293: You Know My Pouches

27 Sep 2018

Our reviews of the iPhone XS, Apple Watch Series 4, Creative Selection, and Scott Forstall.

Episode Description:

Please give some money to St. Jude. It literally helps save lives.
Follow-up:
- Apple Watch making-of fire/water faces video
- Apple Watch 64-bit compilation magic
  - Steve Troughton-Smith
  - Chris Lattner interview
- iPhone 🎾 is fast
- The iPhone 🎾 camera is good
~~Our~~ Marco & John's new toys
Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda
Post-show: Marco's ocean status

Chapters

St. Jude results
Fire, Water watch faces
Bitcode for Apple Watch
XS beats iMac Pro
Gimbals and iPhones
Sponsor: Marine Layer (code ATP)
iPhone XS review
Sponsor: Prime Video Channels
Watch Series 4 review 🖼️
Sponsor: RXBAR (code ATP)
Creative Selection 🖼️
Ending theme
Marco’s ocean status

St. Jude results

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think watch out for the jellyfish is the bigger like there’s a lot of stuff in the ocean that wants to kill me. The jellyfish

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will not kill you. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John promise they might hurt this thing a little but it won’t kill you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Getting stung by jellyfish is part of the experience. I don’t want to mention that part.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} It is part of the experience. You’re really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not selling it, John. It’s not that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bad. All right. So at the top of the show, I think we should take a serious moment to thank everyone for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey contributing to Stephen Hackett and his family’s fundraising effort for St. Jude Children’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Research Hospital. They were, where were they at, like $16,000, $17,000 or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that when we recorded? They were less than $20,000 when they recorded. I genuinely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey am overjoyed to say that as we record tonight, they are at $42,399. Whoa, that’s awesome. Which is amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think we can hit 50, and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} going to be so bold

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as to say 60, but I think we can get to 50 just saying. So if you’ve listened to this, if you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey listened, if you, if you’re listening to this and have already donated, thank you. If you haven’t donated,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thank you for thinking about it. And thank you for going as I’m talking to you right now to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey heroes.stg.org slash Hackett, H-A-C-K-E-T-T and throwing them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at least $5. I said last episode that even $1 would help, which is true, but it turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out you need to do at least five for reason. So if you have at least five dollars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which you probably do, I mean, you’re probably listening to this on a thousand dollar iPhone, you probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have five bucks. Why don’t you throw St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital five bucks? It’ll make you feel good. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thank you. Also do it soon, because this is a September fundraiser, and while I’m sure you can donate to St. Jude

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whenever you want to, it would be extra cool if this happened during the last few days here of September.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Exactly. So genuinely, as much as I’m trying to snarkily encourage you to donate more money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Really and truly, thank you from the three of us, for anyone who listened to this show and donated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know if it was a big push from Stephen, if it was us, if it was a combination of things, but no matter who or how or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why, Stephen and his family have doubled what their goal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was, which makes me exceptionally, exceptionally happy. So thank you to everyone who donated. I really appreciate it.

Fire, Water watch faces

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And now back to regularly scheduled programming and let’s start off with something else. That’s cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey except way less cool I don’t know which one of you guys found this but Apple made a watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey face making of video Which is only like what two minutes long three months long. This is amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m so glad one of you put this in the show notes because I would not have seen it Otherwise, I was one minute long exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s a little bit longer than I spent using that watch face

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was circulating on Twitter, I’m not it’s kind of weird like it’s a minute it’s more like just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John excerpts. It’s more like an ad for like a longer video. If the longer video exists, I don’t know where it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is. This just shows clips of it. But here’s the upshot. We talked when the series for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Watch came out about how Apple was showing off the power of the GPU. And I mentioned they do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that in the heart rate monitoring thing where they have that particle effects with the heart and whatever. And they have all these other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John effects that are like flames and like water and stuff like that. They’re vapor watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faces. And I said I didn’t know if those were just video, but the heart one definitely isn’t. Well, not only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what I meant was I didn’t know if the all encompassing watch faces were like, oh, it’s just a movie that’s playing like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s a there’s, you know, video file in there and it just plays the video. And I assumed that they had created that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video like in a special effects application with the flame effect or whatever or some,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, like that it was it was computer generated, but all it was doing was playing a computer generator like it wasn’t procedurally generated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the fly. It was a pre recorded thing. Well, it Turns out it is pre-recorded, but they didn’t make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in like After Effects or in, you know, some sort of special effects application. They made it with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like flames, like actual flames for the flame face. How did they make the vapor one? They made it with vapor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How did they make the water one? They made it with a big thing of water. And the video shows you them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing it. It’s almost as if like, you can imagine it being like a joke video where there’s some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John special effect that someone sees in television or a video game or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they show people making it for real when it would be so much easier just to make it on a computer. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the keynote, you could see the effect of these things like hitting the curved corners of the watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and bouncing off. And it’s like, wow, they modeled the walls of the watch. So the thing that’s expanding outward

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hits the edges of your watch and reacts to it, right? What they did was made a giant thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s like two feet by two feet in the exact shape and proportions of the watch and put fire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it and put water

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} in it and put flames in it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And in the cases where like the bubbles touch like the little tick, what are those called, Marco? The little,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we think we didn’t have a name for those, the tick marks that go around

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the… They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco called

⏹️ ▶️ ^John indices. The indices, right? So the effects hit the indices, like the little bubbles hit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the indices. They made big plastic sticks in exactly the places where the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} indices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are in the graphic and put water in it and filmed it. And so this looks like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John such a fun project. Like if you get to work on something as part of a marketing push, getting to do this looks so fun. as like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John combination of marketing and special effects and to see it all boiled down to these tiny, tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little videos that end up on your wrist. I thought this was very cool and very fun. And I wish it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was more than a minute long and I would love to hear people talk about how they decided to do this, like coming up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we need some cool new watch faces, what can we do? And someone’s like, I know, we’ll build a giant scale model

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a watch and set it on fire. Good, sold. Off you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go!

Bitcode for Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, friend of the show, Steve John Smith, noticed something in the last day or two,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which was actually in turn noticed by Miguel de Caza. I hope I pronounced that right, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so sorry. This is actually a throwback to our interview with Chris Lattner a while ago,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it’s about Bitcode. John, would you like to take over and kind of explain this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not a throwback to our interview. We did talk about Bitcode when we had Chris Lattner on the program. So here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the context. We mentioned on the last show, I think, or maybe a show before, anyway, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the watch series 4 uses a 64-bit CPU, but the actual sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you compile down to is called RM6432, where it’s for a 64-bit CPU,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it uses 32-bit pointers, which is a little bit weird, and that was what we were remarking on because a bunch of other people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had noted it as well. We’d forgotten at that point, although we’d mentioned in many shows in the past, and as any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch developer knows, if you develop for watchOS, you don’t send Apple binaries. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John send them bitcode. And if you’re wondering what bitcode is, You can reference the link we’ll have in the show notes to our

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interview with Chris Latner where he talks about it and that show has links to all the web pages on bitcode or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the bottom line is it’s a not a completely machine agnostic format, but it is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less machine specific format for encoding, you know, compiling something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down to not an executable that can run on the machine, but to an intermediary form which can then be turned into machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John code and executed. And they, you know, you can do this for iOS too. Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that correct, Marco? can submit to go to Apple for your iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps. Yeah, with iOS, it’s optional. And I believe with watchOS, it’s mandatory.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so but you can do it for iOS, but you have to do it for watchOS. And we talked about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John advantages. Why would why would you want to do this? Why would you not give Apple a binary and the advantages that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple can basically build your binary on the fly for the people who want the thing by excluding instructions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that aren’t relevant to the device that’s being loaded on and making your application smaller. And Chris mentioned on the show, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talked to him that you could, you know, finish, you when you change it into machine code you know exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which instructions exist in the hardware that you’re targeting so in the in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bitcode it could say that you just need to divide two numbers but you don’t know if there’s a divide instruction for numbers of that size maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one platform has it one platform doesn’t or whatever anyway Steve Trout and Smith

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was discussing on Twitter that the fact that the watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has always required bitcode means that watch applications that were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John submitted well before any arm 64 you know watches existed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can run without being resubmitted and without being recompiled on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John series 4 which we didn’t really talk about but it’s not like you know do people have to recompile their watch apps the answer is no they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t because every single watch app that has ever been submitted is bitcode and apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple can take that and target the 64-bit architecture without

⏹️ ▶️ ^John asking Developers to do anything additional now. I don’t know if it’s that’s because they all it also uses 32-bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pointers I’m not sure you know we need a Chris back in the program explain You know how how they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pulled this off and if the architecture was significantly more significantly different like different Endian this or like it was x86

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something could they have not done this but because it’s still arm and the only difference is That you know a 64-bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John insert whatever That they can pull this off anyway Point is they didn’t pull it off, and I think this is a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know it was wonder how long apples roadmaps are but But it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of hinted at the idea that when they came out with the first watch and were trying to decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the rules would be about submitting watch applications, someone said, let’s make everybody submitted in bit code. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the answer to why was because like in five years, we’ll probably have a 64

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit CPU on the watch. And it would be nice if we didn’t have to ask people to recompile like we asked them to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the phone and the iPad and stuff like that. And so they did it that the magic of bitcode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John went basically unnoticed. Like I didn’t see a lot of stories about boy, the new watch is great. And by the way, isn’t it great

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that developers don’t have to recompile their apps like they did when the phone went 64 bit? No one said that. Where’s that story?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I think that’s actually the lack of a story is the story that it’s not a thing we had to talk about that it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worked. Yay for Apple and yay for cool compiler technology.

XS beats iMac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on David Hinnemeier Hansen is that right DHH has noted that the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tennis is Faster than an iMac Pro on the speedometer 2.0. JavaScript benchmark.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s the fastest device I’ve ever tested It’s an insane 45% jump over the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPhone 8 or iPhone 10 chip How so this is better than your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey computer Marco? Maybe you don’t even need a Mac Pro. You just need a An iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean the screens a little small

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, we get so excited about saying how my phone is faster than my computer. Marco’s phone is faster than his

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer in at least one thing. Well, this is now granted, benchmarks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are weird. Sometimes benchmarks exercise a particular thing that one particular CPU can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really well or that a benchmark fits entirely within a cache of one thing but not on the other. But this is not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the phone against an OK computer. This is a phone against like Apple’s fastest computer with the Xeon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that surely has more of everything, you know, it can address more memory, it’s at a higher clock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed, it has more cash at every possible level has more, you know, instructions in flight, more execution

⏹️ ▶️ ^John units, everything is wider in it. And yet, for whatever reason, assuming this is valid, and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John DHH, by the way, is the creator of Ruby on Rails. And what else did he make the old base

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} camp 37

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signals 37 signals is now called base camp. Anyway, I’m assuming this is a legit thing. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m assuming speedometer 2.0 is not a ridiculous benchmark, at least. And obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is not a CPU benchmark, it’s an application benchmark, and mobile Safari is not exactly the same executable as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John desktop Safari, yada yada yada. But the fact that it’s even in the same ballpark that we’re discussing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone versus 3GHz Xeon, on anything, on literally any task, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really ridiculous. So I was impressed by that.

