catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

341: John Is My Default

Actual dogfooding, credit-card care, Tesla Superchargers vs. others, Siri privacy, and Terminal. That’s right, Terminal.

Episode Description:

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

Chapters

  1. Dogfooding
  2. Autoboot & Magic Erasers
  3. Apple Card limits, activation
  4. Apple Card care
  5. USB-C in cars
  6. New Sony cameras
  7. Sponsor: TechMeme Ride Home
  8. Tesla Superchargers vs. others
  9. Sponsor: DoorDash (code ATP)
  10. Siri privacy update
  11. iOS 13.1?
  12. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
  13. #askatp: Hire a photographer
  14. #askatp: Nextdoor, etc.
  15. #askatp: Terminal themes
  16. Ending theme
  17. casey@Caseys-iMac

Dogfooding

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of your your tiny beings in your house. I saw one of your Instagram

⏹️ ▶️ John stories you had a Bowl of food for hops. I think what was it? You were you were like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John I got to give hops his breakfast first You remember that one and this was before you said you were out of dog food

⏹️ ▶️ John So I wasn’t aware that you’d run out of dog food but the bowl that you put down to hops like it’s on

⏹️ ▶️ John camera for two seconds and it looked to me like Oversized chocolate chips

⏹️ ▶️ John coconut shavings and carrots Tell me that’s not what was actually in

⏹️ ▶️ John the bowl. Coconut shavings? No. Oversized chocolate chips, coconut shavings, and

⏹️ ▶️ John carrots. Obviously it’s not chocolate because that’s poison for dogs, but it looked like, I’m just saying as it goes by the camera real fast, it

⏹️ ▶️ John looked like big chocolate chips. Those were chunks of dry dog food. Oh, wow, they look really big. They

⏹️ ▶️ John look like they were the size of like nickels. No, they’re… Coconut shavings.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. No? Oh, I know what you mean. Okay. Are you talking about the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey omelet breakfast or whatever you made them

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on Dog Day?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, there was one segment of that. You can see, I saved it as a highlight of my story. You can go see. So, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feed Hops, what I’ve been feeding him most mornings is some, you know, dog kibble

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a reputable brand. I have been chopping up some carrots in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there, like just like I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John take like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco four baby carrots and chop them up and put them in because he likes carrots and, you know, keeps his stuff working

⏹️ ▶️ Marco regularly. And then, the other little bit you saw was torn

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, a torn up slice of deli turkey like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know boar’s head

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oven roast turkey. I know there’s too much salt in it and that’s why I don’t give him a lot. Looks like kind of a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was it’s like it wasn’t even a full slice. It looked like a big bowl of food for a small dog.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was very close to the camera. It’s it’s actually like a cat food bowl.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hops is not a big dog. Put that

⏹️ ▶️ John food and mold it into the shape of a dog it would be about the same size as him.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not only is he not a big dog but But it doesn’t even fill the bowl, and it’s a cat bowl.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The bowl, it wouldn’t even hold the amount of water he would need to be a water bowl. That’s how small

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John Mad Fientist All right. Anyway, you’ve got bad planning on the dog foods now. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John making people food for the dog.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Evan Brand Yeah. Well, because I bought… The brand I get is one of the fancier brands

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not available in your typical grocery store. You have to go to a nice pet food

⏹️ ▶️ Marco store to get it. And so, there are grocery stores here, they do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell a very small selection of dog food. And I looked at it all today, and I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was all total garbage. The ingredients are like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco water, sawdust, compressed meat byproducts, it’s all the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worst garbage you can possibly imagine. I’m like, I don’t feel right feeding that to him.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know he wouldn’t care, but I care. It’s about standards and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to, you know, put a bunch of crap in my dog. So I’d rather just see him cold

⏹️ ▶️ John cuts. That’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small amount. And the reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the human that’s the human equivalent of that dog that you rejected

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John agreed,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s yeah, but it’s like it’s that’s in very small quantity and it’s mostly because I wrap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the pill. I have to he takes thyroid pills because he’s old and so I wrap up the thyroid pills in the in like a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of deli turkey because it makes it easy to give it to him and it’s relatively low bulk, so it’s not like I’m not adding that much, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to him and then i just put like i tear up a few little extra strips of the turkey and put it in there so that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he inhales his dog pellets, but it turns out when you make food they actually like you don’t need to taint it with deli

