331: The Technical Burden of Users

20 Jun 2019

Bluetooth permission dialogs, Afterburner, Pro Display XDR longevity, mouse pads, and Marco’s fun summer plans.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • Mac Pro vent design
    • New Yorker article
  • Apple Reverses Course on MDM & Parental Control Apps
  • Apple tightens up rules for enterprise app certificates
• iOS 13 Bluetooth permission dialogs
  • Marco's tweets 1 2 3
  • Benjamin Herrin's findings
  • application(_:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:)
  • UIDevice
• Mac Pro
  • FPGA
  • The Talk Show #254: Live from WWDC 2019
  • Mac Power Users #485: WWDC and Interview with the Mac Pro Product Manager
• Pro Display XDR
• Sign in With Apple
  • An aside about Overcast and user data
• #askatp:
  • What do we think about mouse pads? (via Andy Beyer-Bowden)
    • MUG
    • HardOCP (it was the Ratpadz GS)
    • CS Hyde C4-NGen
  • Buying an old-generation MacBook Air as new today? (via Jon Schwenn)
  • How were the WWDC box lunches this year? (via many, including Tim Schmitz)
    • SoFa Market
    • San Pedro Square
    • Mango Tango
• Post-show: Marco's anticipated summer of fun

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Mac Pro holes
2. MDM-app policy
3. Enterprise-app policy
4. iOS 13 Bluetooth permission
5. Sponsor: Molekule (code ATP)
6. Mac Pro Afterburner
7. Pro Display longevity
8. Cold purchasing feet?
9. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
10. Sign In with Apple
11. Sponsor: ExpressVPN
12. #askatp: Mouse pads
13. #askatp: 2014 Air today
14. WWDC lunch update
15. Ending theme
16. Post-show 🖼️

Mac Pro holes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let me help you. Let me help you here. With Lord of the Rings, it is like 44 hours of film

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with a bunch of people walking around trying to throw a ring in a volcano. That’s the whole thing. That’s all you need to know. That is it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was the biggest waste of my life, of my time in the world. It’s not even worth it, Marco. Don’t do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. Thank you. All right. Let’s start with the Mac Pro hole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey design because we can’t get away from the trypophobia, whatever it’s called. I don’t even remember anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But a friend of the show, Stephen Stephen Hackett has collected a bunch of links and information that he conveniently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey put on one post, I think expressly for us. So John, tell us what’s going on here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, a few tidbits. First, in one of the popular feedback items we got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John last week, people were pointing us to the design page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro. They actually have a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John movie animation thing showing how the holes are created. They show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a side view, sort of a cut, you know, a side view cutaway of the thing. they show hemispherical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John divots appearing first on one side and then on the other offset. So that’s what we theorized and we should have just gone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Apple’s website because they confirmed that is indeed how those things are shaped. How they’re made,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, we don’t know, but that’s how they’re shaped. And then the speculation about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where the design came from and about, you know, the poorly heard conversation between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Johnny Ive and Tim Cook about it coming from the G4 cube. Stephen Hacker took out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John his G4 cube and looked at the bottom of it and you can see it’s the bottom of the top

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway one side of the the naked robotic core thing has a bunch of big holes and then behind that another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John piece of metal with a bunch of small holes and they are offset in the same sort of arrangement where through each big hole you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see a bit of three other holes right um but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a 3d thing so it’s unclear based on the overheard conversation whether johnny was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John referring to this like oh the Mac Pro it looks kind of like the the G4 Cube

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or as I originally thought that they actually did think about this machined

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pattern with the hemispheres but then just didn’t actually put it on the G4 Cube and just did something that’s much much cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and simpler to manufacture but also not as cool and not as prominent like these are much smaller scale

⏹️ ▶️ ^John holes and then finally somebody who sent this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Evar Majus sent us an article by by Ian Parker in the New Yorker that is an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old article from 2015 talking about Johnny Ive and in it they talk about a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John particular person in the design studio who used to come in early in the morning and make a bunch of geometrically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complex objects. Then they would have the machinist mill, which doesn’t seem cost effective. Like I know people are coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in just wasting the time of your machinist on staff and spending material and electricity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and wear and tear on the tools just to make cool designs. Anyway, and they said sometimes when they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having a meeting about a speaker hole pattern or something, Johnny will say, we’ll ask the guy, can you get your box of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John patterns? Like, this is just this ready-made box of weird patterns that they can try out, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fun. And you know, that’s kind of like brainstorming and just coming up with ideas and socking them away and then saying we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to, you know, we have a need for this. Instead of having to come up with something on the fly that you have just sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a parts bin of interesting design ideas that you may or may not be able to apply. So that may have happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this case as well. So I think we have thoroughly, thoroughly exhausted the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John origins and design merits and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aspects of the whole pattern in the front of our Mac Pros. I think we can put this one to bed, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No argument here.

MDM-app policy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I had seen some information about this flyby, but I didn’t get a chance to read it. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we had put in the show notes is Apple reverses course on MDM, which is mobile device management in parental control

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey apps. Can someone pinch hit as the chief summarizer and chief and let me know what this is about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You basically summarized it. Remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} before when we talked about- Look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at me go. Yeah, you did it accidentally. When we talked about before that there’s parental control applications that we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using in mobile device management features that are normally used to control a fleet of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company owned or company controlled devices and they’re using it for parental control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Apple told them they couldn’t do that anymore. Apparently Apple has reversed that decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it now says that you’re allowed to do it for parental control applications as long as you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sell, use, or disclose any data to third parties for any purpose. How

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is going to enforce that I have no idea but bottom line is that apparently are enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John companies making and selling parental control applications using this technology and their cries were heard by Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they have relented and they are allowed to continue to have businesses using this technology. Honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple really needs to create purpose built APIs just for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this. If they want this, apparently they do want this, this sort of market, this third party market for parental control stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have these powers. They want that to exist because if they didn’t want to exist, they could have just held fast and said, sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your business is over. It’s screen time or nothing now. Obviously, they want it to exist. They should do better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than MDM, because MDM really is not the best tool for that job and not really intended

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for that purpose. And having these multiple sets of rules about if you’re a parental control app,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have this. But if you’re an enterprise actual mobile device management app, you have that set of rules

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is just weird. But anyway, I’m sure they’ll resolve it in a few more years.

Enterprise-app policy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Kind of tangentially related around the same time that this parental control brouhaha happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there was the like illicit app store thing where People or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey companies were using enterprise certificates in order to distribute apps to people that were not part

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of their company So to recap if you’re a big company say like Northrop Grumman you might have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bunch of internal tools that you want to distribute only to your own employees and you can get a a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enterprise certificate from Apple if you jump through the appropriate hoops and pay the appropriate money, which will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey allow you to distribute apps outside of the App Store, sort of kind of sideloading them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just for your own employees. And what some not very nice people were doing was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey letting anyone be their quote unquote employee. And so apparently, Apple has tightened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up their rules with regard to enterprise app certificates. And one of you was kind enough to put in the show notes the following quote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you understand and agree that Apple reserves the right to review and approve or reject any internal use application that you would like to deploy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at any time during the term of this agreement. If requested by Apple, you agree to fully cooperate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with Apple and promptly provide such an internal use application to Apple for such review.”

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I read that as, you have to do what we say when we say it, and if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think you have something private, well, it’s not private when it comes to us because we are the gatekeepers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, enforcement is weird. Like how would they know what to request from who for what reasons?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like it’s just kind of like they have to hear through the grapevine that somebody’s using a certificate to distribute

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an application that they shouldn’t or that Apple is, you know, an Apple can ask and say, show us what you’re distributing or show us this application.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if they don’t know, you know, anyway, and this seems mostly tangential to the thing was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s even worse. And I was amazed that people found like just random people on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John web who want to distribute an application outside the app store. They’re not a big company.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They don’t have any employees. They just somehow got an enterprise certificate and they’re using it to distribute like some weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John jailbreak application or a game emulator or some other weird tracking spyware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff that wouldn’t go through the app store. And they just have a website and have instructions on how you can download

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff from the website and install their enterprise certificate on your phone and install this weird software that gets you pirated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff or, you know, is porn or gambling or whatever. And that has just been sitting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there existing on the web outside of Apple’s view apparently. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this doesn’t change any of that because those people would just get shut down no matter what. This is more like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for companies like Google or whatever that do legitimately have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enterprise certificates. It’s just that Apple now says, at any time we want it, we can ask you, hey, what are you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John distributing? Show us this, show us that, and then we can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to it. which I’m sure the big companies love.

iOS 13 Bluetooth permission

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, you’ve been tweeting recently about Bluetooth and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new, I guess, like prompt that’s in iOS 13. I am not yet running iOS 13 on any of my devices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I will probably put it on my iPad when the next seed comes out. But can you tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me a little bit about what’s going on here? Because I find it very interesting and I thought we could talk about it a little bit before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I go to sleep during the Mac Pro section.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sure. And I should begin this with a massive disclaimer that I’m still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco learning about this and I I currently don’t know that much about it. I don’t know that much about the Bluetooth API usage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything, but basically the world of like, you know, ad tracking and analytics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tracking is always looking for a way around Apple’s protections

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and rules. So, you know, they don’t want people, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so lots of apps basically want people’s location data and other things that they can sell to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco money. You’d be shocked how many apps sell your location data behind the scenes for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco money, especially apps that actually get permission to use your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco location for some part of the app. Like this is very common among scammy weather apps and even some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ostensibly non-scammy ones, like some of the really big weather apps end up being caught like tracking your location

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the time and then selling it to people for money. Tracking location is like a very valuable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco privacy thing to be sold and so lots of apps try to do it and Apple tries

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to lock it down. If you deny the location access to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actual GPS chip of the phone, there are still ways to infer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your location much of the time. One of those ways is to scan for Wi-Fi networks around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you and figure out, and match it against databases of known Wi-Fi networks and where they are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can oftentimes get tracked that way. Another way is via Bluetooth beacons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and other Bluetooth devices that can be scanned with Core Bluetooth. What Apple has done in iOS 13 is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lock down Core Bluetooth in the same way that GPS access is locked down by requiring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco user permission. So it pops up a box saying, hey, so and so app wants to use Bluetooth, do you want to allow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this? And what’s interesting is that in iOS 13, so I’ve had the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco beta installed on all my main devices for about two days now. By the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t do this. Like, it’s really bad. And this is, Beta 2, Beta 2 is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really bad. Especially, especially around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco audio and volume and audio routing to multiple audio devices, it’s really bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So don’t do this. But anyway, the Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dialog boxes just keep popping up for me from apps that I haven’t even launched that are just doing background refreshes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or responding to silent push notifications or something. And so I tweeted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco earlier today, I think, or yesterday, I tweeted like, hey, here’s the apps that so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in like one day of running this, I already have like six or seven apps that most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of which I haven’t even launched that are trying to use Bluetooth. And I’ve gotten a ton of responses since then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from people either saying, wow, my list is even longer, or from people saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here’s all the ways and all the reasons why some of these are legitimate. And I think it’s interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of the things people pointed out is that the location-based apps, like Google Maps and Waze,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they apparently will use Bluetooth beacons to, like if you’re in certain tunnels