Gimbals and iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So the next item of follow-up is listed in our internal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey show notes document as follows. More about the iPhone XS to Woo Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Which one of you jerks put this in here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did, you’ve been hanging out in all the various Slack channels with us and people talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} about how great

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPhone XS camera is and you’re like, don’t tell me about this, I don’t wanna have to buy, you know, I’ll just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I feel like you’ve got your real camera and your real camera’s still better than this camera and you know, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you’re hold strong. But then I heard the most recent episode of the talk show with John Gruber.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I know exactly what you’re going to talk about. They were specifically talking about how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sometimes the image stabilization in iPhones can fight with you when you’re using a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gimbal to record video. Is this sounding familiar yet, Casey? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And in fact, that is right after that moment, like within a minute or two of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey moment is when I had to turn it off and I have and I will go back to it later. But I did hear that right before I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had to stop listening to the show. And I probably would have stopped anyway because I was so damn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey annoyed at that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they said just to finish this up was that apparently Apple told one of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the iPhone 10 s does a better job of dealing with being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a gimbal. It’s not that it has the ability for you to just turn off the stabilization in the camera, which would would be nice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that somehow it does a better job of dealing with me and people, which is such a narrow particular use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case that we just so happen to talk about on the very last show, which is very relevant to Casey’s life. And I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the world is aligning to make Casey feel bad for not buying this phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not only was like not only is the tennis apparently like better about this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they also said that apparently the 10 was especially bad about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco’s advice to use like an old seven or something is looking better and better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. And by the way, we heard you just just follow up on that topic. We heard from a bunch of people. We had a brief discussion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco during the show about using an app like Filmic Pro or something like that. And I cut it from the show because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything we were hearing was kind of all over the map about whether it actually worked or not. And what I think the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco truth appears to have settled on is that you can use apps like Filmic Pro to disable stabilization,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it only disables like a software part of it. And it can’t disable the hardware part that’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, suspending the camera in like magnets and stuff like there’s there’s some part of it that can’t be disabled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in software so you can partially disable but not fully and apparently some people have tried just putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a magnet behind the phone and that apparently like kind of locks it in place yeah like sticking a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John powerful magnet right next to your camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems like maybe don’t want to do that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah it doesn’t sound like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great idea but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ll just throw it out there that people have said that worked but not a lot of people but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But yeah, so all this is to say it’s really funny that like you literally eat the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phone you have is apparently the worst possible phone for

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} for video stabilization, funny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that you could upgrade to this better one that we will talk about in a little bit that among

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the many problems that would solve for you this this is one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know it occurs to me when I was listening back to the last episode that when I think about Casey doing his videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t often think of the fact that he’s shooting all of it on an iPhone. I mean, obviously he is like it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think he bought like a separate camera for but in my mind I don’t see like an iPhone sitting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a tripod and yet that’s that’s obviously what it is. So it’s never I’d never really thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about how suitable the particular phone you’re using to record

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I mean maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe it’s because most of the time I think of that like I think of Stephen Hackett with his crazy setup and he’s got like Marco’s old camera on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this big you know like a it’s also not a movie camera still still image camera, but it’s definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a big rig set, but Casey’s got like this little flat slab point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and his GoPros, which are we also see on camera. We never see the iPhone on camera and yet there it is recording all the video for him.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and I’ve gotten asked in the past, you know, why not use my Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the answer is it doesn’t do 4k and the only camera that I regularly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use of the trio that I use that does not do 4k is my old GoPro, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a GoPro Hero 3 plus, I believe. I don’t have it in front of me. But the other, the GoPro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hero 6 and the iPhone both do 4K. So the videos are released

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in 4K and it just, I guess, upscales, upsamples, whatever the term is, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey brief windows of time when I use the old GoPro. But I’ve been looking for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an excuse to upgrade to a newer version of my OM-D E-M10.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so maybe using it for video will be my excuse and and or I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cave on the phone issue because As of now I have not bought myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any new treats. I am still on the iPhone 10. I’m still on the series 3 Everyone’s gotten treats, but me you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey guys everyone else has their treats not me So Marco tell me about all your treats including the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey watch that you seem to be wearing more than I expected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, by the way, honestly, don’t upgrade your camera get the iPhone instead because it is is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, I’ve said this before, that the iPhone is the best video camera in the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in most people’s hands for most reasons. There’s always exceptions, and pros

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have good reason to get different cameras, to get pro cameras. But most people operating a camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to film most things most of the time, the iPhone is the best video camera in the world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is so much easier to use in so many ways than other cameras, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the results you get are so good in so many ways that you should probably stick with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that money would be better spent getting a better iPhone for shooting video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as long as long as it can work with the gimbal somehow, than anything else honestly.

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iPhone XS review

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey music ♪ Yep, so tell me about your new treats, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, did John get it yet? Yeah, I got it done on Friday. Right, so I mean, my thoughts on the XS are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boring. Let’s start with the phone and we’ll go to the watch next. So start with the phone. John, I wanna hear what you think of it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you didn’t have the 10. So you’re coming right from your Jet Black 7, which is somehow scratch-free, to this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, yeah, so this is my first, this is like a year-old stuff, because everyone else got used to the 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John last year, but I didn’t, I’d still been using my 7, and I was happy using it for another year, because I felt like it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the peak of that form. Like, it felt really good. I mean, I suppose the 8 would have been better, but it felt really good to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I agree, especially with Jet Black, and using it, well, you didn’t use it without a case, but Jet Black, no case, iPhone 7,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think was the peak of that form.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well we can start, we can start with the case. So I have a leather case on that one and I liked it, it was great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got a leather case for my XS and you know, the first thing you do is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well the first thing I do is put it in the case after I get the SIM card into it and everything. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the leather case for the XS is like harder and slipperier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the 7. Now granted it’s leather, so I’m like well maybe this is exactly what the 7 case was like when it was new, maybe it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will break in. It definitely looks like it’s more textured or whatever, but anyway, I’m hoping it does break in. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I’m oiling it like a baseball mitt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it totally. All their leather cases, even the one you got for your 7, most likely did this. When they’re brand new,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re fairly slippery and they’re fairly firm. And within about a month or so, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really get nice and they get kind of tacky and they soften up and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so that’s what I’m hoping happens. I’m sticking with it. It was two years ago. I didn’t remember what the heck the 7 case was like when it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was new, but but that’s one of the first things I noticed. And so now, this is my phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did add my face to my wife’s 10 as soon as iOS 12 came out so I’ve been unlocking hers with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Face ID when I needed to. Now I’ve got my own phone so I’m dealing with all the things that everyone else has already dealt with. Face ID, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gestures, all that other stuff. Face ID I find mostly delightful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I still get that weird nerd tingle thinking about what it’s doing and being amazed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it works and how fast it does it. It happens faster than my brain can consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how amazing it is. And I don’t consciously lose, just unconsciously I think about how amazing it is and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it makes me smile. Obviously this is a nerd thing, most people don’t care about this stuff or whatever, but definitely gives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me the nerd tingles when I unlock the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I love how they’ve managed the interface,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it doesn’t really matter what order things happen. I just pick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up the phone and swipe from the bottom and sometimes it’s already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unlocked and sometimes it unlocks later. It doesn’t matter, there’s not some sort of order of operations, it’s just like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll do the things and if all the things assemble and if the big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anded conditional is satisfied at any point, I don’t care what order things happen and it’s just, your phone will unlock.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I’m finding that really nice and I’m finding it very fast. Being sideways, it doesn’t work. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still don’t quite understand why it doesn’t work sideways but hopefully they’ll work on that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m amazed that it works when I like, am holding like a piece of laundry under my chin or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in my mouth to help fold it or something, or like parts of my face are obscured or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when eyes close with glasses, without glasses, with weird things on my head,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just, it’s pretty phenomenal. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mostly a non-issue. Surprisingly, my biggest stumbling block so far is the lack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a home button, and I didn’t think that would be the case. I just, you know, I figured it’s a thing I would get used to really quickly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s no big deal. And it’s not because the gesture is bad or anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a perfectly good gesture. It’s not slow, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I’ve, breaking my habit of pressing somewhere on my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to either go home or to wake it up, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finding it hard to get out of that habit. I also find it somehow more difficult to, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, it’s a slightly bigger phone, but I find it somehow more difficult to get my thumb down there to the very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bottom to do a swipe up gesture than I did to pinch the bottom center of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my iPhone 7. I wanna press things so much that I find myself occasionally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hitting the side power button to try to go home. Like I’ll be using my phone, I’ll be like, I wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go home and I wanna press something to go home and I press the side power, which of course

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t take you home, right? You know, it just turns the thing off or whatever. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not doing what I want. You know, every once in a while that happens. So it’s still early, it’s only been a week. Hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll get used to it. But my programming to touch the home button is apparently very strong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I really wanna press something. And it’s easier to not press something. It’s easier just to swipe for the most part.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Other than the reachability, it’s like easier in terms of like having to, you know, I’d mentioned before about forced touches is a more difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gesture to do. It’s just that my hand is so trained to do that that I’m having trouble getting out of it. And very often

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s like this brief microsecond pause as my brain figures out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay, you, same thing with multitasking, okay, you want to go home or you want to bring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up the multitasking switcher or you don’t want to bring up the multitasking switcher, you should just use the stupid side to side swipe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which I keep forgetting exists, right? Cause it’s not, you know, so I have to break those habits and they’re taking longer than I wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And face ID, I think is great. And the final thing is, apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When I hold my phone in my left hand, it didn’t occur to me this would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be an issue until I got this thing, but my left pointer finger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ends up in the spot where the lower camera is. And this has never been issued before because we never had a camera,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I never had a camera that, you know, extended down. Mine’s rolled just a circle in the corner. So I didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything there. And even like on the Plus phones, it goes sideways instead of vertically. So I find my finger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of hanging, I hold it in my left hand, which happens hanging or hanging out by the bottom camera,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like by that little ridge and like touching the camera and I don’t want to touch the camera lens. I don’t get my camera lens all mucky, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so it’s like, but I want to put my finger there. And so like I shimmy the phone a little bit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would like it if that camera lens would get out from under my finger and maybe be horizontal instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of vertical. I think it looks cool vertical, but it’s but it’s under my finger, which is a little bit weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You don’t you don’t put that finger near the sleep wake button

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh apparently not like i don’t really hold my phone in my left hand that often like i’m a right i hope my phone in my right hand but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every once in a while i have occasion to hold it in my left hand and when i do that’s apparently where my finger goes and i’ve noticed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it well as a left-hand phone holding pro because that’s my primary way of holding my phone i can tell you you’re holding it wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well anyway um the setup setup process was uh mostly uneventful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this isn’t really 10s specifical though i check in on it like this this is the year i I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of sort of started to believe Marco saying, I’ll just use the iCloud thing with iCloud keychain, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John restore everything will be fine. I did that. And when I realized that I would have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reset up all my slacks, I said, forget it and restore from iTunes backup, which took forever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and took two tries as usual. The first time it took like an hour and a half

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and right at the end, it’s like an error occurred. Sorry, couldn’t do a thing. And then my phone rebooted and it was like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John half installed. So then I had to take another hour and a half it finally completed but there’s no way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was gonna recreate all my slacks even when I did the iTunes restore my Google Authenticator app was missing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff in it I had to figure out how to read things to Google Authenticator which is never easy to do every one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of those servers has some totally Byzantine way to do that I wish you could transfer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them from one phone to the other like I would kept my seven around but anyway it transferred the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I really loved is I was dreading this but it didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t have to rearrange all my home screens for once because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same number of icons vertically and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} horizontally on the home screens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I don’t didn’t have to do anything. I was like, Oh, thank God and I was told didn’t screw up my icons too much, but that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was already on the other phone. Um

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all right, two things before you continue. Number one, if you do act like key chain, then you get what what used to require

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iTunes restore the iTunes encrypted restore rather where all your passwords are saved with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. There is, though, you know, as you mentioned, there are some apps like slack that store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their authentication keys user login info in a way that is not backed up. And there’s a few different ways you can do that with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the SDK. They probably don’t need to be doing it like this. They probably should be using the keychain, but they’re not. Or at least they’re not using it for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something else critical. But Slack also has a pretty nice feature these days that you can just enter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an email address and it lets you then one button add any Slack where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that email address has a login.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I noticed that today when I was adding a Slack to my iPad and it said, do you want to add your slack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by email address or sign in? And I was like, what the hell does by email address mean? I said, let me just sign in. I did it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was just adding one slack. If I had known that feature existed, maybe I would have tried it. But at the time I was doing it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I also believed that the iCloud restore was the reason my Google Authenticator crap was missing. Apparently that wasn’t because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I said, I did the iTunes restore and the exact same things were missing. But adding slacks, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would rather wait for another hour and a half iTunes restore than to add slack. I’m glad there’s a more efficient way to do it. Maybe next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time I’ll try one more time to do the laborious iCloud restore. Because I do use iCloud keychain.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I use the iCloud restore, do the Slack thing to get all my Slacks back, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deal with my authenticator stuff manually, which apparently I’m forced to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’ll also say I had pretty good luck this year with the whole hold your new phone next to your old phone thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it arranges it for you with a little pop-up thing, like when you connect to AirPods. Yeah, I did that. It was actually really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice. It worked perfectly for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, if you’re doing iCloud restore, that totally works. It’s fun, and it works, and you don’t have to worry about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I even did the watch transfer thing during that setup process with my ancient one and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worked fine and it’s way faster than an iTunes restore and it’s way faster than iCloud restores used to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and then I just turned off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my watch and put it away, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} transferred

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transferred to the new phone. I think it rebooted during some point. I got to see the you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again 20 minute boot process of the series zero phone running watch OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} 4. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boy. Yeah. Yeah, so I’m liking it so far. I haven’t actually taken

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of pictures. I was actually inspired today by Tiff’s picture of chestnuts. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, I saw some cool chestnuts on outside work. And so I took a picture of chestnuts with my new, I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John picture I’ve taken with my new camera, because they look cool and shiny. Like they’re all broken up on the ground. Like in her picture, she was holding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them in her hand. So I figured that was a good picture to take, but I haven’t really done anything exciting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with it so far. Let’s see. Yeah, I think that’s about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, I forgot one more thing. OLED screen on a phone. I’m sure everyone who has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OLED screens on their phone already knows about this. I already knew about it, but I guess it didn’t really occur to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much it would bother me. And also, now I want to look into this further and figure out what the exact cause is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I can be properly annoyed by it. The… Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s called, like the… the jello type thing, like if you just go to messages and scroll up and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down, it looks like the bubbles are like wobbling and getting closer to each other and farther away. Have you all seen this effect?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, they are. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re not. what you mean, but no, that actually is a UIK dynamics effect also.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right, but no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but see, I thought maybe that’s just an effect and I’m going crazy. So I pulled up my iPhone 7 and did the same thing and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t do it there. It could maybe it’s reduced motion. Maybe that’s it. All right, before I go off of the deep end, let me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let me let me turn on reduced motion, which is another thing, by the way, I mentioned this before, but I don’t I had a reduced motion on my 7.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t do it on the 10 s just because it bothers me less. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assume the transitions are the same. Let’s see, general accessibility.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so if you want to if you want to see an example of the effect you’re talking about it mostly doesn’t show up on light backgrounds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It very much shows up on when you have a very dark background and something scrolling. So one area that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know that you can see this very well because it was reported to me as a bug is if you go to the overcast about screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the black theme and you scroll up and down real fast it looks like the logo is jittering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the middle of the screen. So anytime anytime you scroll up and down real fast on a black background