⏹️ ▶️ Marco turkey. I did however, I must say whenever I’ve had to make him like chicken for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me like if he if he like gets sick and I have to make him chicken

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like he won’t eat anything else like I’ve had to do it a couple times here and there throughout this dog and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I do it I always feel bad for him and like you know the vets tell you like just boiled chicken.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done it for my dog multiple times as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Boiled chicken is terrible. Like, it’s so flavorless. And you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco give them onion or anything else that could flavor it. And so I always do a little tiny

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pinch of salt in the chicken water. They

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco salt. And I always do, I always do a little dash of rosemary.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He doesn’t care probably, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John care.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t wanna give him such incredibly bland chicken. So today I did the same thing. I was like baking,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I baked a couple of chicken breasts and three chicken thighs to make this big dog food mixture tonight and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a little dash of rosemary on top because it just felt so bland without it.

⏹️ ▶️ John His sense of smell is 10,000 times more powerful than yours. It’s probably overwhelming him with rosemary which dogs

⏹️ ▶️ John do not seek out or like in any way. It’s not food for you, it’s food for the dog. Empathize, you

⏹️ ▶️ John need empathy for the dog. Believe me, all the work I put into this food, it’s like 10,000 rosemary’s in his

⏹️ ▶️ John face. Well, it’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, so. I feel like it allowed me to feel good about feeding him the meal that he seemed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really love.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re supposed to be empathizing with the dog, not you. We know you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only downside is I have no idea how much of this mixture I’ve made to feed him,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he certainly won’t tell me, because he’ll just inhale as much as I give him, because it’s really good. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if I’m feeding him enough or too much. I guess I’ll find

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John out after. Do you have

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you can do it by volume. Don’t you have like a scoop that’s like, this is the scoop for pops, like whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John fits in this scoop is a meal, assuming it’s reasonably packed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would give them like a third of a cup each meal of like the dry kibble, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is totally different. This is like, you know, freshly made, like you know, baked things with actual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco meat and actual vegetables and a little bit of rice. So it’s like, I don’t even like, I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the volumes are not comparable because the kibble is probably so much more calorie dense.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can just tell when it comes at the other end, when it becomes a uniform density, you can say how much poop is there and how often.

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. Then you’ll know you’re putting in the right amount when the normal amount comes out the back.

⏹️ ▶️ John you

Autoboot & Magic Erasers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should start with follow-up as always Andrew Bimmons writes a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way in which you can disable auto boot So I was lamenting that you know, I like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take a mr Clean magic eraser to my computers when they’re powered off in order to get the finger grease and other you know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bits off of them and if I were to do that with the newer Macs from what I’m told they will turn

⏹️ ▶️ Casey themselves on as soon as you press any button on the keyboard and Some people wrote in with some like software tools

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do this when the key when the computers on which I’m not entirely keen on But Andrew wrote in and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, the command you need, and we will put this in the show notes, is sudo nvram autoboot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey equals percent zero zero. And autoboot is Pascal case, do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have that right? Capital A, capital B. Like I said, you’ll see it in the show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes. Continuing our segment of reading out command line

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John things and source code. We

⏹️ ▶️ John put them in the show notes too. It’s a useful thing. Although I think I missed the last time you mentioned this, that you’re using magic

⏹️ ▶️ John erasers on your computer. I don’t really recommend that. Because don’t they have like a

⏹️ ▶️ John mild amount of bleach in them and I know they’re kind of abrasive, so both of those things combined to make me think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are both kind of incomplete. So what magic erasers are, is melamine foam. And it’s actually a really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting material. It’s basically a super fine abrasive formed into a sponge.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s no other, at least in the regular kind, it’s probably like different flavors now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like in the regular kind, it’s just a block of foam. and you make it a little bit wet to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it effective, but then you’re basically, it’s basically a super fine abrasive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they actually are really useful things to clean off a lot of different kinds of things. The problem with cleaning computers with them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they work fantastically on cleaning keys on keyboards, like on laptop keyboards. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco downside is that because you have to put a little bit of water in them to activate them, kind of make them work,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re scrubbing on a keyboard, there’s a very good chance you’re gonna leak a drop or two of water

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it. and I’ve actually seen this happen and I’ve seen this cause problems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that is the biggest reason not to use them. It’s not about the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco block of melamine foam itself, it’s about the water that you need to use with it causing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems for the device that you’re cleaning.