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that have these beacons installed, to provide GPS in tunnels, or to provide GPS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco indoors, in various places indoors. I don’t know how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco useful and accurate that is. I mean, if you’re driving down a tunnel at like 60

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco miles an hour, Can you even make a Bluetooth connection to something you’re passing by?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it connects. I think it’s just like a pinging type thing. It’s not making a, it’s not pairing with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it or anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so anyway, so walking around indoors is probably a more common thing, or maybe even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using mass transit, like subways, it might be a more common thing. Anyway, so there are some legitimate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reasons why apps that use your location as part of the functionality, like a mapping app,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might want Bluetooth access. I do find it creepy that it’s Google that’s doing this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Another problem is YouTube. And apparently, every app that includes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Google Chromecast support. Whoops. Huh. So one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things that Bluetooth is often used for is for proximity device communication.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so, like one of my things that had it was the Nokia

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Healthmate app. Because I have a, why things, or I guess Nokia now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wi-Fi scale. and during setup, it uses Bluetooth for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco setup and pairing of the scale initially. Now, this just came up in a background

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco refresh. I haven’t launched the app in months, and I think it’s, what we’re seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is like, the app just instantiates the core Bluetooth device manager singleton,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it just instantiates that and just like has it ready to go all the time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even though like I’m not currently pairing a new scale, So I don’t need this. The scale,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like every day when I step on the scale, it communicates over wifi. And I get my results in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the app over wifi. So like Bluetooth isn’t necessary anymore, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the app just starts the Bluetooth manager API probably in like the application did finish

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco launching, you know, startup method and just, you know, calls it a day. Similarly, the Tesla app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So like there’s a couple of features that Tesla offers that I have never set up and don’t use. And some of them my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco car isn’t even capable of. but apparently it also just instantiates a Bluetooth connection

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the background all the time, like whenever a background refresh is. So what we’re seeing is there are legitimate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco uses for a lot of apps to have this, but there’s also a lot of apps that really don’t need this permission. By the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way, I’ve said no to all of them, and everything still works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, and there were a few responses on Twitter from people who were upset that I was calling them out. I was like, these are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco legitimate, this is gonna cause problems. But I think what we’re seeing here is like, apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco often just request access to things by default because it’s easy because it’s part of some like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco global setup method like your app to finish launching method and you you just instantiate the Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just in case you need it. Like for example, there’s an API on UI device which is like kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your your API gateway as an app developer to the phone and its properties. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an API to check the battery level of the phone, which by the way, people have used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be creepy. Like one of the ways people try to fingerprint devices or fingerprint

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unique people and devices between different apps without using the ID for advertising that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco provides would be to match the exact battery level, which would be like, you know, 94.37% with the time of day,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with other things try to fingerprint you. And so years ago, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco made the battery API only go in 5% increments. So you’ll never get 94.35% reported

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to you as the app. You’ll get 95% and then a little while later you’ll get 90%. And so Apple’s always in these battles with creepy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco analytics packages to try to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lock down things so that you can’t be uniquely identified without your knowledge. So Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enables battery monitoring. You have to actually tell the API, turn on battery monitoring, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then you can start getting values from it. And I do that right from the start. sync engine starts I’m enabling battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco monitoring because I check the battery level to determine how frequently to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sync because syncing involves a network request and that could use power and so when your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco battery level is not great or when you are in low power mode I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco throttle back the sync engine so it doesn’t make as many requests. There’s lots of things like that that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like people might be starting up the Bluetooth API just automatically all the time for every background refresh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for some feature like that that they think is minor or might occasionally be helpful to you, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they just do it out of just, it’s, why not do it, right? So what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice about this is that now it gives people the knowledge of what they’re doing on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing that could be used for creepy purposes, even if it isn’t always, but it could be used for creepy purposes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So Apple’s giving people the knowledge like, hey, you know what, by the way, this app here, they’re doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re wanting to access your Bluetooth hardware, and you get a chance to say no. And for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most apps, you can say no and nothing bad happens. I should also clarify before, I just remembered now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before I forget, before we get a lot of confused emails and tweets, the Bluetooth access that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is prompting about and potentially denying has nothing to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with Bluetooth audio output. Like Overcast does not use this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Even though you can play to a Bluetooth headset, it’s only about scanning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for Bluetooth devices and communicating with Bluetooth devices in ways that are not about playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco audio. That’s all this is. So you shouldn’t see this prompt from like podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps and stuff, unless they integrate the Google Chromecast SDK, which apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco starts this up for whatever reason. So anyway, most of the warnings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you see are gonna be legitimate, and most of them don’t reflect the apps being creepy as hell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but there are a whole lot of apps out there that are creepy as hell, and use this in some way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I would say, you know, similar to if an app asks for your location,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say no, unless you have a really obvious, clear reason to say yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wonder if this Apple’s going to eventually come out with their version of like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cross origin request, whatever stuff. I know they, they have the thing where they require all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your network connections to be secure and everything, but we’re not at the point where like the iPhone is like a little has a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John snitch installed and tells you everything you’re connecting to. Do they have a thing where you have to list all the domains your app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John communicates with? Is that a requirement?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No. And that’s how Overcast can download podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because otherwise, that’d be a big problem. Yeah, I can imagine that coming on eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that’s like the next frontier of creepy things that things can do. So the Bluetooth is one. And the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, I forget if you already talked about this or tweeted about it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John analytics packages, not just Chromecast SDK, but if you have any sort of thing, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John send your crash reports. and we’re a company that will, and by the way, we’ll also track the location of all your users and convey that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information as well. Like using Bluetooth, again, to find location, like without GPS, like you can do Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^John network mapping and there’s the Bluetooth stuff. So that’s another reason I think a lot of apps use it. Not because the app maker

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is trying to creepily do something, but because they merely embedded a third-party SDK that they had no idea was doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this. I bet half the people who embedded the Chromecast SDK don’t know. But anyway, the next frontier is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what kind, like where is this application sending your data, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if the, if the application vendors had to just whitelist and say, wow, this application is going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to communicate with these domains, right? And then at least there’d be some way for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both Apple to know what it’s supposed to do with and disallow connections to anything else. And maybe someplace for users to understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what it’s connecting to. Um, obviously for things like podcast applications, they’d have to have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m going to communicate with everything, right? Uh, which should would definitely be a thing that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should be able to ask for an Apple should give it to you, and then Apple would know what’s up with that application,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and people who are interested in what things your app are communicating with could see the list and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says this app has the permission to communicate with any website or any server, and here are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the last 100 servers that it communicated with, and you could look at that list, and maybe I’m going a little bit overboard, but it seems like that’s the direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is going, and that every way that app makers can find to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John funnel data into or out of the phone for purposes that the user of the application

⏹️ ▶️ ^John might not guess. Apple is adding controls to, adding visibility to, you know, not that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re stopping them from doing that, but just that like, if it’s a legit thing you have to do, you should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have no problem saying that, saying this is what my app is gonna do, and you shouldn’t be ashamed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to explain that to your users, and it should, you should be able to explain it. Users, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you could explain it somewhere to either Apple or your users, they should be like, yeah, okay, that all makes sense, fine, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If that’s not the case, and you’re like, Why is this application, you know, again, like in the old days, reading all my contacts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and sending them up to the server. This application has nothing to do with my contacts. Why is it even doing that? Why is it tracking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my location? Like, if you can’t explain that to your user, you shouldn’t be allowed to use it. So I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this type of change, even though it is producing yet more dialogue boxes. That was the other complaint

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I saw on Twitter, that people were like, well, you’re just training people to click through all these dialogue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boxes and click okay. Maybe, but it’s better than no dialogue box, in which case, you know, it has 100%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people essentially allowing it to happen because they’re never even prompted. So it’s it’s better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than no dialogue box at all. How much better and how much dialogue fatigue are we getting? I’m not sure. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hopefully after the initial release, when everyone has to deal with all these dialogues, it will just fade

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into the background and not be such a common thing. And by the way, real time follow up so we don’t get this next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The withings co founder bought the company back from Nokia in 2018. That’s fun. You sell your company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Nokia, some big company. Yeah. You sell your company to Nokia and presumably get a nice payday.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then, you know, the big company like squanders everything your company had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they sell it back to you for a song. So you’re back in control of your company and you made a nice windfall in the meantime.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s kind of great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just, I think this is fascinating and I do love that Apple, as you guys have said, is calling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more and more attention to this behavior that could, isn’t always, but could be nefarious. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think oftentimes it is either nefarious or laziness. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve been guilty of this. I can’t think of specific examples, certainly not with regard to Bluetooth, but I’ve been guilty of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can see myself, and I don’t use any third-party analytics in Vignette, but I could totally see myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just throwing some analytics package in there and not realizing that I need to tweak this setting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey here or turn off this feature there in order to prevent this sort of dialogue from popping up. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey entirely blame your average app developer, but I definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey am creeped out by how many apps seem to be doing this. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was, I think Benjamin Heron had tweeted and you had retweeted a list of what looked to be like 50 plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey apps that he had discovered on his phone that were trying to get Bluetooth access, which is just bananas. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s so hard because as you guys had said, how do you know where this data is going? How do you know if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey using it to find your location in a tunnel or if it’s using it to try to figure out your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey specific point on the earth for an app that adds images to your contacts?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s so hard to say, but I do like that Apple’s surfacing this. I do like this effort to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey give more control to users, and I hope that this sort of thing continues. Another

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing like this is, and I don’t have anything to put in the show notes handy, but maybe we’ll be able to dig something up, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey apparently when you delete an app that has has an associated subscription, it actually says to you, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you still have a subscription for this thing, and it’s gonna re-up on such and such a date or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like that, which I think is another great idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, it stinks for Marco in the sense that he might not collect money from people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t even realize they were sending him money, but I know I speak for Marco in saying, that’s for the best, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} that’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That doesn’t suck. I actually really don’t want people’s money if they are like tricked into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco giving it to me. I really don’t want that at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I really like that as well. I just really like this direction. Yeah, I think, John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you had said that there’s fatigue about dialogues, there’s fatigue about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey subscriptions. We’re getting fatigued about everything, our current administration. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s worth it, I think. It’s worth it to see this and to think about this at least for a second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think that this behavior will change. Because the reason all these things are using Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you didn’t have to prompt before, right? Once you have to prompt, it changes the equation entirely. We’ll have to find some new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nefarious way to figure out where you are for the purposes of analytics, right? I mean, it’s kind of the same reason that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I installed an analytics package that tells me what all my users are doing with the application and sends me crash

