are everywhere and they’re great and they’re on the web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which Apple Maps sort of are to some degree but if I need to look up a you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, driving directions or something like that. I’m not using Maps on my Mac. I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Google Maps website. It’s just interesting to me that, despite the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple’s cylinders can speak many, many languages and are comparatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more available as far as I was aware or am aware in many other countries,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here it is Google has this just way, way better off than Apple does,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is just interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone always wants to bring up Siri’s multi-language stuff. And on the surface, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s great, right? More languages is better than fewer, right? Because you can sell to more of the world, and it’s nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re using a product that you don’t have to use it in a language you’re not familiar with for the people in the rest of the world who aren’t monolingual
⏹️ ▶️ John like so much of the US is. But whenever I hear
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I think, great, so now Siri can misunderstand people in multiple languages. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this relates to
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco talking about his HomePods and how he liked them and how he complained about Siri. I think we got
⏹️ ▶️ John a question. I didn’t actually put it in the notes anywhere. But Marco said, oh, Siri’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ John great. But if they had named timers, maybe it would help. And what I was thinking is,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about timers and other things that cylinders can do, just generic
⏹️ ▶️ John questions that I ask it all the time. Forget about that. Just for music,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s actually a harder problem than you think, just ask Marko with his giant collection of fish songs, to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to yell something to your cylinder and have it figure out what song in your music collection you want
⏹️ ▶️ John it to play. Because I don’t remember the exact titles of all my songs. And if you have a lot of fish
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the titles look similar, and you just want to say something like, you know, play last year’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Christmas, play Meat Stick from last year’s Christmas show, you know, or whatever, something, like that should be enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John A human could understand what you’re talking about. A human with knowledge of Marco could
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey find that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or naming a city and a year, just something. And that’s the area
⏹️ ▶️ John where the Google cylinders and the Amazon ones, for that matter, beat out Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that, oh, I can speak the language I want or whatever. I wanna just say something that vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ John refers to some song in my music collection or that I listened to in the past, whatever, and I wanted to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out what that is. And my experience with my HomePod is very often, even when I know the
⏹️ ▶️ John exact title, because it has a weird word or a homonym in it, or there’s another similarly named song,
⏹️ ▶️ John or there’s one in Apple Music that it wants to play instead of mine, just getting it to play
⏹️ ▶️ John a song that I know I have in my collection, even though I’m speaking English and it understands English,
⏹️ ▶️ John so the language support is there, I can’t get it to do what I want. And that’s just with the narrow
⏹️ ▶️ John domain of telling it songs to play. When I think about
⏹️ ▶️ John how far Syria has to come, it’s stuff like that. Things that Syria already does, that it does
⏹️ ▶️ John it in more languages, that I just can’t get it to be successful because I have to be very precise
⏹️ ▶️ John or because song titles are weird and a lot of them sound like each other. It’s like, luggage at the airport, bags look
⏹️ ▶️ John alike. So check your, like, song titles are very often alike. And it’s very frustrating when you take three
⏹️ ▶️ John tries and it keeps playing some song that you didn’t realize has the same title by a different artist and you try to say the artist’s
⏹️ ▶️ John name and it thinks the artist’s name is part of the song it’s all confusing. You just want to pull it off on your phone and scroll, scroll, scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John and pick it because you know that will work. And maybe it’s unfair of me, but every time I think of multi-language support, I’m like, great.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I can have that experience in Italian too. That’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually ran into this exact scenario, which was my fault to be clear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco a human would have understood it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s it. No, I was on a run and I decided mid run that I would like to change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was listening to, which is a terrible idea because then I’m relying on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my AirPods, which are connected to my cellular Apple Watch while I’m like huffing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and puffing and panting. And I kept trying to play this album, which I thought was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called Live at the Troubadour or something like that, which was a live album,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not by Dave Matthews for the record, by Kevin Gilbert. But anyways, it turns out the name of the album
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually called Welcome to Joytown. But if I had told someone who was familiar with Kevin Gilbert’s work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I want to play Thud Live, they would have understood, given the context, what that meant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s a very hard problem for a computer to solve. I’m not saying it’s unreasonable that Siri couldn’t figure it out. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was freaking infuriating in the heat of the moment because it basically just shrugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and moved on. But once I realized, oh, the name of the album is actually Welcome to Joytown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, that one’s kind of on me. But golly, was it infuriating at the time. And so we do have a long way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go, just like you said, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Google solution to that, by the way, speaking of things that Apple, I want to get back to the privacy angle
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple Maps, but the Google solution to this type of thing, the way Google
⏹️ ▶️ John is successful, maybe the way it does the pharmacy stuff, certainly the way it would figure out what you were talking about with that album or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it has so many different places where people train it to do the right thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John for that particular one, I bet if you typed in like, know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, play thud live or album thud live or whatever you’re whatever it is that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John a Google search box, because lots of people have searched for that, or lots of people have linked
⏹️ ▶️ John to it with link text that is similar to that or Bob, the magic of the Google search algorithm, and not
⏹️ ▶️ John like people are feeding it to say when when people in general, say
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that, they usually mean this thing. And I have to imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John that Google cylinders are fed by the information about people doing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that with all of Google’s products and that feeds into its ability to understand basically
⏹️ ▶️ John you said a thing other people have typed or said similar things and when they have
⏹️ ▶️ John done it they have clicked on the search results or whatever that leads to this thing so I think I know what you mean
⏹️ ▶️ John right you need it can’t just if it was just an isolation it was just a cylinder in me that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be much more difficult but Google has this wealth of knowledge coming from, I have to imagine, Google search,
⏹️ ▶️ John but perhaps other things as well, that feeds into their server-side implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John of whatever the cylinder is connecting to, that lets it figure out what I meant, because other people have said similar
⏹️ ▶️ John things. So you don’t really, like, that’s what I’m always amazed when I, I mean, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, I don’t, it’s like a magic trick. I don’t know how the cylinder does it. Like, the questions will come up at the dinner table, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I will just ask a cylinder, totally confident that it will have no idea what I’m talking about and it somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John gives me the answer probably because other little kids at the dinner table have asked the same question and I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even know how it does it but when I ask Siri I get the feeling that Siri is is in a
⏹️ ▶️ John you know locked in a stone tower no one is allowed to talk to Siri and it’s just me
⏹️ ▶️ John and Siri and I send my little note up in a little bucket on a little scroll of paper Siri looks at
⏹️ ▶️ John it and just goes I don’t know what that is and just does something random or sends