⏹️ ▶️ John I still don’t like the idea of using abrasive and I think some of them do have a mild bleach in them and the other thing is if you’re doing it

⏹️ ▶️ John on the keys, especially with these current ones, even if you get it wet, little bits can shed

⏹️ ▶️ John from the Magic Eraser.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco tiny little things

⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t want the other thing that our keyboards are vulnerable to is any little speck of anything. I don’t want a tiny little

⏹️ ▶️ John speck of abrasive working its way into there. So all I’m saying is Casey, like follow the instructions on Apple’s website. 75 degrees

⏹️ ▶️ John for the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco air and they always say like

⏹️ ▶️ John a clean like damp cloth with just water. Like if so you have finger grease

⏹️ ▶️ John on there right? Water it’s not as good as like a degreaser to get off

⏹️ ▶️ John finger grease but it will eventually get off the grease. It is universal solvent. It will eventually get rid

⏹️ ▶️ John of of the grease unless you have some serious like motor oil situations going on there but don’t endorse

⏹️ ▶️ John the magic eraser.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is noted, and I will promptly ignore you henceforth.

Apple Card limits, activation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about your Apple Card. I hear there’s some trouble in paradise there.

⏹️ ▶️ John I got my, I applied for the Apple Card because now it’s open to everybody and I did the little thingy and

⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone where you apply and you enter some small amount of information was very painless.

⏹️ ▶️ John My first sad realization was that my limit on the card was going to be $10,000

⏹️ ▶️ John which is very low and not enough probably for the Mac Pro system I plan to buy.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s probably not that big of a deal, practically speaking, because my wife got a card too. And so I could buy

⏹️ ▶️ John the monitor on her card and the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey computer on mine or

⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. So you think. I was going to say, you think the computer will fit on one?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. I hope. I hope

⏹️ ▶️ John better. But $10,000 is not a high limit

⏹️ ▶️ John for a credit card in general. It’s lower than any of the limits on any of my actual credit cards. And what

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard since then of people complaining about the limits is that they’re being conservative because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the first consumer credit card. Goldman Sachs is done. Yada, yada, yada, excuses, excuses. Anyway, I immediately went to

⏹️ ▶️ John customer service and in addition to going to the text chat to say, get me out of arbitration,

⏹️ ▶️ John I also said, and by the way, can you increase my limit? Because my experience has been if you ask a credit card company to increase your limit,

⏹️ ▶️ John they will. If you have good credit and all this other stuff and like I have good credit, I have lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of credit cards with high limits. I figured they would do it. But their response was at this time, we are

⏹️ ▶️ John not evaluating credit limit increase requests from customers who have had an account open for less than six months. So basically

⏹️ ▶️ John no one’s getting an increase for six months, which is kind of cruddy by then it will be too late. So

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that’s, that’s my card situation. Um, the other thing is I did get the physical card cause everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John should just, even if you’re never going to use it cause it’s cool. Um, and I w I was

⏹️ ▶️ John impressed about a couple of things. One, the apple card, which is a normal size credit card

⏹️ ▶️ John actually comes in packaging. I just assumed would just be like, I don’t know, like stuck to a piece of paper like other

⏹️ ▶️ John credit cards. But no, of course, Apple has to have packaging for its card. And as you would expect, the packaging

⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, interesting in the details. It just looks like a folding piece of paper with a card inside

⏹️ ▶️ John it. But if you look at it closely, it’s actually very clever and interesting and cool. And the second thing is you open it

⏹️ ▶️ John up and there’s your little Apple card. And it’s in this little slot. And mine at the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ John of the slot, mine says, activate your card. What is the text here?