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reports. And to each crash report, it attaches the last 30 seconds of audio heard by the phone so I can hear the user

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cursing. That doesn’t happen because you need permission to get access to the microphone. And no one wants to prompt for that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if their application doesn’t actually need it. it. So same thing with this new rule on Bluetooth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All these weird SDKs that don’t actually need Bluetooth and are just using it as a backdoor to get your location are going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find some other way.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Alright, I’m gonna go to sleep now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What’s going on with Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think this is the bottom of the barrel of Mac Pro topics.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, sure it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Uh-huh, sure it is. How

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many times have we said this? things that were put into the document at WWDC. I think this is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the last of them. This is about briefly

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} one small item about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the afterburner card, which we had touched on before. The card that lets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac Pro deal with three simultaneous streams of 8K video or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an even larger number of streams of 4K video. And it does all of the work of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decoding and the video on this card. And it uses an FPGA, which is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John field programmable gate array, which is basically like imagine a chip with a bunch of gates on it instead of someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deciding ahead of time how they should Be connected to each other and what they should do you can Program

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to arrange itself. However, you want its field programmable so you can you know, take this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Lego set of gates and Make essentially, you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the the chip that you want it to be and then it runs software after it has become that chip obviously it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is Less efficient and bigger and hotter and all that than an actual custom designed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John integrated circuit that just does one thing But it’s very flexible and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was a couple questions about that Is that we see like why that why do they use an FPGA? What’s the deal with that? I thought my first guess was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like maybe it’s time to market Like they were they were kind of in a rush for this Mac Pro and they wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have this afterburner card and maybe Making a custom chip in that time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frame wasn’t feasible and it turns out an FPGA could do the job just as well and obviously it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would be more expensive and take more power but money and power are two things the Mac Pro’s got plenty of so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not a big deal. But when Craig Federi was on the talk show at WWDC he said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the reason they use an FPGA is because it’s reprogrammable like that it’s field programmable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Implying or outright saying I forget that essentially they’ll be able to change the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John card to reconfigure it maybe to do different things maybe to just do the same thing but better. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that, that’s an actual goal that they, you know, it will be reprogrammable to change its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John behavior in one way or another, which is really cool. Again, I’m not sure how often Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exercise this or whether it’s open to third parties, but that’s that makes that piece of hardware even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little bit more exciting. And then Doug Brooks on Mac Power Users podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also at Macworld mentioned the afterburner card as a way for customers to to spec fewer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CPU cores. That’s a money saving thing. Like if you get the afterburner card, then you don’t have to get the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Pro with a bazillion cores because you’re offloading a big part of the hard work that the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would be doing to the second card. So Apple’s always looking out for your wallet with that Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How much does that, we don’t even know. I was gonna say, how much does the afterburner card cost? Like that money saving thing only makes sense if the afterburner

⏹️ ▶️ ^John card itself is not like 10 grand or something. I have no idea. Obviously it’s probably not 10 grand, but we don’t have the prices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on anything. So right now, it makes sense as a money-saving story. After we see, although it probably makes sense

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no matter what, because probably the most expensive thing, aside from RAM, that you can add to your Mac Pro, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to max out the CPU, because Intel’s prices are pretty nuts when you get that high.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, Intel is gonna have quite a good time with these CPU prices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the Afterburner, I would say, is unlikely to be under $1,000.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, it would be-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The wheels are gonna be under $1,000. The stand is $1,000. Of course it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} gonna be over $1,000. Yeah, I’m guessing that’s like a $1,500 option maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I don’t know anything about FPGA pricing. It’s interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that also they called it Afterburner. They didn’t call it ProRes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Accelerator. So I think that also opens them up to future

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expansion of this into other types of roles. There’s all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pro hardware that is basically some kind of accelerator card for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some kind of specialized task that goes into a PCI Express slot. Apple themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were bragging about things like Avid has some kind of accelerator,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somebody has whatever, there’s some kind of DSP accelerator for I think Pro Tools or something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know. See, I don’t know this market at all, but many pro fields have these kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accelerator cards that are usually basically like programmable thing, or not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco programmable, like specialized hardware to super accelerate some tasks, similar to how a GPU accelerates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco graphics calculations. I think there is a future here for other applications. And they probably will never be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a large number of other applications, but I bet there’s gonna be at least one to three more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think the main interesting prospect is that the card continues to do essentially the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same job, but then it gets better at it and supports more different codecs and formats or whatever as time goes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on. They protect your investment that way, Not that suddenly the FPGA is reprogrammed as like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, a Bitcoin miner or something, of all that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} certainly possible, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems like not something that Apple would be into.

Pro Display longevity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, tell me about the Pro Display XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One more leftover item from our discussion of that, longevity. We talked so much about the price and the stand and all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other stuff, and we talked about the longevity of the Mac Pro itself, but the final

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing to consider for this horrendously expensive but cheap if you want a reference monitor display

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is how long do you think it will last? As I sit here in front of a 10-year-old monitor that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, as far as I can tell, as perfect as the day I bought it, does not have any dead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pixels, doesn’t have any image retention, isn’t any dimmer, like it just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monitors, in theory, if they don’t have anything weird and complicated inside them, can last a very long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. The biggest thing in favor of the longevity of this display

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the number of pixels on it, in that 10 years from now, you’re not going to be like, well, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, it depends on how well Apple does with the glasses thing. But presumably, if current trends continue 10 years from now, you will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not look at this 30-whatever inch monitor and be like, I really need a bigger monitor or I need, I need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more pixels. Uh, I certainly won’t cause my vision was just getting worse, not better. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John features wise, if that monitor is not going to look old or small

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or dim anytime soon, but there are many things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the other side of the longevity equation, aside from assuming it continues to work perfectly, will you be disappointed with this? No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The assuming it continues to work perfectly thing is very fraught because this is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a sort of Reliable implementation of a proven technology for monitors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as far as I’m aware There is no monitor and Apple was tried emphasis emphasize this it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same features and is built the same way as this monitor There are televisions that are built the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same way as this monitor, but they’re very different. They have far fewer pixels They are much larger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They have you know have much more headroom for cooling because they’re not shoved into a smaller space

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so that’s the only real analog we have and Televisions getting around 10 years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no matter what technology they’re built on you start to ask questions Right about that reliability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about just the circuitry in there and everything this display. I Guess if all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John goes well, maybe you get 10 years out of it, but it’s got moving parts. It’s got two fans.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I I mean the fans in my Mac Pro are okay, but that tends to be the type of thing that dies. I’ve gone through many GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coolers in my Mac Pro which are obviously of lower quality than the fans that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John puts in the entire thing. So maybe the fans will last 10 years? Will the cooling be sufficient? Will some part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that thing be baking? Will it have image retention problems? The whole HDR thing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The back of it being a heatsink makes me think it’s going to be generating a considerable amount of heat. So my confidence

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this monitor, actually physically lasting 10 years and continuing to function,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not that great. So if you’re thinking of buying this and you think it’s gonna,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes, it’s horrendously expensive, but I’m sure I’ll use it for 10 years, I wouldn’t bet on that. And the other thing to keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in mind is, this technology, dynamic backlit LCD

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a bunch of LEDs that turn on and off, there’s a reason it is not the top tier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technology in televisions anymore, because it is more complicated and not as good quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as OLED, which is a much simpler technology that gives you essentially the same results. Will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there be an OLED screen that surpasses this? Certainly there could be an OLED screen that is much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John simpler than this. OLEDs have a problem with brightness. It’s harder to get,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like on OLED televisions, you can get a very bright little square in the middle of the TV,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but if you fill the entire screen with white, they don’t have enough power to drive that the brightness levels that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the that an LED backlit thing does. So so there’s that disadvantage but other than that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OLEDs are so much simpler thinner and don’t require as many fans don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multiple layers of filters and circuitry to control which parts of the backlight are on like there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is no backlight it is self-emissive each pixels gives off its own light so I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John imagine in 10 years this display it won’t seem old because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too small or has too few pixels or doesn’t look as good, but it will seem, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, kind of like my Mac Pro does now with a bunch of spinning disks and nine fans

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it and all that other stuff. There’s just, it’s a lot of bulk and a lot of machinery and a lot of heat and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lot of power to get a result that you can get from a much thinner, completely silent, fanless,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much cooler OLED. That’s my hope anyway, that in 10 years there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a replacement that had those attributes. Because certainly that’s true of televisions now. Like, I mean, my Plasma TV with all its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fans and this giant power draw and it’s huge hot stuff. You replace that with an OLED, no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fans, much quieter, much less power. I expect that to happen in the modern world as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I guess I’m mostly telling this to myself. Like, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John am I justifying this horrendous display? It’s not because I’m gonna keep it for 10 years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna buy it with the expectation that it might not even outlast the Mac Pro. I might still have that Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro 10 years from now, you know, with all the internals upgraded 10 times over, but the display might have died

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by then, and I’m mostly okay with that, but keep that in mind if you were thinking of plugging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down the price of a car for this system.