⏹️ ▶️ John it back down that Siri has no friends at Siri. No one is feeding Siri information about like,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what, Siri. And by the way, it’s just my private Siri that is doing this, right? But each person is talking to their
⏹️ ▶️ John own private Siri. No one is saying, you know, in the past hour, 500,000
⏹️ ▶️ John people have said this and they’ve meant this. So if someone else says this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good bet that they mean this other thing right that that’s what it feels like and
⏹️ ▶️ John i think that apple needs to leverage uh other sources of information to get it smarter now on that front on
⏹️ ▶️ John maps that you know and there are who’s into this they’re leveraging iphones they’ve got tons of ios devices
⏹️ ▶️ John ios devices have gps’s in them wouldn’t it be great if we could use those gps’s to feed into mapping
⏹️ ▶️ John data so you you could see where people are going you can see how fast they’re going you can improve
⏹️ ▶️ John your map data even down to the part they’re saying like you know what about walking paths through parks if they build a the new walking
⏹️ ▶️ John path through a park. How can you get that updated on the map data? Well, you’ll see a bunch of little GPS dots moving along a new
⏹️ ▶️ John path, and then you can feed that information through to a human who will say, yep, that’s a new path, and draw it on a map, and it could be there
⏹️ ▶️ John the next day. Apple’s unique angle on this, and I’m sure Google does the same thing. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John unique angle on this is, of course, privacy, in that, don’t worry, we’re not tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John where everybody goes. Like, oh, so if I carry an iPhone around, Apple knows everywhere I go.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, Apple is not just anonymizing the data, so it doesn’t know that it’s you going from place
⏹️ ▶️ John to place, but that it refuses to track data from the beginning or the end of your journey. It only
⏹️ ▶️ John tracks it in the middle, and then it interleaves your little middle segments with other people’s little middle segments.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it still gets total coverage, but it can never say that any given anonymous person even went from
⏹️ ▶️ John point A to B. They can only say that an anonymous person traveled this tiny segment in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of their journey, and another anonymous person traveled this tiny segment, but it has no idea who these people are, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John has no idea where they started, and has no idea where they ended up. And that is an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John style way to get this information. The Google style way is we’re just gonna tell you all your GPS data
⏹️ ▶️ John and Google has all information about exactly where you go and it’s not even anonymized and they know you went from point A to point B
⏹️ ▶️ John because all that stuff is so much more lax. And I think it was Margo mentioned like that Google might have more difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the sort of heterogeneous world of the Android ecosystem. But I think it’s easier because I bet
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people who sell you Android power phones have no qualms about just sending all your GPS data all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like maybe they don’t want to send it to Google because it’s a thing, but I bet if you install Google’s apps, they have that Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s apps have access to your information and they will just send it. I mean, I’m sure they’ll anonymize it. I don’t like they’re trying to spy
⏹️ ▶️ John on you, but I don’t think they’re going to the same lengths as Apple. Or if they do, they’re certainly not bragging about it, which is a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John because if they are doing it, they should be bragging about it. But yeah, that’s, I mean, isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John what Waymo is based on? Seeing other people who are running Waymo and how fast they’re going, and then it can show you all the traffic stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like- I think you’re thinking of ways- Sorry, not Waymo, Waymo is the self-driving car, Waze. Both Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ John Google have traffic data, but I’m not sure if Apple has come from a third party or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I’m glad Apple is doing the thing they seem not to be doing in other aspects or can’t do in other
⏹️ ▶️ John aspects. They can’t do it. If Google’s getting this information from its Google search engine, Apple has no equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of that to feed its smart cylinders, which is a shame. But Apple does have an equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the phones. They have all their own phones that are out there, and they’re being very careful about it. They only do it when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John running a navigation. So it’s not like if you’re just walking around with your phone, it’s sending GPS data to Apple. It’s only doing it if you’re also
⏹️ ▶️ John using maps. It’s so restrictive, if you read this article by Panserino, it’s so restrictive that it almost amazes
⏹️ ▶️ John me that they have enough data, right? Because it’s not the beginning, not the end, anonymized,
⏹️ ▶️ John interleaved with other people, and only if you’re running maps. Who runs maps when they commute from
⏹️ ▶️ John home to work? Like, you don’t, you know the way to go. So those people are never gonna be contributing any map data,
⏹️ ▶️ John whereas the Google ones, I can imagine tons of Android devices sending GPS information when the phone is off or playing
⏹️ ▶️ John music because no one’s stopping them from doing that. And you know, anyway, whatever Google
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing, Apple will be wise to do it, but in a more privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John conscious way and then brag about it. And that’s exactly what this mapping article is about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that people would not use maps during their commute. I take your point about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowing how to get from home to work. And I had, well, by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time people are listening to this, had a very small commute. But there are a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of people that I know that have longer commutes that rely on something like Waze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to make sure that one of the several routes between them and their office isn’t –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever one they choose isn’t the slow one. And there’s lots of traffic. Like take the D.C. metro area, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think Boston is very much like this as well. There are a few different major
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arteries through the DC area, and it very well could be that the one that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer to take is clogged today, so you really need to take your alternate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. And without having some sort of navigation software to tell you that, it can be really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tough. Actually, a great example I have personally about this is my mother-in-law lives just maybe 15, 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes away, but it’s a very short trip up 95. And 95 is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often a parking lot going northbound at any point during the weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so every time we get in the car to go to my mother-in-law’s, one of us will always at least glance at like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google or Apple Maps or Waze to verify that we can take 95 and don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to take US1, which runs parallel to it. And more often than not, we end up on the alternate approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead. And so I wonder a couple things like, A, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I guess we had said that if you’re not actively navigating, then Apple will not capture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that data. But do you have to be actively navigating in Apple Maps?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I would assume that there’s some amount of system-level API calls that are given to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mapping apps in such a way that they can interrupt audio. I mean, Marco, you’ve dealt with this to some degree,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interrupt audio and duck it and so on and so forth. So could Apple figure out when Waze is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey navigating and capture some of that GPS data that it has to provide to Waze anyway. Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Delsignore Maybe that’s part of getting into CarPlay for navigation apps this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Oh, that’s another interesting point. That’s a really good point. Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Delsignore I mean, also, like, I am one of those people who uses Waze to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Define work? I’m assuming that’s the beach house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max Delsignore Yeah, work is what I set my work thing to in Waze and the Tesla navigation app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the ferry terminal at the beach. Steve McLaughlin Ha, ha, ha. Max Delsignore Because it’s the place that I go most often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I need traffic routing because it’s across New York and Long Island and so there’s tons of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird traffic stuff that happens all the time and always taking weirdo routes. And they give you a home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a work and I have no other ideas of what to set the work to. So I set it to the ferry terminal.