⏹️ ▶️ John Wake iPhone and hold here. That’s it. Like, you know, when you get a credit card and says to activate your hard

⏹️ ▶️ John call this number and you got to go through some phone tree and you press a bunch of buttons and you have to have a bunch of things to identify yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John and you activate your card and blah, blah. And it’s not it used to be more painful when you had to speak to a human. But even the phone

⏹️ ▶️ John tree stuff is annoying. To activate this card, it says wake phone and hold here. Doesn’t say

⏹️ ▶️ John activate Apple Play, doesn’t say launch the wallet Apple and all those. So it just says wake phone and hold here.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that baffled me for a second because I’m like, just wake the phone?

⏹️ ▶️ John Do they mean like, do I have to unlock it? Or can I just tap the screen to turn it on? Anyway, I held

⏹️ ▶️ John my phone close to the thing and went, I thought for a little bit, and went, bloop, and it said, you want to activate your card? I said, yes, and it activated.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it was the best credit card activation experience I’ve ever had. That said, my wife got her card, and I was waiting for

⏹️ ▶️ John her to do the same thing. I’m like, you know, I wanted her to experience the joy of activating a card without having to call to somebody on the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John But hers didn’t say, wake phone and hold here. Hers said like launch

⏹️ ▶️ John the wallet app and do something or other like it had her doing a bunch of other stuff. It had different text

⏹️ ▶️ John instructions printed on the bottom of the thing and just holding her phone next to it didn’t activate it. She had to actually

⏹️ ▶️ John follow those instructions. I think maybe it’s because she didn’t actually do any transactions with the car before she got the physical

⏹️ ▶️ John one because I had already like paid for iCloud storage or whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco heck you know had it set up for. Does she happen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have an old a super old phone that that doesn’t have NFC? iPhone 10. Okay, so that isn’t it then.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s very confusing. But anyway, just to let people know what kind of activation experience they might get. They might get

⏹️ ▶️ John the really cool activation experience or the slightly less cool one, but both of them are better than using the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder why it’s different. Like why have two different ones going? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know. I looked it up before. I know like maybe, I don’t know, maybe there’s some like additional feature of NFC

⏹️ ▶️ John that allows it to be more passively. But I Googled all this stuff and it’s like, no, this has been a feature of iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ John forever. So you’d have to really have an old phone. It would know what phone she was using because she

⏹️ ▶️ John had put it in her wallet on her phone. That’s how you have to do that to even order the physical card. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that was all set up so they know what kind of phone she has. Right. Anyway, that was great. And the card itself,

⏹️ ▶️ John which we’ll get to in the next item. It’s cool, it’s white. I’m not gonna actually

⏹️ ▶️ John use the physical card at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve held one briefly when I was in San Francisco. I met up with a friend of mine who had one and they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are very fancy. They’re very fancy. I kind of want one, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I just don’t feel like going through the whole rigmarole of unfreezing my credit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and applying and getting it and freezing my credit again and blah, blah, blah. And I don’t buy Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff enough that I really think that 3% is gonna make that much of an empirical difference in my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey world. Plus, I don’t plan on buying a Mac Pro because I’m not a maniac. So I don’t need to worry about these things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey See how stress-free your life can be if you don’t need to worry about the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also just like, just as a credit card user, I hate this new trend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of nice credit cards being like heavy, thick metal. Why do you want your wallet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be unnecessarily heavier? Like plastic was fine for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decades of using credit cards. Why are we changing this? This makes no sense. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want the benefits that the high-end cards give you, but I don’t get like, can I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco opt for a plastic one?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Come on Marco treat yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John Someone was saying that like they were doing like market research on on credit cards or some company was doing market research

⏹️ ▶️ John on various premium credit card designs and the the number one factor by far in all

⏹️ ▶️ John focus groups was the thing that everybody liked about cards was to Have heavier equals better everything else varied

⏹️ ▶️ John color, you know shape texture designs on it but heavier equals better was like

⏹️ ▶️ John number one with a bullet. So you might not like it, but apparently in the market of

⏹️ ▶️ John credit cards, heavier is more impressive is better. I feel the same way. I’m the market. I’m not.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to carry it around because I already have a master card, so I don’t need to have a second one. And I’m certainly not going to put a heavier

⏹️ ▶️ John one in there. And then the next thing we’re going to get to is another reason I can include in there. By the way,

⏹️ ▶️ John E.H. in the chat room says the iPhone doesn’t have background NFC scanning. Only the 10 S and the 10