Cold purchasing feet?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I cannot wait until we get to the point that you can spec this out. Both of you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can spec this out and see exactly what you’re in for because, oh boy, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is going to be something else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I already know that it’s going to, like what I want is probably, what I want is probably going to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like 18 grand. Like it’s probably going to be some obscene amount of money. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I also, I really don’t think I’m going to get one. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Okay. You get one briefly. The resale value should be pretty good on these, especially if you decide after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John six months that you don’t want it anymore. I mean, you found that out with the trash can, that it wasn’t the computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for you and you sold it and the resale price was reasonable. Like, you didn’t take too much of a bath. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like rolling your Ferrari off the lot and you lose 150K. No, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reason I sold the trash can after a short time was that the 5K iMac came out and I wanted desktop retina

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so badly and there was no good way to do it on the trash can for a while, if ever, after that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But otherwise, I really enjoyed it. I liked it at the time I bought it. It was fine for me. It wasn’t as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ideal as an expandable tower, but it was actually great. And actually, it would be more ideal for me now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than I think the new Mac Pro, which is unfortunate. But that’s not to say they should go back to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But no, I think the more I think about it, the more I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iMac Pro really is probably the best computer for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have to buy it at least briefly because I need someone to buy it and tell me about if it’s finicky and weird. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have that duty to fulfill.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You have to be that person, John. After 10 years, you have to finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be that person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I want someone else to tell me if it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lemon. And we’ll see. And if they do resolve the monitor situation by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offering some kind of 5K monitor that’s compelling and well-priced,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that might change my calculus. But for now, with the only good monitor being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 6K monster that while I would love a 6K display, I don’t need any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the fancy backlighting and HDR, like I don’t need any of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really just want a larger version of what I already have in the iMac, because the iMac Pro monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is already dramatically overspecced for what I actually use it for, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not dramatically overpriced for what I use it for. Whereas I currently don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use a $40,000 reference monitor because I don’t need one. And so for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple to make a really nice $6,000 one, that’s great, but I still don’t need it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m really leaning towards iMac Pro still because I have it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco already, first of all, so it’s kind of free. So I have it already and it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. And I have, there’s nothing wrong with my iMac Pro. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so maybe if things start going bad in a few years or like maybe like if I have problems with the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the iMac Pro, that might push me in the direction of a Mac Pro to separate those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco concerns. But right now I’m not motivated to make a change.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Okay. This is what happens when Apple doesn’t put up the configurator, because once that configurator goes up, suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco’s trigger finger gets a little itchy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, I give you a hard time Marco, But in a lot of ways, I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the both of you, I think John more than Marco, but the both of you have been longing for this computer since

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey probably before the trashcan came out. And I don’t know you, Marco, to be one to shy away from trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something new. And I will be flabbergasted if you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at least pull a, I don’t know if it’s a pulling a Steven or pulling a Marco at this point, because you two are competing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey over who buys and resells or returns computers more often. But anyways, you’ll pull

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a something and buy one of these and then. I suspect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’ll end up keeping it, but I am not nearly as confident as I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey before we started really thinking about what this pricing is going to be, but I will be utterly flabbergasted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you don’t at least briefly have one that you own in your house, even if it leaves within

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the two week return window, or perhaps like the two to six months Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quote-unquote return window wherein you will sell it to somebody else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Possibly John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Possibly John. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the only way I can get one at a discount. I would never sell a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to John, are you kidding? I’m sure you would. Imagine, oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} god, no. No way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I agree with Marco on this a hundred percent. Why? I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure you would. It would still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be under warranty.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If something goes wrong with it, it’s my fault. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to blame you. It’s under warranty. You would totally blame

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey him. I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blame you. I mean, I might drive there to pick it up. I probably wouldn’t let you ship it, but.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, you would totally do your little grumble, like, well, you know, the GPU just died.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Probably wouldn’t happen if.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That happens, like, you know, like I said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco must have dropped it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This computer has been through a lot of GPUs. Like, it happens, it’ll be fine. I would take the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John discount. There’s no way I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ever sell you any hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, I cannot possibly agree with you more on this issue. There is not a chance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I would sell John. And now, giving it to him, which of course you wouldn’t do with a computer this expensive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} but…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, giving it to him, that’s a different story. Right. But selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} No. No. No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, I normally don’t sell things to people I know. Like, if I’m gonna give it to somebody, I’ll just give

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to them. And if it’s something that’s too expensive for that, I’ll sell it to a stranger on the internet. Because I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want there to be that awkwardness of, like, if something goes wrong with it down the road, that’s really weird,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right? So I really don’t like selling things to people I know, but among the list of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know, John would be the last person I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sell it to. It’s better to sell it to somebody you know because I know that you don’t mistreat your hardware,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so it wouldn’t be a suspicion in my mind that you had stored it in a room with 700 cats and been chain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John smoking in front of it for a year and then dropped it off your desk. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know that’s not how you treat your hardware, And so I would be assured that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hadn’t been mishandled by you, it could have been mishandled by UPS or anything else, which is why I might drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go get it or whatever. But that’s true of anything I get shipped to myself too. Like you can’t control that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, still not worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. I still agree with Marco on this one. I would not wish that upon my biggest enemy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Just trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to deny me the Marco discount, which I need, I mean need desperately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You wanna start making YouTube videos? I got some video gear. It’s silly. Pass. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got all the video gear I need on my PlayStation. Yikes.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so one other thing we’ve wanted to talk about over the last couple of weeks is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this whole sign in with Apple thing. So I think it was during the keynote or maybe the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey State of the Union, but it was something on Monday that Apple announced that instead of doing, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s kind of like a peer sort of to log in with Facebook or log in with Google, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will be able to sign in with Apple and use your iCloud account in order to sign in to other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey services. So presumably, there will be some API that Apple is vending that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will let, say, Overcast, for example, use some sort of token or credentials

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from Apple in order to give you an Overcast account. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this all sounded well and good, people were excited about this, including me. But what was interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was something that somebody spotted. I forget where this was, but this is a screenshot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that we got from somewhere. Sign in with Apple will be available for beta testing this summer. It will be required

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as an option for users and apps that support third party sign in when it is commercially available later

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this year. Well, shots fired. So this is extremely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cool In general, I’m not sure what I think about forcing it upon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people, well, companies really, but it’s really a great idea. And one of the things I talked about during the keynote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or State of the Union or wherever it was, was that they’ll actually give a vendor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so say Overcast, like this completely cryptic, not fake, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unique email address that will proxy emails from say Overcast to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so that Overcast, and I’m picking on Overcast, not just because Marco’s here, but that will proxy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey emails from Overcast to you so the evil people at Overcast can never see your actual email

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey address. It just seems like it’s really, really well done. I don’t know how I feel about this forcing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people to use it, though. So before we talk about forcing people to use it, any other notes about kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of what this is?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s important to clarify in what conditions they are forcing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people to use it. Okay, tell me more. It’s easy if you just kind of glance at this and the rule

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to think that they are going to require any app with user accounts to use this. And a lot of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reactions I’ve seen have seemed to be based on that assumption, but that’s not what they’re saying. You can use it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for user accounts, but you aren’t required to. When you are required to offer it is if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offer login or registration, you know, if if you offer user account login

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco via third party things like social networks. Interesting. I have my own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco account system in Overcast. So I don’t need to offer this because I don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an Overcast login screen that says sign in with Google, sign in with Facebook. So therefore I’m not required

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do this. The only people, as the rule’s written, the only people who are required to do this right now or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who will be required this fall are apps that offer sign in with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco third party thing as their account system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or in addition to their account system. Like they might have a, you know, they always call it, in websites, they call it sign in with email,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is basically make an account on my system or don’t bother making an account and we’ll just authenticate you using whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your social network or thingamabob is. Yeah. So I think a lot of apps do that. They have their own

⏹️ ▶️ ^John account system, but they have those other convenient ones. And then the private email thing is kind of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the thing that tech nerds have done forever, where they give a unique email address to each service, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is just a pending a plus and a service name or something like that so that when they get spam, they can have the satisfaction of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knowing, aha, I only gave this specific email address to this company and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know that this company sold my name. What they do with that information other than being satisfied

⏹️ ▶️ ^John briefly, I don’t know because every company sells your email address. Like, they all do that and what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are you gonna do? Now I’m never going to buy anything from insert store name soon you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy anything anywhere ever again because they all

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} sell your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information. They all do. But this privacy thing is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it does this for you, it doesn’t do like your name plus and some tag, it’s just entirely, you know, random

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cryptic type thing. And then you can sort of turn it off. You can say, well, I’m done with that one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t want that email address to connect to my actual email address anymore. And so you won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hear from them anymore. Like it just disconnects it. Which is probably not what you wanna do. You do want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them to stop spamming you, but you also still wanna get the email that confirms your order at the whatever online store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you bought it. But anyway, that option is there. I think the most interesting thing about that option though,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is Apple has said they won’t retain any of your messages. But it’s like, good, we didn’t expect you to Apple doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want our email. But But But But the way the system works is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big, long cryptic, weird looking hex string at something that something that apple.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like private that apple, like I don’t know whatever it is it’s the email goes to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an Apple server. The Apple server using the email system as we know it, then stores

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and forwards that email to your actual address. So the email passes through Apple. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we are essentially trusting Apple to not look at these emails, the vast, vast, vast majority,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which are not encrypted in any way. Email is a plain text format. Most people don’t have, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signing keys and also those stuff, you know, you can. So there is an inherent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of this feature that relies on people having trust in Apple, which I think is entirely well founded

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because Apple doesn’t make money by scanning your email and selling advertising based on what the content

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of or so on and so forth. But that is an aspect of the system. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the has the best reputation for privacy among these big companies actually is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the best on privacy for, you know, for the economic reasons. And so I think this won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be much of a barrier because people honestly don’t even understand what all the other big companies to do with email, but for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tech people, it’s a good thing to understand if you decide to use that. Because if you give the company, if you give this online

⏹️ ▶️ ^John store your actual email, the email will not necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pass through Apple. So it’s way back to you, because again, email is a store and forward, and you have no idea how many places your email

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is being stored and forwarded to. And who gets access to it? And if you have a Gmail address, Google can see it, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you have a whatever address, then maybe your email vendor can see it. And best not to think about email. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} particularly secure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not particularly secure, but that’s one thing to keep in mind. And the final thing I think is interesting about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this and the reason I’ve wanted a feature like this for such a long time and the reason people offer sign in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Facebook, sign in with Google. Is there a sign in with Twitter? I don’t even know. I think some things have that. I think so. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the reason they do this is because no one wants to set up a new account. It’s friction in the process. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a barrier to entry. It makes lots of people say, Oh, I don’t want to have to set up a thing. And it used to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back in the even worse old days. So I’m not gonna call the bad old days. We’re still in the bad old days. The even worse old days,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they would make you pick a username. Do you remember that, where you had to pick a username and the username you wanted would be taken?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so you wouldn’t even be able to remember what the heck you put, because your first and last name are taken, your first name is taken, your last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John name is taken, your first and last initial are taken, and so you can never remember what you put. Thankfully,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the even worse old days till today, most sites have switched to doing an email address, which hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have some stable version of, which is, again, not a great system, especially when you use third party email vendors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a domain that you don’t own. But no one wants to set up an account. I don’t want to put in my first name and last name. I don’t have to put it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in my address. I don’t know how to uncheck all the check boxes about the spam. Like it takes a long time and it’s annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t want to do that. I’m in the middle of trying to buy something or do a thing. Just let me do the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So sign in with Facebook is like, oh, I’m already signed into Facebook in all my web

⏹️ ▶️ ^John browsers and in the application and on this phone. So I’ll just tap the sign in with Facebook and it will bounce me through the little,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, single sign on thing. and I won’t even have to enter anything because I’m already signed in and the embedded