⏹️ ▶️ John So does Waze have a mode where it doesn’t tell you like, take this turn, take
⏹️ ▶️ John that turn, but only tells you like, oh, here’s the alternate route you should take. And only like if
⏹️ ▶️ John you take the normal route, in other words, it doesn’t say anything to you, but only if it sees that your normal route is going to be a problem, then it navigates
⏹️ ▶️ John you the other route. Because I don’t I don’t want to be told, like, turn here, turn there, because
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes they’re a little chatty if you know where you’re going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, part of it is you can just turn off those audio prompts and you can leave on audio prompts for things like, you know, police reported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead and accident reported ahead and stuff like that. And that might be nice, just just because it gives you an idea of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there is like an unexpected disruption to traffic, like an accident or something like you don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that usually until it’s too late until you get there and you’re slowed up with with everybody else. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would really consider actually doing it all the time. The other thing is, when you set something as your work address, which I run into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s kind of funny for me, it will send you push notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that morning, if there’s really bad traffic, like unexpectedly bad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll tell you, hey, just so you know, it might take you a little bit longer to get to work today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple has that with the proactive thing. Occasionally, I think this came in iOS 11, I’ll look at my phone and it will
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you know, or in the morning it’ll say, your commute to work looks good,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it should take you such and such minutes, or like, it looks like there’s traffic on your way to work. It’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like navigating me, it’s not turning on maps, but it’s one of those notifications that lets you know
⏹️ ▶️ John either that things look fine, or that, you know, they think it’s gonna take you an extra hour to get to work,
⏹️ ▶️ John so consider an alternate route. And then it would still be up to me to say, oh, I better open Waze or open Apple Maps
⏹️ ▶️ John and see, or open Google Maps and see if it can provide me an alternate route. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another example of Apple’s on-device learning. It says, every day it seems you wake up and leave
⏹️ ▶️ John the house at this time and go to the same place. I guess, you know, that’s your work and this is your home and this is a commute you do a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I can tell you that it looks like it’s going to be fine this morning and you should be there in X minutes. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John that proactive stuff I’ve, and that doesn’t have to use any server-side stuff. It’s all on device. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no privacy angle. And so that would be a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John place for them to insert this kind of like, uh, do you want me to navigate you the alternate
⏹️ ▶️ John way? And I just press a button and it fires up ways in that or apple maps in that mode I was saying where
⏹️ ▶️ John it only tells me when to deviate or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t think it does that, but I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’d be a difficult problem because I really just wants to navigate you all the time because it’s like, well, I didn’t want to say anything cause you know this way,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m just going to tell you the deviation. I was just trying to avoid the situation. Like even when you take long trips
⏹️ ▶️ John like from going someplace coming back from someplace. It’s like at a certain point, you’re like, OK, I know the way home from
⏹️ ▶️ John here. But no device in my life understands that I know the way home from here. Right. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult problem. But once I get back on to 95, I don’t need navigation anymore. So there’s always some point,
⏹️ ▶️ John some point in the trip, especially on the way home, where we turn off the GPS device to say, OK, well, I got it from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And anything else on maps?
⏹️ ▶️ John There was another article that I didn’t get to, unfortunately, I’m just remembering it now. It’s probably buried in Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. So there was the original article, Panzerino talks to all the Apple people and shows
⏹️ ▶️ John you pictures from inside of the weird van and talks about everything. Then there was a Q&A article
⏹️ ▶️ John of questions about that other article, which I didn’t read, but we should find for the show notes. Maybe one of the questions is
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what we were just asking, exactly when does my data contribute to Apple Maps? Can I turn
⏹️ ▶️ John it on and off, so on and so forth? Maybe that’s in the Q&A.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. But it is worth looking at the Justin O’Byrne post, which is the one we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey referring to that we thought was on Medium, where he goes through and shows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the differences between Apple and Google. And it’s a long post, but it has a lot of visual aids that are really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really well done, and I’d forgotten about this post until I think it was Marco that brought it up, but it is definitely worth reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both Panzerino’s post and this one as well. They’re both really, really good.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Squarespace. Start building your website today at squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP and enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off. Make your next move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a unique domain and a beautiful website from Squarespace. Squarespace makes it incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to make a beautiful website no matter what your skill level is. Now even offering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco domain sales as well. So whether you have a domain or not, you can go start to finish all with Squarespace and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly easy and you can you can get done in very, very little time. So next time you have a project to do at Squarespace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this, you know, you might underestimate what they can do if you’ve never used it before, they can not only do, of course, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think of as a content site, you know, some pages of information, a blog, stuff like that, photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco galleries, but they also do hard stuff to host, like podcasts. You can host an entire podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Squarespace. You can host an entire store on Squarespace that sells digital or physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goods. They have all that integrated as well if you want to. You can design your logo on Squarespace right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there in their in their site Builder, you can do so much with Squarespace, again, no matter what your skill level is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no coding required. If you want to jump in there and get into some of the code, you can, but you don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually ever need to. And all these sites look so good. They are, of course, responsive, they look modern,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they look clean, they’re adding new designs all the time, so you can keep your site really looking fresh. Everything is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to use. And if you need any help, Squarespace offers award-winning customer support, which is always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice to have if you need it. Check it out today at squarespace.com slash ATP. If you sign up for a year, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even get a free domain name with your purchase. When you decide to sign up after your free trial, make sure to head to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco squarespace.com slash ATP and use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first correction.
Apple headphone rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP and code ATP for 10% off your first purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a rumor that came out in the last few days that new AirPods are coming, which in and of itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not a particularly big surprise, but there are some surprises within. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are apparently going to be over the ear headphones from Apple, not Beats, mind you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. As is reported at Bloomberg, a few quotes, Apple’s working on new AirPods with noise cancellation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey water resistance, the people said. Apple’s trying to increase the range that AirPods can work away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the iPhone or iPad. You know, Macs are a thing too, you guys. One of the people said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you won’t be swimming in them though. The water resistance is mainly to protect against rain and perspiration, the people said.
