295: Outlets That Suck
11 Oct 2018Casey’s future Panerai won’t have Walkie-Talkie mode, but he can always use his house’s intercom system instead.
Episode Description:
- Watch pontification
- Trading in with Apple GiveBack
- Follow-up:
- ARMv8.3 improves JavaScript benchmarks
- Minecraft left Apple TV
- Screen Time
- iCloud Family accounts
- Apple Watch Walkie-Talkie
- Intercom systems and central vacuums
- Bloomberg's story on Chinese spy chips
#askatp- Storyboards for iOS development? (via Bastian Inuk)
- What's the worse compromise: Fusion Drive or hybrid cars? (via Spencer Wohlers)
- Do we enjoy racing games? (via Marc-André Weibezahn)
- Post-show: RIP manual transmissions?
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Outsmart average. Get up to 1 year managed free.
- Molekule: The only air purifier that actually destroys pollutants.
- Mack Weldon: Better than whatever you’re wearing right now. Get 20% off your first order with code ATP.
Chapters
- Casey’s Watch Waffling
- Follow-up: Watch size 🖼️
- Apple GiveBack experiences
- ARM + JavaScript
- Minecraft leaves Apple TV
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- Screen Time
- iCloud family setups
- John’s contact photos
- Sponsor: Molekule (code ATP)
- Walkie-Talkie
- Sponsor: Betterment
- The Bloomberg story
- #askatp: Storyboards
- #askatp: Fusion drive vs. hybrid car
- #askatp: Racing games
- Ending theme
- Neutral
Casey’s Watch Waffling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I haven’t bothered picking up a watch. And at this point, I’m like, I don’t know if I should even bother. Jared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Polin, Jr.: Why? Are we too close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the next one? Steven Penney, Jr.: No. I just feel like I’ve missed all the excitement at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jared Polin, Jr.: Obviously, he doesn’t need it if he’s getting by without it so long. Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Penney, Jr.: Yeah, exactly. Jared Polin, Jr.: So two things. Number one, it really is the big deal. And if you care this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much, you probably should buy it. But number two, if the only reason you wanted to buy it was to participate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the wave of newness, then you shouldn’t. Steven Penney,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jr.: I didn’t think so. But now I’m wondering. Now I’m wondering if maybe that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a very bad reason to buy it because that’s very short-lived. But if you wear the Apple Watch every day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you really are into the Apple Watch, you should buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s what it boils down to. I think both of those things. I don’t know if I’m really into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple Watch. What does really even mean in this context? But I take your point and I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in spirit, what you mean is spot on. And I probably should go find one. I haven’t looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at iStock now in a while and I haven’t just ordered online because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, literally just like walk into a store like in the morning, like you know now that you don’t have a job, you can do this. Like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know your local store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m doing my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right now. It probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opens at like 10 in the morning. Just go there at 10 in the morning one day and say, hey, do you have any? And they’ll say yes or no. And if they say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, say hey, what time do they usually come in? And I’ll tell you like 1 p.m. And then so next time show up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 1 p.m. and say, hey, do you have any? Right. I bet I bet if you actually do that, I bet you can get one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re probably right. I have been making a habit of looking at iStock now like a fool, although, oh, I actually This is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll turn this into follow-up now.
Follow-up: Watch size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went to my friend’s house. I think we didn’t talk about this on the show. Did we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I think it was after we recorded One of the husband has a 44 the wife has a 40. I Think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gotta go 40. I think I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 40 lifestyle is awesome I really enjoy the 40 like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good size it it really is much better proportioned For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so I’m curious your reason, you know But my reason stands that I care about how a watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks on my wrist. I care about the proportions of it. And I get a lot of value out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small watch being sufficient on me because that’s graceful. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pleasing. It’s lighter. It’s smaller. That actually is more valuable to me. The smaller I can go and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still look reasonable on me. And so I’m curious your reasoning because you’re more into it than me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a computing platform. So why do you say 40?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just from looks, I think that the 42
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked on the upper edge of okay on my wrist. As I look down on my wrist now, I think I’m right on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ragged edge of it being okay. And even though the 44 is only two millimeters, and maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in my head, who knows? But at the end of the day, even if it’s in my head- It’s not. Let’s suppose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. I still got to look at my own darn wrist every day. You know, and if I look at it and go, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then that’s not a good thing. And so even though I really don’t want to get rid of my bands, which is funny because I only have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like three or four, only one of one or two of which are actually decent, it makes me kind of not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sick, but it makes it bums me out to, you know, not being able to use the stuff I already have on what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appears to be the same device. Like I totally understand it. I’m not saying Apple did anything wrong here, but that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, when I tried on this, my, my friend, Steve and Kristen, when I tried on Steve’s watch, it didn’t look,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t out of bounds, unacceptable. If that means anything, if that makes sense, it’s just, it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite look right on my wrist. And I thought it looked fine on his wrist. Um, his wrists are bigger than mine. And so I think that makes sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but on my wrist, I just didn’t think it looked quite right. And I thought that the, the 40 did look a hint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smaller than I would have liked, but all told, I think it looked better than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 44. And I think part of this is just some, I don’t know, uh, maybe latent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, or subconscious angst about me not having the wrists for like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Panerai because one of the first times I looked at a watch and thought damn that’s a good looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch was a friend of mine who was a watch nerd not Marco surprisingly because this was years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he had a Panerai forget the model but it’s one of the ones with like the weird clasp on the right hand side around the crown which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people hate and I think you’re in that camp Marco but I love I just think it looks really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I prefer the ones without it but yeah it is a it’s It’s a cool look overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all of their stuff looks pretty much the same and it’s all a pretty cool look. Although to be fair, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Panerai look is a statement of bigness. Like they are big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intentionally. That is the look. That is the style they’re going for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Powell I’m glad you said that. That is a perfect way to describe it. And I always thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, yeah, they’re huge and were just comical on my wrist. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried my friends on once and it was hilariously oversized. But I always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought to myself like, and this was even years ago when I was just wearing either no watch or like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crummy Timex wristwatch, you know, that was like 25 bucks a target, which I loved and it’s actually a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good looking Timex. You’re probably thinking of the exact one I’m thinking of, both Marco and listeners. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I always thought to myself, you know, if I ever fall upon just an absurd amount of money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to get myself a Panerai and just not care about the fact that it looks ridiculously stupid. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I wish I had bigger wrists. Maybe I just got to take the Dr. Nick approach, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reference John, and get myself a little bit bigger so I can sport one of these watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But realistically, I think it’s just the 40 looks better than the 44. And there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something to be said for being able to share watch bands with Aaron, which I can’t imagine that would happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often, but it would be kind of nice to be able to share them occasionally.
Apple GiveBack experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think whatever it is I get around to pulling the trigger on a watch. I think I’m gonna do a 40 and Part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the reason I want to do it in the store It’s because I’m pretty sure I just want to you know trade in or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the term is in this context you know get rid of my my 44 that I’m wearing now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get a credit against the 40 that I would be buying and you can do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in store I thought that was the case and what I had read after having looked only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only briefly into this was that it’s actually much better to do it in store because I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do some amount of the assessment in store, whereas if you send it in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever third-party vendor is handling that, my understanding is they’re way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more aggressive about taking credit away. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, for the sake of discussion, I think my current watch is worth like $225, and let’s just say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true even if it isn’t. My understanding is if you go in store, you’re likely to get $200, $225 for it, whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case may be. But if you send it in, you’re getting like $150 at the best. You know what I mean? Because they just, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this has a tiny hairline scratch you can only see under a microscope that we have at our little facility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever the case may be. So I want to do it in store, and that’s why I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just ordered it. And so one of these days, I just need to walk in, like you said, and just give it a shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, for whatever it’s worth, on that topic, since this year I learned of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this system of of trading things in, I’d sent in a bunch of stuff. Over the last couple of weeks, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have sent in two iPhone 6s, an 8 Plus, my iPhone 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is still processing because it took a while to get there, and my Series 3 Apple Watch. All of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them so far, I don’t know about the 10 yet, but all of the other ones have given me the exact quoted price online.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh really, okay. Yeah. So is this Apple Giveback? Is that what I’m thinking of? Is that the term for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s run by, I think it’s run by two different companies, Brightstar or Fobio. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other ones except for the 10 went to Brightstar. The 10 went to Fobio. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went FedEx and the others went UPS. I don’t know if this is actually two different companies or two different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco receiving centers for different age devices. But so far it’s been totally fine. I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the full value of everything I sent in. I know I can get more if I go to eBay or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t want to deal with that. That’s the reason why I try to sell things on Twitter so often because dealing with eBay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is tricky and very risky. Even as a seller, it’s very risky. There’s a lot of scam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buyers out there. It is worth it to me to give up some of the value for an easy sale, and that’s what these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would give me. So yeah, for whatever it’s worth, I’ve been totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine with my experience with this company so far, but your mileage may vary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Moyer Yeah, I hear you. Also, we should tell everyone that we fired John from the show, so it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Green John never gets rid of anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking at these ugly Panerai watches. It occurs to me, I mean this is something that I think about,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sure some other people do, but do you guys ever worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about wearing things that can either injure you or increase
⏹️ ▶️ John of injuries to you? About the little, this ridiculous guard thing
⏹️ ▶️ John they have over the. Yes, it’s called a crown guard. Whatever. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So looking where that is, depending on what risk you wear it on, like if you fall and catch yourself with your hand
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re the palm of your hand goes to the ground. And so it’s like at a 90 degree angle with your forearm. That thing’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to like dig into and cut into the top of your hand. Like it just is
⏹️ ▶️ John a sharp piece of metal and it’s a big chunky watch. And it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco say it’s that far.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically, the same thing is like, you know, wearing earrings like that. You’re probably fine. But if you wear big dangly
⏹️ ▶️ John earrings, they can get caught in something and yank through your earlobe. and in a situation where your earlobe would otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John be fine, right? Like, so there are things that you can wear that can
⏹️ ▶️ John injure you or increase the severity of an injury that you would, you know, that you’d be injured anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John But wearing the thing increases the injury or makes it much more severe. And these giant watches
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely look like they would increase the severity of an injury or possibly injure you in a case where you wouldn’t have an injury in that
⏹️ ▶️ John area. And they can also protect you, I suppose, if you block bullets with them like Wonder Woman. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, it doesn’t stick out that far. It’s like it’s not no this is this is a non-issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does not stick out that far You’re not gonna injure yourself with your panoramic
⏹️ ▶️ John Even even just a regular watch with nothing sticking out on it can increase the severity of your injury if it
⏹️ ▶️ John snags on something or presses against some part of your skin because It’s just it’s a foreign object
⏹️ ▶️ John attached to you. I don’t know. I’m obviously I don’t I don’t even wear my wedding ring anymore I don’t wear
⏹️ ▶️ John earrings Don’t wear a watch. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we did you wear earrings at some point?
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. I didn’t use a tense that should lead you to believe that I did. No, I do not have
⏹️ ▶️ John any additional holes in my ears. That would be kind of, I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see this if we can somehow arrange
⏹️ ▶️ John this. I can get a clip on earring. I’ll put it on for you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right now. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I suppose that could increase the chance of injury as well. Even just a very simple earring, like because the post goes through, if
⏹️ ▶️ John your ear gets pressed against your neck, the post can go into your neck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if you’re to that point where that’s a risk, I think you have bigger problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you can’t wear earrings in gym class. They don’t want you to poke a hole in your neck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God. Or get your ear ripped out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the good news is if you fall into the water, the Panerai, isn’t the history of Panerai that it was like a diving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch or something like that? And so you would at least know what time it is as you’re drowning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The loom is so strong that as you go into the depths of drowning, you will see that time for quite a while as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go down. Precisely. And it’s so big that it’ll weigh you down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’ll hurry it all up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll go down faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should probably get started with some follow-up.