⏹️ ▶️ ^John web view already has my cookies and it’ll just sail right through and I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to make a new account. I already have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Facebook account. Let me just reduce the friction. That’s why people use that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature. I use that feature sometimes. Every time I use it, I regret it because I use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to sign with Google, not sign with Facebook, obviously. But I don’t like the idea of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google being that much of a linchpin, even though my email address is at Google anyway. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, it’s convenient in the moment. Long term, perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not that great. But the advantage that Apple has is they have even less friction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than sign in with Google and sign in with Facebook. Because while you’re using your phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you are signed in to your Apple ID if you have any iCloud. I don’t even know, can you even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get onto your phone without any kind of iCloud sign in? I suppose you probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} can.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can. But they really fight you on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but nobody does that. Because if you wanna do anything useful on your phone, in any way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like buy apps, which is a thing I feel like you might wanna do on your phone, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna have an Apple ID and you’re gonna be signed into it. And that sign-in process has access

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Touch ID and Face ID and your keychain with all your passwords on it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that sync across all your other Apple devices, even if you don’t use a third-party piece of software and the new strong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John password generation. It is even lower friction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t even want to have to bounce through another site. I just want it to be like when I make a purchase in the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or Apple Pay on the web where it just, like I’m staring at the screen and it looks at my face

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it approves it and it goes through. I barely even need to hit anything except for the double tap on the side thing for Apple Pay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But for login, you won’t have to do anything. Just hit for it, sign in with Apple, continue to stare at your screen and get signed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in. Using an account that you probably already have from a company that has the best reputation and privacy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the entire industry you already trust with certain amount of information because you’re using an iPhone and you’re presumably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buying apps from the App Store. I can’t wait to use this feature.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In the same way that I enjoy using Apple Pay, which means I don’t have to remember or enter my credit card

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information or whatever, and that the site doesn’t have to doesn’t get and retain my credit card information.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would love to sign in to everything with sign in with Apple. I already have an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John identity. I’m probably always going to have an Apple identity for for as long as the company exists. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already signed into it everywhere. It’s the ultimate friction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reduction in sign-in that is possible on the devices that I use. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking forward to this feature. I probably won’t use the private email thing because honestly, everybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has my email, like the entire universe has my email. There is no way it could get more spam.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like there’s not, it’s not like, I will, I’ll keep my email

⏹️ ▶️ ^John private. That way I’ll get less spam. No, you won’t. You won’t get less spam. It’s impossible. Anyway, I’m probably not going to use that feature, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nice for including it and it will make paranoid people happy and give them something to do as they deny people access to the email

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by turning it off and then don’t understand why they didn’t get a confirmation of their order.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I’m really looking forward to signing in as easily as I pay for stuff with Apple Pay, probably even easier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Marco, do you plan to offer this then?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t so the short answer is I don’t know yet what if I were starting brand new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco today if I didn’t have an existing app to to have you know legacy about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wouldn’t have an account system at all I would store everything in cloud kit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and try not to even run servers and just get myself out of that business

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s reasons why now I’m regretting where I currently stand first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all while I’m going through a whole bunch of server upgrades and database upgrades and everything, and it’s really quite a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of work, and it’s very frustrating. So that’s part of it. Like, it’s like, oh man, I wish I could just get rid of all this user data,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’m trying to. But another part is that the future world of where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple is pushing us as soon as this fall is multiple devices. And Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has a sync backend and a web player, and has had an iPhone and iPad app for years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m already in the multi-device world, but where they’re really pushing us is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a lot more people to have multiple instances of Overcast, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the most common ones is probably going to end up being the Watch app. In fact, I think already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Watch app, not the standalone playback, but I think the Watch app in general has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco significantly more users than my iPad app, so that’s why I kind of have to care about it. As I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco facing the prospect of rebuilding my Watch app, again, to be an independent app, as well as looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the Catalina, I’m sorry, the Catalyst version to have the Mac app also exist,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m looking at a whole bunch of places where people are gonna have to log into Overcast. And every time somebody has to log

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into their existing account, that introduces the potential for them to abandon the effort

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and just say, forget it and delete the app. Or it introduces the potential for them to inadvertently create a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new account, and then they have two different accounts and they have a problem and they lose their data

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or they email me or they get all confused. So having all this account stuff is a pain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s a pain for everybody, for the users, for me to have to manage it and own it and everything. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want accounts anymore. The reality is I have accounts and I have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco large number of users who have accounts. I would love to migrate to an entirely CloudKit-based system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I don’t think I have time this summer to do that. Like that would be a massive undertaking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that would probably take six months. First a few months to implement it, and then a few months to fix all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the bugs that would result. So at least six months, possibly up to a year, I think, to do something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I would love to be in a place where I was starting fresh and had no accounts at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not in that place, though. I have this technical burden of users.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sorry, I love you all. and user base

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to move forward. I can’t just start clean and throw everything away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So from that point of view, I am probably stuck with my account system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a while. So that being said, I should probably offer this to make it even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easier, but then I worry like, is everyone just gonna tap this and now they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a third account?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And then, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. You’d have to like port them, like have a migration process where if they tapped it, And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple offers APIs for you to be able to do this. If they use the same email

⏹️ ▶️ ^John address to sign up for their account, or you could say, are you sure you have another account? Or you might have a record of their other account

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the other devices, like you do now for the sign-in, across iPad and iPhone. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right now, I do iCloud syncing of the login token. So that way, when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco set up the app on a new iCloud connected device, it prompts you to say, hey, do you want to use the account from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Marco’s iPhone? And you can say yes, and it just logs you in, which is how I can have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco email and passwordless accounts that still have multi-device sync. Although that doesn’t work on the website.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you could use that to convert. But like you mentioned CloudKit and everything. That was originally one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the big selling points of CloudKit. CloudKit was essentially sign in with Apple because it’s like, oh, each user can have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John certain amount of data. And it was like sign in, let’s sign in. It’s like, well, what do you mean each user can have a certain amount of data? How

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you know what user the data belongs to? Ah, well, they’re signed into their Apple ID on their phone. And when you use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CloudKit, it just implicitly uses that and problem solved, right? And there was no login,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was basically your accountless account. This is just one step farther. Like this seems like an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ideal fit for the way you wanna deal with accounts by not dealing with them. This would give you that solution, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do have this legacy problem and you’d have to somehow figure out how to convert and it’ll be a big pain in the butt. If you could magically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John convert all of your accounts to sign in with Apple accounts, I’m sure you would, but that’s not the type of thing you can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John behind the scenes for people. So you just have to, I mean, depending on what you think your growth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John curve is like, you could offer it as a conversion and push it on first launch and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make all new users be faced with a giant default button to sign in with Apple and just slowly drain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the swamp and phase out the, that phrase

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had meanings in the software context before it was destroyed, just like red baseball hats.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You could slowly convert all your other things to sign in with Apple. I still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco miss red hats being wearable. Like, that’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Steven McLaughlin Marco, I miss a lot from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} better days.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Paul Rubin The before times, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will say though, so one thing I’ve been doing as part of my big database

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco migration is, you know, I’ve been running Overcast since 2014. So I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like five years almost. Next month makes five years of user data.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And GDPR happened, and so all of a sudden I had to start like, you know, making sure I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really adhering to these rules, but also like, you know, get express consent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything. And my, my pre GDPR privacy update, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco added a splash screen at first launch to existing users saying basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prompting them to remove the email address from their account to convert email accounts into anonymous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accounts. And I, and I added all this stuff to be able to go back and forth whenever you wanted to change your password, change your email, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want. But I really encourage people, you know, on first launch to lose their email

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco address, basically in Overcast. And which by the way, created a ton of support problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Let me tell you, I’m still paying for that. With like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, people who basically lost track of their accounts because they then signed out or they deleted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it unexpectedly. Anyway, so I prompted everyone then and I also made it such that on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new user screen, I don’t even give you a chance to create a new email account.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco First you have to create an anonymous account and then if you want to add an email to it later in the account settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen you can. The result of this is that my rate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of acquiring new email addresses went down substantially, but I still had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of these user accounts from the last four years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before that, most of which had email addresses on them. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over the last few days, I have deleted over a million accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Holy smoke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because it’s been, so I basically, you know, I was smart enough to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a long time now, to record on the user account the timestamp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they last either logged in or synced anything. So basically the timestamp of their last activity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It turns out, you know, like, and I know how many active users I have, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my number of total user accounts was many times that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Defined as monthly active users. So I have many times the amount of monthly active users

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in just user accounts. This happens to pretty much every web service. That’s why VCs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanna know your active user count, not your user account count. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the number of user accounts you have is fairly meaningless because tons of people create an account,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try it for an hour, delete it, move on. or people accidentally create multiple accounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they only end up using one of them or whatever. So I had all these user accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So before I did this bulk delete, oh, and my heuristic was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accounts that were not currently subscribers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had never bought an ad, because I offer ad buyers a dashboard where they can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco log in and see the stats of the ads they bought, and had not had any activity in at least a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year, and had not been created in the last few days. You know, so like that’s, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, making sure to check for that in case somebody like creates an account and then it gets deleted immediately because there was no activity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on it, right? That would be terrible. So anyway, I ran this and it deleted over a million accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And now the vast majority of my accounts that are left don’t have email

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco addresses on them. So I feel like I’m making great progress here. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco getting rid of as much user data as I can, but I still need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get to that holy grail of, like, I just want none of this user

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco data, or I want 100% of it to be anonymous. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some friction involved in getting there. And one step might be, I keep all the user data, but I lose all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the email addresses. And I’ve experimented with various ways of doing this over the last few years, but I haven’t come up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with anything that actually is a good idea yet. Like one idea I had was to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hash them all, the same way you hash passwords, and just store the hashes of email addresses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This creates a number of technical issues if you do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Believe me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve looked into this. It’s surprisingly tricky to attempt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, so I mostly haven’t yet. But in a world where I have a Mac app, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ability to log in to the website and use a web player becomes way less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco important. And already that’s incredibly unpopular because it’s terrible. Like, and most people don’t even know you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can. Like, already my web player is a waste. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I have a Mac app that you can log into and sync everything, like I would still, in my scenario

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in my head here, I would still have web addresses that you could go to for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco each podcast. Share links could still work. You could still like share a link and it would have a player.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It just wouldn’t be tied to anybody’s user account so you couldn’t log in to the website in this world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and have playback synced and everything. So the only people this would really hurt if I got rid of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco after I have a Mac app would be people who use the web player when logged into their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco account on a Windows PC at work. And that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a really small number of people. This is where I wanna move to. None of this has anything to do with signing with Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Honestly, I’m sorry for this massive tangent. with Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I were trying to get more accounts with email addresses, whether they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco valid or proxy, I don’t care, if I was trying to get more email-based accounts, logging