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where something in the middle can can move it looks like it’ll jittering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh whoa whoa all right so the dynamic effect in the messages bubbles was a was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a reduced motion thing uh but yeah the effect you’re talking about is still a real effect and i

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do see it the the bubble effect was extreme and that is apparently a real effect oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} god

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey marco why did you show

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this next you’re gonna tell me about the fedex logo

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} uh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and and i i don’t know what caused this i’m assuming it’s like you know pixel transitions being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different from light to dark and dark to light or maybe it’s about the whole screen is refreshed I’ll look it up between now and the next show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I’ll figure it out but that’s one of those things that where OLED

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screens behave differently than LCD screens in a way that is visible during motion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I suppose I’ll get over it but here’s the thing about I was thinking about this when I was thinking about the uh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPads that are coming in the fall I would love it if the iPads were OLED because I watch a lot of video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on my like TV shows and stuff on my iPad. at. It’s great that I have perfect blacks on my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone, but I don’t, you know, I’m not watching television shows on my phone. Like I’m sure it makes the pictures pop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you know it’s a great screen and everything. But especially again after hearing the talk show and having hearing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, nearly Patel and Gruber rave about how, how good the LCD screen on the 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John R looks. If I, if someone said, uh, you can have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tennis, but with an LCD screen on it without these weird visual artifacts and it looks as just as good side by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side when showing your photos as the 10, you know, as the OLED screen, I might opt for that. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want OLED in a situation where, you know, I want to see video, but on the phone, I don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quite as much about it. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get over it, especially now that I know that the message bubble effects was because I didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reduced motion on. Maybe I’ll leave reduced motion on now to get over that. But the effect that Marco has now showed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us all and you should not look at if you don’t want to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} That’s that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing I was talking about. It’s a real thing and I can see it and it bothers me ever so slightly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wonder because it really is only a problem when you have a black background. I wonder if maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple held back on the dark iOS theme in part because of this problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah because it’ll show up everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I get yeah I always think I’m done with this one more thing. It’s always one more thing. I learned that from Steve.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So part of the home button thing, me pressing on a thing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wake my phone up because it was also a touch ID or whatever, my expectation that I can pick up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my phone and touch all over the screen without waking it, as long as I don’t touch the bottom center of it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is throwing me off a little. Now immediately I turned off, turned off raise to wake, I turned off raise to talk, I turned off,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, talk, raise to listen, I turned off all the things that try to detect when I’m picking up my phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the phone actually does do a good job of detecting like, oh you just picked up your phone, like I can pick up my phone now and grab

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it by the screen, it doesn’t wake up, it knows like I’ve just grabbed you by the screen, but if you just tap it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it wakes up, which is great. Like, oh, I love waking up my phone up by touching the screen. I can’t go back to the thing where I had to. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very often now I will inadvertently wake my phone because I will brush it. And if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m what I’m usually doing on my phone, if I’m picking it up and not looking at it, it’s playing overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and overcast has a little, you know, it shows up in a little sort of what is that called

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} the control

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco center now or like the springboard now playing right thing, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John widget. Yep. And dead center. And is a little control that controls my position in the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if I accidentally grab my phone and it wakes up and I slide my finger and I move that scrubber, there’s no undo as far as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I aware. And I just scrubbed, you know, 35 minutes into the podcast I was listening to. So now my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone is a little tiny bit like the Apple TV remote and it’s like, it’s like a hot phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hot

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You pick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up the phone, it’s hot. You know, I don’t like, I don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wake my phone. I want to be able to grab it and only when I want to wake it, I’ll press

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the home button on the but it’s not there anymore. So I’m I’m working through those issues. Again, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} appreciate the fact that it tries to be therapy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’re working through it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I love the fact that it tries to be smart and like ignores my touches when they’re clearly not meant to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a waking touch. But sometimes it’s a little bit confused. So I’m still working through those issues. That’s it. That’s it. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think I’ve covered everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So do you or do you not like the phone? And do you miss I like do you miss the Jet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Black 7?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, so the X and the XS perform the magic trick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that all great Apple technology does, which is like within three and a half minutes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using the XS and taking possession of it as my phone. When I went back to the 7 to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John check some settings, because it didn’t transfer my screen wake time for some reason, like a couple of my preferences, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this seems to be going to sleep. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, the X and XS reset your, the XS didn’t do it for me, but when I moved to the 10, it reset the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco idle timeout to be super short.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I don’t know what the deal with it. Anyway, when I went back to the seven, because I’m keeping it on to look up settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff like that, the seven now looks like I’m looking through a tiny porthole

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} onto my phone. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, why is this screen so small? And what are these things on the top and the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blocking my view of the phone? Like, did someone put tape over my phone? It’s not that much smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, the device isn’t that much smaller, the screen’s not that much smaller, but I can’t go back. Like it’s now, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is now an old phone. It’s garbage, I can’t look at it, I can’t touch it anymore. I do kind of miss Touch ID,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I look at it and it looks like the original iPhone to me, like the 3.5 inch. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just like, what is this thing? I do kind of miss the size, because I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is a little bit big. Oh, I bought a new pouch. You know my pouches. Yeah. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} bought the- Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} my God, John. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should have led with that. This is breaking news.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I bought the larger size pouch, because the pouches are like, this pouch fits these phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I use that for those things. And then it’s like, oh, if you wanna fit a larger phone, like the 10 or the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy this one. So I bought that one, but I think it also fits the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Max. And it’s just big. It’s just too big. There’s too much extra space

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in there. There’s like a centimeter extra bag once I slide the thing, it’s too loose. So then I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John realized, maybe I could just stick the 10 in the bag that was holding my seven. And I can, like the butt sticks out a little,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but just barely. And mostly I just want it to cover the screen. so I can put things in my pocket with it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and not worry about it scratching them. That’s basically why I have, especially since I don’t know how scratch resistant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this actually is. So I’m using the pouch for my 7 with it, even though I have a new pouch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh my God. So I like it. I’ve totally transitioned to it. I can’t go back. I’ve got some issues. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John working through them. Face ID is really neat. It’s a little bit touchy. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so happy we asked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And people are actually asking for a link to the pouch. So John, I don’t want to receive this email.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have that link to, I started a notes document like a year ago that just has URLs in it. Like it has the URL

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of your toaster thing, Casey, on your blog, because people ask about it all the time and I was sick of looking up the URL and copying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bit. So I just put URLs that people ask me for. The pouch URL is on there. We will put it in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco word. Well, I don’t have that much to add about the XS except for the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really am very, very glad did the upgrade because my god

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the camera better like I really think they underplayed the camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I said it before last week I won’t go too far into it but wow is the camera better you know if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just you know if you see in people’s reviews you see the side-by-side shots and you think oh maybe that’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ideal scenarios that really show the difference well as soon as you use the camera for like a day you’re like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh my that was really easy to get a really shot with very little effort. In

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the little bit of time I’ve used it so far, it was really stunning how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well it dealt with HDR. How well it dealt with mixed lighting where maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have a sunset or something, or a reflective surface, or a bright surface, or a bright light.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The way it manages HDR is so good, and it seems very sharp.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Shutter lag, I expected more of an of an improvement with shutter lag. It actually isn’t very much improved,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the result of what you get out of it is really, really good. Even portrait

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mode, I’m a huge portrait mode skeptic. I have never seen a portrait mode picture that I thought was really great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and perfect, but I came close. Like the one I, it’s on my Instagram feed. I shot a portrait of Tiff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the beach dock, and that’s portrait mode, and I had to tune it down a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from like the f1.4 that it wanted to be because that looked totally ridiculous and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unreal, but I put it in like the f5.6 or f4 range and it looked pretty good and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it didn’t look obviously like oh that’s portrait mode it just look like a nice picture so I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m very very happy with the camera on it additionally I shot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some video with stereo sound and it’s kind of nice like it’s it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the one thing I will say is that it doesn’t sound the stereo effect I think is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being amped up slightly but not to an extreme degree it’s it’s like it’s like they turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up the the you know boost slider a little bit on the stereo separation to make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slightly wider sounding that naturally does when you’re standing there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s very very slight otherwise it really is nice to have stereo sound especially like like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the examples I did was we were at the beach so I shot standing at the beach looking at the waves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and the waves were crashing down from left to right. And you could hear that. You could hear that right in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the video. And listening on headphones really sounds awesome, and it really sounds better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than just having mono audio before. So overall, very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco impressed by the camera. It is not a small upgrade. The rest of the phone is a small upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The camera is a major upgrade. This is like an every three years kind of upgrade for the camera.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, one other thing we forgot to mention about the camera it. Maybe we talked about on the keynote show, but we didn’t, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John haven’t really, uh, leaned on too much and has been coming up in blogs and also on that episode of the talk show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Um, we mentioned that like if you take the camera into dim lighting, it will lower the frame rate together more light

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in each frame, like during the same video to just salvage what would otherwise be a completely dark

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video. Uh, but it will also, if you have it set to a lower frame rate, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will double the frame rate and take a frame in between the frames that it’s going to use and use that frame

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to add more detail and lighting to the frames that it did take. So if you’re shooting at 30 frames a second, it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually record at 60 and take every other frame and just use it to make the two, you know, in between each frame, it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use another frame to make those frames better, which is pretty amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s doing exposure bracketing. So it’ll expose one low and one high and merge them together

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every for every frame of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video. Yeah, because it’s like I can do 60. Why am I just going to do 30? Why don’t I just do 60 and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do one high one low and high one low a high one low and then I’ll make you 30 good ones out of those things which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty and you may be wondering like okay well then why doesn’t it just leave the the quote unquote shutter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open for a longer time and get me 30 but expose each one longer right the longer you leave the shutter open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the more you’re going to get blur uh and so this technique is you know I only need to be open for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a sixtieth of a second to get a decent exposure and if I do that and take two of those one high

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one low they’ll be less blurry and then I can combine and match them and compensate for the motion between the like it’s all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s It’s computational photography, right? It’s pretty amazing. The same way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people don’t think about the fact that when they press the shutter button, it is basically telling it, you know that picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you captured several milliseconds ago? Save that one. Like it’s not taking a picture when you press the button, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always taking a picture. Like it’s got a rolling buffer of the last, whatever it is, 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or four or however many frames. And when you press the shutter button, especially since you’re like, when you press the shutter button, you probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John move your phone, right? Like you shake it or whatever. like, oh, it’s going to make the picture blur. It’s like it already took

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the picture by then. You’re just telling it to save. Phone cameras don’t work the way you think they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do, and they’re fiendishly fast, and it’s all pretty amazing. And as as for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you call it portrait mode, when you posted that picture of Tiff on your Instagram, I immediately zoomed in on her hair and said, ah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John portrait mode. So it’s good. But yeah, it’s portrait mode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it’s not perfect. But like but there are way fewer artifacts than there used to be on the earlier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco implementations of this feature, especially like if you tone it down, like I said, like I didn’t go with 1.4. Like if you go with one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really extreme ones, the artifacts become more obvious where I didn’t make the right decision. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you go with something like a 4 or a 5.6, like it’s a lot easier and nicer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Instagram sizes, you don’t see that, but you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I had to zoom. Let’s put it this way. I had to zoom in on her wispy little hairs to see, oh, I see where it’s mangling,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the blur, right? But an Instagram size not zoomed in, like that could have been a real camera almost.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really am trying to resist buying a phone but my ability to resist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is wearing thinner and thinner. I’ve already told myself I will be getting a watch. I just haven’t done it. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, tell me about this watch that I keep seeing pop up in all these pictures of you, Mr. I-only-like-fancy-mechanical-watches.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What’s going on there?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ll start with the size thing, because this is, you know, we talked about this before. To wrap up, I got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 40. I tried them both in store. I got the 40, the smaller of the two. For the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part, watch sizing is like, you know, you can wear what you want, and, you know, as long as it’s what you want, who cares? Some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people like really big watches, some people like really small watches, there’s a lot of leeway. But ideally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you follow two principles. Number one, the lugs of the watch. Those are like the little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sticks that come out of it, top and bottom, that hold the strap on. So the body of a watch is like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco middle part that has the main case with the dial and everything, and then the lugs kind of stick out from it to hold straps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not on the Apple Watch, of course, but you know. And so one fashion thing is the lugs should not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco overhang your wrist. That’s fine if you don’t care, but if you’re caring about proper watch fashion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the lugs should never overhang your wrist. Part number two to understand this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I want you to picture an icon of a watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What does it look like? The watch cursor in Mac OS? Yeah that’s perfect yeah the watch cursor in Mac OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right so you have a watch body in the middle and you have kind of like a short little strap on the top and a short little strap on the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s kind of assumed in a 2d representation the strap is like curving under the watch but you see the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two ends of the strap and the middle the watch head right so So it’s a top-down view of how a watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is expected to look on a wrist. That is a watch-shaped watch. You know, John has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a dog-shaped dog. I have, I want a watch-shaped watch. For a watch to look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that in real life, this is the second rule of watch sizing, which is often disregarded.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The strap should not come straight down from the watch at a 90-degree angle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It should have some curvature on your wrist before it comes straight down. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t, if the watch is so big that the strap basically falls straight down where it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like filling your wrist to that degree and the strap just kind of falls straight down, that’s a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big look. And that might be what you’re going for, but it’s a big look. I don’t like that look. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the more classical watch-shaped watch look. And so what I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the biggest watch that will possibly fit on my wrist. The 44,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I tried it on, looked like that. It dominated my wrist with a giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen. And so for many people that’s a feature, for me that’s a bug. I do not want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. I want a more classically proportioned watch. So for me, the 40 provided