ARM + JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Greg Parker writes in that ARM v8.3 adds a new float to int instruction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with errors and out of range values handled the way that JavaScript wants. The previous instructions to get JavaScript semantics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were much slower, so JavaScript’s numbers are double by default, so it needs this conversion a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is with regard to the dramatically increased or improved benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the new A12 processor, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it did really well in the JavaScript benchmark. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is just depressing. It’s worse, I think, than the quote-unquote string instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John in x86. Because JavaScript, as we all know, is a dumb language. No
⏹️ ▶️ John one making a language today would decide, you know what, semantics for edge cases
⏹️ ▶️ John and Booleans and type conversion and how numbers are stored, no one would choose this. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not good. No one is like, I love how JavaScript handles numbers. It’s so obvious and does
⏹️ ▶️ John what I want all the time. It doesn’t have any weird edge cases. It’s just the best. No, it’s stupid. But
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re stuck with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like the way PHP named functions or orders arguments to things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like, I mean, JavaScript is a victim of its own success. It’s everywhere now. And they keep changing, you know, JavaScript.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s a lot of things like that, that you can’t, you would think, Oh, why don’t they just change it? Why did it change it? So they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John native in storage behind the scenes and not have everything be doubles. But that would change programs out,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would break programs, right? And the web, you know, they keep adding stuff to JavaScript and adding new
⏹️ ▶️ John features, but the fundamentals like that are changing slowly. Put it that way. I don’t know if they’ve changed at all, but they’re changing very
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly. So adding an instruction that lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly convert from JavaScript, stupid, everything is a double, even though you think it’s even though you
⏹️ ▶️ John start as the number one, it’s like, I know I’ll start that as a double. Please don’t write the whole like 53, 53
⏹️ ▶️ John bits of precision for you know integers even though it’s their 64 bits long anyway it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of stupid things about it but given that JavaScript does this
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have to follow these semantics having a CPU instruction that
⏹️ ▶️ John does this conversion and handles it the way JavaScript wants you to handle it in terms of what if I converted and it’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John big or too small underflow and overflown all of the stuff makes a JavaScript benchmark faster because the
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript benchmark maybe you know a couple of them are doing lots of stuff numerics where otherwise they’d be spending so much of their
⏹️ ▶️ John time doing conversions from into float to float in and back and forth. If you can do that 10 times
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, you get a higher score on the benchmark. So that is that’s gross
⏹️ ▶️ John and depressing. And I don’t want my CPU is perverted by a stupid language. But regular people just want
⏹️ ▶️ John web pages to be faster. And this gets the job done. So I suppose,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, yet more explanation of why the A12 does so well on this JavaScript benchmark, even if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a depressing explanation.
Minecraft leaves Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Minecraft is leaving the Apple TV. We’re grateful to the Apple TV community for their support,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we need to reallocate resources to the platforms that our players use the most. Don’t worry though, you can still play Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple TV, keep building in your world, and your marketplace purchases, including Minecoins, will continue to be available.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know nothing about Minecraft, so John, will you
⏹️ ▶️ John translate for me? Do you know that Minecraft is really popular?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although, I did not know it was on the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, and I think it was even in an Apple presentation at some point, anyway. Minecraft was a wildly popular game,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been popular for years and years, and the straightforward hot take on this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John as everyone has said who’s responding to these tweets about this, is that if you have a gaming platform
⏹️ ▶️ John where Minecraft feels like there aren’t enough users, where you can’t support Minecraft, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a crap gaming platform. Because it’s not like this is some obscure game. If Minecraft can’t get enough people to play
⏹️ ▶️ John it to justify porting it, like it’s incredibly popular, and the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who play it don’t demand super high performance or need to have a mouse and keyboard, or
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a platform exclusive like Apple TV, but they say, you know what, it’s not even worth it. It’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John worth it to like the most popular game in the world, like before Fortnite probably. One of the most popular
⏹️ ▶️ John games in the world, one of the most popular games ever made. It’s not worth their time
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in your play. And this is after a fairly high profile, even though none of you remember it, coming out and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Minecraft will be on Apple TV. Yay, see, it’s a good gaming platform. Notice, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re not pulling off of iOS. I think they still have a phone version and an iPad version.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s Apple TV in particular that they can’t be bothered with because not enough people
⏹️ ▶️ John play Minecraft on Apple TV. And that’s depressing. We’ve talked about Apple TV and games
⏹️ ▶️ John in general on Apple. And I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John probably should care about this because it’s a big external validation of the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV is not a good gaming platform. Like, not that you need much validation. It’s more like
⏹️ ▶️ John a dumping ground for people who have an iOS game and think, ah, you’ll probably make
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple TV or maybe it’ll be okay, but nobody is getting an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV to play games on it. It’s just not really a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure people who have Apple TVs might enjoy the fact that they can play games on it. That’s different than having a gaming platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’ve discussed in the past. If you really want to break into the gaming business, you can do what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John did and fall ass backwards into it and say, oh wow, games, they make a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you can set out to have a gaming platform, which is what Microsoft did. And that involves a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of giving people a lot of money and losing money over a long period of time and courting game developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John generally doing what Apple is doing with television now, which is like find talent, get them to make things
⏹️ ▶️ John for your platform, market it, and it remains to be seen if Apple will be successful. But that’s what it takes because gaming is
⏹️ ▶️ John an entertainment industry and you can’t just say, we have a platform, now come make great things for it
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s not how the creative and gaming industry works because all the other players are out
⏹️ ▶️ John there courting developers and trying to get the best content and getting platform exclusives and
⏹️ ▶️ John paying for marketing and paying for people to bring ports to the thing, like it’s difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John build critical mass. So Apple is back to its normal position which is people just seem to love
⏹️ ▶️ John to make games for our phone platform because we have a bunch of users who are willing to spend money
⏹️ ▶️ John on software and you can build your casino human nature exploiting free to play, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, casinos for children and we make tons of money off that and we somehow we managed to sleep at night.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but it doesn’t really require us to do anything other than sell lots of iPhones every year, which is itself a difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John task, but still it’s not. The iPhone is not a gaming platform first and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else second, despite games being by far the best seller in the app store.
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Screen Time
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Screen time is here, and I have barely looked at it, but I presume one of you has a little more thoughts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this than I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put this in here back when screen time was actually here, back with iOS 12 introduction. been sitting there and we have
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve had other things to talk about whatever. I put it in for a couple of reasons. One, I figure it’s a good time
⏹️ ▶️ John for us to check in with our own screen times to see if there’s any surprises. You know, I’m assuming we all have it turned
⏹️ ▶️ John on and occasionally we look at it. So what do we think about the information we found out there? But the second reason is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I also turned it on for my kids and I wanted to talk about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, this sounds fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John But let’s do let’s do us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. I thought I was using screen time. But until last night when I was trying to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why my settings has the one indicator on it. I didn’t actually have it turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. So I just turned it on last night. So I don’t really have useful data yet. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Most used for me, the Plex Beta, because that’s how I’ve been watching a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things here and there, like before I go to sleep. Tweetbot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey messages, Instagram, Safari, Facebook, surprisingly. I didn’t really think I looked at Facebook that much,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And mail. Ninety pickups a day, a thousand and five notifications. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is last seven days, 500, maybe more or more than 500. I don’t know. It just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says 500 messages, notifications. That’s my most 182 mail notifications, which have been on my to-do list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to turn that, crank that down even more than I already have. Uh, my garage door opener
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting pissed off about everything like, Hey, the light turned on, the light turned off, the garage is open. The garage is closed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to turn that down. Uh, Instagram, Our baby, she pooped, she peed, she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ate, etc. thing, ESPN and Slack.
⏹️ ▶️ John Matt Stauffer So no surprises for you except for Facebook, which you didn’t think you were using that much, but showed up in the top five or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jeffrey Pistone One, two, three, four, five, top six, but yes, that is an accurate description. Time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per day, it’s hard for me to tell. I don’t, I don’t know. Well, Tuesday apparently was six hours, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems pretty aggressive. But I don’t know. Yeah, the only thing I’d say I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can definitely glean from this is that I spend a lot of time on Twitter and messages, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew a fair bit of time on Instagram and Safari, which I knew more than I thought on Facebook. And I get a lot of text messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s interesting to me is that it’s my age. I mean, even though I have I have very small, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, number of values here, but it’s breaking down individual websites in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Safari and they look like apps. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they if they if they get up to like it’ll do if a particular website
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re on for a significant period of time, it ranks that website right alongside everything else. It still shows your safari
⏹️ ▶️ John total though, which is handy for the kids stuff to find out which websites they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. So I can’t say other than the, I mean, Facebook was what, 58 minutes in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven days, which is not egregious, but more than I thought to be fair. But anyways, other than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, I wouldn’t say there was that much that was really too terribly interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I’ve been watching, I use my iPad a lot and I’ve been watching TV shows on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So like Hulu is by far my number one, but they just like binged an entire season or something. And Netflix I was like
⏹️ ▶️ John in third place and Twitter Twitter’s usually is the top none. I’m watching video app YouTube surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John is I guess I’m not much one hour over the past seven days of YouTube, but it’s video, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, so I do watch I’m not I don’t know how to split stuff by device But this is all devices and
⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell you that all the videos on my on my iPad Other than me watching TV shows on my
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I think I’m using my devices less than you my average pickups per day is 17. Oh Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my God, you basically never touch your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You gotta get out of that whole pouch and everything. It’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the phone and the iPad, remember. It’s not just the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you do all… You really do love the Mac, don’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then my notifications per day is 29. And almost all of those are from Nest.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, security, camera stuff, noticing the light moving across the room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God, it’s the does do the nest engineers who design these like, you know sensing notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco movement kind of things Do they not ever test it in a room that has a window?
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of the time I get it is not the Sun by itself But like a branch with leaves on it swaying
⏹️ ▶️ John in the wind in front of the Sun making it like flicker and move But but I think most these notifications are
⏹️ ▶️ John Your nest cam thinks that here’s a dog barking and it’s right. It does my dog is barking. Sorry neighbors
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, second place is messages, uh, but it’s a very low number. Uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John third place is my dog’s GPS thing for notifications. Um, so yeah, uh, what this is telling
⏹️ ▶️ John me is that basically I’m watching a lot of video and Netflix, Hulu and YouTube and Tivo even one hour
⏹️ ▶️ John on Tivo. I think I watched, yeah, occasionally I’ve humming in bed already and want to watch TV
⏹️ ▶️ John show. I don’t bother going downstairs to watch it if I’m going to like, if it’s the last thing I’m going to watch before I go to bed or whatever, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John watch it there. So Uh, not a lot. And then Twitter is Twitter is by far my number
⏹️ ▶️ John one actual iOS app. It doesn’t involve watching videos. So no surprises for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do. I’m such an anti notification person just seeing obviously when you rank stuff, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to rank like, what is the thing that sends you the most notifications? There will always be a number one unless you have zero notifications on,
⏹️ ▶️ John there will always be a number one. But my instinct is to look at that number one and say, I’m going to knock you down.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got, I got to take whatever that number one is. Let me see if I can cut that number of notifications in half, but there will always be a number one.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like I can eliminate it. It’s like, if I follow this instinct, eventually everything will have notifications turned
⏹️ ▶️ John off. So, I mean, maybe I’ll make, I don’t know. I like, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Nest notifications. I like to be able to see if my dog is getting into something in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I like knowing like when the kids come home, they usually get a Nest notification for them walking in the door.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, so, but on the kids’ devices, I mean, transitioning into the kids’ stuff doesn’t sound like
⏹️ ▶️ John we have any dramatic news for our stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, hold on, before you do that, are you, either of you, I’m assuming not Marco, leveraging any of the like downtime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything like that? Because I really should explore that. Maybe I’ll set homework for myself that, um, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to play with that. Because as an example, we tend to eat dinner at around the same time every night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sometimes I’ll get a buzz or notification or something, or maybe just not have the self-control to not pick up my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, um, and I’ll be using my phone over dinner, which obviously any family time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn’t be doing it period. But particularly over dinner is kind of obnoxious of me. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll try that and set that up to give myself a little downtime during dinner and see how that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works out. But John, have you played with it? Well, let me start with Marco. I assume you haven’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I haven’t. I mean, I do schedule do not disturb at night, like when I’m expected to be in bed, but otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, I’m going to try some downtime and see how that works over dinner. John, what about you? Any downtime or app limits or
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t I don’t I don’t see why I would use downtime because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the thing that like Stops you from using your device, right or does it just lock out certain
⏹️ ▶️ John apps? Yeah, or yeah, but I don’t I don’t want to be locked out of anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean for me like, you know It’s just for me to try to add some kind of value to this discussion and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having any data myself yet I have spent you know periods in the past using things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like rescue time that can track what I’m wearing what I’m doing on the Mac And, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of stuff was never possible to do on iOS in some kind of like automated system wide way before, which is why screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time is noteworthy and useful now. But on the Mac, it’s been possible for a long time. And so I have done that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before for long spans. And just to do things, you know, kind of like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our friends have talked about, like on Cortex and what you, Casey, have so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done very poorly on analog about time tracking. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey a true story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what you’re basically doing here is like time tracking for the stuff you’re doing on your phone and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the value there is in not necessarily in like shaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you or in controlling you. The value is giving you information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about something that your brain is pretty hard. It’s pretty bad at estimating on its own. Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just ask most people like how many times you pick up your phone in a day and you know they’ll get some estimate. and it’s actually like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times higher because your brain’s not good at that. Or a more useful example of how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long do you spend browsing Twitter every day or every week? Like if you look at like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, if I want to get 40 hours of work in in any given week, how many of those hours am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wasting on Twitter? And you can get that information now. You have that information. And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had that information in the past, like on my Mac, that number has been scary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why I made Quitter. Like, that’s why, because I would see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, I’ve used Twitter for something like six hours this week out of the 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 50 or 60 that I was at my computer. That’s not good, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it to me. And so the main value in this is giving you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tools to do whatever you feel is necessary. And that might be nothing. You might decide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you see your data, like, you know what, okay, I already have a pretty good balance, I don’t need to do anything right now. But it’s useful to check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there every so often, just so you can see like, oh, I’m spending X hours a day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a week on this thing. Is that really worth it to me? Is that worth those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X hours a week? Or should I use these tools to help me reduce that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s really valuable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have guessed way more than 70 pickups per day. I don’t know if this thing is broken or what. I