⏹️ ▶️ John gross. The Bloomberg style guide requires them to say the people. I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John ugh. Whatever the Bloomberg style guide is doing to the writing
⏹️ ▶️ John about Apple rumors, it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No argument. It continues, slated for 2019, the earbuds will likely cost more than the existing $160 pair, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that could push Apple to segment the product line like it does with iPhones, one of the people said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is also working on a wireless charging case that’s compatible with the upcoming AirPower charger, should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it ever ship, but that’s neither
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John here nor there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The company has also internally discussed adding biometric sensors to future AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a heart rate monitor to expand its health-related hardware offerings beyond the Apple Watch, another person said. The current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods will be refreshed later this year with a new chip and support for hands-free Siri activation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our final poll quote, there are over-ear headphones coming from Apple too. Those will compete with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pricing models from Bose and Sennheiser. They will use Apple branding and be a higher-end alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the company’s Beats line. originally intended to introduce the headphones by the end of 2018, but has faced development challenges,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go figure, and is now targeting a launch as early as next year, the people said. The people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, the people. They asked not to be identified, the people, because they were talking about unreleased products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not a lot of this is terribly surprising to me. I’m a little surprised at the notion that they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like split the AirPod line. I don’t think it’s unreasonable, but it just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I don’t know if it’s really necessary, if you will. Like, it just doesn’t seem to me like that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey constructive. But hey, they basically print money and maybe this is why.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand how these rumors things don’t like, like the, they, they present
⏹️ ▶️ John all this information with equal, uh, certainty, certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John not entire certainty for, but equal certainty. And like history has shown that
⏹️ ▶️ John the things you’re going to know the least about are pricing and like marketing related stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s no reason for almost anybody to know that. And Apple can change its mind about it, like
⏹️ ▶️ John up until the very last minute. So anytime I see any speculation about what a product is
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be named or how much it’s gonna cost, years out ahead of when it’s shipping, it’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to couch that, you have to say, like, why even mention that? Because you know your certainty is terrible on it. You’re never
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna exactly guess the price or the name a year and a half away. The story
⏹️ ▶️ John is, oh, new AirPods are coming, and maybe you got some features like water resistance and noise canceling. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the story. The story is not, oh, and we think they might be more expensive. Why do you think they might be more expensive? Do you have someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who says, I am the sole decider for the price on these things, and I’m deciding a year out this is how much they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to cost? I really doubt that. So, like, is it just made up? You just think, well, it seems like they should
⏹️ ▶️ John be more expensive? Or someone thought they might be more expensive? Like, if you believe in any of the sourcing
⏹️ ▶️ John on this, I would totally believe that they could get the noise-canceling and water-resistant parts right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, the wireless charging thing, Apple already announced, that’s not even a rumor. It’s a rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s going to ship. But the pricing and the segmentation, what you’re just talking about, Casey, I put no
⏹️ ▶️ John stock in that whatsoever. Not to say that it isn’t true. It’s just that this far out, don’t pay
⏹️ ▶️ John any attention. You’ll find out when you find out. And it’s interesting to speculate about, but I would not put
⏹️ ▶️ John that alongside the other information in this article as if we know it just as well as we know about the two major features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also might just be like, you know, Bloomberg is ostensibly a financial focused publication.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So this might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just be like, you know, they, what they really have is, you know, they bought Mark Gurman and so they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good line on Apple rumors. But they still need to like couch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as financial news. But anyway, overall, like, you know, all the pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and branding speculation aside, which I agree is probably unreliable. This is pretty cool. This is good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news. First of all, I think guessing names for these things is super fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, noise cancellation headphones are AirPlugs, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over-ear headphones are AirHeads. I mean, come on. Mad Fientist – AirHeads is good. Tyler Burrus – There is a reason why there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple kinds of headphones out there in the world. There’s a huge market for headphones. Even before Beats,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which had a pretty large influence, but even before that, there’s all sorts of types of headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s the AirPlugs kind, where you have what you have, Casey, like the in-ear monitors that that really seal well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could solve a problem that AirPods have, which is that you really can’t use them on planes because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earbuds just are not, there’s no sound isolation, they don’t seal well in your ear, and so in a very loud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place, like a plane or even like a subway station, like you really can’t hear those very well.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was thinking of with the noise cancellation. How can you have noise canceling earbuds? If they’re the same
⏹️ ▶️ John shape as the current AirPods, what good does noise canceling do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing they have to be basically in your monitor style where they do seal, where they look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like earplugs, where they really go in your ear and have the little rubber gasket that seals. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably what that is. I can’t imagine noise cancellation would make any sense at all in an earbud style,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is what the current ones are. So I’m guessing earplugs are noise cancellation.
⏹️ ▶️ John So translating through rumor-ese, I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John they really were the little jam into your ear canal things, that that would have been mentioned in the article.
⏹️ ▶️ John but it wasn’t. So now I’m thinking that this tidbit of information
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the new AirPods basically look exactly the same as the current AirPods. And the noise
⏹️ ▶️ John cancellation is more about being able to cancel out background noise better so it can hear
⏹️ ▶️ John you say, hey dingus, to do the hands-free activation. Oh, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, you have to, it’s like reading the tea leaves. It’s like, if someone heard this and didn’t really understand or think about it very well, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John just write the sentence and not really think about how can you have noise canceling AirPods? And so your conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ John was that noise canceling is the Bose style one, and so it has to be an in-ear, but my conclusion is they’re very confused, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really just about rejecting background noise better than the current ones do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it could be both. Ultimately, as soon as I heard noise cancellation AirPods, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought in-ear monitor style. And in fact, Apple used to make those. Do you remember back during the wired days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like 70 or $80. They had a higher-end version of the iPod headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think they sold them for very long, and I forget what they were called, Stephen would know, sorry Stephen, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did sell those, or it wouldn’t be the very first time they ever made them. But that’s a really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco balance of still being pretty portable, still being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice and small and nice looking, but being usable on a plane. A lot of people use those for that reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, really, the king of noise cancellation for planes usually is over ears. That’s why you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Bose QuietComfort Series and everything like that. those are the real big sellers. By the way, my favorite among those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now is the Sony WH, what is it, 1000 MK2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the Sony $300 over ear headphone is that begins with WH and ends with 1000XM2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s comfortable and they finally fixed the sound. Anyway, for Apple to get into this market is a no-brainer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a high profit market that Apple has expertise in. I don’t know about the noise cancellation part, but they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expertise in headphone design, in the manufacturing of such things, the design of such things, the W2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff or W1 stuff, we’ll have the Bluetooth, you know, awesome custom pairing stuff and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re, it’s a way for them to make a lot of money on another consumer electronic device that people will give them $300 for. They can’t, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like last week, they’re really good at making $300 nicely designed white things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that charge and do something cool. Like that’s basically Apple’s MO these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So of course they’re working on this. It would be stupid of them not to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the same reason that they’ve made other headphones because people want them. Other brands are currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serving those markets and making lots of money and Apple wants in on that. And I think Apple could do a really good job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they wanted to. And their recent efforts in audio engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general, you know, the speakers on the iPhone, the HomePod, the improvements to the speakers in the Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like the iPad Pro speaker, like they’re doing so well in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker and headphone design recently. Expanding that line is a no-brainer to me. So I’m looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I also just hope that maybe there’s a type of AirPods that I can actually use, because the current ones just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physically don’t fit me. I’m actually not holding out much hope on that, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is not so good at making differently sized things for different needs. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to favor a one size fits all approach, where all is always defined to be everything but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my needs. And typically to make comfortable over-ear headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they typically need to be a little bit big, and big headphones don’t look nice, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple won’t make something that doesn’t look nice. So I’m a little skeptical of like, their over-ear headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are probably gonna have ear cups that are a little bit too small, and a little bit too shallow for good comfort.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m worried the AirPods are gonna just not fit me, because they never fit me. But I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited just to see what these products are, just in case one of them actually fits me and works for me, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would like the convenience of W1 stuff, I would like some of the design of Apple stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m never incredibly happy with my airplane headphones at any given time.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things I do with my noise-canceling airplane headphones is
⏹️ ▶️ John stop the podcast or the music or whatever so I can talk to people and adjust the
⏹️ ▶️ John volume, and I do all of that with a little remote that’s hanging down from a cord, and Apple’s ones won’t have a cord,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I really, really, really don’t want to say, hey, Dingus, stop, hey, Dingus, volume
⏹️ ▶️ John up, dingus volume down because that is ridiculous no matter how well it hears me i just want
⏹️ ▶️ John a button to press and i would imagine that not only will these not have a cord with the button thing on it
⏹️ ▶️ John but they won’t have buttons on the ear cups either maybe if i’m lucky uh
⏹️ ▶️ John no there won’t even be any other remote i’ll have to do it on my phone or i’ll have to do it by saying hey dingus and both of
⏹️ ▶️ John those solutions are not great so as much as i might be interested in these i’m more likely to
⏹️ ▶️ John replace my current Bose headphones with whatever that Sony one you’re suggesting is because I feel like speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of small ear cups, I think the Bose ear cups are a little small for me and I would like something bigger and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have yet to find anybody who finds both the Bose QC35 series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Sony WH-1000 MkII comfortable. Almost everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finds one of them extremely comfortable and usually not the other one, so it’s kind of a personal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit thing. I personally think the Sony is the more comfortable one, but a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people think the Bose is the more comfortable one. It depends on your head shape, your ear shape, how tightly you have the headband
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set, where exactly you wear them, like whether you like kinda shift them back or forward or whatever else. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find the Sony’s extremely comfortable. That’s the reason why I started using them is because the previous version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them was terrible. Before it was WH, when it was just the Sony something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MDR-1000X, that’s what it was. That version was rough because the sound was really bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it just basically lopped off all high frequencies and it just sounded muddy and terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I started bringing them on planes anyway because among all my Bluetooth plane headphones, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were just the most travel friendly and the most comfortable. Like, they folded down the nicest, they had the nice little travel case, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had great battery life. The only thing they don’t have is double pairing where they can pair to multiple devices. They don’t have that and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoys me. But you could turn off the noise cancellation, which I liked a lot. and it was just extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfortable. And then the WH-1000 Mark II came out and it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improved the sound. It didn’t change that much else, but it made the sound better and it gave you an app that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could tweak the sound with and I was able to set it to be a little bit better even than stock. They still aren’t the best sounding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones that I’ve heard, not by a long shot, but they now sound good enough that they’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for travel because they’re comfortable and everything else about them is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the Bose ones I find are pretty comfortable, but at around about hour four or five, I start to notice that
⏹️ ▶️ John there are more and kind of have to, you know, I kind of wish I had more comfortable ones. Maybe that’s true of
⏹️ ▶️ John all headphones, but you know, I keep waiting for the Bose ones to break or something, but so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luck. Oh, they never do. What Bose tends to lose out on usually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bose is usually very good about initial comfort. When you first put them on, they feel amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bose is usually really good about lightweight as well. Like they really have good design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for comfort. where they usually fall down is the thickness of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rim around the ear pad, like the part that actually touches your head is actually kind of a skinny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contact patch around that circle. And so usually, like the other headphones I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that are very comfortable, like the Sonys, you have a wider circle that presses against your head, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weight’s distributed a little bit better, a little bit more comfortable. So that’s usually where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that difference happens, whereas, but the Sonys are, I believe, a little bit heavier. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lightweight is what you really want, go for the Bose. If long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfort, like wearing them for an entire plane ride comfort, if that’s not working out for you on the Bose, try the Sonys, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually find the Sonys pretty good at that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised headphone makers don’t account for another factor in my
⏹️ ▶️ John comfort that I bet a lot of people share, which is that I wear glasses, and glasses go behind your ears. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so very often, if you put in any kind of headphone, first of all, the, the, whatever, or whatever they
⏹️ ▶️ John call it, the stem or, I don’t know, the thing that goes back by your ear, the pad presses
⏹️ ▶️ John against it because it’s away from the temples of your head, right? And also, there’s a little thing tucked
⏹️ ▶️ John behind your ear. So if the ear cup presses your ear against the plastic thing that’s behind it, that will become
⏹️ ▶️ John irritating. And I’m not the only person in the world who wears glasses. I would love a headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John that had a little, I don’t know, a little channel or a notch cut out or something that allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John the ear, that it didn’t press the, What the hell are these things called?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now we know the secret Apple feature to kill off features, a notch.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right, they’ve got it on the phones, they should put, anyway, yeah. So because then it wouldn’t be pressing my glasses against the side
⏹️ ▶️ John of my head because there would be a little notch cut out for them. They are good at notches these days. Getting back
⏹️ ▶️ John to your one size fits all thing, like, you know, if the AirPods don’t fit your ear, you know, tough luck, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the only shape that they make. But every time I see these shoving to your ear canal things,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, isn’t that an even harder thing to get right because
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPods, they kind of rest in your ear and if they fall out of your ear, that’s bad, or if they’re uncomfortable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not an exact fit. They just kind of have a few little areas where they contact
⏹️ ▶️ John your ear and hopefully it’ll work. But this thing, you have to jam right in there. So if it’s the wrong size, if your
⏹️ ▶️ John ear canal is much smaller or much bigger, there’s not a lot of leeway when you’re actually jamming
⏹️ ▶️ John it in your ear. I think you’d have a much higher chance of resting a rigid plastic thing
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of in the outside of your ear than jamming something into your ear canal. I’ve never wanted to try this,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I just assumed, well A, I’m kind of grossed out by it, but B, I’m assuming I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John stick a one size fits all thing into my ear canal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, almost always these things come with multiple ear tip sizes, or you can get them really easily aftermarket. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually they’ll come with at least two, like at least a large and a small, or like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly firmer, slightly looser, you know, there’s always like minor variations, and you can usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get aftermarket ones also, like if the stock ones just aren’t comfortable for you or don’t fit you right or you want a different color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else, you can usually like go on Amazon and for 20 bucks get even more different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of tips for these things just in case you want them. So that’s the advantage of something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Like the regular AirPods and the general shape of earbuds don’t really lend themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much to things being wrapped around them aftermarket or like aftermarket. People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, people try. There are a few products that are like basically like little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silicone sleeves that wrap around the current AirPods and pad them a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which also unfortunately makes them so you can’t charge them. So I don’t really know why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people would buy those or use those. It doesn’t help if they’re too big, obviously. Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, the AirPods don’t really leave a lot of leeway for custom sizing, but in-ear monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do because the construction is almost always like little tiny thing in the middle that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the driver and then a big rubbery cap that goes on top of it. And usually those things are interchangeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with multiple sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Real time follow up, the part on the glasses that goes back behind your ears is apparently called the temples.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the part of your face though. I know, it’s called the temples. Temples are the two, the things that fold behind your