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. It provides enough, you know, leeway in sizing that the strap has room to curve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around my wrist instead of just falling straight down, which is important on the sport strap since it doesn’t fall straight

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down no matter what. So if it’s too big on you, it just kind of makes these big like air pockets on your wrist which kind of look weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So anyway, 40 is great for me. And I got the steel one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as I planned on it, and it is really, really nice. What I like about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the final thing I’ll say about the size, besides the fact that it finally looks more classly proportioned on me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that it gives me the same screen space,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and therefore, for the vast majority of the case, the same utility as the old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big watch did in the smaller watch size case. So I have the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco utility in the smaller case. And I finally understand why most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people like the tiny crappy laptops in the lineup. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you’re not an extreme enthusiast of something, having your needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco completely solved by a new smaller thing than what you needed before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with no downsides that matter to you, is incredibly satisfying. So for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t love the Apple Watch. I kinda like it, I like other watches better. But I need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to use the Apple Watch on a certain basis for my job. It’s exactly how a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of people think about computers. I am much happier with this one than I’ve ever been with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any other Apple Watch. And because of that, I am wearing it more. You know, it’s still not my favorite watch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s still never gonna be my primary watch, but I am wearing it more than I’ve worn any other Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco since the very first one, since before I switched to regular watches. And I’m very, very happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with it. It is a very, very nice smartwatch. It’s even a pretty decent regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch. Not a great regular watch. There’s still things about it that annoy me, but pretty decent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a regular watch and excellent for a smartwatch. I do have some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more specific reviews of things like the faces. Before I get into that, do you have any questions on what I just talked about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I should talk about my my watch experience based on the sizing to because we went to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the store to look at watches. My wife got the gold small watch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is what she wanted. And I tried on all the different sizes of watches many different times, many different finishes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to to think about just exactly what Mark was talking about. Is the 44 too big? Is the 42 small?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And do I want to buy a watch? And so I spent a while while she was getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John she got her watch set up there and they transferred it from her phone. so I had plenty of time to mess with the things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I understand everything Marco was saying and I mostly agree with it. And I even took pictures of my wrists and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything. And boy, it’s tough because here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing, like the 44, as my wife put it, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t look too big on you. Like it doesn’t look like it’s too big. It doesn’t look like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch is definitely too big for you. But it’s really close. to like it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it but you know it’s weird right and so but here’s the problem i’m like okay well whatever let me try on the 40

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or is that what size is the 40 the small one yeah 40

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just looks too

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} small it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks too small like i know this is this is just you know a cultural thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like it’s just my upbringing but when i wear it i feel like i’m wearing a woman’s watch because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for my life women’s watches are all smaller and when I put this on, like it feels and looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too small to me. And yet, when I look at the pictures I took of my own wrist with these watches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on them, it looks right in the pictures. In the picture, I’m like, that’s exactly the right size watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like the watch icon. Like that is exactly the right size

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you. But when I put it on in real life and I look at my wrist, I feel like, why are you wearing your mom’s watch?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, it just feels too small. And secondarily, like I don’t really care about fashion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, right. So I’m thinking about this mostly, mostly just from the perspective of like, that’s why I’m showing my wife.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like, look, does one of these look ridiculous on me? Just tell me like, whatever. From my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John perspective, I went the one with the bigger screen because it’s all about the screen. And why wouldn’t I want the bigger screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Like, even though I recognize that it is probably borderline and it’s like so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John close to the edge and I should really probably get the smaller one, but then the smaller one feels, it’s like I just want the bigger screen because it’s a bigger screen. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the whole point is it’s a screen, right? in the end this whole experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically led me to the decision that I’m not going to get a new watch. Just because the sizing, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like if I bought either one of them I would regret it. And seeing them in person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was like, I just, I pulled a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John casey, I was I’m holding strong with you Casey, I said you know what I’m just not going to get one. I thought I was going to get one, I thought it would be a great year to get one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re really good, I like them, but the sizing thing and me saying do you really need this, are Are you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to wear it that much more often than you are the other one? My answer is no. And so I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting a watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well slow down. I intend to get a watch. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} just have to accomplish to get it. I mean like comparing you to the phone. Like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reasons I might want to get the phone, but do I really, really need it? Like that’s what I’m comparing it to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco honestly, like when I tried them on in the store, the 40 was smaller than I expected it to be. But the 44

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was bigger than I expected it to be. And I had the same dilemma in my head of like, is this too small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for me? might it look more traditionally feminine, which by the way is hilarious because until like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 90s, men’s watches were 35 millimeter. Like that was the standard size for men’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watches, which is way so like that’s the size of my Minimatic that I talked about before, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which I thought was is a little is pretty dainty on me. And when I was buying that watch, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was really like I saw in the store, I’m like, Oh my god, I love this. But I’m so afraid it’s too small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for me. And I really waffled about it for a while. And I ended up buying it because I loved it so so much otherwise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I didn’t regret it at all. I love that watch, it’s one of my favorite watches. And that’s kind of how I felt looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the Series 4 40 millimeter in the store. Like I was really questioning myself, I was like, oh boy, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I should cancel my 40 order and just get the 44 or whatever else. But when I tried on the 44, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, no, you know what? This is too big on me, period. And so it’s either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have one that’s too big or have one that might be a little too small. But your perspective on the watch sizing is actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot like what you were just saying about the iPhone 7 feeling small. Like when you’re accustomed to a certain size,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, the transitions, bigger or smaller, look crazy for like an hour, and then you get used to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like whatever it is, you get used to it. And you can get used to it going in the smaller direction too. It isn’t just going bigger that you get used to things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and I also realize you mentioned like the men’s watches being like 35 millimeters. Like I wore, when I did wear watches, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were all way smaller than the Apple Watch of any size. Like the 40, the other 44. But the thing is, I realized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m judging the Apple Watch not based on the standard of it being a watch. I’m basing it on the standard of essentially being an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Watch. Like I have this this image of my mind of how big a smart watch should be and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why the small one seems so small because I’m like it’s like a miniature Apple Watch that I’m wearing on my wrist it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not like a regular so maybe I would get over anyway I’m not getting one but like if they stick with these two sizes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I will still face this dilemma at some point in the future when my Series Zero like eventually dies but for now like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I took the Series Zero out to pair it to my phone and everything I got to spend more time with a series zero.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I still like it as a thing that tells time and shows me my message bubbles. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m just going to keep rocking the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} series

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here. I can’t use the overcast stuff, but like, you know, I just my phone for that. I’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey okay. Yeah, I went to the store very quickly and very briefly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and by myself. So I didn’t have the voice of reason of Aaron with me to help.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So why didn’t you get one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Because I don’t believe they had the stock I wanted at that particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s the real reason. It wasn’t self-control, it was stock.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, actually, no, it was self-control. That’s right, because I actually even brought my business credit card

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with me because this was going to be on the business and I did not leverage it and I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even ask. That’s what it was. But now, a week later, it’s a stock issue. I haven’t been looking at iStockNow.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey every day. No, of course not. Anyway, I went and tried on both and I’ll put a link to some very poor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shots I took of myself and posted on Twitter. I thought that the 44 was fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I was convinced when I left the store that whenever I go and actually buy one I’ll get a 44. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ever since I left the store I’ve been wondering should I really be getting the 40?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And at first I was like man if I’m in the 40 then Erin if whenever it is she gets around to upgrading

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which will probably not be this year that’s going to to look ridiculous on her, isn’t it?” And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I thought to myself, well, you know, risks probably aren’t that different, truth be told. And then I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey got angry about, you know, losing out on my watch bands, of which I have like two official

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sport bands, two hilariously crummy Amazon knockoffs that I use every great once in a while,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and a reasonably crummy Amazon knockoff Milanese loop. And- Guess what? You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can buy more knockoffs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yeah, well, that’s the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then it occurred to me, but it would be kind of nice to be able to share bands with Erin, actually. Which that never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had crossed my mind until after we recorded last, that if we’re both on the 38

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slash 40 size, then we can swap bands back and forth, and that would actually be kind of nice. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I still am not sure which one I should get, and truthfully,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I should probably wait to buy one until Erin’s with me so I can try them both on, and in between her rolling her

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey eyes, she can suggest a size for me. But I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know what what I would do because I was so convinced that 44 was just fine and then ever since I’ve left

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve somewhat convinced myself that maybe 42 is I mean I’m sorry 40 is the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John answer so the past show we’re all like oh Heming and Hawing and printing oh well we want to print out pieces of paper to check the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch sizes just go to the store just go to the store we all just went to the store now we still can’t decide yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I decided and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m very happy with my decision Margo is decisive he’s more much more experienced watch decider than we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are yeah no and I have a feeling you know we We know that a lot of our audience is men and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of men are, especially a lot of men who listen to this show, are like us,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not that great or confident at our fashion skills. And so a lot of men might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not feel confident picking the smaller one, even if that’s the one that actually seems to fit them better,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you might think, you know, is this a more feminine model? And I’m here to tell you, it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like Apple has done a very good job of minimizing the gender styling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco differences among the Apple Watch models. Like, in the rest of the watch world, they don’t do a very good job of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But Apple does a very good job at not overly gender

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco targeting most of the Apple Watch models or bands or sizes or anything else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Some are a little bit more feminine or a little bit more masculine, but very few. It’s almost all unisex. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so don’t worry about that. know, there’s no reason you should be worried about to begin with, just for lots of reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but like, none of these will… nobody’s gonna look and say like, oh, you’re wearing a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco woman’s watch. Like, what year is this? Like, you know, like, we’re a little bit better about things as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a society.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I just want to emphasize that… emphasize that point that you just touched on, which is a thought technology that people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John may not have in their arsenal, but they should add. Something looking feminine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you think about that being derogatory, doesn’t make any sense, because what are you saying that anything…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people… people so, you know, Don’t don’t think give that a second thought but like well, of course, I don’t want to wear something that looks feminine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why not well because Girls are bad like think it through

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not actually it’s it’s horrible that that So many people just accept that as a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is it is not actually bad I’m not telling you what to watch to buy buy whatever you want You know pick the one that you think looks nicest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on you But I would invite you to noodle around with the idea in your head

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that something looking feminine on a man is Bad and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John follow that through to its conclusion about like why that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again not saying that you anyway It’s just it’s worth it’s worth thinking about that. Put that it put that aside and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like Twiddle it with your brain finger every once in a while and think about it Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exactly I mean and so yeah Don’t like there are certain bands that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are somewhat gender targeted Almost all of them aren’t almost everything is neutral like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might you know my steel one comes with the white sport band. This is about as neutral as you can get. Like it’s right, I’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say it’s right down the middle. This is not gender specific or gender targeted or anything like that. And you know, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can wear it where whatever size fits you and that will look better than wearing the wrong size for you, no matter what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those sizes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are. I feel like the one does look a little California though. It’s kind of like no white after Labor Day kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reminds me of Johnny Ivan is white slacks and it’s like it’s a it’s like you want to go yachting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right? I was kind of worried about that because like I I’ve never I’ve never owned a white band before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I’ve tried them on in a store a couple times and always got the feeling like, oh, that’s kind of nice for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somebody cooler than me, maybe, but not actually for me. But this one, this is the only band

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that this configuration came on. And because I changed size

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco classes with my watch, this is now the only band I have that fits my watch. And I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about buying a new one, but I’m actually pretty happy with this. It actually, I think I will be this cool person, this cool California

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco summer person, you know, for the time being. Because I think it looks really good. It’s nice and neutral. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not too casual and not too dressy. Like, it’s right down the middle. So I’m actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty happy with just the white sport band, to be honest. Anyway, so I do have some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco criticisms and opinions about the watch faces. Some of this is actually covered pretty well in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Upgrade this past week. So listen to that as well. You should be listening to that anyway, because it’s a great show. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sorry for the overlap here. So everyone is really excited about these new Infograph faces.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco These are the ones, this was, you know, the analog one was the one that that was in the press shot that was leaked a couple of weeks ago. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have these, these new fancy colorful curved complications. I, hmm,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have tried over the last few days since having this watch, I have tried to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco configure the Infograph analog face in a way that I like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it is the one with the, with the regular hands in the middle, not like the big, you know, modular one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I cannot come up with a configuration of that face that is good, that also allows me to tell the time quickly. Like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I fought with that face too. Yeah, like it is really, and to Apple’s credit, they’ve given