⏹️ ▶️ John number looked accurate, but I don’t know if it’s counting my pickups quite right. I feel like I’d, well, I don’t know, maybe I added them up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I take out my phone more than 17 times a day today. I don’t know. But anyway, downtime,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, I use downtime on the kids.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey How’d that go?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s things that stops you from using your thing, and you can make exceptions for applications and stuff like that. But no, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use that. Do Not Disturb is the feature that I love,
⏹️ ▶️ John because although I have to sometimes remember that it’s on iOS 12, it’s kind of obnoxious with this banner, every time
⏹️ ▶️ John you have Do Not Disturb on, there’s a giant banner on your phone every time you look at it, just so you know, like, it’s on right now, so let me
⏹️ ▶️ John see what it looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find that great, honestly, because it prevents you from from leaving it on without realizing it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and missing everything for like a day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but this thing like time. I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do this time to do not disturb. This is my recommendation for
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody who’s listening right now. Set schedule. Do not disturb. Pick hours
⏹️ ▶️ John like be conservative. You want say I don’t want to be disturbed from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. Maybe start with that if you’re afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to be reached all times. Just pick some times of like after this hour. I don’t want to be disturbed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And and before this hour don’t want to be disturbed and just set time do not disturb for that time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s such a simple thing that I’m shocked that everybody doesn’t do it, but I always see people like, oh, I don’t want to do do not disturb or
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget when it’s on or I just set a schedule. It’s like, oh, then send something like, oh, but what if someone wants to reach me at 1001 p.m.?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like your favorites can get through, repeated calls can get through, like they’ll reach you if they need to
⏹️ ▶️ John get through, right? So my time do not disturb is like 9 p.m. to like 6 a.m. or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And that does for me what I think a lot of people are looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for for downtime. Well, maybe it’s not the same thing. Like I’m not preventing myself from using my phone. Phone works fine as far as I’m concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the point is if my phone is sitting next to me while I’m watching TV, it never
⏹️ ▶️ John disturbs my television because nothing will make it vibrate or make a noise, which is kind of annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John to other people who live with me because occasionally my wife or my kids will text me from
⏹️ ▶️ John upstairs. My kids will text me, not text me, I’ll get the notification from
⏹️ ▶️ John them they want to buy an app or download an app or extend their downtime, which we’ll get to in
⏹️ ▶️ John a second, and I won’t see the notification or my wife will text me and I won’t see the notification.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we’re in the same house. They could just come and get me if they really cared, but they’d be like, why didn’t you answer my text? Like, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see your text. Like my phone, my phone becomes dead to the world as far as notifying me
⏹️ ▶️ John about anything. But if I would need to pick up my phone and look up where an actor is from or something, it works fine. Like I’m not locking myself
⏹️ ▶️ John out of anything. So I don’t see that I would never use downtime. But that’s the exact feature I
⏹️ ▶️ John want for my kids because it’s just a sort of it’s computer enforced way
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing we have always had downtime in the house no electronics after whatever time right that’s been a rule forever
⏹️ ▶️ John but the problem is if you’re not on top of them they’re always trying to eke out that extra two or three minutes or they’re like oh just let
⏹️ ▶️ John me finish this thing that I’m doing or whatever and it’s just it’s a constant battle and you can shortcut
⏹️ ▶️ John that battle and not fight over those extra two minutes oh or whatever by just having the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John do it and there is a handy feature which they all quickly discovered which you can ask for an extension so if you’re in the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle of watching something and the big scary downtime banner comes over at precisely
⏹️ ▶️ John you know 9 p.m or whatever they can press a button on the screen that says ask for more
⏹️ ▶️ John time and we’ll get a notification that says you know so and so would like
⏹️ ▶️ John to have 15 more minutes of youtube or whatever app they’re using like it’s specific to that app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you could say yes or no. Um, unless your phone isn’t doing that at the start, in which case you don’t see the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey notification. You have to wait for them to come
⏹️ ▶️ John wine in person, which is fine with me. Like, good. Take the stairs. It’s good exercise. Um, so we
⏹️ ▶️ John did that. Like a couple aspects of your I did that. I also wanted to see what they were doing, like to see their
⏹️ ▶️ John graph, like how much time they’re spending in each app. Not that it was surprising. Guess what? YouTube is really popular with both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, websites there on, which was interesting and led to some interesting conversations. But you know, It’s not it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not uh, i’m not like pouring over their entire uh history or whatever uh the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John time stuff or the downtime stuff was Very upsetting initially because they didn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John the hard line nature of it Especially before they discovered the the extension they didn’t like the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that it precisely, you know And the the hour takes over whatever the precise time there’s no ifs ands
⏹️ ▶️ John or buts doesn’t care if you’re in the middle of something Doesn’t care if there’s only one minute left on the show that you’re watching. It just doesn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It just now did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you tell them beforehand that this was going to be a thing or did you just turn it on and let them? You
⏹️ ▶️ John know I told them about the feature of iOS 12 when it was announced and have talked to them about it previously
⏹️ ▶️ John Gleefully saying it’s coming. It’s coming, but I didn’t like tell
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey them the day
⏹️ ▶️ John they knew I was upgrading all their devices I didn’t tell I think I anyway I probably caught a couple of my surprises
⏹️ ▶️ John by the fact that I was been talking about but they didn’t know Exactly when it would come a couple of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John How many more are there?
⏹️ ▶️ John know what? But my son got annoyed by it my daughter quickly adapted and shifted into
⏹️ ▶️ John just asking for extensions And I don’t know I mean they live with it It’s it’s fine like you can
⏹️ ▶️ John the tricky thing is before they have the extension thing my son is like I need I need to do My homework like fine. I’ll disable it for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I disable it, but I didn’t realize that I had permanently disabled like And so
⏹️ ▶️ John the next day he’s using his device past the deadline and we’re like did you turn it off first thing so I turned It back on
⏹️ ▶️ John So but I think now we’re just settling it. We you know, you can adjust the time and they’re in negotiations It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s not like a it’s again. It’s a thing that we were doing. Anyway, it’s just an additional tool
⏹️ ▶️ John to Make that interaction easier because for whatever reason The kids are
⏹️ ▶️ John more accepting that the computer is doing it to them Then if I came
⏹️ ▶️ John and hardline set up, it’s 9 p.m Like this I would do that and then it’s an immediate negotiation
⏹️ ▶️ John and whining and annoyance or whatever where if the screen just blanks over, then it’s on them to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John do I care enough about watching the last two minutes of this thing to go down and whine and beg or ask for an extension?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or do I not care enough? They have to come to me and say, I want, it
⏹️ ▶️ John puts a burden on them to do it. And it’s just, the path leads to the person who’s like, oh, I wasn’t doing anything anyway, I was just farting
⏹️ ▶️ John around on YouTube and they’ll pick up the video right where I left off tomorrow morning or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John when I look at it. So, you know, I think that’s mostly settled in fine. I do like
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing what they’re doing. I’m doing it again. Screen time isn’t the first time I’m seeing what they’re doing. I always look what they’re doing on their
⏹️ ▶️ John on their devices, which they hate, but it’s part of it’s part of being kid is your parents get to know what the heck you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing on the computer all the time. What video are you watching? What websites are you going to do? What is this about? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m always I’m always watching
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in real life.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they prefer this because at least then I’m not over my shoulder, not over their shoulder. Just say, hey, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that video about? They hate when I do that, but that’s parenting for you. You have to actually be aware of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, little Birdie is telling me that you’re downplaying how perturbed your son was when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this all landed. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I know, but like, I don’t wanna throw
⏹️ ▶️ John any kids under the bus. It’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s tough being a kid,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We all we all make adjustments like I ended up adjusting my son’s time
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a little bit different than my daughter’s because he’s older and to recognize the fact that he has less time for leisure because he does
⏹️ ▶️ John like sports after school. Right. And then he’s got to do homework. Right. And so the adjustments have been
⏹️ ▶️ John made to make it reasonably equitable so they can get in their minimum amount of YouTube time,
⏹️ ▶️ John although they really don’t have a case. When I look at like the YouTube totals for the week and how he’s like complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John like on a weekend when downtime kicks in and like, oh, you only watch six hours of YouTube today, which
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey watching YouTube is like a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that your parents would say that you would like playing Nintendo or whatever. Like what you watching YouTube is not a thing. He’s watching video,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If he’s watching a television show and he’s watching a season of a television show because there’s a season of a television
⏹️ ▶️ John show on YouTube, which is a thing like, oh, you’re watching quote unquote YouTube. It’s just like watching TV or movies
⏹️ ▶️ John only, or like what I did binge watching like a, you know, a sci-fi series on Hulu or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that it’s YouTube doesn’t change the fact that he’s essentially watching a TV show, right? So it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not that ridiculous. Although a lot of it is, of course, watching Fortnite videos, but I watch a lot of Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John videos, too, so I can understand. Anyway, it’s mostly working itself out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the big thing like this, this topic changed like, yes, let’s screen time for the kids. I’m finding it a valuable tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s you know, it can’t be the only tool and it should be. You should be doing this anyway. It can be helpful. I’m glad this
⏹️ ▶️ John feature exists in iOS 12. But now this topic suddenly changes, unfortunately, for people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like hearing us talk about bugs to a story about how screen time has decided
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s no longer interested in performing one of its major functions. So if you have a family
⏹️ ▶️ John in iCloud, uh, which I suggest you do, because there’s lots of cool features to come with it and you make a family and you put the members
⏹️ ▶️ John of the family and you put the kids in and you know, you have the, you know, the adults and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think only one person could be like the family manager, which just lets you add
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey them anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, when I go to screen time on my, any of my iOS devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John I see all my info. And then if I scroll down, there’s a section called family and it shows my two kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John not my wife. She’s also a member of the family, but it doesn’t show her. So I see my two kids and they’re in a little section on their own
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have a little, you know, rightward facing arrow. And it used to be when I
⏹️ ▶️ John would tap on one of them, you get, you see a screen that looks just like your screen where it says downtime app limits,
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed apps, content and privacy restrictions, include website data, you know, all the same things that you see
⏹️ ▶️ John on your own. And that’s where you can set what the downtime is for that kid, what the outlet app limits are, which is nice. I excluded
⏹️ ▶️ John apps like, you know, by default, like maps and messages are excluded. I excluded like FaceTime and
⏹️ ▶️ John I excluded excluded a whole bunch of things that are reasonable. Basically, if I could, uh, blacklist that all it has
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with blacklist YouTube and I basically destroyed their devices
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as far as they’re concerned, right? Um, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, and the content and privacy restrictions, you can not let them, uh, you know, rent, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John rated R movies. So for a longest time when you have a family, if a kid wants to buy something,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t buy anything. They can’t even download free stuff without it sending a notification to
⏹️ ▶️ John one or both of the parents’ accounts and saying, you know, Kate wants to watch the movie, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can see information about the movie, you can approve or deny. That feature’s been there for a while. It’s not a screen time thing, but that’s definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John a cool thing. If parents don’t know about it, you should definitely, there’s another reason to put people into a family. You definitely enable that. You basically know
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s no way your kids can download anything onto their devices without you approving it. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s a free app, especially if it’s a free app because I like these free-to-play games. Anyway, at the top it says
⏹️ ▶️ John screen time, and it’s got an all devices thing because they both have like phones and iPads at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in theory, if you tap on all devices you see it today and last seven days. There should be a bunch of graphs there just
⏹️ ▶️ John like there are for us, but instead what I see is underneath all devices it says as this device
⏹️ ▶️ John is used screen time will be reported here, and if you tap into all devices It today says nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the last seven days says nothing this worked fine for like the first two weeks of iOS 12 and Then
⏹️ ▶️ John for the past two weeks or so There’s just no data as this device is
⏹️ ▶️ John used screen time will report it to you. I assure you this device is being used No, they have not disabled screen time on their devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their devices are all set up fine You can look on their devices and see the info They’re all set up to
⏹️ ▶️ John share with iCloud like everything all the settings are correct. Nothing is disabled They haven’t somehow circumvented it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just both of them one day just disappeared. So now this feature that used to work is
⏹️ ▶️ John now entirely nonfunctional. I can’t see any screen time information for any of my kids anymore, despite it working
⏹️ ▶️ John for like multiple weeks. So that kind of annoys me because it’s one of those things like, well, what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I pulled the refresh. I tap. I turn screen time on and turn screen time off. Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know what to do. I tried all the things like I’m not going to delete the family and then
⏹️ ▶️ John recreate it because I’ll destroy a million things. So I’m hoping the dot update will fix this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this is pretty frustrating that a headlining feature that I was actually enjoying decided
⏹️ ▶️ John to just stop working and not entirely, because again, I can go to their devices and
⏹️ ▶️ John look it up on each one of their devices. But the whole point of this is as the, you know, family adult
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, I should be able to look at it on my devices. And they’re all listed here. I just can’t see any information
⏹️ ▶️ John about them. So I find this very frustrating. But aside from the bugs, I suggest
⏹️ ▶️ John all parents, a look into making a family with your kids. That you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what the process is. It used to be worse than it is now, but kids
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t have their own Apple IDs, which is what I suggest. Don’t try to share one amongst the whole family. Everyone in the family should have their own Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID. There’s a kid’s Apple ID. You can make a family. You can say which are the kids and which are the adults. And the kids
⏹️ ▶️ John you can, you know, require your approval to make purchases. and in theory you could see their screen
⏹️ ▶️ John time information. And these are all great tools for parents and I’m glad Apple’s added them. I just want
⏹️ ▶️ John them to go back to working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think you’re alone in this either. We heard from a lot of our friends who did this during the iOS 12 beta that apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed like screen time, like whether it tracked data for you or not, and especially whether it synced that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data, was seemingly very rough and buggy during the beta. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s possible they just haven’t ironed that out yet. So I would keep an eye on it and hopefully they will get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all worked out in the next couple of point releases.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I heard that too during the beta switch. I ran iOS 12 since like the second beta on my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John and I heard people saying, oh, screen time is fine, except like they were just doing it for themselves. Except like every once in a while
⏹️ ▶️ John with a new beta, it just totally wipes all my screen time data. I’m like, well, fine, it’s a beta, like they’ll wipe the data every once in a while, but
⏹️ ▶️ John surely once the release one comes, they won’t do that. This seems like a different class of bug in that the
⏹️ ▶️ John data is all still being collected. I just can’t see it from my phone, despite there being sections
⏹️ ▶️ John for their stuff. So yeah, I hope they work this out because otherwise it’s a pretty nice feature. The UI
⏹️ ▶️ John was pretty straightforward, which is actually a challenge because it is a fairly complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John and setting-filled thing to do, and they’ve managed to organize it in a way that I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have to. It was pretty obvious to me what was going on despite all the screens kind of looking similar
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything like that. So it’s a lot of buttons and a lot of settings and a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of semantics and a lot of information that they managed to organize in a nice way. just need to make it work.