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with Apple would be great. I would use it immediately, no question. But I’m trying to get less of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m trying to get rid of the email addresses I have, trying to have as little personal information from anybody as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possible. And so it’s not going to do anything for me. If they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco force me to use it, I will, but I currently don’t plan to because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all it would be doing would be adding more robust support for something I don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do you have to get their email address if you sign in with Apple? I think you have to explicitly ask for it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s it, yeah, so maybe they just give me an ID, basically, some kind of unique identifier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like basically the equivalent of an access token or some unique identifier, But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the API, you have to say, the examples they always give, like if you want to ask them for their email address and their first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and last name. And I didn’t dig into it deep enough to know, are they just saying that to say, like, oh, if you want their name, you have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ask for that extra? But I think the idea is, if you don’t want any of that, don’t ask for it, and your app won’t ever have it. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really is completely opaque as far as your thing. You should check out the API to see what the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John limits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are. That would be interesting. Then I could prompt everyone to sign in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with Apple on first launch of the new version, associate that ID

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with their accounts and just have that be the anonymous account.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of like CloudKit. You don’t get their email address when you use CloudKit. Well, how do you know who they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are? Well, it’s just what they’re signed into and the API uses it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s not a bad idea, because that also works on the website. Because they have, they said they’re gonna have some kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} web gateway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, signing with Apple works on the web

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too. It’s just like signing with Facebook. That is an interesting option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Add it to your short list of things you might need to do to overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, right, oh God. No, because like, I want, like when people, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really wanna have an independent watch app for this fall, and honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people out there, you all love the apps you use, you all know the developers of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps you use, and you all are asking the developers of the apps you use, so are you gonna be there on day one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Let me tell you, as one of these developers, this summer, the answer for many of us is gonna be no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everything that we have access to now from WBDC, all these new tools and APIs and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco platforms and everything. This is a lot of work. Summer’s only a couple months long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is gonna be like, I have a feeling like this fall, we’re gonna be seeing a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of really bad apps and a lot of apps that people are kind of apologizing for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, sorry, this is what I have ready now. It’ll get better later. And a lot of developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who are just gonna be like, sorry, my, you know, Catalyst slash independent watch app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco isn’t gonna be ready yet, and maybe next year, or maybe later in the winter or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s gonna be a long time for a lot of apps to update to all this stuff, because there’s just so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new stuff. I would love for the first time you install

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my new independent watch app, for that login screen to pop up, and for there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be a quick sign in with Apple button right there, and then you’re just done, and you never have to deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with anything else again. Because there is kind of a massive question of like, How do you log in on the watch otherwise?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if iCloud works with my existing setup, great. What if it doesn’t? What if you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get the message from iCloud? Or what if you’re not logged in? Or who knows, God knows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what, right? So I’m just signing in by writing their email address with the Apple TV remote pointed at their watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Combine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of Apple’s worst input methods.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, or I could have one of those terrible things where the watch displays a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco four-digit alphanumeric code and you type it on your phone. There’s ways I could do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It just sucks. All those ways. Have the watch display a barcode and then have the phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco camera recognize it. But then I need to prompt for camera access. There’s just so many bad ways to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do this and only a couple of good ones. So I would love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have that experience be better for initial sign in for both the Mac app and the watch app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Once those exist, right now neither of them do. But I’m hoping they exist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco soon. Anyway, so, signing with Apple might be the way to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, but I’ll see, because that also creates a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I make that the way to use my app, what about those people, many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of whom still exist, who have multiple individuals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who share the same Apple ID in order to share purchases from forever ago before family sharing existed?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And what if they both use Overcast, but separately, because they’re separate people? You gotta add profiles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Overcast. Oh my God. Right, so like right now, like you know, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have a separate account system, that’s fine, you can have, it doesn’t matter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, who’s Apple ID is, you get occasional collisions on the login screen when, you know, one of them is offered the other one’s login

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco token on a new account, but you know, otherwise, like they can just say, no, use my other account, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If signing with Apple becomes my account identifier system, two people who use the same Apple ID

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can no longer have two separate Overcast accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can add profiles, just have the sign in with Apple ID be a new ID that points to one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or more of your existing email list IDs. You know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, yeah. I could do that. Boy, that sucks. There’s so many ways to make this suck. Well, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. I mean, it would still be only one sign in for everybody. You’d still be able to present a profile screen, but your back end is exactly the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same. Your sync engine deals with the secondary ID, not the primary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. Yeah, that’s not a bad idea. Why are you so good at this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Database backend web services is all I do. Yeah, that actually isn’t a bad idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, don’t worry about it. Do the watch out

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} first.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John To briefly bring it back to Sign in with Apple before we finally move on to Ask ADP,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other thing to note about Sign in with Apple is the same feature that they call Sign in with Apple, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use this exact same feature to let people basically just look up their password in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s keychain, right? So it’s a totally an old school email address and password

⏹️ ▶️ ^John login system on your website, on your app or whatever, it’s your own account system, but you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanna present a really nice UI to quickly look up their password in their keychain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and fill it in and do authentication to do that lookup by doing face ID

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or touch ID or something similar. Signing with Apple also accelerates that and it is entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up to the person writing the application to decide, am I just gonna look for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they have like a sign in with Apple, Apple ID login thing? Or am I also going to look to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see if they have an email address login based on their email address on their contact card or whatever they enter whatever like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John am I going to do both and prioritize one over the other the app developer hasn’t entirely has control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over that. And the question I had a WC, which I never really got an official answer to it, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that whole requirement that hey, if you offer a sign in with Facebook or sign in with Google, you have to offer sign in with Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Could you fulfill that requirement by saying, yeah, we offer sign in with Apple. It’s just a really convenient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way for us to get your password out of the keychain. And it’s just our account system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Et voila, we were shut. This is the same button. It’s like a UI, they’ll pull up for you sign in with Apple. So look, it’s signing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Apple. We’ve done it. The best and the best unofficial answer I could get was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that probably won’t fly with the App Store. And they’ll say, when we say sign in with Apple, we mean the thing where you can use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your Apple ID to sign in, not the thing where we use face ID to authenticate you to look up a password for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some email address based account in your keychain? I still don’t know the answer to that question. But I think we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find out rapidly because I bet a lot of people will try to skirt the requirement by doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think they’re gonna get slapped down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, one more thing, you know, when it when it comes to people, please, please don’t beg your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco favorite app developers to have everything on day one. One thing that really is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a large degree of friction to adopting the new things we got this year. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s two big ones to know about. Number one is if you try to maintain support for older OS’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like if you don’t just require iOS 13 immediately, which most apps don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then it’s hard to adopt a lot of this new stuff. Secondly, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want to write a Catalyst app this summer, or if you want to write anything using SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s any good, you have to do it on Catalina, which Which means you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to run a Mac OS beta on your development machine. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whether you do this the conservative way, like what I’m doing with a separate boot partition or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an external SSD, or whether you do it by actually just upgrading your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco main install to the Mac beta, which I don’t recommend. Either it’s a separate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco installation, which has its own degree of friction because you aren’t using your main installation for whatever reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you are using your main installation, you are dealing with beta bugs on your main development OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all summer. Like iOS developers have had it easy all these ten years because we could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco run the beta on a hardware device but the device we were actually developing it on, we were writing the code

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on our nice, most of the time stable Macs and we didn’t have to run the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco betas ever. This is the first time I’ve ever run a Mac beta and turns out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco betas are terrible and you don’t want to run a beta on your development machine. And so a totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reasonable path for developers to take this summer might be to defer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their Catalyst apps and to defer much Swift UI work until

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Catalina is actually released and never actually run the Catalina beta on their Macs during the summer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In which case, their Catalyst Mac apps won’t be ready on day one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or they’ll be terrible, but they probably won’t be ready on day one. And so everyone out there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of you wonderful users who would expect and beg for a Catalyst

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app on day one from all your favorite iOS developers, please give your developers some slack and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be patient because there’s lots of reasons from the sheer complexity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it all to not wanting to run a beta Mac OS to develop on, which is a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different prospect than running beta iOSs, lots of reasons like that why your favorite apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might not have their Catalyst versions out on day one this fall, and it might be more like a next spring, next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco summer kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. One small bit of real-time follow-up. I am one of those people that does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the pre-family sharing approach for sharing apps. And it is, Erin and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do not share Apple IDs, we simply share store accounts, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my store account is my Apple ID, but I am not signed into her phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as an Apple ID, I’m only signed into her phone as an iTunes store account, if that makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any sense at all. It’s a small difference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. And that is not as bad. It’s not great, but that is not as bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as literally sharing the same Apple ID.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Which I know my parents did for a while, and I finally convinced them not to do it anymore because they had constant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey problems. And I know there are still people that do it, to your point, but I think most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of what you’re thinking about, or the more common use is what Aaron and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are still doing because I’m too lazy to move to family sharing, which is same store account,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey different Apple IDs.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let’s move on to Ask ATP. I think these will be quick. Let’s see what happens. Andy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Byer Bowden writes, hey, what are your opinions on mousepads? Thrilling question, I know. I personally don’t understand the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey appeal. Mousepads are all the rage in the gaming PC world, but I’ve never seen the need. mouse will function perfectly on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any halfway decent desk surface. Well, for me, I use a glass top desk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey In fact, the desk is glass. And so I like it. I know most people find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that to be insane. Hey, you know what? I like it. It works for me. But because of that, I definitely need a mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pad. I have the most boring, basic black mouse pad that I think I got from Amazon like five years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ago. And that’s it for me. John, what do you use in terms of mouse pads?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s interesting that you mentioned a glass top desk because for whatever reason back in 1984

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when no one knew what the hell to do with the mouse and we got our first Macintosh, my grandfather and my uncle also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got one at the same time. The received wisdom, presumably the only person that had any connection I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was my grandfather. My grandfather went to Mac user group meetings, mug meetings, and the received wisdom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was that the best surface for mousing on was glass. Remember these are mice with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mouse balls. It was like a weighted rubber coated ball inside a thing that had two little rollers that touched

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it one for x-axis one for y-axis and then it would the ball would poke out of the thing and the idea was the glass

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was the best surface. I’m not sure why that is like I guess maybe a compromise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between how smoothly you can slide the mouse over the surface versus how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John grip the ball has because it was you know it was very sort of matte finish rubber and matte finish rubber does get a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good grip on glass right but then it’s also smooth enough that there’s not a lot of of friction when you’re moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the mouse. And I feel like that is why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mouse pads are still a thing. Because people have different tastes about what should the balance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be between how hard it is to slide and sort of like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel of it. Like is it rough, is it smooth, is it grippy, is it not? Those are kind of two independent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things. These days obviously we don’t have balls in the mice anymore, it’s all optical magic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The only real consideration is you have to have a service it works with an optical mouse. If you try to use your mouse on a mirror surface,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re not gonna have a good time. There’s lots of other services that are better or worse for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using an optical mouse on, but in general, it’s all about feel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I personally do use a mouse pad because I don’t like the feel of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an optical mouse on a bare desk surface. It just feels weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to me. I used my mouse on my first series of Macintoshes on glass that felt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine but at some point I transitioned still in the ball era I think I transitioned maybe around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the SE30 to being on sort of a fabric covered mouse pad my current preference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is one of those rubber backed fabric covered mouse pads that’s very very thin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just because like they used to be really thick for who knows what a reason I guess they were squishy or whatever but a very thin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very large mouse pad Amazon sells when I recently bought a new one because the kids destroyed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the ones on the 5k iMac very large Amazon John Basic’s black fabric