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us all sorts of new garbage things to fill the complications with. Like you can put the moon and the earth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in some of the round

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} faces. What does the earth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The earth just shows like the shadow on the earth, I guess? Like. Yeah, it might be like a time of day kind of thing, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know, like it’s not great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Can I put the overcast logo in some places?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, actually with yeah with the build that should be coming out maybe tomorrow. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s really it’s really hard to make that face both

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco useful and not super busy and there are so many things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would do differently if I could design my own faces. I wish I could design my own faces so badly. I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so many things differently. By the way, quick prompts to carrot weather. I have never been a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Carat Weather user. I prefer Weatherline for my weather needs. I just like the way the interface works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I started using Carat Weather today because they offer such amazing customization

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the watch complications. And they can do things, you know, not only do they add things like, there are things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco humidity that you can’t get with Apple’s Watch thing because all the different, they added like air

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quality index, but they didn’t add humidity. Like it’s like…

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} That’s because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey humidity doesn’t exist in California.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve been to San Francisco a lot. They seem to have humidity there. That isn’t that far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from San Jose. I think Apple people

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} have been there a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Humidity is a state of mind, Mark. Humidity is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} a state of mind.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, so carrot weather is really great, not only for certain things like humidity that you just can’t get with Apple’s complications, but also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have a lot of customization options where you can say, all right, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the carrot weather complication is in this face, in this shape type, display

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this piece of information. when it’s on this shape on this face type display this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other information so you can actually have caret weather in multiple complications on the same face

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco displaying different things and you can combine two values so like if you want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know like like one of mine one of my favorite faces actually my favorite general purpose face is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco utility and it has two small complications and one big text at the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well if you want to know like a fourth piece of information Care at Weather has a thing where you can, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wanna know the temperature and the weather and also sunset time. And you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do that. It’s one of the options to have weather and sunset time in that one big bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco complication on utility and on other phases like that. So like, it’s really, really great. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a huge fan of Care at Weather for the customizability of watch complications. It’s fantastic. That does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco require, I believe, a $4 a year subscription, but for God’s sake, it’s $4 a year. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t worry about it. Anyway, so getting back to infograph, I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco come up with a way that to make that face legible to tell time quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It can do lots of other stuff. You can fit lots of other information in those complications,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the ends of being so busy, even if you keep the center dial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco empty or if you like just put the date blob up there and you don’t fill the other three things that are in like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sub dial positions, even if you don’t fill those, the The design of the hands and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hour indices is so minimal and you have to look at it for a little while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to tell what hour you’re on. And so it’s really not a good face design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It shows well in marketing, but if one of the things you want your watch to do is tell the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quickly, I don’t think Infograph is a good way to do that. The Infograph modular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one, the one that’s like a digital face that’s just basically a colorful version of the old modular face,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I can see the argument for way better because that is, you know, it’s an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all-digital face, there’s no giant dial in the middle, that I can see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is substantially more pragmatic and a cleaner design, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I like analog time, you know, it isn’t just because of, you know, having old watches,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I also just like telling time that way. You see a proportional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco view of what’s going on. It’s just kind of how my brain works. So I want a good analog face.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Infograph doesn’t do that for me. My favorite face to look cool, even though it isn’t analog,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is still Solar. This is the one that has that big sun curve in the middle and it goes through the sun phase.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love Solar. I’m a little worried for its future because it’s no longer in the default set of faces.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You have to go to that add menu on the far right that no one knows is there and it’s with all like the other forgotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco faces of your like the but is it still is really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good a lot of people haven’t known that the solar face which used to have zero complications

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and maybe you all stopped using it like in watch OS 3 I think I watch OS 4 it was solar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got complications either it has two complication slots so you know you can put like the day and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco date in one you could put weather and the other or something like that the only thing is it doesn’t appear to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use the complications or offer them on series 0 and maybe series 1 and 2 so you might need a more modern watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but anyway solar has complications now if you haven’t looked at it for a while give it another shot and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if one of the things you want to know is sunrise or sunset time that’s built into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the face so you actually need fewer complications on it so it’s actually a pretty high utility face if you want digital

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time but But ultimately, my favorite watch face for general use is utility.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, if you’re offering a range of watches, like you would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re designing faces for the most popular smartwatch in the world, I think it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an uncommon desire to tell time with analog hands on a round

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dial that has the 1 through 12 hour numerals around it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Only two Apple Watch faces of the 20 or so can actually show the 1-12 hour numerals around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the dial. The other one is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Mickey Mouse face, so I think I might even rule that one out for lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of reasons. Only Utility can display the 1-12 numbers. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Explorer face can do 12, 3, and 9, but that’s it. The Explorer face is kind of ugly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in lots of other ways, although it still remains the only one that can tell you your cellular reception and whether you’re connected to cellular, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is bizarre to me that that isn’t a complication, but only one face has that for some reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But Utility is the only face that gives you 1-12 without Mickey Mouse dancing in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the middle. So it is still, I think, the best all-around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco general-purpose Apple Watch face if you want analog time. And it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looks way better on the Series 4 than it did before because on the previous ones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the screen bezels were so much larger it looked like you had a tiny watch dial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the middle of a giant watch body and that is not a good look. The new one because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the screen goes more edge to edge it the the size of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the like you know the round part of the dial in the middle of it the size is much better proportioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the overall watch body. It like you get like in mine you know I I have about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same size watch dial as my old 42 watch in this new 40

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco size body. So it just, it looks like a much nicer proportioned watch. It no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco longer looks like a tiny dial in the middle of a giant expanse of black. So it’s way nicer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than that. I will say though, I have the exact same complaint that John Gruber cited in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco his review. I really don’t like how they now curve the complications

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around all these old faces. Oh, by the way, HTML Arson in the chat is saying, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not counting the chronograph face could be wrong. I’ll double check after the show. The curve complications

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around these old faces. It just looks terrible. Like it looks like a mistake.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It looks like something you would try in the design labs. Once you’d look at it and be like, Nope, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t work. And you’d cancel it and he’d go back to something else. I wish they would just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco put those back in the corners the way they were and make the text straight again. And this applies to almost all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the old faces that have this style of complication, which used to be the only style where you have like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco generally a monochrome or almost monochrome like short line of text or a corner

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like round thing or like a corner, you know, three characters of text kind of thing. I really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really don’t like that. And it greatly messes with my utility face. I really don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. So I really hope that will change that or offers an option or reverts it or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something. I’m not holding my breath on that because I bet they won’t, but it really does make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the old faces, which otherwise look very good in the new models because the new margins, but those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco curve complications make the old faces pretty rough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I only have an old and busted Series 3 watch, but I agree with you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about the utility watch face. I actually use it with no numerals. So your quest for numerals,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t agree with, but I almost always use the Utility watch face. When I was still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a regular jobby job, I did like the Siri watch face for when it was, it was an easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way to scroll through upcoming meetings and stuff like that. But now that I never have meetings,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve been on Utility pretty much nonstop for the last couple of months and I love it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right, real time follow up. I was totally wrong. Chronograph is another face that has the one through 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco digits. So my mistake, there’s actually three. And if you rule out Mickey Mouse because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ridiculous to although chronograph has the same problem of utility of utility in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has those rounded text complications now in the corners and that just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not it’s not a good look. All right, I just tweeted to the ATP FM account

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the picture because that was the easiest way to get it off my phone quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So this is your preferred non-solar setup?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Solar doesn’t look very good at night. So I’ve switched to this for the podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How about that? So the bottom is the carrot weather combined

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weather conditions and sunrise sunset complication, which is I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} think a very early

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a watch nerd would put sunrise sunset on his watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, so here’s why I like, you know, Max can be funny about this too. I like having the sunset sunrise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t care about sunset. I like having because I like to do dog walks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in that range of the evening, but I want to know how much light I have left because that way, like as I’m working,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying to get like trying to finish whatever I’m doing, like programming at 530 or six o’clock,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I want to know like how much daylight do I have left to do a dog walk and then when I have two little daylight left, I leave

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the dog walk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Somehow I managed to do that without being knowing when sunset is never occurred to me to look up sunset. I just look out the window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I could tell how much light is left.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but it’s But it’s nice to know, like, you start developing a sense for like, you know, how dim is it versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, do I have like 40 more minutes of reasonable sunset or do I have 20 more minutes of reasonable, like, it’s nice to have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s the thing, like, I messed with all of the new watch faces on my wife’s watch and in the store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to try to get them to some state where I felt like it was a compromise that I would want on my watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I couldn’t, I couldn’t figure anything. I mean, it was only like, you know, five, 10 minutes. Couldn’t figure it out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lots of arrangements that looked really good. Like if you just wanted to take a picture of them, they looked cool, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not sure if I if I if I could read the time off of them because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} some of them are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John extremely busy and and be if I would want to. I want that to be my watch. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use utility on my watch too, but of course now, like Marco said, it looks like this tiny little circle in this vast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John field of blackness because you know the new watches they do that screen thing where your old one looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really small and cruddy and everything like that. But yeah, especially the curve things around the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corner. Not sure I got a I think I think their default face they use in the ads looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really cool. But I just think it’s like total visual noise. I was to glance at my watch and try to figure anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out from it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, another problem I have. So you’re talking about infograph. Another problem I have with the infograph face is when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco configuring it, what you ideally want is some kind of like visual balance or symmetry between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the corner complications that are super bright and have maybe a big colorful bar and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ones that don’t. And there just wasn’t enough stuff that I wanted that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had the nice color bar to actually fill it nicely. I could do it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco poorly or put stuff on there I didn’t really care about, but I couldn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do anything nice. I don’t know. I couldn’t come up with any with a configuration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of infograph that looked good and was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco functional enough for me to actually tell the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, I was surprised you couldn’t get rid of like I was cycling through the complications and the big circle three circles in the middle. I’m surprised

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you couldn’t set them to none like as far as I could tell there was no none choice. You totally can the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco circles in the middle. Yeah, you can you can set all of them to none. You can even you can even blank out the date on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco top.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was cycling through them to try to get it to be like Earth Moon workout. out timer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s weird because like whatever the scroll direction on the crown is for those I kept doing the wrong one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like just intuitively I just kept getting it wrong but before the A’s is blank. Hmm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe I just missed it. I’ll check again. Yeah anyway it’s you know I I continue

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be fairly disappointed by the selection of Apple watch faces. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just I wish so badly that there were either either that Apple would make more that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like as much as solar and utility, or ideally, that they would just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco open this up to third-party developers. And I know that’s a very—that’s an unlikely wish

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at this point. I think they’ve made themselves clear by their inaction on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco front, this is probably intentional. This is probably like a decision. They don’t want people doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, not that they just haven’t gotten to the API for it yet. So it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seem intentional, but boy, I wish that would change their mind on that because I would love to design a face. I would love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to see what other people design. I would love to address like the complaints that I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with things like how you know it’s not smart enough with you know certain times of day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or certain modes or having certain events be present when they shouldn’t be or things like I would love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a chance to design that or to see what other people would do to solve that problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would love the artistic freedom and and the the freedom of expression

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that to like have more watch faces than just the same three that everyone else is using.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, the Apple Watch gives a ridiculous amount of customization potential

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in areas that don’t matter. Basically in the straps. And that’s fine, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice, it’s better than nothing, but everyone still has the same three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch faces on because they’re the only good ones. And that’s not how the watch business works. You want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to be individual and you want to be able to update it every so often. And that’s, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s personal fashion and personal expression. And they just have not budged. Like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this utility face that is pretty much still the only reasonable face to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still looks almost exactly the same as it did when the first watch came out, when John bought his. That was forever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ago. And so, like, I feel like they keep doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new cool things with like the bands, but what I really want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is customization for in the software side. Like more of that, please. Something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that allows people ideally to design their own watch faces.