iCloud family setups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are these days and I don’t think we have time for today. I’d like you to sell me on doing this iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family thing because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey geez. Do it. Well, I don’t know, man. Well, so maybe. Okay, fine. I guess we’re just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pull on the thread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. Number one, you share purchases. Number two, you have like, I think you share iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage. Yeah, you do as as a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John Consolidate to a single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bill. Yeah, yeah. Single bill, shared iCloud storage, shared purchases, although not in-app purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe those are still separate. Depends on the app right so certain types aren’t but for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most part you’re sharing most purchases you’re sharing media purchases and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have all these parental control things so you can you can do the thing where like your kid can ask for a game and you can approve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and stuff like that it’s really nice. I strongly and as far as I could tell like we set it up for our family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think whenever about a year after it launched like a few years back as far as I can tell there’s no downsides like I don’t I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think anything has gone wrong or is worse off since we set it up. It’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John You also get like automatic location sharing and you can prevent the kids from turning off location sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s all sorts of controls that are inconveniences because like if you have a family, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we all share our location with each other in perpetuity. But if you’re all in the same family, you don’t even have to set that up. Just they
⏹️ ▶️ John show up and you’re fine my friends because they’re part of your family all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting. Yeah. The way we’ve had it and have run this way since both of us got iPhones And remember,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Declan has an iPad that’s kind of dedicated to him, but basically it’s just a Daniel Tiger device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He almost never uses it outside of long car trips, and basically the only thing he uses on it is Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this isn’t really relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in traditional—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He’s your son, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right. Yeah, right? Exactly. Of course he’s using Plex. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John course he is. It’ll be relevant faster than you think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And so this is really, today, only about Aaron and me. And the way we’ve run it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the trick that a lot of people discovered by accident, which was different iCloud accounts with the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Store account. So we’re using my Apple Store account, but different iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounts. And to be honest, that’s generally worked pretty well for us. But I know I’m gonna have to pull this, you know, rip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this bandaid off sooner rather than later, to your point, John. So it’s not ruinous to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the switch from…
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, even just for you and Erin, like, you don’t lose anything by doing this. Because if you’re in the same family,
⏹️ ▶️ John she can still use all of your purchases. Again, plus or or minus the in app
⏹️ ▶️ John purchases. I don’t know how many of those you have, and it might be annoying to have to repurchase them or whatever. But the sooner you
⏹️ ▶️ John cleanly separate into your own Apple I d s like the simpler things become,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I mean, and I can’t. I was also worried about like, Oh, am I gonna have to rebuy anything? But in
⏹️ ▶️ John practice, I don’t think we had to had to rebuy anything. Maybe because we don’t do it many in app purchase. But um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, separating into several appropriate ideas across everything. But being in the the same family, gives
⏹️ ▶️ John you most of the benefits, and it’s just cleaner. And that part, all that stuff, the purchase approval and everything, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, it’s not part of screen time. That stuff isn’t really buggy. It was buggy in the beginning, but it’s been around
⏹️ ▶️ John for years now, so most of the kinks are worked out. Or if they’re not worked out, occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John you get some weirdness on the Mac where you can see the same family stuff, but occasionally it gets
⏹️ ▶️ John a little fidgety over there. Usually you can solve it just by signing
⏹️ ▶️ John out and back into iCloud. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just not the same. Yeah, but that’s true of any stuff like mine.
John’s contact photos
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t mention this, I don’t think I mentioned this on the show, but my contact stuff is back
⏹️ ▶️ John to not syncing. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco annoying. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John I went through, I was looking at, I was on the Mac for whatever reason, and I’m like, oh, I have all these, it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what it was. It was like, after Mike’s wedding, I had all these pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of people I knew, computer people, like you guys and Mike and all, I had recent photos
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I love the word computer people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so like I need to update the contact pictures because previously I had like for you know for Mike I had like a
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know where I got the picture I probably just googled for his name and pulled a picture or maybe I use like his Twitter avatar or something
⏹️ ▶️ John But they were old their old pictures in here I had you know pictures that I’d taken that I liked of these people I’m gonna replace their contact pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John so they show up nicely In my messages list or whatever And so I go and I paste you know I figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out using the Mac contacts app what it wants me to do get stupid image in there because you used to be able To just drag it but now you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do some other dance And anyway, I get the image in there. I crop it to the right size I you know, blah
⏹️ ▶️ John blah blah and I do this for like four or five contacts. I think I might have updated both of yours
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget Margo’s got his ancient picture that but he basically looks the same so I know I did our pay Marcus He’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco now. I got totally different
⏹️ ▶️ John well, but it’s just think like the reason I don’t remember this is because I
⏹️ ▶️ John did all this work on the Mac and then Then I noticed the next day None of that stuff was on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or my iPad like what the hell? I spent all that time doing these pictures and so then I’m back to
⏹️ ▶️ John going back to the Mac and like Turning off contact syncing and turning it back on and just trying to like do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t it’s just I cannot get Anything I do on my Mac to appear on any of my iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices or on any of my other Macs. I Haven’t haven’t tried it in my hobby yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s something used to frustrate me like this like nothing I can do There’s no like, please sync
⏹️ ▶️ John it now. Like see this contact image. I’m holding my phone next to the screen. It’s the same contact. It has
⏹️ ▶️ John a different image. It’s the old one. Same thing with it changing any other contact info like adding a new email
⏹️ ▶️ John address or phone number. It’s very, very frustrating. I felt
⏹️ ▶️ John are we pass this now? Can’t we get contacts to sync successfully? Everyone has a while. My computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it’s because it’s too old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you should get a new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, this is my wife’s computer. It’s a 5K iMac running Mojave. Everything is latest, latest, everything. I felt like there’s no excuse.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a big excuse. Sync is really hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want something to happen. I want to do something on my Mac and see something happen elsewhere. Put it in a duplicate contact.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care. I just wanna see something
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey happen to acknowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing, especially I’d spent so long, like carefully finding all the images and cropping them
⏹️ ▶️ John and being careful not that they’re too big as it chokes if you just like take a giant, you know, 20 something megapixel image,
⏹️ ▶️ John chuck it on the thing and try to crop it to the head. It freaks out, right? So I’m making small versions of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the end, because I had done it once and it annoyed me, the second time I did it, I made a little folder
⏹️ ▶️ John that I call contact photos, and I put the contact photos suitable for dragging into contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John in that folder, and then I put it in my Dropbox. So the 900 other times I try to do this, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a ready-made bin of all your heads
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that I can just throw onto stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me look on my, I haven’t looked lately. This was actually like, you know, it was actually pre-Mohave, but I haven’t looked
⏹️ ▶️ John lately to see what my contact situation’s like. Let me see, is Marco beardy?
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the question. Hey, I got beardy Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think it’s because I did it on
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone as one of my ninth or 10th times. Yeah, I think I used the one that you
⏹️ ▶️ John have for your Twitter avatar picture maybe. You took that picture. I took all these pictures. They’re from my photo library.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I was pulling pictures from my photo library. I think I just happened to pick the same one that you picked from like WWDC or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s frustrating. And the main reason I’m doing that though because you ever get that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where like I don’t know if you guys run messages on your Mac a lot, but I do because you know, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the window just sits there, right? So sitting in the background and every once in a while you look at the window
⏹️ ▶️ John and along the left sidebar of the thing, you’ll see the avatar image of all the people you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to or, you know, the last, you know, five or ten or depending on the size of your window, the people you talk to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And first of all, if one of them has no icon, they’re just like the silhouette that looks bad. You’re like, like, oh, that person
⏹️ ▶️ John needs an icon. Like, why doesn’t that person have an icon? I’ve known that person for 20 years. They have no icon, that’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And second of all, if you look at it and it’s like a picture of somebody, it’s like a bad, blurry picture that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like 64 by 64 pixel image, stretched out and looking all gross. It’s like their AIM icon from 1993 or something. You’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to fix that. And it uses the contact images.