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses. The temple tips are the ones that curve around behind your ears and the big straight things that go back from your
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses towards your ears, those are called the temples, according to this one page on the internet. I would just call them the
⏹️ ▶️ John sticks. The sticks, yeah. Yeah. My sticks are broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You get the glasses and you got the sticks of the glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ John How do you not wear glasses yet? Do you not wear glasses at all, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not yet. No, I lucked out. I lost a bunch of other battles, but I lucked out on the eyesight thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m doing okay on that. My sister’s a few years older than me and she just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started having to wear reading glasses like recently, so that’s probably in my future. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t wait to see how it affects all of your headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s a good question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good point. I’m certainly, I’m not, The idea of contacts, if I need to go that direction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not very appealing to me. So I would probably go the glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco route. So we’ll see. JS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as someone who has to wear contacts in order to see anything, you are right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say that contacts do not sound appealing because especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before I started wearing contacts, there was no part of wearing contacts that I was excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about except being able to see. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you can stick with it for like a week or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I wear hard contacts, which almost nobody these days has to do, they’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that bad. So I would encourage you, if the time ever comes, to give it a shot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you have to stick with it for a while. It’s not one of those things where you put the contacts in, you’re like, oh, wow, I can see and this feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. It’s not like that at all. I wouldn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toss them out, you know, without having given them an honest crack, especially since you would presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to use soft contacts, which are way, way, way, way, way, way, way more comfortable from what I’ve been told. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would give anything to be able to go back to glasses. I wish so badly I could just wear glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, but unfortunately I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, soft contacts have come a long way. I started wearing them in like high school, and over the
⏹️ ▶️ John years they have improved tremendously to the point where now
⏹️ ▶️ John they are so much more comfortable than they used to be. But that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I used to wear them every single day in high school, and over time
⏹️ ▶️ John I have worn them less and less to the point now where I only wear them, you know, a couple days
⏹️ ▶️ John a year. If I have to do some kind of sporting thing or something where I don’t want to have glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John or some things where I want to wear non prescription sunglasses, I do have prescription sunglasses, but sometimes I don’t know, or non prescription
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. But in my, in my old age or whatever it is, I find
⏹️ ▶️ John that I can only wear them for, you know, like the middle main
⏹️ ▶️ John active part of the day. Eventually my eyes just start to feel tired and I just need to get them the hell out, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ John how I was in high school. In high school, I’d put them on in the morning and take them out before I went to bed and that was fine. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’m just getting old, but the contacts are getting better. The contacts are getting lighter weight and thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, more breathable and all that good stuff. And yet somehow I’m able to wear them for less and less time
⏹️ ▶️ John without making with my eyes feeling dry and tired. So I don’t know if this is
⏹️ ▶️ John another fun side effect of aging, but as the contacts have gotten better, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have gotten worse at wearing them. Less tolerant of the discomfort. for a titus for glasses
Sponsor: Betterment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Betterment, investing made better. Get up to one year manage free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Betterment.com slash ATP. Betterment is the largest independent online financial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advisor. It’s designed to help improve your long term returns and lower your taxes for retirement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco planning, building wealth and your other financial goals. By taking advanced investment strategies and using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology to deliver them to more than 300,000 customers. See at Betterment, hidden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs are nowhere to be found. No matter who you are or how much money you invest, you get everything for one low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparent management fee. And they give you advice in your best interest as a fiduciary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This means they are not incentivized to recommend certain funds, and they don’t have their own investment products to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell you. And they offer personalized advice and a suite of tools to help you know whether you’re on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco track to hit your investing goals or get the retirement you want. And when you need help, their tools and guidance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can help get you on track. You tell them information and they make tailored recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for how much to invest, how much risk to take on in your portfolio, and the types of investment accounts you should have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have all sorts of optimizations to this too, like they have a tax optimized portfolio, they have a socially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsible investing portfolio, and all sorts of other great things. All of this with low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparent advisory fees compared to traditional services. It’s only a 0.25% annual fee. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco includes unlimited messaging access to their team of licensed financial experts. If you a more complex situation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment Premium gives you unlimited phone call access to their team of certified financial planners for only 0.4%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annually. And everything they do is designed to lower your taxes and increase returns. Their tax-coordinated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portfolio, on average, can increase portfolio value by an estimated 15% over 30 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Investing involves risk. Listeners can can get up to one year managed free. For more information, visit betterment.com.
#askatp: Mojave auto-dark-mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s Betterment.com slash ATP. Betterment, investing made better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. Ishan Sharma writes, any word on Mojave having automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or scheduled dark mode? It would be cool if it could trigger like night shift. Having to manually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toggle it on when I work outside or in bright surroundings would be a hassle. I am not aware of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything like this, but I’m sure something could be done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make this happen. I’m assuming John has put some Apple script in the show notes here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So do you want to tell me about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know about the time thing, too. I mean, it seems like it’s such an obvious thing that Apple might, might already
⏹️ ▶️ John have it in the operating system. I haven’t run any of them hobby beta, so I’m not sure. But if it turns out that Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have this feature in there, it’s very easy to write an Apple script. We’ll put it in the show notes, because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a one liner Apple script, which in typical, silly verbose Apple script way
⏹️ ▶️ John it is tell application system events to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to not dark mode. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a toggle because you’re setting dark mode to not dark mode, which is basically set dark mode to the inverse of the current setting. You probably
⏹️ ▶️ John also set it to true or false. But then again, it being AppleScript, I honestly have no idea how to express a Boolean because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the programming language that is the enemy of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmers. Set dark mode to please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Anyway, since you can script it,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a million different ways you can schedule it, right? You can, you could set a cron job, which is probably what I would do because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix nerd, but you could set a launch daemon thing. It is, there’s tons of different ways that you can,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s probably a, you know, GUI, uh, commercial programs that will run a schedule task at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, so you just make this Apple script and you save it and then you use the utility of your choice
⏹️ ▶️ John or any built-in facility to run it at a certain time. And voila. And if you don’t want to bother
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that, if that’s still too much work, probably by the time Mojave ships,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, if Apple doesn’t already have this built in the operating system, there’ll be some small, free or inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ John app on the Mac App Store or something that does exactly what you’re describing. So I wouldn’t worry. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think you will have this covered eventually.