⏹️ ▶️ ^John covered, rubber backed, very thin mouse pad. That is my preference. That’s what I use at home, at work,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everywhere I possibly can. Because I just like the balance of friction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the feel of it versus doing it on metal or wood or glass or anything else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Marco? So I agree with much of what you both have said. You know, what John said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for optical mice, which is all mice these days, to work, they need to see some kind of texture.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, you know, a glass desk, it doesn’t work because there is basically, you know, not enough visible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco texture at the scale they’re working at to see it. And so any good mousing surface has to just have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some kind of texture to it. And it can be very fine, but it can’t be glass. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s why, you know, some surfaces you just need that. And you know, a lot of times you can’t, you know, you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco change your desk that easily, but you can easily put a, you know, a piece of paper under your mouse or something. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m a fan of mousepads, also for the feel, but for a few other reasons. So the one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have used for a long time, I used to use like gamer mousepads. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco man, I forget what it was called. There was some kind of like big, hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plastic black mousepad. Glide, something glide? No, it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco done I think by like the hard OCP people back in the early 2000s. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was like, there was this giant, like it was this dense piece of plastic with a curved front, I don’t know, whatever it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was called, I forget. I also have used the Funk surfaces, the F-U-N-C surfaces, those are fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too. But the one I’ve used for probably about 10 years now is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the CS Hyde Company makes one called C4 Engine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I use the medium size with the rubber backing on it. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what they make is a series of Teflon mouse pads. These are like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco real, actual Teflon. They also sell like Teflon tape and Teflon feet that you can stick on the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of your mouse. And so the idea here is to have as little friction as possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when moving the mouse, so it moves really easily. And in practice, this doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually last as smoothly as you want for very long, because it wears down and, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certain spots get, you know, a little bit less smooth. But this brings me to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my next point about what makes mouse pads great, which is that from the days of the rubber

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ball to the present and to the foreseeable future, crap gets under

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your mouse. Because we are humans and we live in worlds and crap gets under your mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you have like, like the rubber ball, you’d have like those big long strips that you could pull off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of like all the crap that it picked up on each wheel, right? You’d try to like pull it all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off in one big strip. So there was that era and now like crap just gunks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up the bottom feet of your mouse. And so it is nice to, after a few years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be able to just replace that surface with something brand new. If you are just mousing directly on your desk,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco depending on the texture of the desk and the material, it may get permanently gunked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up in like the spot that you put your mouse. And so you don’t really have that option. Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a mouse pad, you can always just replace it. So in that way, it’s also really nice. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco finally, the reason I like mousepads, is because they reserve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the space on your desk where the mouse goes. Like, if you have a cluttered

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco desk, like the mousepad is like staking a claim on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this square over here. Clutter should not intrude. And granted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re really messy, clutter can go on top of the mousepad, but like, I feel like that becomes, it at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like is staking a claim. It’s making a point like you shouldn’t put anything else in this square right here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is where I go, this is mousing area. If you don’t have anything to define that area,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is so easy for stuff to invade it. And then as you’re mousing around, you crash into it. And that’s, I never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want that. That’s always a terrible feeling. So. I always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John associate that with PC users who first got their mice. I would, first of all, your mouse shouldn’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your desk and neither should your keyboard because that’s too high unless you have your chair cranked up super high, but it should be on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a tray. But anyway. Nope, you should put your entire desk that low and get a monitor stand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Either one, you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} what I mean? Most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people don’t have an adjustable desk in that way and desks are too high for normal chair heights. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they would get like the Microsoft White PS2 mouse, like their first mouse for their PC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And they would have no place for it because they would have the keyboard, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big horizontal desktop computer and the CRT on top of it. And it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where do I put this mouse? And so they would just like put it down next to their keyboard, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there was no place for it. like their junk was all over there, and they would have the mouse, and there would be like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a centimeter of space to move it on three sides, or maybe a centimeter on two sides. And it would just, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would just, and it wouldn’t even be straight, it would be like at a weird angle, and the cord would be all tangled up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they would mouse by like banging the mouse within that one or two centimeters of play, and like picking it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up and moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it. Yeah, you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do like multiple passes to go across the screen. Yeah, just to go across the screen, constant banging, and like, and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would slowly skew, and they’d shove their drink in front of it, and then they’d reach around their drink to try to get it Casey style

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and just like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} oh, come on, man.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They just never understood that like, that’s not how it’s supposed to work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s supposed to be this big area where you can make these movements with your hand and it corresponds to the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They were just treated as like a weird mutant joystick where you’re driving the cursor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around by increments by moving it in this little cage. It was like a veal that, you know, don’t have space to like turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around. It was terrible. Wow. Yeah, those PC users, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know what to do with mice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Those people, they would also, usually they would have, like usually they would have added the PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a desk that was just like a regular paper desk before that, and so there wouldn’t really be a spot for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, and so they would have their 14 inch CRT monitor like off to the side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so the way they would use their computer all day long, somehow their necks didn’t fall apart,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well maybe they did, would be they would be like turned at a 45 degree angle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The keyboard would be in front of them, sort of, maybe. And then the CRT would be off diagonally to the side

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because there was nowhere else to put it on their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John desk. You know where you still see this today is in point of sale things. If there is an old PC in point of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sale, there’s never room for the mouse in point of sale. If you’ve ever watched someone use the mouse on their point of sale computer, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wedged under the monitor and they reach around the back of the monitor and do that same sort of one centimeter little shuffle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s ergonomic nightmare and it’s very sad and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco evil. Yeah, those systems have the most apt accidental acronym ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Do you guys have currently or can you recall

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the past a mouse pad with something on it? A picture, a design,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a brand like Marco’s thing right now is just the blend you sent us links to in the website. It was just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brown or beige but solid color. None of you have anything on your mouse pads right now?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, no. I’m sure I did. I can’t recall any specifics and obviously I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have no shame and I’d be happy to admit to some of these specifics, but I genuinely can’t recall any. But I’m But I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey confident that in the past I definitely did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. But you don’t now?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, no, no. It’s just a black basic mouse pad that probably cost me five bucks on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Amazon. So I like something to be on my mouse pad, but I don’t want something dumb on my mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pad. Like I’m kind of annoyed that I think the Amazon basics one has like an Amazon thing or something on it. You know, it’s black

⏹️ ▶️ ^John otherwise, but there’s like a little logo or whatever. But I want there to be something interesting on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Back when I was going to the MIT swap regularly, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an open air thing that MIT has on like the something Sunday of every month during the summer-ish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time where people sell old computer stuff, is someone was selling like a stack,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like an inch and a half high stack of mouse pads and they were Sun mouse pads and they were exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the kind that I want, the really thin fabric covered kind that were just like two-tone, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blue and silver with with the big Sun logo sideways on them. I don’t know if you remember what the Sun logo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks like. And I thought that was super cool because I loved Sun computers when I was at school and it was obscure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Unix-y and the pattern was nice. And I’ve been working my way through that stack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m using one of them right now. Oh my gosh. My kids destroyed one of those. I replaced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it with an Amazon Basics because I don’t wanna use any more of the good Sun mouse pads, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John great. At work, I use a mouse pad that my wife got from her office, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has the name of her work on it. And you know, it’s just, you know, I don’t have much personalized on my desk, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do have a picture of my family and I do have a mouse pad from my wife’s work. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John failing that, I would go with solid color. but I do like a mouse pad with a little pizzazz.

#askatp: 2014 Air today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on, John Schwen writes, my wife’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey early 2014 MacBook Air is not long for this world. Retina and 16 gigs of RAM would be nice, but the loss of MagSafe, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so much. I see that you can still buy the old model, quote unquote, brand new. The last one was perfect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for five plus years. Is it dumb to buy a new old one? To my eyes, I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey miss MagSafe, but I don’t miss it enough to buy a new old MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Air. I cannot recommend that and I think that would be a really preposterous idea. Marco disagree

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I I don’t know that I can disagree with you. I mean they do still sell it But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean the new ones are only like $200 more I mean, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, I love the old style of laptops and you know, I don’t love the new style of laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I have to admit like the old style is getting pretty old now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and And so I, and also like a non-retina screen, that’s really bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, maybe if you don’t care, if that’s what you’re used to, that’s one thing. Lots and lots of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco care. Yeah, but I really do care about retina. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I couldn’t abide it on that alone. But even the idea of buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 2015 era MacBook Pros, which you know I love, even buying those now, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in 2016, that was a good idea. In 2017, that was still pretty much a good idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In 2018, it starts getting, mm, it’s awfully old. Like, you’re putting a lot of money into something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is four years old. In 2019, it’s starting to get highly questionable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to invest new money into one of these such old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco machines. Because as you go forward, like, you know, it’s not likely to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have as long of a service life as one of the newer models, or at least have a long of a relevance life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because these things are pretty far behind the current tech in certain ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Certain critical performance ways, support of certain new port types and new speeds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of things and everything. So support for certain external monitor sizes and everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re gonna be fighting an uphill battle the longer you hold onto something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s of one of these older generations. And if you already have it, that’s one thing. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re buying new, if you’re spending money on something new, I feel like these are getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just too old to have that be a good option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the only variable here is price. It’s not a smart thing to buy now. It is old, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John days are mostly past. But if you can get one really cheap, they were great computers, and if you get it cheap, you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the expectation that you’re gonna be using this for five years, so it’s all about the price. The prices that they’re being sold new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for, you shouldn’t pay that much. But if you see a refurbished one or a used one good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John condition that you can get for a really good price. I still think they’re good laptops. Just expect to use it for like a year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a half until you know what you’re waiting for is the new Apple laptops with the non

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crappy keyboard, right? And so if you can’t actually hold out for that, buying a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inexpensive, uh, you know, previous gen Macbook air to hold you over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as long as you get a good deal, I think that’s viable, but don’t pay like close to new computer prices for it because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just too old and slow at this point.