⏹️ ▶️ John So then you go to their contact and you add a picture. And what you want is a messages list that you look at and you’re like, yeah, I recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John all those people and those are the people I talk to. and they look nice. And, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what motivates this, my, you know, retentiveness to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a, to wanna have a pleasing sidebar, partially inspired probably by like all my screenshotting
⏹️ ▶️ John and OS 10 reviews, that you would never take a screenshot where the sidebar didn’t have like beautiful professional
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can communicate with. Oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s no like embarrassing message. That’s the thing I’m always about messages. Next to the avatar, it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John the name and the date, And then it shows the last line of text that was in that conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the last line of text may not have been spoken by the person whose image is there. It may have been the last
⏹️ ▶️ John line you sent to them. Oh, yeah. And so sometimes it makes it look like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John your wife is saying something that you said, because it’s her image next to the last
⏹️ ▶️ John sentence you wrote to her. So it’s still not a great interface. Anyway, everyone’s got pictures on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. Well, but no, but you can collapse that though.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get rid of it. Yeah, you can get rid of the whole sidebar, but like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. You can get to go to just icons. So it’s just heads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What kind of monster leaves the like one line of most recently said no, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes that’s all I can see in the window and I won’t be able to see that when the last line is from them. I think it’s relevant information.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also want to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I’m saying. There’s two modes of the sidebar. There’s show me the last line in addition to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their avatar and just the avatars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really? I had no, I I’m always in last line, like a chump mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, that is like a chump mode. You just, in the divider between the sidebar and the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey messages pane, slide that bad boy to the left.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think it’s one of the dates too. I wanna see the last line when it’s from them. It reminds me of the context
⏹️ ▶️ John of the conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s weird. No, I don’t like, and it has their name too. Yeah. Ah, screw that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, this is the way to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John How am I gonna know what two-factor verification looks like? This is another context tip while we’re in the context
⏹️ ▶️ John tip section of the thing. Every time you get a two-factor thing, which everyone’s saying you shouldn’t do over
⏹️ ▶️ John SMS anymore anyway, But anyway, if you still have some services where you’re getting two factor or SMS, uh, every
⏹️ ▶️ John time you get one of those, add that phone number to a single contact that you call two factor verification or something similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John So then when it comes in, you don’t see like, what is this random text from? Oh, it’s a two factor thing. It’ll come
⏹️ ▶️ John in as two factor verification and it’s not a random number every time after you’ve added like the five or six common
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers that you get stuff from. Uh, it’ll, it’ll, that’s it. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s a really good
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. It’s just like saying, I haven’t given it, gotten to the point where I’ve given it an icon, but it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John like, how many icons are Mr. Two-Factor? Details. One, two,
⏹️ ▶️ John three, four, five. Only five phone numbers covers everything. Granted, I’m trying to move away
⏹️ ▶️ John from SMS for Two-Factor, but many services, it’s still the only thing they offer,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony, PlayStation. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Sony is really known for their incredible online security.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I’ve enabled Two-Factor. My PlayStation account It was one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the accounts I care the most about because someone got into there and like deleted all my destiny characters or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that would be we More disastrous than deleting all of my photos
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have backups of the photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’d rather have somebody go and delete all your family pictures than your destiny account
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I have a hundred backups of those
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how many backups do I have of
⏹️ ▶️ John you know PlayStation data none It’s like that the thing I tweeted the picture before that’s Nintendo finally
⏹️ ▶️ John has an online backup of switch data and it’s like, oh, finally, because, like, my data was tied to
⏹️ ▶️ John my specific switch, and if I, you know, dropped it and cracked it in half, that’s it. Like I said, I’d send it away
⏹️ ▶️ John to Nintendo, like, oh, well, we’ll just give you a new one. What about my saved data? Sorry. I gotta do that. So now I
⏹️ ▶️ John have an online backup of that too. Just one
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Walkie-Talkie
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a, hopefully quickie, about a new Apple feature that mostly works well and I really love even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was both hilarious and stupid when I saw it during the keynote, and that is Apple Watch walkie-talkie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. I did not understand the point to this up until a couple of days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now it’s like my new favorite thing. This is if you have two people with an Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on watchOS 5, there is a new app called Walkie Talkie, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go into that app and you can invite people to join Walkie Talkie mode with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then like the Hellscape was, that was the late nineties and Nextel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey push to talk phones, which were very popular in the Northeast. I don’t know if they were popular anywhere else. Uh, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can just drop in on somebody’s world and send them a, well, talk to them, like you actually broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a verbal message from their wrist, which sounds freaking terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you say have a partner that you live with, and if you say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have one or more children that you live with, it is amazing because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the past I would grab my phone and type out a message to Aaron like, Hey, can you bring me a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottle? Or, Hey, can you help me do this? Or, Hey, Declan is really hungry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did you give him for snack earlier? So I don’t give him the same thing again or whatever the case may be. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can just bloop on my watch and we can get through this conversation so much quicker. No typing involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m so I’m so glad I don’t have this, because all I would hear is, Dad, answer the request on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John here now, but at least it’s yelled from upstairs instead of actually coming out of my wrist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Approve my request. You don’t have to add your children as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come out of your drawer. Let’s be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true, too. It would absolutely come out of your drawer. I think that for most use cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, you know, when we all looked at the, what do they call it? Digital touch. Uh, when it first,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the watch first came out and everyone was like, dudes, people, Apple people. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not what we want. And generally speaking, I think that’s applicable for this walkie talkie mode, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holy crap to get Aaron and I to have a quick two second conversation, you know, typically involving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some child related issue. It is great. And I love it. put a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word out for everyone because we tried it kind of on a whim when we were at the beach over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the weekend and it was great. It worked really, really well and I’m really, really happy about it. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a similar situation, you should give it a shot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you feel you’re missing the simple joy of yelling across the house to each other?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, and we do that from time to time, but oftentimes if we’re going to do this walkie-talkie thing it’s because one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us is upstairs and the other downstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s a big part of being a family is yelling across floors of a house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And I mean our house is not particularly big it’s an at best average size house, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s big enough that you know Yelling between floors is not particularly fun nor conducive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we only have one echo in the house So we can’t do any sort of like what is that drop-in or whatever? It’s called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is the the best thing that we have available to us and it’s funny because it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like coming full circle I remember as a kid we we my family built a house house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gosh, how old was I? Maybe eight or ten or something like that. And it had one of those in-home intercom systems, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were super popular
⏹️ ▶️ John Morgan Oh, those were so fancy. Jim Collison They were so cool. Paul Morgan I was just about to mention this. I was going to mention
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a very unflattering context,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Collison Well, it was so cool, but they were pieces of trash. But it was amazing because you could play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FM radio throughout the house because that’s what people wanted. But anyway, I just thought we had made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as a family. And again, house was not particularly large. It was an average-sized home. But we built it, and we had our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little intercom system, and I think we also had a urinal in the basement, which was amazing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a story for another day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The first time anybody’s ever said a urinal is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m telling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Put one in your house and see what you think. They are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See what you think. But yeah, so having that intercom we thought was the coolest thing in the world, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lasted like a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that you had the inter… That was the coolest thing in the world in 1992 or something, and never…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about. It’s not a 90s thing. It’s an 80s thing. So the thing that’s relevant to
⏹️ ▶️ John my life that I was going to say about that before Casey even began that story was like that the house we run on Long Island was
⏹️ ▶️ John renovated in the 80s. So Long Island house renovated in the 80s by rich people. Right. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it has, of course, it has an in-home intercom. It also has central vacuum and it also
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I was going to mention central vacuum.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John another good one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had this one rich friend who had all this stuff. And the two things I was going to mention were the intercom and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco central vacuuming. Yeah, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was actually a third one, which I think might be part of the intercom system, but it’s also, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it was banging all of a sudden, but it was similar. It was like built into the wall,
⏹️ ▶️ John a dual cassette stereo system, like it built into the wall,
⏹️ ▶️ John like flush with like a wood grain thing or whatever. I think it might’ve been part of the intercom, but they have one of those too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but here’s the thing about the intercom, the whole house to come. The way it manifested itself throughout
⏹️ ▶️ John the house, uh, was, you know, cause it was, it was like, you’d push a button and talk and
⏹️ ▶️ John you could hear this. It was like terrible quality. It was RF or whatever. It’s like, I kid
⏹️ ▶️ John you not 16 inch by 16 inch square fake wood
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey huge. They’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re bigger. They’re bigger than 12 by 12. They’re They’re probably 16 by 16. They’re plastic slats,
⏹️ ▶️ John like blinds or whatever. Like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, what are the horizontal blinds called made out of wood? But it’s plastic with wood grain on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a big square, and then there’s a circle inside the square that’s this gigantic, it’s like bigger than a subwoofer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the biggest supposed speaker. Inside, there’s probably this tiny little four-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker thing in it. And then all these buttons lined up on it, and you’d talk across the house. Now, my family
⏹️ ▶️ John was a rich family in the 80s, but not quite that rich. So we bought from Radio
⏹️ ▶️ John Shack, these little realistic home intercoms things. This vaguely rings
⏹️ ▶️ John a bell. They were beige. They were like maybe like as
⏹️ ▶️ John as an iPhone 10S Max, but of course like seven times as thick.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they had a big button on them and you would press the button down and you would talk and it would broadcast into horrible
⏹️ ▶️ John fidelity throughout the house interior. And there was the idea to
⏹️ ▶️ John stop us from yelling through the house, but the sound quality was so bad and you’d end up yelling into the intercom and you could
⏹️ ▶️ John hear them like not on the intercom. I don’t know why we kept them for as long as we did, but we did have them in the house and they’re mostly useless.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve never used the ones in the in the vacation house, but they’re there. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this is this is the you know, the most pathetic contest ever. But my rich friends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intercoms were fancier than you because it was just it was basically phone system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was like an office phone system. Each room had a wired office phone, and basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the kids’ bedrooms had wired office phones in them. And you could use those. So because everything was wired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the phone system, it was perfectly clear, just like an office phone would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the cheaper ones are RF. Yeah, they were bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A user in the chat says, I was born in 1991. What the hell are they talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the intercom system, imagine there was this big control panel, typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the kitchen, which was like literally two or three feet wide and like a foot or two tall, where you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could speak into it and little—well, not actually that little per John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conversation, but comparatively little boxes in every room would wake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and broadcast the message that you just said in the kitchen. So a great example of this is mom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or dad says, hey, dinner’s ready, come downstairs. So you walk up to the intercom box, which is massive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you hit a button and you say, hey, dinner’s ready and then all of the rooms in the house get that message,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, dinner’s ready. And that was extremely cool in the, apparently anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from as early as the seventies all the way through the like early to mid nineties. They were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically pieces of garbage. They typically toward the end of the era would allow you to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FM radio like I was talking about earlier. So you could put on radio throughout the house and these were the crappiest speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey known to man. So it sounded hilariously bad, probably no better than an iPhone, if not worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they were a sign of someone that was typically at least slightly well-to-do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen the kind of intercom system you’re describing. I’ve never seen it. I’ve only seen the one at my friend’s house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was basically an office phone system installed in their house.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put a link in the chat room too. It’s not the exact one that we have, but it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey similar design. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, yeah. See how
⏹️ ▶️ John big that is? Oh, yeah. Yep, I hear you. Imagine a panel that size in every room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the central vacuum, what that is, is imagine you had like this big tall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey canister somewhere, typically a basement or a garage, and then you had hoses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s called a vacuum, who knew? But no, it’s larger, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one we had in the house that I kind of sort of grew up in, because we had central vac in that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco We did not have an inner home. We did, we did. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, so there’s hoses running throughout the home, like you don’t see them, they’re in the walls, but all running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to that vacuum. so you could plug in, so you take a hose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can bring it to any room and plug the hose into the wall and suddenly you have a vacuum in that room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it actually is very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you basically have like outlets that suck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, that’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. There’s like outlets like near the floor level usually that are just like suction outlets and you plug a hose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it and you can have a vacuum anywhere. But like vacuums aren’t that hard to carry around or like it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it solves a problem in a really crazy way that isn’t that big of a problem to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JSON Yeah. I mean, it was a neat trick. And actually, one of the extremely cool things about it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, actually, I think my brother-in-law’s house, which was built not that terribly long ago, has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. He has a central vac, but in the kitchen, he has like a little door or something where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can like sweep crumbs into it. You know what I mean? So it’s like right at floor level. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember how you activate it to get the sucking to start title, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can sweep dust into there, which is actually pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like a built-in dustpan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey basically. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. None of these things are worth their installation and maintenance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over just having a vacuum. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true. Here’s the miraculous thing about them, though. The fact that they continue to work at all, because all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John home automation crap that we’re installing now or that people installed like five or 10 years ago is
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to work, you know, when they’re 20 years old. But here is here’s 1980 stuff that’s 20 years old or
⏹️ ▶️ John more. I mean, it’s still just as bad as it ever was, but it continues to function it, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John RF continues to be just as bad as it always was. And you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of it becomes more and more hilarious, because now again, Casey, we got into this because Casey is, is talking
⏹️ ▶️ John to his wrist at higher fidelity than these gigantic, you know, panels in every room of the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And I don’t think it’s like Bluetooth or anything like that. This is getting carried over the internet, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, it must be because I was walkie-talkie with Stephen Hackett very, very briefly when this all first came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. So yeah, this is going over the internet. I could talk to Memphis from Richmond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more clearly than I could talk from the downstairs to the upstairs in a prior home that my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not if you yelled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is quite clear. Uh-huh. Touche.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some ask ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Bestian, are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we really not going to talk about the Bloomberg thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I fully support that upgrade covered it really
⏹️ ▶️ John well. still on the topic list. It’s probably not going away. We’ll have another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it next week. Just quickly, is there do you think do you think there’s any chance that Bloomberg is correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like there isn’t like it seems like they really have a lot of egg on their face.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now they can’t they can’t be like 100% correct because the claims are so broad
⏹️ ▶️ John that it would be very easy to find evidence of them from all the players involved who are highly motivated to
⏹️ ▶️ John find evidence of them. So it can’t be 100% correct. Could it be 1% correct surely there could be
⏹️ ▶️ John a kernel of truth somewhere in here but their claims are just
⏹️ ▶️ John so massive that this is things happen and it happened to all all these different companies and all these different
⏹️ ▶️ John people and confirmed by all these people and confirmed by this agency and that agency and like
⏹️ ▶️ John all these people can’t be conspiring to pretend they know nothing about this
⏹️ ▶️ John and and again they’re fairly highly motivated to to
⏹️ ▶️ John find out if this is true true. And to or like, I don’t think there can be coordination between all the tech
⏹️ ▶️ John companies and all the government agencies got all got together and decided we’re all going to get together and agree on the same story
⏹️ ▶️ John and deny this Bloomberg thing. So Bloomberg made a boo boo somewhere. It just depends. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John sinister? Is it just incompetence? We didn’t even give any context for this. I guess maybe people don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t been reading the news. But the Bloomberg ran a story claiming that there are secret very tiny chips
⏹️ ▶️ John embedded in boards used by a bunch of big tech companies and that allow,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, hackers to get into their data centers or whatever. And they named a bunch of different companies and all the companies
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, we, you know, like the companies weren’t just like immediate denial, they checked this,
⏹️ ▶️ John they all of them probably turned to their security people and said, do we have secret chips in our computer? The things
⏹️ ▶️ John have we talked to the FBI about it? Like, you know, and the answer was they talked
⏹️ ▶️ John to all their people, the security people, their company lawyers or whatever the answer is no none of this stuff is a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So I’m not sure where you’re getting in the FBI denied and like everybody. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you’ve had the level of denials from it like you really can’t look at these denials and say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh they’re they’re leaving room to be as they were out of it like they’re like categorical like very like
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not using weasel words they’re not using carefully worded lawyer messages. And they’re almost
⏹️ ▶️ John worded as if we were willing to believe. We double-checked and triple-checked
⏹️ ▶️ John just to make sure. Make really, really sure because we’re going to… They issue a statement like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we checked it. If you say we have these servers with these chips, and you say that we discovered… In
⏹️ ▶️ John some cases, like, oh, this company, it was Amazon or whatever, discovered these chips and then canceled
⏹️ ▶️ John its order. It’s like, we wouldn’t know if we discovered the chips and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco canceled the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order. It’s a thing we would remember. Well, and like these the kind of statements like if if these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies and their denials, if they’re lying about this, executives would go to jail if they got caught like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how severely these statements would be taken.