#askatp: Marzipan to iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Scott Norris writes, UIKit on the Mac will add pointing device support, menu bars, Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support, and other Mac stuff. Will this migrate back to UIKit on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and bring trackpad support in Windows to iPads or rumored iOS laptop forms?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there’s kind of two levels to this question. The first is, are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of these APIs going to be in any way, shape, or form available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iOS, or really, could they be? And the second level of this question is would Apple ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do anything like that? And I think, yeah, presumably the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Mars of Han is to, is to create one singular foundation upon which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both iOS and OS or gosh, Mac OS are derived from, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like Apple is still in this mode where they’re petulantly insisting that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can never, ever, ever have a touchscreen laptop, by the way, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPad with a keyboard on it, if you would ever like to use the keyboard on this touchscreen thing, but don’t call it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a laptop. It’s an iPad. And so as long as they’re refusing to allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these two worlds to merge, I don’t think that you’ll ever, I would be surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’ll see pointing device or trackpad support. Windowing, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t see us attaching a mouse to an iPad anytime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soon. What do you think, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a good idea, like this would open up the door to iPads adopting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a more Mac-like user interface, like you know, once the apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are kind of accustomed to that or built for that. But I can’t, I don’t, I think I’m with you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not entirely sure I would see Apple doing that. I mean, at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, you know, it comes down to the interesting question of, well what is the difference they want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have long-term, assuming there is one, between the iPad and the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, obviously there’s two very different software platforms, but those are getting closer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s two very different hardware platforms, but those are kind of getting some similarities too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, they keep saying no in bigger and bigger text. No, we’re not doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, what Apple says is different from Apple’s actions. And you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always says they’re never gonna do something until they do it. I wouldn’t say that kind of thing would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never happen. And in fact, we have lots of signs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evidence and trends that are going towards more conversions in that area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to have iOS have a more laptop-like form factor with more laptop-like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software and more laptop-like window management and stuff like that, we’re already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heading in that direction. And there’s more stuff on the horizon that suggests that more stuff could happen there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say it’s a sure thing that the iPad will go in that direction, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like everything is lining up to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I forgot, I believe Mike had talked to me on Analog a long time ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how there is a specific kind of mouse that I think is made by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Citrix or something like that, Espresso in the chat reminded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Yeah, there’s a mouse for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad. Yeah, exactly, that allows you to use a pointing device certain apps in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contexts, which I completely forgot about. I don’t have a link to put in the show notes, but I think something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that does exist for very specific use cases. Anyway, John, any thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think, I mean, whether or not it’s related to the Marzipan stuff, I think it’s inevitable that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John little pretend, make a pretend laptop out of my iPad stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they sell a keyboard that does it and lots of third party stuff. Inevitably, that that is going to have something
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to move the cursor. Like they have all these modes where you know they’re making it even easier to get to now because you don’t have force touch
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad where you hold down on the spacebar and it turns into a trackpad. Like iOS has a way
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to move at least a text insertion point with a trackpad. They just don’t have a trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So the APIs for doing that are getting close and because they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do stuff like that for marzipan like getting support for pointing devices and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s obvious cross-pollination there. I think it is inevitable that Apple will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John provide some kind of pointing device that’s not a pencil and it’s not your finger for iOS devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when they provide that, it’s possible that the software that backs that
⏹️ ▶️ John could share a lot or be shared entirely with the same software that allows, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you used to use a mouse with UI UI kit applications in Mars pan type apps. Um, the
⏹️ ▶️ John question, all this stuff is how long is it going to take? And you know, when, when it comes,
⏹️ ▶️ John what will the form factor be? We’ve talked many times in the past about an iOS laptop and how great that would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but right now Apple still continues like a very trendy restaurant to make deconstructed iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple laptops where it’s, it’s, it’s an iOS laptop, but the pieces are all separate
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have to assemble them yourself. You just mix them in your mouth and it’s like you’re eating peanut butter and jelly but you have a separate peanut and
⏹️ ▶️ John a grape and then a piece of wheat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness. That was also unexpected.
#askneutral: Millennium Falcon car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Brent Billings asks if the Millennium Falcon were a car, what car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would it be? I, I, wow. I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The best, the best answer I could come up with, which I’m sure is going to deeply offend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, but it was the best thing I could come up with is a Buick Grand National
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s kind of old, kind of rickety, but yet deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey respected and pretty damn fast all at the same time. all at the same time. So that was the first thing that jumped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to mind. And John, I’m deeply sorry for offending you so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. What a terrible idea. No, obviously, look, it’s a freighter. It’s a souped up El Camino.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thought you were on the same wavelength
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. That is good, Marco. I actually I am very impressed. That is quite good, Marco. I am into that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I have the obvious answer that I assume one of you would pick. I was going to go last, but I assume one of you would
⏹️ ▶️ John have already picked, especially Casey. And you’ll feel shame once
⏹️ ▶️ John answer but I was trying to think of the non obvious clever answer and I don’t really have one but anyway the obvious answer is Casey I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John give you one last chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know no I got nothing I’m gonna be so upset in a second
⏹️ ▶️ John the DeLorean from back to the future come on
⏹️ ▶️ John what you boot that is totally it let me tell you let me tell you why that is first of all it’s a weird car and
⏹️ ▶️ John the Millennium Falcon is a weird ship second of all it’s got a bunch of crap done to it it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey made a a lot of special
⏹️ ▶️ John modifications, right? It’s not just like a DeLorean from the factory. It’s a DeLorean with a bunch of crap all over it that makes it better.
⏹️ ▶️ John She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, right? And has special abilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it is a iconic hero car and not just like, oh, it’s just another DeLorean, right? So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the obvious answer. How does the DeLorean not look like much? Well, I mean, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John some people don’t like how it looks and it’s got a bunch of like pipes and tubes and crap sticking out of it and wires all over
⏹️ ▶️ John the outside of it. It’s not really, you know, it’s not, no one’s going to confuse it for
⏹️ ▶️ John like Speed Racer’s car or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one’s ever going to confuse an El Camino for anything fast either, but they can, you know, people soup them up and they can be really
⏹️ ▶️ John fast. So they don’t have what are they called the greebles? Like both of the Grand National and the El Camino do not
⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of pipes and stuff all over them. And the Lightning Falcon does. And if there’s, if there’s a more clever answer, probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it can put it this way. I don’t think it can be any car that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John off the lot. It has to be some car that has had crap done to it because the Millennium Falcon I mean if you
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to spoil the new Star Wars movie but anyway the Millennium Falcon as we see it in the original trilogy is
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly like parts of it are missing things that are open exposing inside
⏹️ ▶️ John that shouldn’t be there’s all sorts of pipes and crap all over it. It’s clearly been hacked up and modified it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John smooth and sleek and you can’t just go and buy one of those off the lot. It has been modified.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like it has to, it can’t just be, oh, it’s this model of car or it’s this model of car. It has to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s this model of car, but with these modifications. And when trying to think of something like that, you usually end up going to
⏹️ ▶️ John movie cars because that’s a, that’s a set of modifications people know. So like you could say
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, the Corvette in this movie that is modified in a certain way that we all know about anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the future car is the obvious answer. But I wish I could have come up with a non-obvious and more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not impressed with your answer, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never mind. I don’t buy it. Plus, it’s another movie car. I guess that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strictly speaking against the rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s a real car. It just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco time. Yeah, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and Squarespace. and we’ll see you next week!