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Creative Selection

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I need new toys. But you know what I did do I installed Mojave on my MacBook adorable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh yeah. Oh we don’t have time for that we get to the book.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Are we actually doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco book now. Did you read it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What if I didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Come on. Come on. You got an extra week. You got an extension

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the teacher and you still didn’t do it? I have things to do, John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What things are you doing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Actually, I read the book. I’m just messing with you. Good. Well, let’s talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey book then.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we are talking- Yeah, so this is going to be spoiler filled, although I don’t know if it’s really spoilers since it’s not a work of fiction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No spoilers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No spoilers for the past. Yeah. Spoiler, the iPhone came out. It had a keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, I’m trying to treat the listeners with respect, gentlemen. I’m just trying to say, hey, if you haven’t yet read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Creative Selection, we’re about to talk about it. And if you’re not interested in that, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why the Germans forced us to use chapters. So skip to the next chapter. That’s all. That’s all I’m saying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, Creative Selection.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco First of all, I totally butchered the author’s name in the ad read a few weeks ago. He was very kind.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He didn’t actually tell me this. I learned it when he was on Rene Ritchie’s show, Vector, and he said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco his own name. And I was like, oh my god, I butchered that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I even I mean he was very gracious, but I emailed him and asked him how to pronounce that in

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} for our show. So we would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mess it up. It’s Ken Kushenda and it’s it spelled. If you didn’t know how anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was pronounced, you might say Kassienda like I did, but that is not at all how it said it’s pronounced Kushenda.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So sorry Ken. Yeah, so this is a book on Ken’s time at Apple. He was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an engineer who worked on seemingly a lot of different projects, but the ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he goes over in the book were the first iPhone autocorrect keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPad keyboard, briefly, is covered there, Safari,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and what else? Oh, and I learned on Twitter the other day that he also wrote the code for the original Solar Watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Face, which I like so much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, that’s funny. Now, I did not know what to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think coming into this book. A lot of people had said, oh, it’s really great. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, I did that really annoying thing that only annoying people do apparently, where they’re like, oh, everyone says it’s so cool, it must not be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cool. And I was not overly enthusiastic about reading it. And it was really good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I’m really glad you made me read it because I really enjoyed it. And I think perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the thing I enjoyed most about it was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was the best description I’ve read yet of what it’s like to write

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey software for a business. And when I say business, I mean a business with like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey many employees within it. So I’m not trying to poop on your parade there, Marco, but writing software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for Tumblr is very different than writing software for Marco. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t know if I have off the top of my head any specific passages which really exemplify this. I did highlight

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a few of these on my Kindle, a few passages that is, but the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that struck me the most was how good a job it did of trying to explain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what it’s like to write software and how difficult it is to write good software quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then my second favorite thing about it was learning about how different Apple’s processes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are than anything I have done, well, maybe not anything but almost all the time I spent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey working for bigger companies, our processes looked almost nothing like this. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that probably explains a few things. But no, I thought it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very good. And obviously we were paid to talk about it a week or two back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I am telling you, hand over heart, it is very good. And I think it was only like 15

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bucks on the Kindle. And it is definitely worth 15 bucks. And it took me something like three and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey half, four hours to read. And I am not a particularly quick reader. So I definitely recommend it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is very good and I really enjoyed it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I too. I mean, I said this in the ad read, but, you know, and, you know, he didn’t pay me to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say it was good. You know, you can pay us to read your ad script and to talk about your product in like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco objective terms or in, you know, your marketing copy. But you know, people can’t pay us to say that we like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something. And you know, that like if you if you hear me say that in an ad read, I’m saying that because I genuinely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did like it. and that’s never guaranteed. It’s never part of our deal, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really did like this book. Like I really liked it. I did the audiobook version, which is also interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because he reads it like Ken himself reads it, and he’s a pretty good reader at it, too. So it was really fun, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the only thing is you miss out on the illustrations in that. Like there’s a whole bunch of illustrations that are in the book, so it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of nice to actually have access to both copies if you can, but it was a really good audiobook to it, and it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not too long, and you know I got to read. I got to listen to it while testing overcast while walking my dog

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the beach all summer. It was actually really nice. But anyway, it was so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good because so often—I mean, first of all, this is a book

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that has Steve Jobs in the subtitle. And if you look at books that name-check

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Steve Jobs, and if you look at the quality they have had, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty inconsistent, pretty spotty. Clearly, there’s a lot of opportunistic you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco business book types trying to cash in on the Steve Jobs name. And this, I didn’t get that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feeling from this at all. Not at all. And there are certain things about it, like, and like there was a good review

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on it. I think it was in the ReallyFM B-Sides feed where John Voorhees and Stephen Hackett did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a review of this. And I share a lot of their, they had a few minor complaints about it. It does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco format everything in kind of a a business book type narrative,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that’s easy to just kind of breeze through. And then you get the meat, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the actual like engineering stories and stories about demoing and so it tries to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco form these back into like these like you know seven or eight core lessons of like Apple’s process.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I couldn’t care less about that. But it even if you don’t want to hear that kind of stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this book is still very enjoyable because it doesn’t dwell too much on that and it just gets right back into the good stories.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s what I’m here for. I’m here for the engineering stories. And we really don’t hear a lot of modern Apple engineering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stories. We really don’t. And the way Ken has done it is pretty,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would say, very respectful. It sounds like it’s probably fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accurate. Like it sounds very plausible to be very accurate. And he has said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot in this book, but I don’t think he like burned any bridges. Like I would guess, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know this for, I don’t know this for sure. Of course, I don’t really have any way to know, but I would guess Apple’s not mad about this book.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, like he, I think he’s very fair to the company, but he doesn’t, he doesn’t like candy coat everything. He doesn’t say everything’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco perfect, but he’s very fair to everyone. And it seems, it seems like it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a really accurate portrayal of this time. And it doesn’t go too deep into like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Steve stuff. Cause like he, he didn’t see a lot of Steve. He was an engineer. Like he saw some of Steve, but not a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it doesn’t go too far into that. It’s like, you know, a nice normal amount. There’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this about, well, not a lot, but a moderate amount about Scott Forstall. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s really interesting, you know, we in, in these, you know, parts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone thinks of Scott Forstall as the guy who was fired over, over either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maps sucking and the apology letter he wouldn’t sign, or he was fired because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Johnny Ive wanted to get rid of skeuomorphism. And I don’t think either of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even come close to the full story there. Nor do either of those, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pay the right amount of respect for Scott’s role in the company and what it was and what was lost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when he left. And I’ve heard from a lot of people over the years who used to work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with Scott or worked under Scott. and I Really think it was it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a real shame that he was let go and none of us know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the whole story and From the bits and pieces we’ve heard it does sound like he was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at least partly at fault but I think I think we’re gonna look back on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that on on Scott being fired as as just a real shame. Whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tim made the wrong call, whether his hand was forced, I don’t know. We’ll probably never know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I think it was a bad outcome. Whatever the reason, the outcome of not having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Scott there, I think, really hurt and has been a strong influence

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over things happening or things getting worse in areas that we complain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about, in areas that really hurt us. because what’s very clear is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Scott really was like a like a Vice Steve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost. It’s hard to word this in a way that doesn’t sound like diminutive or anything weird but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Scott really I think had a lot of Steve sensibilities and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was in a kind of Vice Steve like position in the company

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so to lose him after also losing Steve,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it really took a lot of the Steve essence out of the company. Like if Scott was still there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and still in a powerful role as he was, I think we’d have a lot more of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things that we miss about Steve. We’d have a lot more of those still there. And that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really sucks that we had to lose both of them. You know, it was bad enough we lost Steve. We didn’t have a choice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in that. But to lose Scott also, I feel like that really hurt the products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s not about felt and leather in the interface. It’s not about that at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That clear the story is much deeper than that. And again we probably don’t even know it. And it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seem like to some degree maybe Scott was you know being difficult. But it’s hard it’s hard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not to look at this and to see like maybe Scott was mad that he was passed over for CEO.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe he was mad that under Tim he didn’t have as much influence as he did under Steve,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know the reason. But clearly from this, and from stories I’ve heard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from people who worked with Scott, losing Scott Forstall was a huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco blow to Apple. And I don’t know if Tim really had any choice in the matter, but if he

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did, I think he made the wrong choice, and I think that will go down as a really bad choice historically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of the same about how working for forestal can certainly be difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but By and large was really really really good and I agree with everything you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said About how this paints forestal in a light that was different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to me anyway, and I’m glad for it also, I think to go back to what I had said about how I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was kind of Wishy-washy about starting to read this book. I think I’m still grumbly about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Becoming Steve Jobs. This is not the Isaacson biography It’s one that came out a year or two later and I couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even get through it. I did not like it very much, which is weird because I also didn’t care for the Isaacson one, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey most people seem to like becoming Steve Jobs. I thought it was just a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slog and I never finished it. And so I was kind of half expecting this to be the same, but it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not at all. And yeah, the business-y, like here’s the seven keys you need in order to be like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that. I agree. Marco didn’t really do anything for me, but. I really think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it is a darn shame that so much like folklore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of modern Apple seems to be just kind of disappearing into the wind and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I Don’t know if Ken burned bridges to write this Typically Apple does not like to air even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey clean

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} laundry let alone dirty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey laundry But I am genuinely genuinely glad that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey book in in things like it exists because it’s it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s gonna be too bad if the Design and creation of one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey most influential products of the last, you know 10 20 50 hundred years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if all of those stories just go away with the people that worked on it And so I’m really really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey glad for this book and it and it really talks about about how interesting and difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is to design software. And I’m not saying that that’s unique to software by any means, but it’s the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing I really know about. And, you know, if you look at the keyboard on the iPhone, and as much as we all say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey damn you auto-correct, the story of how the keyboard came to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and how it came to be, what appears visually to be a very traditional QWERTY keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but behind the scenes is working quite a bit differently. It’s a fascinating story on iterating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey software design. And what seems so obvious at the end, a QWERTY

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey keyboard with some auto correction, with some very clever and interesting auto correction, that seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so obvious at the end, but the meandering path they took to get there is fascinating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it shows why doing this sort of thing is so difficult. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah, I really loved it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I’ve read a lot of Apple books, like even the ones that you think are boring. I’ve read those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I’ve been reading everything stuff about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple since I was a kid, like the very first issue issue number one of Macworld magazine, like it had the biggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John story and it was about the team, the people that made the Macintosh. The thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unimaginable today that there’ll be a giant magazine spread during the launch of an Apple product, interviewing individual people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are on the team about what it was like to develop it. But back then that’s the thing that they did. And it was very glamorous. And of course, Steve Jobs is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of those people. He’s on the cover of the magazine. Um, and since then I’ve been reading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every, every business book you can possibly that I wouldn’t call them business books. Some of them are some of them aren’t but books

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about Apple books about the people the history of Apple you know the history of individual products

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and teams. I have the big giant Newton book with the typo on the spine. I’ve like I’ve read all these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Ken’s book was pretty much unique in that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s a curse that afflicts many of the books about Apple which is that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tend to be written from a remove where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re talking about Apple and necessarily they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are expected to analyze Apple and look at it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say this is what Apple is like and let me like tell you about it and draw conclusions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like and they’ve got the big picture they’re very often often during Apple or Steve Jobs or a particular product in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a larger context of the world of, you know, their companies that are peers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John products that are peers, how important was this product, the technological march of progress,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like they’re burdened by that. Like they have to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s how wide their lens is. And they have to say things about all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of those issues that yeah there’s subjective aspect to it but there’s there’s also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of an objective reality was this important or was it not important why did thing X happen why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did thing Y happen like the the big picture and draw conclusions this is this was good and this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was bad this was a failure this was a success right Ken’s book

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t have to do that because it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a story of one person’s experience at Apple and that person is not the CEO.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s first person. He’s writing about his own experiences. It is not let me tell you about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other people who worked at Apple. It’s like me. This is my story and his story, even though

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, you know, touches upon greatness many times and he worked on some very important, significant products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He’s not the CEO. He wasn’t, you know, he’s not even at Scott Forstall’s letter level, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He came in at a lower level and and climbed up the ranks but didn’t even make it up to the point where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he was like you know middle management and he briefly touched on management that didn’t didn’t appeal to him right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so all this book has to do is say this is what it’s like to be one person who had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this particular career at Apple which is much less of a burden because there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way you can read it and say well you’re wrong about that it’s like it’s just he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John telling his story. And so that aspect and the fact that his story is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, because I read, you know, Gil Emilio’s book, he’s also telling his story, but his story is, I’m the CEO of the company,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And he’s, you know, got the head the size of Texas, right? Anyway, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s different, right? And, but even in that respect, you can, you can read Gil’s book and say, well, this is what Gil

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thinks of himself and his job. But you know, you yourself are pulling back. But there’s in this story, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so many other books about Apple, try to sketch the outlines of like, you know, let me tell you about this person, this person, this event,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you can kind of like, by coloring in certain areas, you can get the shape of Apple. But this is so precise and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right down into the middle of the thing is like, I worked at Apple, and this is what I did. And this is what it was like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that is so refreshing, because it frees me from having to essentially,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, you know, look at this, this big, important analysis and say, Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that really true of the entire company or that particular vendor? Was that really a success or really a failure? failure?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Was that really better than that? Or is that why this happened? It’s like, there’s no arguing because it’s one person telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their story. And for the most part, the story doesn’t have like world shattering implications,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? The iPhone has world shattering implications, but the story of the development of the keyboard is the story

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it. And it’s not even the full story of the development of the entire keyboard because other people helped on that too. And he brings them into the story

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as well. So I thought that was fascinating. And it really helped me, me, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, basically read it and enjoy it without constantly banging up against places