⏹️ ▶️ John Executives never go to jail. So let’s be real. But you know, they would get fined.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, like this would be like a severe like SEC problem. Like they would they would almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly have major problems if they were if they lied about this kind of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Almost as bad as Elon Musk’s tweeting. That’s yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll get to that some other time. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Twenty million dollar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweet. Good job. Oh, I wish he would just stop being like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just stop being like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco him. Just stop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keep making the awesome cars. Please stop tweeting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s worth listening to the latest upgrade, which is upgrade number 214, which actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a journalist as part of the panel. And so Jason Snell and Mike Hurley did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really good job of kind of dissecting all this. The only thing I think that may be interesting for the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us to really pontificate on. And maybe this was covered in the Bloomberg piece that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t read because it was almost immediately debunked by everyone. But what do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think is the attack vector here? How do you make heads or tails of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data anywhere on a machine without any context? If you intercept an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet cable, can you really tell what’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where do you attack in order to get all of the things that are happening on a computer without context.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I can’t just put my finger
⏹️ ▶️ John on. But if you’re on the board, though, like that’s not the I don’t think that’s the most
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious attack that you suppose you could do that. But first of all, many things travel across a computer board
⏹️ ▶️ John in unencrypted form that are otherwise encrypted. Right. Because, you know, if encrypted data comes in over network connection,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is decrypted by the, you know, whatever software on your computer and the decrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John information is put into memory and read by programs. Like that’s how you render a web page when it’s SSL,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, HTTPS connection, right? At some point, that information is decrypted inside the computer. So in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were in the right place, you can intercept decrypted information because your computer has to decrypt it to use it. And there you are.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think that’s the vector. I think the vector is more like BIOS and bootloaders, like
⏹️ ▶️ John compromising the security of the hardware to allow you to
⏹️ ▶️ John pull down a compromised OS image, right with like a rootkit on or something like that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can subvert the hardware at the lowest level. And then, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the assumption is, oh, we’re running a trusted version of the OS that we validated a trusted version of the firmware, like everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is all great and validated. If you can sneak in there and subvert that and say we can
⏹️ ▶️ John load any arbitrary binary onto your system, unbeknownst to replacing a binary
⏹️ ▶️ John that you thought was your validated version, but it’s actually now we’re going replace with our version and that piece of software
⏹️ ▶️ John has a backdoor in it. You know, logs everything that is typed on the keyboard attached
⏹️ ▶️ John to the computer, watches all network traffic for like certain information and relays it. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s still difficulties like I was saying, like these computers in question, like have no way
⏹️ ▶️ John to communicate on the network. Every one of these companies watches egress from the network like a hawk and has it all locked
⏹️ ▶️ John down. So it’s not it’s not easy. But if you can get in at the hardware level, there’s all sorts of very nefarious things you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do. One of the most interesting stories I saw about this was a security researcher, I forget who,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we had been talking about this I would have collected more links, but who had written up for like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those security conferences, I don’t know if it was Black Hat, but one of those similar things like let me show you all the cool exploits you could do
⏹️ ▶️ John if you could get onto the motherboards of this hardware. And he did a bunch of proof concepts and had ideas
⏹️ ▶️ John about it and suggested ways you could hide the hardware and you know all sorts of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this Bloomberg story basically includes every single thing he talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the way he talked about it. So as he said himself, and the paraphrasing is basically, either I’m incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John good at predicting the future, or this story was massively influenced. But like, it doesn’t mean that
⏹️ ▶️ John Bloomberg saw what he wrote and made up a story. It just means like, whoever the sources were, perhaps saw his stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and then fed Bloomberg information that exactly matched his ideas of how you could exploit this, like, like
⏹️ ▶️ John literally every single thing point by point, you know, I said, you could possibly do this. And the Bloomberg story, they say, somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John did do that. And I said, you could hide it here. And the Bloomberg story says, they hid it there. And like, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird. Like, at this point, I think it’s like, there’s got to, there’s got to be something nefarious
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere, because the, all these supposedly validated sources have to have some motivation
⏹️ ▶️ John to be sources and to say, hey, Bloomberg, I’ve got information for you. What their, what their,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, motivation is and why they’re doing it, it, and why they were able to
⏹️ ▶️ John seem credible to Bloomberg. Eventually, we have to get to the real story, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of theories about retaliation and trade wars with China
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to make it seem like China is exploiting stuff or trying to hurt tech companies or a stock manipulation. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of motivations for this type of thing, but hopefully in the end, the real,
⏹️ ▶️ John real story will come out and we’ll know what the deal is. But for now, I’m content
⏹️ ▶️ John to believe that all the secret exploits inside the data centers of all the biggest tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ John remain totally hidden. Because that’s all you can say. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say, I’m sure everything’s secure because this story is BS. This story may very well be 100% BS.
⏹️ ▶️ John You still just don’t really know, do you? You just don’t really know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I just, when you look at all the, everything that’s come out since then, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these pretty very, very, very firm, very high risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco denials from all the companies, the corroborating denials from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the British and US intelligence agencies or whoever they are. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance that Bloomberg is right in the face of all that, and not to mention what you mentioned with the guy who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gave them an interview, and then they basically said all of his theoreticals, they basically said that as fact, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just seems very unlikely that any part of this is true. I 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blame Bloomberg for this. I don’t think this was necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nefarious. I don’t think we know enough yet to say whether it was intentional stock manipulation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I do think it
⏹️ ▶️ John was- What’s the non-nefarious motivation for this? Someone has to have bad
⏹️ ▶️ John motives, because if it all isn’t true, someone is taking untrue information and either just making it up themselves and printing
⏹️ ▶️ John it, which is unlikely, I think, or being this being a source sources coming to Bloomberg and saying, here’s this information,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not true, but they are they’re intentionally feeding false information. So that’s a nefarious motivate. They
⏹️ ▶️ John must be feeding false information for a reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could be a misunderstanding somewhere along the way. It could also just be like confirmation bias. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had so many I’ve seen so many instances, both stories I’m involved in in stories I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where a journalist or their editor really wants to make a story true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they will basically, you know, talk to sources until the source tells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them what they want to hear or until they hear what they want to hear, even if the source never even said it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not necessarily malicious, it’s just like human nature. Like you want so badly for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to be true that you think is true that you will find evidence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, even if that evidence isn’t real or doesn’t actually support the conclusion you’re trying to write about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s a natural thing that happens. The real crazy part here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is these are very, very serious allegations against very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big companies and massive world governments and a major publication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears not to have done enough diligence on vetting this before making it a very high profile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story. That is the crazy thing to me because I really don’t believe a shred of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think this story is true at all. I think we have a lot of evidence on the other side, and we have nothing on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the side of it being true, except Bloomberg saying, we say it’s true. But but it really appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a massive case of negligence on Bloomberg’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part. But yeah, but it was like, it’s so easy to validate if these things are out there, especially because the story
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically says that they were discovered by some companies like you should be able to to verify
⏹️ ▶️ John all of that. Like everyone, if this is if this is a widespread problem, and some companies already discovered it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the only possible explanation would be Yeah, they discovered it, but they’re just not saying anything about it because it’s super secret. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the conspiracy theory you have to spin to make the Bloomberg story actually truthful gets bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John and bigger and more ridiculous by the day because it’s the type of thing that it’s not. It’s not just one tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John isolated thing. It’s so widespread and so large and such large numbers and like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s totally under their control to detect that they can take the boards out. They can put them on a microscope. They can, you know, examine
⏹️ ▶️ John it like it’s the type of thing that if you know it’s supposedly there and you know where to look for it or
⏹️ ▶️ John how to look for it, you would find it if it was there. Like, obviously, if you don’t know to look for it or like slipped
⏹️ ▶️ John under your radar, you might not see it. But once the story is out, certainly you’re going to look at the stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. That’s why I think like it’s for this to be true, it requires such craziness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually be true and so many people to be lying and outright like and right. But if instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say it looks like Bloomberg was wrong and is either really afraid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to admit it or really in denial that they’re wrong or too proud to admit it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What they have done here is so incredibly damaging and so incredibly irresponsible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they could really be sued big time for this. Bloomberg, I’m saying, they have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serious problem on their hands if this is wrong, and it sure looks like it’s wrong. I don’t think Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sue them. I think Apple has done enough and I don’t think they would want the bad PR of suing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a journalistic entity. That’s pretty bad PR for a big company. But what Bloomberg has done appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be so neglectful and so potentially nefarious that it wouldn’t surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me if somebody sues them in a really big way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, like I said, just listen to Upgrade. There’s a lot of good stuff there. It’s worth your time.
#askatp: Storyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on to Ask ATP, Bastian Anuck writes storyboards for iOS development,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yay or nay. If you’re not familiar with iOS development, there’s basically three mechanisms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to generate a user interface that I can think of off the top of my head. You can write a bunch of code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can handle each user interface, and I’m oversimplifying a little bit, as an individual item,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, and that’s typically referred to as NIBs, or you can use a relatively,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comparatively new technology called storyboards, where you have many different screens all in one file.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is one of those things like Objective-C or Swift that everyone has an opinion about and nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agrees on. And I expect that that’s going to happen again momentarily. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used both professionally. I tend to come down in favor of storyboards because that’s clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where Apple wants you to be. That’s that provider used to provide things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you can do. I forget the term for now, off the top of my head, but you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey table view cells and things like that in storyboards very easily. There’s ways to do it with nibs, but it’s not quite so simple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a bunch of, there’s a few other things like maybe safe area insets, or other things that were only in storyboards that never made it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nibs. The problem with storyboards though, is that they are just a wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place to have tremendous merge conflicts. And if you have storyboards that are more than a screen or two and a team of more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than one, it gets real ugly real quick. So I’m in favor of storyboards. I am, and if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t like storyboards, I’m still in favor of nibs. I personally do not think the writing code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everything way is a smart call because all code is evil. But Marco, tell me why I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t necessarily think you are wrong. I don’t use a lot of storyboards. I do almost all of my interface work in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code using auto layout and my compact constraint library which is basically a fancy version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto layout syntax that you can do really easily in code with a combination of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the kind of ASCII based auto layout syntax, the, uh, I forget what it’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Visual format language. That’s it. VFL. Yeah. The visual format language. You’re right. Um, so I do all my interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, but, um, that does, that does bring issues. You know, it, it makes it harder to accommodate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like dynamic text or new screen sizes just because like there’s more places to check. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more work to be done. Um, certain, certain, uh, areas of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development you need to use a storyboard for like the launch thing or like watch kit stuff is all storyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based. So like there’s certain areas where like you just kind of need that and that is clearly where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is investing their time. They’re investing their time in the tooling and the capabilities and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making things easy for you if you use storyboards. So there’s a huge argument to say just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use storyboards because when you’re when you’re fighting Apple on fewer fronts things are easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. However with storyboards and with nibs before them there are certain walls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you just hit and they have done a really good job of reducing these walls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time so that storyboards are now more capable and more flexible than ever and there’s fewer and fewer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas that you’ll run into where like you just can’t do this in a good way with a storyboard you have to switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to code but there are still areas like that and there are still downsides to using it using storyboards in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways there are things like like using custom controls where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do like the IB designable stuff and make your your custom control like appear in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface builder in a useful way, but that’s really buggy and is difficult. And so you end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, if you’re a storyboard heavy, you know, workflow, you end up doing a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of supporting work to enable the storyboard. And that might, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain use cases, that might be more work than it would have been to just write the thing in code in the first place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s a debate that is not, it doesn’t have an easy answer, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I lean towards just use storyboards because that’s what Apple wants you to do and that’s what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna make easy. That being said, I don’t do that because that’s me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would love for Apple to do something about making it easier for multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people to work on storyboards at the same time. And I don’t know how to do that because it’s just like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, the Xe Proj files or if you’re a Windows person like the Visual Studio Solution and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Project Files, it’s just It’s hard to have a scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where multiple people can modify them and things don’t just go straight to hell. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still encourage storyboards, but be careful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, working with people is overrated. Does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that mean I’m overrated?