WWDC lunch update

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We owe our listeners a tremendous apology because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we did not do our jobs. This is what, the second or third episode post-WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where we have not talked about the lunches. And we actually, for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the first time in years, we actually, the three of us, shared a WWDC lunch this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And all three of us had lunch together inside the venue. And Tim Schmitz was the one I happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to see who asked this question. There were many others that came before him, but this was the one I happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to notice when I was sitting down to, uh, to get ask ATP squared away for this week. So Tim Schmitz asks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any WWDC lunch updates this year. I, I actually don’t think I have any, it was basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the exact same as last year. And, and as usual, I’ve found that I’m, I’m accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey avoiding these lunches because it ends up that I’ll try to meet somebody for lunch. So for example, on Monday,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I ran over and met Aaron for lunch at a sofa Market, which is this new to me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I think it’s only a year or two old, really cool food court that’s just a few blocks away from the convention

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey center. I also went with my friend Jelly, who does the wonderful app GifWrapped,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to, oh shoot, I can’t remember the name of it now. Oh, San Pedro Square, I think is it? I think that was the name

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of it, which was another food court that was kind of nearby. And so I genuinely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wasn’t actively avoiding the lunches because I think they’re fine. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey only had one or maybe two of them. So I don’t really have that much to say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, this was your first year. This is your triumphant return to the WWDC lunch. Uh, any,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any notes or thoughts on yours?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I thought they were fine. You know, not great, which is, you know, understandable. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re never great. Uh, you don’t need them to be great. You need them to be fine. And I think they were, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco totally satisfied that they were, they are They are exactly what they’ve always been,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a way. There’s always, there’s nitpicks you can pick

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with everything, every single aspect of every single meal. There’s something about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it that’s a little bit off. But it was fine. There were none that I took a bite and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m like, oh, I can’t even eat this. Like, no, they were fine. I ate them, they served their purpose, they were quick and easy and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can move on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, Casey, you could have had a second lunch with all three of us, but you ditched us for whoever it was that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were going to see. Marco and I had a second lunch together. Anyway, so I had lunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every day of WWDC as I usually do. It was similar to last year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I feel like there, I think I said the same thing last year. I feel like this, whatever this catering company isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really even trying as hard. Like, welcome to San Jose. Yeah, pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much every lunch, or at least a lot of them, didn’t even fill all the little cubbies. Like you usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} get like three or four cubbies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You got the big cubby where whatever the main thing is, you got two or three small

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cubbies. One usually has like the side dish and one the little dessert-y thing, and maybe there’s a third that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that one. Actually, that is true, and this is something I noticed too. There were pretty much no side dishes. Like they had the dessert,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they had the main pile of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. And that’s it. They didn’t even try to do anything else. They didn’t try to make some unidentifiable weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rice concoction or vegetable medley thing or whatever, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shows a lack of effort, but on the other hand, that is always the most challenging thing. We’ve talked about that before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to even figure out what it is. And it also has the highest chance of spoiling the other stuff, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it could be a wet thing that flops over into the main bin and makes the bread on the sandwich

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wet or whatever. And also by not trying, they didn’t try to do anything exotic for the main dishes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So they basically did more or less what I had suggested a couple of years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like the very first lunch on the very first day was a sandwich and a chocolate chip cookie, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard to screw up if you don’t do anything weird. They wisely didn’t put lots of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wet condiments on the sandwich. They were like, you get them on the side in little packets. And so I think the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lunch I had at WWDC was the first one, which was a boring sandwich, which was mediocre or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a industrial chocolate chip cookie. And that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John perfectly fine. The lunches all went downhill from there. Every subsequent day was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slightly worse, but they never reached the really low levels. I only had one little bit of soggy bread

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all of them were like, okay. So I was disappointed by the lack of ambition, but I was happy about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the sort of going for the, you know, the crowd pleasing fat part of the curve. Don’t try to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything fancy. Just do a sandwich and a cookie in a reasonable way. So I think it was a pretty good year for lunches,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even if it was not particularly spectacular. low degree of difficulty, mediocre execution.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, I had forgotten and CMF reminded me in the chat, what was the Mango Tango situation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this year? They were there. It wasn’t one of the dark years of which there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey were two or three, I think, where they switched to some other like silly drink. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think I only had like one bottle, which I believe I had in line with John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey waiting to go see the Mac Pro actually. But yeah, mango tango is some sort of a weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey drink that I just think is delicious. And it’s like three or $4 a bottle, generally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey speaking. It’s hilariously expensive, but you get it quote unquote for free

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with your $1,600 ticket from time to time. And so I love to have them even though they’re like 300 calories per bottle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I think I only had one, maybe two, which was really, really sad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But that is a highlight of my WWDC trip every year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s kind of sad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hey man I love me some mango tango. Leave me alone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week. Molecule, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Mango

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tango. We’ll see you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S 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, tech podcasts so long

Post-show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I should get on the horn with Odwalla.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got a picture of you holding up your mango tango. Was that really the only one you had? It might be, yeah. Isn’t that sad?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought it was more plentiful this year. I saw it around a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, and I was actually in the conference more this year than I had been for a while because a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lot of times I had every intention of going in and then I would need to meet up with, let’s say, Jelly, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, I would need to meet up with somebody or want to meet up with somebody, whatever, and then I would end up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey missing out on stuff. But I was inside the conference much more frequently than the last couple of years, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey still only got a couple of them at most.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, I forgot to mention the other thing that they had more of. So we mentioned that they just had a lunch and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little dessert, but they had side dish thingies separate from the boxes. Like they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just have big bowls filled with chips and nuts

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} and stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. That’s happened before. Right. They always have the bowls of bananas and snacks, but with the meal. They never used to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this in San Francisco. With the actual box lunch right next to it, you were expected to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John furnish your own side dish and you had choices. It wasn’t just one thing. You had like three kinds of chips or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bag of nuts or something else along with the lunch, not just as the snack before and after it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that was convenient and I snagged a couple of bags. In fact, I found a new planters

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mix thing that I liked. I think I took a picture of it. It’s like their tropical nut mix or something. It’s got like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yogurt covered raisins and like one half of a macadamia and a bunch of peanuts and like some dried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fruit, like little dried pineapple bits. And I thought it was a nice, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two ounce size little bag of nut and dried fruit, like a pleasing combination

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I didn’t feel like there was lots of some nut that I didn’t like. And, you know, I tend to like things with dried fruit in it. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John excited about that discovery. I look for them online and I could find them at Amazon, but only if I bought 72 of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a dollar each. So $72, I felt like that would probably be too much of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two ounce nutbags for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wow. I should also point out that they at one point had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey full-on like KitKat bars and other things sitting outside in that like front courtyard-y

⏹️ ▶️ ^John area. I missed that entire- sitting out in the courtyard, they’re probably all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey melted. Exactly. That was the thing was I was like running out the door, so to speak,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey although at this point I had already left the doors. But anyways, I was running out to go meet up with somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I saw this like pile of KitKats and I saw it sitting directly in the sunlight and I thought, yeah, I’ll pass on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, it’s going to become one big KitKat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It actually doesn’t sound terrible. I do love me a KitKat, but that’s right. Do we need an after show? Are we good?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What do we think? I’m telling you, this development is killing me. Which one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, what are you actively working on right now? The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Watch app? No, I haven’t even gotten there yet. Like I’ve been doing server stuff to prepare for some other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff and fix some other stuff and then I have to I mean part of it honestly is it’s kind of nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I’m I’m avoiding beta 1 mostly but beta

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 2 is is terrible and I’m just I’m faced with this massive amount of stuff to do for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco summer so and I still haven’t really done it yet I can I’m diving in a little bit here and there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I’m I was like one of the things I have to do by the way I have to like rewrite my audio engine partly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they they have I’ve officially deprecated the AU Graph API that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve been using to render audio. And they kind of said that unofficially like two years ago,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I knew this was gonna happen. I really have to move to AV Audio Engine for lots of reasons because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the audio graph stuff is, officially it still works,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s not working very well anymore on the newest betas. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know if they’re going to fix that because it’s officially deprecated. And I need to like rewrite an audio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco engine that will work on the watch anyway. And the AV audio engine allegedly will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I have to like rewrite the audio engine for that. I’m also working on a multi-column view

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because using my two column view on a Mac feels even worse than it feels

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on an iPad. And that’s surprisingly non-trivial because of like the navigation structure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, you have to be able to like have like the two columns that go there with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, the root level nav and then the second level being either the podcast or playlist you’ve selected. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also have to figure out what to do with those two navigation bars. Do you display them side by side? That kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of looks weird. They also both have search bars, which search different things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What do you do with those? Like there’s all sorts of UI challenges there. Then you have to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the logic in the app to be able to, like if you resize the app down, so it fits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one or zero columns, you have to then like tear those view controllers out of those navigation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco book controllers and stick them in either one navigation controller with them stacked, or stick them all with one with the now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco playing screen. It’s like, it’s this whole thing that is surprisingly complex and just requires

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a lot of just like moving code around, refactoring code to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work in this new structure of how it needs it and everything. And not to mention the cosmetic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issues of like how do you lay this out in a way that doesn’t look ridiculous when you have all these common elements between them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So just having a three column view, that’s gonna be like two weeks of work right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there, probably, out of the like 10 weeks I have in the summer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Basically, like there’s not, like there’s so much stuff that just accumulates like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Fun. Yeah, so first I need a multi-column view, that way my Mac app, which I think is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think if I can rank the importance of what I have to do for this fall, number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one is the Mac app, because that is the thing that will get me the most new ground covered,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s the thing that people want the most. Actually, no, sorry. Priority number one is update for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iOS 13. So anything that is broken on iOS 13, I have to fix.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anything that is weird or deprecated, that if I don’t do it right in iOS 13, like using old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 3D Touch APIs, not using the new menu system, having any problems with the new card-based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco presentation controller style, I have to fix iOS 13 stuff first, which I haven’t done. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I should really be doing that now. Then, after that’s fixed, then I have to, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think, do the Mac app. But that requires this three-column thing first, and probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the new audio engine, because I’m having a lot of bugs with the old one running on the Mac. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then after that, I think the next step after that is tackle the independent watch app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only reason that’s not higher on the list is that I already have an independent-ish

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch app, kind of works. So like it’s, it’s less important. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have like those three major projects to do this summer. Not to mention, by the way, I also need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do some significant server migrations, which I’m also doing this week. So I have those three things to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do. Uh, and I’m like a quarter of the way through the first thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s already been like two weeks and it’s like, Oh, this is, this is stressful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is not good. And all of these things are going to take longer than I think they will, I’m sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just, I don’t mean this in a mean way, but I do find there to be a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bit of humor in the thought that I just had, which is that you might need to do a great vacation this summer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by staying at home while your family is at the beach.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Nope, that’s not gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I know, which would be terrible for you, but I do think it would be funny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would send them home and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would stay. Oh, okay, I see how it is. The king needs his space. Be gone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey child and wife. you must be gone. Let me know how that works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out. Yeah, I’m sure that would go over well.