Neutral: Casey’s Car Corner
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. Accidental. Tech podcasts so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, Tim in the chat had the best answer of all. The Millennium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Falcon is actually Casey’s BMW, as it’s always breaking down when he needs it the most.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Too soon, Tim, but also fair
⏹️ ▶️ John point. Yeah, but the Hawaiian tongue comes through in the end. So far, we haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey be the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey betting against it in this case. I would bet against it as well. So we have we have to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another episode of Casey’s car corner. I, by happenstance, did something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lightly interesting on Friday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the expectations are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I’m setting real good expectations. I’m a great salesperson. I drove a brand new GTI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah. So to recap, I was telling you guys that, especially two friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of mine, one of whom just bought a new GTI, but, and actually the other one used to have a GTI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, both of them have been saying to me for years, years, you have to drive the GTI, the GTI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so good, you don’t understand, drive the GTI, you’re going to love it, drive the GTIs, which I always said, eh, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my boss’s boss, his wife just bought a brand new GTI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he brought it to work on Friday and he said, hey, you want to go for a spin? I said, sure. And so he said, well, do you want to drive? I said, well, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t have to ask me twice. And I drove his wife’s GTI, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a SE, I believe it is. It’s whatever the middle trim is. I believe the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S is the lowest trim, if I’m not mistaken. Then there’s whatever I drove, which I think is an SE.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there’s the Autobahn trim. And I drove the middle of the road one. It was what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would call DCT. I think I think it’s a DSG in Volkswagen parlance, but basically it was two pedals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I went into this drive thinking, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is going to be nice, but this is not gonna be for me. It’s front wheel drive, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow, but not as fast as I would like. And it’s the wrong transmission,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, et cetera. I drove that car maybe a mile before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was deeply in love with it. because that interior felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily as good, if not better, than my BMWs. Now, to be fair, my BMW is a 2011,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is a 2018. But it is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunningly good interior for a car that is somewhere around $30,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This car has no business being a $30,000 car from the feel of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the interior. It easily should be a $40,000 car, if not more,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just judging by the feel of the interior alone. Now, in the more broad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense, I don’t know if it necessarily feels like a $40,000 car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it’s very nice, very, very nice. It was reasonably quick, handled very well from what I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell. I mean, I wasn’t going particularly fast. I wasn’t pushing it particularly hard. I never really beat on it in an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acceleration perspective that hard because the thing rolled over 200 miles as I was driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So this is well within break-in and it’s not my car. It’s not even my boss’s car, strictly speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s his wife’s car. So I really didn’t want to act like a total turd, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am flabbergasted with how much I like this car and I don’t want a hatchback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want a front wheel drive car. I want something that’s quicker than the GTI, but bang
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the buck where I was saying just last week, if I’m not mistaken, that the Accord
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is unequivocally the correct answer for me, I would say it’s Now, the Accord
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the GTI is unequivocally the right answer from a pure value for money perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, you didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any passengers this time, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, my boss’s boss is like 6’7”, so he was in the car with me. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody in the back. But he said he has gotten in the back, and it was not deeply uncomfortable. I wouldn’t say that it was –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m paraphrasing him, but he wouldn’t say that it was extraordinarily comfortable, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey livable for a not long, long, long trip. So yeah, so as underscore my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name is T says in the chat, yes, I would say that the interior was indeed blow away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was really impressed. I was really, really, really impressed. And in
⏹️ ▶️ John theory, I hate to say this with your BMW, but VW does not have the most sterling reputation
⏹️ ▶️ John for reliability in recent decades.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, that’s true. But the reason that this is still OK in my mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because they have a six year bumper to bumper transferable warranty. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably would not get a loaner. I don’t know that for sure, but I would guess I would not get a loaner if I were to have some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of issue. But the good news is I would not have to pay for any sort of repair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for six years. And I bought the BMW in late 2012,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m looking to sell it in mid to late 2018. So that’s right on schedule
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the hypothetical six-year warranty that the BMW never actually had. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the GTI was this much fun as a two pedal car. I can only imagine how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun it would be as a three pedal car. And then add all wheel drive and more horsepower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and more torque and suddenly you have a golf are and suddenly things are getting interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then you lose your sunroof. Oh, stop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a thing you like it. You always talk about how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it. I know I just don’t I don’t don’t ruin my moment because I feel like I finally solved my car problem and now you’re ruining it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of all the cars that you’ve had these temporary obsessions with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like the Golf R is probably the least terrible solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve come up with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think the GTI is even less terrible because it’s between $5,000 to $10,000 cheaper and has a sunroof.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I take your point, and I do think that of the stupid ideas I’ve had,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Golf R is probably the least stupid because I don’t think I would actually buy a GTI because I I would always say to myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, I really wish I got the R. Well, until I opened the sunroof anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wouldn’t have any car shaped cars. You’d have a giant boot and a little booty.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars. That is true. I am not a big fan of hatchbacks. I am really not. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how versatile they would be if I didn’t have two car seats permanently in them. But because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two car seats permanently in both cars, it is not terribly large on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside. And I don’t remember if we discussed this last episode or not, but, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you look at the numbers alone, it’s supposedly as more trunk space than my car does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My BMW does with the seats up now, unfortunately that’s all vertically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a pain in the butt, but supposedly it is a thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see. But I, I plan to at some juncture, um, you know, we’re, we’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some weird scheduling this week because, uh, you know, travel and stuff. So once travel is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completed, I plan to investigate the Golf R and see what I think about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then at that point, I’ll probably at least take the Accord for a spin just to see. So you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been saying for like eight months. Well, I’ve been saying about the GTI for eight years, so I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. How much do you want to bet Casey never goes and test drives an Accord?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a not terrible bet, if I’m honest. Just do it.