#askatp: Fusion drive vs. hybrid car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fired. Spencer Wohlers writes, what’s the worst compromise, a fusion drive or a hybrid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car? Assume modern implementations of both. I thought this was really clever. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I would rather have a fusion drive and avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hybrid car, but it’s a tough call. And I say that because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having never actually used a fusion drive, to be fair, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are not many compromises outside of them still not working with APFS? Is that right, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. Okay, there you go. So there’s few compromises in theory, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would solve a lot of computing problems in theory, and when everything works great,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s fairly transparent. Whereas I would say that your typical hybrid car, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking more of an economy hybrid car, John’s about to swoop in with some sort of like NSX something or other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s pronounced NS10. Well done, sir. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that I would, you know, unless you go into the hypercar territory, I would be more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey displeased by a hybrid car than a
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive. That wasn’t the question. I was going to make it about you. What’s the worst compromise? Not which would you rather have?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, fine. The worst compromise is still the Fusion Drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t at me. Marco, what do you think, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A fusion drive is a pretty poor compromise because you do start hitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird speed issues pretty often. It’s hard to predict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and inconsistent and those are not good qualities for a performance critical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of anything to have, especially your computer. And ignoring John’s complaint for a second, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I were choosing for myself, I would choose the hybrid car because I don’t like either of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I spend a lot more time using my computer than using my car. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and I think I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I think I would I the the problems of a hybrid car which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are many you know like like I think the biggest problem to me of a hybrid car besides like the massive weight that they would tend to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they have all of everything it’s just the massive complexity they tend to have like the hybrid cars you have an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire electric drivetrain and an entire gas drivetrain and all the parts that both of those things need so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a I recognize their importance for like environmentalism to kind of bridge the gap until we get all electric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but just as a concept, like on principle, they’re incredibly complicated. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the idea of requiring all of those parts for all of those systems in this car as opposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just picking one and sticking with that one and making that one really efficient and whatever else. So the Fusion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Drive though, like Fusion Drive is, again, it’s a bridge technology. It’s a hack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a way to get near where we want to be, which is all SSD, but without having to pay the costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s, you know, it’s actually a very good parallel. Um, but the downsides of a fusion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive are constant in use. Um, in the sense that like, if that’s all you have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s all you can afford, fine, it’s fine. It’s better than a pure hard drive, but it’s not nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as good as a pure SSD. I would pick the hybrid car and I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hybrid car might even be the better compromise because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fusion drive is unpredictable in how it will perform in a very critical way to the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas a hybrid car, much of the time that you’re driving it, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could totally forget that it’s a hybrid car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, what if you didn’t live on your computer like you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same thing. I think the — I mean, it depends on how — you know, if I use my computer an hour a week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then maybe I might make a different decision. But I still stand by my last sentence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, which is like, a hybrid car, like, you don’t notice its downsides most of the time while driving it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you notice when something breaks or needs to be serviced or wears out, but like for the most part, you don’t notice its downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time. Whereas a fusion drive makes itself apparent more often in use.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I wanna correct one of the things that Marco said. I don’t think hybrid cars weigh more on average than an electric
⏹️ ▶️ John car with the same range. They weigh less. So yes, they do have all of everything and the complexity is for sure there compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to an electric car, but they weigh less because they have very dinky gas
⏹️ ▶️ John motors and you get huge range from a very small gas tank and they have very small batteries as opposed to one giant hunk of
⏹️ ▶️ John battery. So that’s not a reason to dislike hybrid cars. What’s the worst compromise?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to agree with both of you and say fusion drive, but for slightly different reason. So judging
⏹️ ▶️ John like what what’s a good compromise, what’s not like in the moment, both a hybrid car and
⏹️ ▶️ John a fusion drive are similar. You know, in the beginning I was having trouble picking
⏹️ ▶️ John which Which one is the worst compromise? Because they’re very similar compromises. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t go all the way for, you know, basically for cost reasons. So how can you get
⏹️ ▶️ John a reasonable compromise that gives you the speed of an SSD without the cost? How can you get, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John something that gives you better gas mileage, but you can’t afford to use a full battery pack,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because it just costs too much money. But the Fusion Drive is worse
⏹️ ▶️ John because in its relevant realm, storage for computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John the rate of advancement is such that that compromise quickly becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John moot. Like flash storage is so cheap now that it’s very hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to recommend a Fusion Drive as a reasonable compromise anymore. In the beginning, it was reasonable, but very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John it became unreasonable. Whereas hybrid cars have been a very reasonable compromise for a
⏹️ ▶️ John long time. They existed way before the Fusion Drive and they will exist way after the Fusion Drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly because the full solution, the complete electric, is still very, very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to get the same range, if you want to get a car with a 300 mile range
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all electric, it’s just much more expensive than a car with a 300 mile range that’s a hybrid.
⏹️ ▶️ John A car with a 300 mile range that’s a hybrid you can get for like $20k. Like if you buy a dinky Econobox, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But Fusion drives, like now, flash storage is so much cheaper than it used to be. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the SSD that’s sitting in my computer now, I only bought it a few years ago, already I can get it for a half
⏹️ ▶️ John or a quarter of the price depending on how much I want the performance to go down. So Fusion drives are a worse compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John because they had a shorter lifetime, whereas the lifetime of the hybrid drivetrain
⏹️ ▶️ John has been much longer already and will continue to live on because despite all the complexity,
⏹️ ▶️ John taking a very well-known technology, you know, the internal combustion engine, and making
⏹️ ▶️ John a small, very efficient, you know, Atkinson cycle version of that, and supplementing
⏹️ ▶️ John it with a fairly small battery, perhaps even using cheaper battery technology, like nickel
⏹️ ▶️ John metal hydride instead of lithium ion, and combining them in what is a fairly complex system, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s cheap enough to put in, you know, a Toyota Prius, you end up with
⏹️ ▶️ John something that gets better mileage than a gas vehicle that isn’t as expensive as a full electric. And that’s what you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John ended up with for a long time and it’ll, you know, continue to live on. That’s how I came to my answer.
#askatp: Racing games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marc-Andre Wibizon writes, Since you are all car fans and each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of you owns at least one console, I wondered, do you enjoy racing games? If so, which one is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your favorite? Let’s go the reverse order, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, I, this is about being a car fan, so I bet they mean
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, Gran Turismo and Forza and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think the only racing games I’ve ever really enjoyed are,
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the arcade cart racing game. So Mario Kart, obviously Diddy Kong Racing was a
⏹️ ▶️ John favorite back in the day. Um, I did play some of the wipeout series, which
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco will talk about in a second. Yep. They never really grabbed me that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, the, the racing game I have been most into was Mary Hart double dash.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but in general, the whole Mary Cart series I liked. Um, so I guess the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer to this question is in terms of racing games with like realistic cars. I’ve never been into one. I’ve like I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten gone down that rabbit hole.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m with you on pretty much all that. I I know the kind of racing games that are like in the super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realistic racing simulators like you know, like Forza or Turismo or whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what those are. I’ve played them before. I have never found them to be fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s a it’s really hard to make this kind of game realistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fun to a general audience. If you’re super into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco racing realistically, then it might be fun to you, but to a general audience that’s not fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I prefer the games that are optimized for fun and don’t go for realism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically at all. And so Mario Kart is fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Mario Kart is probably the best example series, and I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about basically the entire series of Mario Kart, it’s basically the best example series of fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco racing. Also, for me, a major part of racing fun is battle racing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love racing with weapons, and that’s always been a very fun category. And so Mario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kart is a very good example of that, very accessible to lots of people. Multiplayer is also very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important to the fun of racing games for me. So multiplayer battle racing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my ideal. That’s the most fun to have with a racing game for me. I find Mario Kart very, very fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wipeout I found more fun as a single player thing because I just never could find anyone to play with me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So I played a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of single player Wipeout. And that was fun too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it’s also Wipeout I had fun doing things like time trials, like trying to get your time better. And I recognize people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are gonna say immediately like, that’s what’s fun about other racing games. But yeah, I know, I know. but I don’t find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the driving mechanics of realistic racing games fun. But I do like things that are futuristic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or cool or just comically ridiculous. Like I really enjoyed, back on the original Xbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really enjoyed the early Burnout games because those were just completely ridiculous, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arcade racers where you drive your car and those are the ones that have the ridiculous crash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sequences. Like you’d crash your car into as many other cars as possible to get points and they would do slow-mo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bullet time of the car crashes and you see everything breaking apart and that was really cool for 2005 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so like I like fun racing games like that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like realistic racing games and I especially like battle racing multiplayer games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for me Mario Kart is the best example of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I completely wholly and entirely agree with Mario Kart. I have played Grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tresmo on and off in the past, and it’s fun, I guess. I don’t know, it seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of work, like upgrading your car and earning new cars and stuff like that. I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give you two really bad answers, and then I’m going to redeem myself. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I played a crapload of Carmageddon, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco was apparently 1997.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved that game, which by probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any metric, metric it was not a very good game but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loved it. Oh no, it was terrible but it like there’s a whole category of games that are like not good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun. And so Carmageddon was a great example of that. I believe this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was DOS if I’m not mistaken it was so old. I also really really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really loved and played probably more of than almost any other human
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wave Race for the Nintendo 64. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot about that. That’s not the other racing series that I really like. But both the original
⏹️ ▶️ John and Blue Storm, I think Blue Storm was head and shoulders, the better game. But I did actually get pretty heavily
⏹️ ▶️ John into Blue Storm as I started getting frustrated by the RNG of the waves killing my lap times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like you like things to be predictable in a racing game and waves are just not. And I get that’s the fun
⏹️ ▶️ John of the game. But eventually I got like Margo say, I do time trials in Mario Kart. I was I would do
⏹️ ▶️ John time trials in in Wave Race and play against
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer players. It just always annoyed me when a perfect run was ruined by like a rogue wave that hit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And so I loved Wave Race 64. I didn’t even realize that there was a Game Boy version until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a minute ago, getting the link for the show notes. But I loved Wave Race 64. I played the snot out of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey game. And at the time, seeing what appeared to be pretty realistic wave physics in a video game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was mind blowing. you kids these days born in 1991, you don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how amazing this was. Cause previously when you played a racing or any, any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey game that involved water, the water was flat always, no matter what, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, it seemed to actually have water a lot more realistic water than anything else we had.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and coincidentally, my final answer, which is the one that I think you guys would have approved of if you didn’t approve of the other two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it, it, it It reads in the Wave Race 64 Wikipedia entry, it reads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the following. Oh, I know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Originally referred to as F-Zero on water.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And that is my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey final answer, F-Zero, which I played the ever living crap out of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I adored that game for the Super Nintendo. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play that forever if I could. And what was really interesting about F-Zero is, and I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a term for this and I don’t know what it is offhand, but the the vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was always in the exact same position on screen. It was the track that was rotate like the your view
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the track was rotating around the vehicle. It was super, super weird, but I loved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that game and I played the snot out of it on the Super Nintendo when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was a kid. God did I love that
⏹️ ▶️ John game. Yeah, I played F-Zero too. I would lump that in with Wipeout in the similar kind of futuristic racing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. The only interesting thing I remember about F-Zero, I mean, obviously they have the F-Zero
⏹️ ▶️ John themed cars in Mario Kart, so they kind of live on and there’s the F-Zero courses in Mario Kart, but the F-Zero
⏹️ ▶️ John Nintendo 64 game was, if my memory serves, 60 frames per second. It was. Which was unheard
⏹️ ▶️ John of on Nintendo 64 because it struggled to do like 15 or 20 frames per second