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where I think like the analysis is wrong or I’ve read contradictory things or whatever because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, you know, because it was so personal. The business book aspects of it, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John given that it’s a personal story, I can forgive a lot. The business book aspects of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it of like, let me have a theme and let me weave it throughout the book and let me explain it or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like is also fine because it’s, you know, you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like there are lessons you do, you can’t have this career at Apple and not come away with some lessons, right? Some things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you think that you learned working at Apple and thinking about them enough to you can distill

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them into a coherent way and make it a theme of your book and support that theme is a good thing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do instead of just entirely being like, you know, like a travel log or like a diary, dear diary, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what I did today, here’s what I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} today. Like there is an overall

⏹️ ▶️ ^John theme. And surely if you ended your career at Apple, you would think about that and you would, you know, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that is a reasonable thing to do. The thing to avoid and the thing is book mostly avoids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the most part is and this happens in tons of other Apple books, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple did a thing thing was successful. Therefore everything Apple did that led to that is a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you should do to be successful to that’s what every business book says, right? Which is like the worst possible analysis. the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same thing that anyone who’s successful like it could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they think every like they can’t distinguish like because Apple operates in this way and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was successful you too should do these things so then you’ll be successful like well all we have is this is the way I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John operate and they were successful but for all we know Apple would have been a hundred times more successful they didn’t operate that way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you know the thing that made them successful is not this way of operating or this particular thing or the fact that they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know pizza on Tuesdays and if you have pizza on Tuesdays, you’ll make an iPhone too. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very easy. It’s very easy when you’re fantastically successful as a large endeavor to look at every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John single thing you do. And say those are pick out the ones that you think were important.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like every morning I have a hard boiled egg, right? It’s important to have breakfast. If you don’t have breakfast, you’re never going to make the iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, people think all sorts of weird stuff, right? So there’s a there’s a little tiny bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of we were successful. And this is how we operated. therefore this led to our success.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not as much as in most other books and the thing is like this book is much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better about like this aspect of a product I think you know was successful after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John struggles but it wouldn’t matter if it was if this keyboard was put into a crap product it would have failed like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as as a cog in the machine you don’t get to decide that you’re going to make a phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with or without a keyboard hardware keyboard you You just get assigned the task of making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the software keyboard and making it work. But big picture wise, if it was a terrible idea to make a phone with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a software keyboard, no matter how good they made the keyboard, it would have failed. And it could also be argued that if they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made the keyboard terrible, that the iPhone would have succeeded anyway because they would have worked out the issues. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brings up the Newton as handwriting recognition syncing. So I’m not saying like, oh, what you did doesn’t matter. But all I’m saying is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s very difficult to draw conclusions in the big picture from you did. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and, and saying that directly that to your success. And to that end, I think one of the things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was interesting about this book and definitely ranked true to me knowing people who work at apple is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you know, if I don’t know how many, how many people know in real life people who work at apple these days, maybe, you know, people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who work in apple retail, cause that’s like a huge number of employees. But if you know anyone who works at apple, if you read books about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apple and stories about them, you will probably be surprised, especially if you’re especially if you’re a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person who works in a big company to learn exactly how few people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple employs to work on particular things. How many people were working on the keyboard for the original

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone? What would become Apple’s most important product? Was it a team of 100 people? It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not. It was like basically one person with some helpers. It was not a lot of people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How many people were on the safari team for for like the first year, three. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have really small teams. And if you work at a big company, where you work on a 10 person team that works

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on like one tiny corner for some strong enterprise application, that 10 person team adds like one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature every month to that one tiny corner, and then Apple makes it, puts a three person team on for a couple years and gets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Safari. Like, it can be depressing. It can be, you know, you’d say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, what are we doing wrong? The other part is it can be inspirational to say, Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and this is goes to describing the system. Like, is the fact like, you know, this book does a good job of explaining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what it’s like to be a developer at Apple. And it’s, as Casey said, it’s very different than a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of, it’s much more like a startup. Because the startups, they operate like this because they don’t have a lot of people. And it’s informal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and there’s lots of personal opinions and you don’t have the staff to do like, this methodical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system involving research and some sort of, you know, all the sort of business

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. Like they’re not doing agile on this particular team in Apple, although maybe other teams were. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not using a methodology. They’re not using this elaborate planning and estimation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system. There’s not a lot of management overhead. It operates much more like a startup.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they get amazing things out of it, right? The book

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more or less says, we worked this way, and this led to our success. And it does comparisons with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google, who there’s some stories about some teams at Google working very different way and saying they weren’t successful and we were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John therefore this way to work is better. That way to work is definitely different. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has pros and cons though. Like if you have really good people, it’s awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s the best way to work. If you don’t have really good people and you put two mediocre people on you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will never get safari out of a two or three person team, right? And so like a lot of that I’ve said this before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of like the business methodologies and software methodologies is a way to get good products

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of so so employees, which is an important thing. It’s not like, oh, it’s insulting. You should feel bad that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re a so so employee. Like we’re probably all so so employees, right? Like all in the in the grand scheme of things, we’re not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John None of us are like writing operating systems or web browsers by ourselves that are taking over the world for the most,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John except for maybe Marco. But like it’s important to have those those methodologies in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s why I think it’s a dangerous lesson for big companies to say we shouldn’t have these big teams and these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John systems and all this infrastructure. we should just say, give two or three person teams and just let them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go wild. And like, it’s such a cultural change that you can’t turn your big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company into Apple. And it would probably be dangerous to try and you probably don’t have the right employees

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do it anyway. But it is inspiring to see that system working at Apple. The darker aspect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it, which I think was highlighted in this thing and was emphasized as a benefit, which is like the demo culture,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you iterate by making a thing and then demonstrating it. And I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the idea of making demos for themselves among their little team and showing it to each other as a way to just test their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ideas and stuff like that. And basically, all of them using their personal pains and tastes to herd a product towards something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s good, which relies on you having employees who have good taste, essentially, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who are smart and have opinions that will lead to good products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The downsides of that is if all of your teams are entirely made of three white dudes, you are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to be blind to certain aspects of products that make them good. Maybe you’ll produce a health app with no ability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to track menstruation for many years, like all sorts of things will will will will potentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be blind spots. But the upsides are also big. But one of the other downsides of of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the small demo culture is the idea of and this is probably worse when jobs was there and even forestall the idea of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking a bunch of people who worked really hard and something and thought about it a lot and iterated and talked to us each other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and giving them 10 minutes in front of a God figure to which will issue some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of snap judgment with incomplete information, overriding the opinions and experiences of the people below

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. And in some respects, that’s what you’re paying them for. You have a Steve Jobs or a Scott Forstall because in theory,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have the best taste and the best instinct for what makes a good product. Someone has to decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that’s their job. That’s why they are the CEO or the vice president and you are not. On the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hand, they are very often the least informed on an issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I wouldn’t want a five minute essentially performance to be an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John environment where an idea that really was the best idea gets shot down on a whim by somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who doesn’t know all the know all the factors. Now you can’t have you can’t have you know, too many too many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chiefs, not have Indians, whatever, like everyone can’t be the boss. Like I understand the things about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of a lot of the scenarios where he was describing those demos. I was like, Oh boy, this is not the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would want like a really important decision to be made about a really important product. Now that it needs to be a giant committee or whatever, but I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much more comfortable about a group of five or 10 peers arguing amongst each other over the course of weeks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and trying things out to come up with a solution. I don’t like seeing that being brought up and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being given a thumbs up, thumbs down by Caesar up in the upper levels of management.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, to the credit of the people involved the story. If that person happens to be Steve Jobs, guess what? You’re really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lucky because he’s really smart and has a great great track record. Same thing with Scott Forstall. And all the stories in the book are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like cases where something was brought to the higher ops after being worked on for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the higher ups not only made the right call but also added value and saying, you know, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re doing, okay, but I have an idea that will make it even better. And it actually was better because you guys down the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trenches, you’re maybe a little bit too close to it, or even just like going ancillary for the UX people where the guy was like, Oh, can’t you just put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a letter on each key? Right? That was a weird way to say it. But that was the right call.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that that I think is one of the best aspects of Apple culture is that, like, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a big company, maybe, you know, certainly as big as mine, maybe also as big as Casey’s, if someone from another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John department gave a cranky snarky opinion about like the keyboard that you were

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} showing, they’d be like, hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, they’d be like, this is not even your department. Like, it would be It would be like if the, you know, if the market,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like essentially the marketing department has an opinion about what the keyboard should be, it’s like, you’re not even in the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John group, like shut up, like they’d be, they’d get dirty looks, certainly their opinion wouldn’t be taken seriously, certainly it wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John affect the thing, but in this environment, everyone is there to contribute, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all trying to work on the same, I mean, think of freaking Phil Schiller who came up with the click wheel for the iPod, he’s in marketing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he came up with the click wheel for the iPod, a pretty big feature of the iPod, the big wheel on the front of it, the marketing guy came up with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, right? who came over gave him the logjam of all the developers like oh we got to have big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hit areas so we’ll have keys multiple keys on them for months and months they’re banging their head against this and the UX guy’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like can’t you just make it like a single key on the key cap and then they went back and instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like being annoyed or getting angry each other Ken went back and said yeah maybe I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could do that and just like the buttons will be bigger but we’ll still show the key caps not to freak people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out essentially was one of the biggest breakthroughs in the entire product and it’s to the credit of the engineers that they listened to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person and it’s the credit of Apple that person felt empowered to say that wasn’t immediately

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shut down. There wasn’t like interdepartmental fighting over it and everything like you know that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a beautiful example of the system working. I’m sure we can all think of if you’ve ever worked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a startup I’m sure you can all think of examples of exactly that same system not working and descending into chaos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and just like blood being on the walls everywhere and just yeah, so it can definitely go horribly wrong. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I I read the book with like fascination and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John joy at seeing like things fire in all cylinders and fear that people read the book

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and think that they can recreate Apple in their own companies and some trepidation about whether this is actually a system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that should ever be imitated or whether it’s just like there are aspects of it that you should that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you should take away from it as being good. But but the bulk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the lesson I feel like you could take from this book is here is one person’s story. Here’s what it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like to be this person in this position at this time making this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think that like that that alone is enough. You shouldn’t be reaching to draw anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John grander from it than just sort of like taking taking this person’s experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they shared with you and try not to go overboard with the modeling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your life after what you read about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was funny though for me to hear, or I guess I should say read,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey passages wherein Ken described like classic issues that I’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at places I’ve worked in the past. I have a couple of quick highlights.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, I would tell you a page number, but A, it’s not showing on my Kindle right now, and B, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But in a chapter somewhere in this book, he wrote, you could have conflicting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lines of authority and fail to ever reach universally recognized final decisions. Like when a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of people all think that they’re the most important person in the room, all saying, this is what you should do. Bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things happen. And that is something I saw a lot. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where was another one? Oh, here we go. This one’s a little bit longer. So bear with me. Detached high-level managers making all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the key decisions is such a widespread affliction that it has its own internet meme, the seagull manager. It describes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a top executive who is rarely around, but flies in occasionally and unexpectedly from who knows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where, lands on your beach, squawks noisily, flaps its wings all over the place, launches itself back into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the air, circles overhead, drops a big poop on everyone, and then flies away, leaving the rest of the team to clean up the mess,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey figure out what it all meant, and wonder what to do about the inevitable follow-up visit. At my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey last job, we called this the Swoopin’ Poop, and it happened all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And this is what you were describing earlier, John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, see, but Steve Jobs did that all the time, too. Like, that’s the thing. he would occasionally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do the swoop and poop. It would be like he would come swooping in to a department that’s working on a thing that he knows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much less about than they do and say, this looks dumb, I don’t think you should do that, and then leave. And that it basically means,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t do that particular thing, or do that thing differently. And they would take serious, it’s inevitable when you have a powerful person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially a powerful charismatic famous person, they come in and they mention something offhand about how they think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that screen should be simpler, or there should only be one of those things, or this whole application should be in one window. They come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, they say that one afternoon, they leave. you are left to say, guess what? We are rewriting our application. It’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in one window. Why are we doing it? Because the seagull boss came by. Now, again, if your seagull boss is Steve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Jobs, you basically won the lottery because his track record is really, really good. If it is not Steve Jobs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the poop is less appealing to clean up, I guess. You have less faith that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the scrambling that you have to do will actually result in something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better. I mean, I keep debating whether I think this is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an anti-pattern or a good thing. Like in a situation where you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an authority figure, especially a charismatic one that you actually admire and look up to, the employees are motivated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to please the leader, right? They’re motivated. You want to please, you work at Apple during this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time, you want to please Steve Jobs. Like presumably you like him, you think he’s good, you like his company, you’re working at it in the height

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of his, you know, his power and his influence, you want to please him. Which sounds like a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John motivation, But on the other hand, I would rather people be wanting to make good products

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than wanting to please their master. Right. And again, if your master is Steve Jobs, that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically align, you will probably end up making good products, products if you do what Steve Jobs wants or what Scott Forrestal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wants or what all these good people down the line do. But I don’t want the motivation to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John please the authority figure. Like that seems like a misaligned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John motivation. And you don’t want to end up elevating them and just taking everything they say is the word of of God because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the important person. You’ve seen this in many companies where people who are not Steve Jobs nevertheless