⏹️ ▶️ John in most normal games. So they sacrificed graphical fidelity for frame rate, which I always respected them for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I remember when that came out and everyone knew that that was one of the things made it special and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I mean, it was, you know, the tracks were really basic, like geometric. They’re basically, you know, driving on a tube. Hey, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tube. Like, it was super simple, but to see that smooth motion for like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very high speed racing game, that was pretty fun. I give him a lot of credit for that. I’ve never gotten too into F-Zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s always been like a fun thing I play for like a few minutes and then I don’t care anymore because it hasn’t captured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my other, you know, desires for a racing game with like the, you know, battle or stuff like that, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a very well done game. I gotta give credit for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just, I wish they would bring back Wave Race because Blue Storm was
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty amazing game. The original one was a little clunky and then it has a Nintendo 64, but Blue Storm, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into racing games and you think like, oh, I play realistic racing games, I play the arcade
⏹️ ▶️ John racing games, I kind of like racing games. It is a different experience than I’ve ever had in any video game because the
⏹️ ▶️ John waves are such a factor. Like you can’t just ignore them and they’re not just scenery. They
⏹️ ▶️ John are what you’re doing. you have to anticipate, look at, and play the waves. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not true of most other racing games. Even things with tracks that change or whatever, they’re fairly predictable and not
⏹️ ▶️ John like the moment-to-moment thing that you’re doing. Kind of like a skiing game
⏹️ ▶️ John or a snowboarding game or anything like that, again, similar racing games where you have to play the hill,
⏹️ ▶️ John but at least the hill is the hill. It doesn’t change shape that much. The waves are ever-changing. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re playing when you play the racing game. Yeah, there’s the course and there’s the buoys or whatever you have to go between, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re playing in the water, and that is so different, and so some people I think find disconcerting, because they think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re good at racing games, and then they play Wave Race, and they just, they stink, and they’re like, well, this game sucks, how can you do anything? And the waves
⏹️ ▶️ John knock you all over the place. So, you know, if you have a GameCube lying around, I’d check it out. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope they bring that game back. I don’t remember if they ever brought back a port for another one of the platforms, but they should.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should, in top four style, I should give honorable mention to Cruisin’ USA, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably the best arcade racing game that’s ever been, don’t at
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Come on. I thought you’re gonna say hydro thunder
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey before that’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved hydro thunder all it which was just cruising USA on water and hydro thunder was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Both of them are really terrible by any true metric, but I loved
⏹️ ▶️ John oh and speaking of somebody racing I’m super sprint. Do you remember that? No, I don’t remember that. That’s before your
⏹️ ▶️ John time I don’t know if I getting the title, right anyone the chat remember super sprint So it was it was a four person
⏹️ ▶️ John Arcade cabinet kind of like gauntlet where if all four people would stay around the same screen and there were four steering
⏹️ ▶️ John wheels wheels. Uh, and it was a top view of a track, like a static top view of the track. So you were looking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, this does look familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John with these little, with these little tiny cars on it. And you drive the cars around the course and
⏹️ ▶️ John like it was a dirt track and you’re in like, you know, basically they look like remote control cars cause the remote control buggy
⏹️ ▶️ John cars like that’s, these are the big cars they’re modeled on. I don’t know if you get what the, you know, dirt track cars are called.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you, of course you would skid around turns cause dirt is loose. And to go around each turn
⏹️ ▶️ John you would like spin the wheel and they were on like bearings
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like the wheel would spin. Yes, yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John go around a 90 degree turn and you’d spin the wheel and it would be spinning like 17 rotations as you go around.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was totally unrealistic, but it was so fun to spin the wheels and just like massively oversteer and then correct and countersteer
⏹️ ▶️ John as your little buggies. And you could see everyone else on the course. It was like doing slot cars on dirt
⏹️ ▶️ John on a static thing. I don’t know. Anyway, I had a lot of fun with the
⏹️ ▶️ John spinning the wheel. And the unique, very low tech, here’s the whole course and you could see every single
⏹️ ▶️ John car on it just drive your little car now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh wow that was that was a fun trip down memory lane actually a lot of this episode was a fun trip down memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also you’re totally wrong the best the best arcade racer like that is
⏹️ ▶️ John no it was the after mostly after my time in the arcades was that was that multiplayer with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it was the time of the sega saturn so it was like the you know the mid 90s to late 90s 1993 limited release full release
⏹️ ▶️ John that set alongside somebody in the second
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cabinet? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like so you could link up up to either four or maybe even eight of them and it would cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dollar per play. Like the like it was like the expensive game in the arcade because they were these you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these big new machines but multiplayer at Atoney USA was a lot of fun. If you could convince anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else to spend a dollar on it, it was a lot of fun. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Molecule and Mack Weldon, and we’ll talk to you next time.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re into Twitter, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental Tech Podcasts, it’s so
Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new 3 series, the new BMW 3 series has no stick shift in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey United States and apparently it’s only going to have it on the small motors overseas.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M3 still has it though, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They haven’t said one way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or the other. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure the M3 still does. That was, I think that might have been the backslide that I mentioned. Like there was a bunch of, there was going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John no sticks anywhere and then there was a couple of strategic backslides and I think a stick on the M3 was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them. It seems like the M3 would be the last BMW to offer a stick in the US.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the US, I don’t know, because that’s it’s people buy six out of the US for different reasons. But in the US, I would bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M3 is the very last BMW car to have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now that I would probably agree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, or maybe the M2. Now that I think about it, like, I forgot they have like a they have like a billion different cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. So maybe now that they have like smaller M car, maybe the M2 would be the last one to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Yeah, I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t think they’ve said anything about the M3 that I have seen. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it says here BMW announced Tuesday that it will drop the manual transmission from its gas powered platforms and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey newest three series lineup. Makes me so sad. They were supposed to hold out. They were supposed to be the ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that held out longer than anyone else, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failed us. Well, as soon as you stopped buying them, they’re like, well, we don’t need them anymore. Casey stopped buying BMWs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s true. I’m sorry, everyone. It’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault. It is. They would have only made it in white.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you going to do, John, when the Accord is
⏹️ ▶️ John next? The cheap cars are going to hold on way longer than the fancy cars. Honda
⏹️ ▶️ John moves slowly. So So just the sheer
⏹️ ▶️ John inertia and the fact that it takes them a really long time to do anything, I feel like it’ll hang
⏹️ ▶️ John on for a surprising amount of time. Maybe not in the Accord, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the Civic and the Type R, just because it takes them a long time to change
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. I think I’ll be able to buy at least one more Accord
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point. Speaking of which, I got my new
⏹️ ▶️ John tires, remember? I mentioned.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Yeah. And they’re working great, except for I have my alignment thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to deal with, which drives me insane. I honestly envy people who can’t tell when the car
⏹️ ▶️ John is out of alignment, but I can tell, and it really bothers me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I gotta get that done. But now my wife messed up one of her tires,
⏹️ ▶️ John so we’re spending a lot of time at the tire store. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, those those Boston winters, man. Yeah, living in the northeast the best. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey winter. I know it’s not winter there yet. But it’s the winters that destroy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your roads, isn’t it? And the plows that are removing your 18 tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John snow? Yeah, yeah, you see the roads from us. It’s ridiculous. They’re repaving a lot of stuff, just obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John not like the residential street in front of my house. But the major roads, a lot of them are getting repaved. And when
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re in the process of repaving, that’s how you destroy your rims as you bang over, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John helpfully spray painted manhole protrusions and 50 miles an
⏹️ ▶️ John major highway. It’s like, Oh, thanks. You spray painted it pink. Now, how am I supposed to navigate these five manhole
⏹️ ▶️ John covers that are all in a pattern that it’s impossible for me to avoid if I’m in this lane?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It just makes me sad that the manual is leaving. I mean, I, I know, I know that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming. I know it’s a thing, but I enjoy it. And everyone is quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tell me how they’re oftentimes less efficient, how they’re oftentimes slower than a modern automatic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the modern automatic’s very good. I know the ZF 8-speed is very good, but it’s more fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me to drive with three pedals. That’s what I like. And you should let people enjoy things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re still going to have that option in a lot of cars, but they’re going to become increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fewer choices and they’re going to become increasingly higher-end sports cars. Like Porsche is probably not going to stop offering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for a while in some of its cars. maybe not all of its cars, but maybe like the smaller ones like the Cayman or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, you know, who knows like there I’m guessing like there’s going to be options like that or maybe like a Miata
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s going to be options where you will still be able to get sticks, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 20 years ago, you could get a stick on lots of different cars and just now you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get them on very few. We’re still going to have options for a while, I think, but it’s not going to necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be cars that you want or that you want to spend the
⏹️ ▶️ John 24. Yeah, like the BRZ, like those throwback type cars where it’s like a small
⏹️ ▶️ John traditional sports car. Speaking of the BRZ, by the way, the 2018 Accord beat
⏹️ ▶️ John the BRZ around the track in the lightning round. Really? So that thing needs a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey badly. Oh, I could have told you that. I’ve driven one. They’re hilariously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John underpowered.
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, that’s kind of embarrassing for a sporty looking car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s pretty funny, though. Also, you know, I mean, this is kind of against the way we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to do things. But there’s also like the the old car option, like you could keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a car in your garage. That is, you know, your old Nissan 350. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white thing with the wheels wheels falling off like you could totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve conflated like three different cars, two of which I owned and one of which I did not I am very
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the modern numbering it was 300. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a 300 z x but it was my Saturn that the wheel fell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off and then there exists a a three fifty Z, which I have never owned my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mistake anyway, but I’m sure all three of them were white. That’s what matters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah, so like the point is like you know you could always just buy a stick car for fun driving like on the side or on the weekends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just make it your regular car and just tolerate the maintenance like a lot of people do that. It’s that’s totally an option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know if I really if I really wanted to buy a stick car today, I could go you know try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find one today or I could you know go buy my M R two and drive it slowly around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco town as its death trap. Like, that’s, I can do that, I have that option. I wouldn’t recommend it necessarily, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that option exists. You know, it doesn’t, you don’t have to be driving a stick all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time or as your everyday car, and it doesn’t have to be a new car for you to still have this as a thing you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you want to have some fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That reminds me, I have not caught up with any of my YouTube subscriptions, of which I do not have many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but one of the regular car reviews that I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been posted in the last month or two is a 300-wheel horsepower MR2, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure is right up your alley.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to guess the answer is turbochargers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that is exactly the right answer. Now, if you have never, if you are listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this, listener, and you have never seen- They installed some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large pipes in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back. That’s a turbocharger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never seen regular car reviews, it is pretty deeply offensive. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s kind of the shtick. So understand what you’re getting into.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find it interesting and actually fairly well written if you can get past all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey misogyny, which may or may not be for show. I can’t tell if it’s legitimate and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or if it’s not. It doesn’t really matter. At
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain point, it does not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s for sure. So anyway, so the dude that does it is has the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appearance of being extremely misogynistic. So be forewarned. But I do think the reviews are interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he, I think it was like an English major in college or something like that. So he makes these really interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often literary comparisons to these cars that I never would have expected. But I have not watched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this particular video, but it is apparently a 300 horsepower MR2. I think this is the era that you cared for, right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. See, there you go. So I’ll have to watch that later. I have so much homework this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hell’s going on? sorry god boy that is a nice looking car. Oh, the problem is like it’s a nice looking car like from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey from all angles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s kind of the problem. Like all like you know eighties and nineties cars have like looking back on old cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them have timeless designs. Some of them have sort of time full designs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them have like you know more time sensitive angles than others. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, but I still would love to drive one of these sometime. I’ve still never driven
⏹️ ▶️ John one. It’s gonna drive like a noisy low Honda Civic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. Yeah, I know. Like it. Maybe it’s probably better that I haven’t ever driven one. Like I think maybe that would ruin the appeal for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like I would realize
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was never actually a really good car and it’s old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, right. But it’s T tops man. Does anybody even make T tops anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this they do? Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John Porsche makes them tar. Porsche makes a target, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a T top target is not it’s not the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s close enough. Is it just like the Boxster with a T top basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s a removable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing right but there’s no t to it you know the entire roof comes out arga
⏹️ ▶️ Marco targa t a r g a with no t you missed the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco got it all right i thought
⏹️ ▶️ John i thought uh fit and porsche make one that actually had a t in it at one point uh years and years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe i just now realize that youtube honors the backward,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward, and play, pause keystrokes from Final Cut Pro. So J, K,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and L. J to go back, K to play, pause, and L to go forward. Do you think those are from Final Cut Pro? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are they from, Mr.