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have tremendous authority and power, and so many things are done to make that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person happy, even just working to make your direct supervisor happy so you’ll get a promotion. It’s part like you start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John playing the metagame and stop playing the game game. That is an affliction as well. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if there’s any avoiding seagull management and sometimes it’s what you need. I mean, hell, even Bill Gates did it when like, Let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turn this whole company around and get focused on the Internet. You know, he came and laid a giant turd on Microsoft,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it was the right thing to do at the time. Like in some respects, that’s that’s the role of the CEO. That’s the role

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of upper management. Someone has to make that decision. So you don’t get into the situation described before where there’s no clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decision at all. Big big companies are hard. Like again, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know people who work at Apple, you know, Apple has lots of the same big company BS to there’s lots of variation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John within Apple. Apple is not homogenous. It never has been and probably never will be. But big picture wise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like this is not the book to describe, like how the five generals and Steve Jobs actually changed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the company. Like there are a lot of other books to talk about that. This is just talking about someone who’s a couple levels down from a general

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about one corner of the company, which I think is much more interesting and there needs to be more books like this and fewer about the five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John generals. But when you get down into this level, I bet there are tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people who can describe working in Apple during the exact same time period in a totally dysfunctional group that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not successful and it produces crap. That’s just not this story. One more thing on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John book. I just want to emphasize what Marco said. I love the illustrations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I didn’t expect it to be any agreed any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pictures. I I I think there’s maybe two other books that I’ve ever read about Apple that have any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of pictures. These were fun kind of cartoony pictures, some which depicted people that I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was fun to see. Oh, look at the cartoon, right? Is it was is a lot of fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They were like the whole book is very, you know, sort of casual and interesting and clever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And, you know, I feel like Ken’s personality comes through in it. Definitely. I feel like they massage his

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably massage his writing a little bit like I feel a little bit of the writing like has been polished up to the point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where I feel like it’s less of his personality coming through. But there’s a there’s a certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are a bunch of different sort of personalities that you’ll you’ll meet if you meet people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have worked at Apple during this time or like there’s a certain kind of personality I feel like that fits in well at Apple both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the old Apple and in the new Apple and I’m sure it changes but like I you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve met some people from the original Mac team I’ve met some people who there are on jobs is there I know some people who work there now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it changes and there you know definitely differences or whatever but the sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fun-loving impish like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not not like joking in a mean way, but like joking in a good humored way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uh, dedicated sort of resilient people. Those are the people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John end up being successful and enjoying their stay at Apple. If they, if that’s how they behave,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a lot of the people who would be successful at a more like dog eat dog corporate business would probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not be as happy or successful at Apple. Um, and so I feel like Ken is definitely one of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of happy travelers that, that I, that I’ve met who who have worked at Apple or still do who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who thrive in that environment, who do great work, who enjoy it, who are able who are able to do it without

⏹️ ▶️ ^John burning themselves out because the pressures are tremendous there, right? So you have to have some kind of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not laid back, but an ability to like, not just like eat yourself alive with stress,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? To sustain yourself in that environment for any long period of time without just entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John burning out and going nuts. And you know, all the people, you know, we listened to the debug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John podcast for Guy English talks to a lot of people who are there around the same time. And I feel some of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people who are higher up in the org chart, the pressure was a little bit, you know, got to them a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little bit more because it was just tremendously like the closer you get to Steve Jobs, the more like erodes your soul or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the pressure starts to erode you. But Ken seemed to be in a sweet spot. He briefly was it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a management role that he thought he wanted and quickly bailed on that. And that was a fun chapter of the book to where it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to be the manager. Why am I getting not getting promoted him, it’s like, Oh God, I don’t want to be a manager.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Quickly retreated to development, which is great that Apple allowed that to happen. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I get if you work for a company that’s not as kind as the circle of people that was around him when he worked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there, you can imagine him, you know, burning out or bailing out of that company. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’d be like complaining about knocking a promotion. You are a troublemaker or fine. We’ll give you this promotion grudging.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, now you don’t want it. Well, guess what? We’re going to slowly exit you from the company over the course of the next year and a half because you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just a problem child. But they didn’t. It was a nurturing environment and they understood that people are human.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if he wasn’t there, you wouldn’t have had many great things that we take for granted about the iPhones. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just goes to show that being kind to people and working to find their place in the company instead of just saying, you’re not a perfect fit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you’re annoying, therefore, let’s ease you out of the company. That’s a bad strategy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. So it was a good book. I enjoyed it. You should read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Yeah. Agreed. And it’s yeah, Creative Selection, Ken Kushenda. Highly recommended.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to sponsors this week, RxBAR, Prime Video Channels, and Marine Layer. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to our former sponsor, Create a selection by King Tishenda. And we’ll talk to you next time.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ll see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you next week. Now the show is over.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t even mean to begin because it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was accidental. John didn’t do any research. Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Casey wouldn’t let

⏹️ ▶️ ^John him because it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was accidental. You can find the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show notes at ATP.FM. And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, check the podcast so long

Marco’s ocean status

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why don’t we do a quickie after show to get an update on Marco’s ocean status, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has been in these notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for several months. Oh yeah, what the hell is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about? So I will give the context. The context is that Marco, a long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time ago, didn’t like the beach. He was not a beach person. Didn’t like it. I forget what his specific complaints were.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It could have been an Atkins Skyworker thing where he didn’t like sand, but whatever. He didn’t like the beach. He married a woman

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from Long Island, so inevitably he was fated to come around on this. So since then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he started vacationing during the summer on the beach and now he likes the beach.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the next step would be, okay, you go to the beach every summer and you like it. Do you go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John swimming in the ocean, which is part of the beach? It’s the non land part.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And his answer was no. I think like this summer, maybe last summer, and I’ve always been waiting to see when he’s going to take the next step

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and go from someone who didn’t like the beach to someone who likes the beach to someone who likes the beach and goes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there every summer and goes in the water, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a big feature of the beach. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I just wanted to get an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John update. This summer has Marco taken the next step in his

⏹️ ▶️ ^John beach life and gone into the ocean to go swimming?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, I’ll go in with my legs, but I haven’t gone swimming in it really. I’m not a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really like I can barely swim I I’ve been meaning to work on that and I take like adult

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco swim lessons But I can I can barely function in the water And so that’s that’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the main story. I I was never that into it as a kid You know haven’t really revisited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that as an adult yet the reason why I Like the beach

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much Has very little to do with being in the water like there’s so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else about it that I love and and that’s just one part of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The main things I like about being there, like it’s a whole town, it’s a whole community, it’s a whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different way of life out there. It’s like on Fire Island there’s no cars, and so everything is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re walking everywhere, you’re biking everywhere, there aren’t really streets, there’s just like these big wide sidewalks and everyone else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is walking and biking, and it’s like a nice safe place to let your kids and your dogs run around,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s just really nice. Like, a recipe for happiness on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a vacation for me is a place that is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco familiar enough. Like, hopefully they speak the same language as I natively do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that’s a very different experience from my everyday life at home. So, like, if I go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco visit another city, well, like, you know, cities don’t do much for me most of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time, because they’re all pretty similar. Like, the difference between cities are not that big. Whereas, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, when I visit a place like this, it’s totally different. The entire way of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco life is totally different. And yet, it’s a really close drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to my house, really. Like, it’s like I can be there in two hours, if you include the boat ride. Like, I can be there in two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hours. And so, it’s, you know, it’s easy to get to. There’s no, you don’t have to fly to get there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They speak my language. They take my money. They even have Fios. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a totally different experience. And it’s an experience that I, and a way of life

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I really, really enjoy. And so that’s part of it. It’s also just like environmental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like being near the water is really nice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if you don’t go in it that much. You still get like that wonderful breeze all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the time. You get the sea air. You get the more temperate temperatures in the summertime,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is, you know, like, I hate air conditioning, but I use air conditioning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the time at home because where I live the rest of the year doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get a lot of breeze. There’s almost no air movement here. It’s pretty much the only big downside of the climate here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s not a lot of options for cooling off when it gets like really humid and hot outside because the air just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of sits and we don’t have too many fans. So it just kind of just, it just kind of sits.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco At the beach, it’s cool enough and there’s enough wind that I don’t need air conditioning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the vast majority of the time. And to me, like air conditioning sucks. Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re sitting in air conditioning, which I am right now, actually, if you’re sitting in air conditioning, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on outside. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically isolated from the entire world because the rest of the world is kind of uncomfortable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for you. But what that means, like it’s not a good solution. Like air conditioning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t work by filling the room with a 74 degree breeze.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It works by blowing 40 degree air into a hot, sweaty room periodically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and hoping that kind of gets around. And the result is when you’re in air conditioning, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never acclimated to the outside temperature and the inside temperature for very long. And so you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have these stupid transitions where like you like, you know, you go to work in the summertime wearing like a light

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco outfit. You get there, it’s freezing. You want to put on like a sweater in July because that’s the right temperature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for air conditioning for it to work correctly and be comfortable. you go back outside you’re plunged

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back into the heat again like that sucks all the transitions suck it’s weird to have to put on a sweater in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco summertime because you’re conditioning too cold if you put it up higher it doesn’t work like air conditioning just sucks like there’s a lot about it that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sucks I see why it’s necessary in a lot of places it’s necessary in my home

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but at the beach it is mostly not most of the time I don’t need it there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so it’s just it’s a whole different environment in addition to the whole different lifestyle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of how you function in this town with no cars and everyone’s like reading you know riding bikes and walking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everywhere I love walking and it’s flat like I don’t like walking uphill that much it’s mostly flat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so there’s not a lot of walking uphill like so it’s a great place to do things I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to feel the way I like to feel in a really nice place

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and part and it part of that is that the ocean is right there and so you know I’m working on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff Like, one of the reasons I didn’t like the ocean before, or I didn’t think I did, was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t like seafood. And I’ve been slowly learning to like seafood, basically. Which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is surprisingly possible. Like, I didn’t think it would work. My strategy was basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every time I went to a restaurant, I would try some of whatever Tiff ordered. Because it’s almost always seafood.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When I tried it when I was like 20, that never worked. I just hated everything. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my theory was kind of like a tolerance. Like if I just try this like twice a week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will probably eventually like some of it or at least be able to tolerate it. And for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years I was so disappointed that I couldn’t like seafood because I like fancy food. I like everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is usually served with and on top of and around seafood. Just didn’t like the fish or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And now I’m doing that. I’m like I’m eating some of these things. Not a lot yet, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco eating some of these things and I’m okay with some of these things and sometimes I even choose to order some of these things. So anyway, it’s this whole thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but like, you know, broadening my horizon and everything and going into the water to a deeper level

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is next on that list. But there’s so much about the beach that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just love about the town, about the environment, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it isn’t all about the water for me. Like the water is one part of many of this place I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I’m glad it’s on your list because all those things you listed are all great, but I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going in the water is a very big part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the sensory experience of the beach basically because it’s all around you like the waves. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not just a still puddle of water like it is a full body all five senses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big thing and it like like you know like like all the aspects of the experience you were describing like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more of your senses than you engage the more the more it will be a lasting and powerful memory, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John smell, the more it will be a place that you think about and come back to. And going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John swimming, especially in the ocean and having fun in the waves, really powerfully

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engages every single one of your senses, including taste, because you will get the water in your mouth. So smell, taste, touch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like sight, sound, everything. It’s all even just getting knocked down in the waves and getting pulled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John under and the fear associated with that joy, happiness, fear, like it’s just all in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, right? And And it it can be daunting, right? So that’s why it’s a thing that you definitely ease into right? And you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, especially if you’re doing this, don’t like you’re easing into the seafood and all that other stuff. But I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s it is worth it is worth doing to like I I make it a point because I go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on beach. I grew up on my own. I’ve been to the beach a bazillion times. It’s not like an experience that I’m missing out on. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like we go there every year for our beach vacation. And I’m mostly just, you know, running around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and wrangling kids and dealing with stuff like that. But I make it a point every time we go to make sure I remember you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should also do all the things you did. Yes, even though you did them 100 times during your youth,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s nothing new. You’re not brought in your horizons at all. Uh, and you’re, it’s not an experience that you haven’t had,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but keep doing it. Like make, make a point to do it. Make time for like, for me, basically the thing is put down the camera,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like give it to somebody else and take a time to go swimming. Yes. And not just go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John swimming in the bay, go swimming in the ocean, go out pass the waves, do all the things, go on, put your head under,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go, you know, all the stuff that you’ve done, like, go through the checklist. Because I find that if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t do that, I feel like I’m somehow missing an important aspect of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the vacation. So I’m glad it’s on your list, you know, and take it easy with it and, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t like go in when it’s calm, take swimming lessons if you need to, do all the things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I think it will really add an important aspect. parts of like getting out of the water, feeling your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John skin tighten as the salt water like dries on it and having you know having it in your hair and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just like the way it makes your body feel and smell for the rest of the day or going back to that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s all it’s the It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The ocean is great. guard the ocean.

catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

293: You Know My Pouches

Chapters

iPhone XS review

Watch Series 4 review

Marco’s ocean status

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