⏹️ ▶️ John R have it. So I have a 10S. That was my guess, but I kept trying. I didn’t know what I was Googling for. I was

⏹️ ▶️ John Googling for like transit pass or some other NFC stuff, but everything I saw was supported everywhere. But maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John background NFC scanning. Background meaning, I guess, if you’re not in an app. Like, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because I wasn’t in an app. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that it can scan without being activated. Maybe that’s really interesting. That makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John So there you go. You only get the super cool experience if you have a 10S or a 10R.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s also true of the shortcut stuff, right? Come to think of it, Didn’t they say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if you have a lowly iPhone 10 like I do, that I wouldn’t be able to use the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tap to activate shortcut thing? Do you know what I’m talking about? Because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you can get an NFC. That’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to remember, but I apparently didn’t know the right words to Google. That there was some new feature in the XS that had to do with

⏹️ ▶️ John snicking your phone against something without launching an app. And this was it. I should have been looking for, I guess, background NFC.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Interesting. All right. Question answered. There

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. Thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you. Thank

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Thank you.

Apple Card care

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me about how you keep your Apple card feeling healthy, wealthy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and strong.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is one of those micro controversies, which I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s anything particularly controversial about it. But it’s an opportunity to talk about Apple’s design decisions again. So Apple has a

⏹️ ▶️ John tech note or support article or whatever, that is entitled how to clean your Apple card, see

⏹️ ▶️ John how to protect and maintain the condition of your titanium Apple card. So it is, you know, a very nice object.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to keep it looking nice, they have all these instructions about what to do about gently wiping it, you know, damp

⏹️ ▶️ John cloth, lint-free microfiber, all the things they tell you about everything. Although they do mention

⏹️ ▶️ John isopropyl alcohol, which they usually don’t mention for anything else. Don’t use household cleaners,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use compressed air, that’s just for our laptops. Don’t use any aerosol sprays, solvents,

⏹️ ▶️ John ammonia, blah, blah, blah. So that’s all fine. It’s like they have those instructions for basically any Apple product. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John how do I clean my whatever? You can probably find an Apple support article, which is good. You should look at because I’ll tell you what not to use.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but the part that got everyone up in arms was how to safely store and carry

⏹️ ▶️ John your titanium Apple card. Uh, in particular, the passage that says, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John where is it? If the credit cards are placed in the same slot, your card could become scratched. So

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t put it next to another credit card. The Apple card needs to be by itself. And then the next bit,

⏹️ ▶️ John some fabrics like leather and denim might cause permanent discoloration that will not wash

⏹️ ▶️ John off. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John put it near other credit cards, don’t put it in denim, and don’t put it in leather because you might permanently

⏹️ ▶️ John discolor your card. I think that’s probably true of every credit card in our

⏹️ ▶️ John wallet. If you put it in denim or leather, they could be permanently discolored. Nobody cares

⏹️ ▶️ John because who cares with your plastic credit cards whether they get discolored. But Apple made

⏹️ ▶️ John this beautiful thing that they have instructions on how to keep beautiful. And part of the instructions are

⏹️ ▶️ John try not to use it like a regular credit card by putting it in your leather wallet or in a wallet

⏹️ ▶️ John like on those iPhone cases where it’s exposed and then you put it in your back pocket of your jeans.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, I mean, it’s not ridiculous. Who cares? Like if you care about it then care for it this way. If you don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John about it, just use it like a regular card. It’ll be fine. It’s not like it stops operating. This is all about how to keep it pristine. But this gets

⏹️ ▶️ John back to the discussion that I think we had maybe on this program or maybe on maybe it was hypercritical

⏹️ ▶️ John days, there was a big thing going around, I guess it goes around every few years, let’s send it around again,

⏹️ ▶️ John about products that look, if not

⏹️ ▶️ John better, at least look good, wear their age well, like they wear well. The example of people

⏹️ ▶️ John always putting in there was like a cast iron pan or like leather goods very often wear in a way

⏹️ ▶️ John that makes them attractive as they get used. It doesn’t look the same as when they’re brand new and maybe they might look worse

⏹️ ▶️ John than when they’re brand new, but they still look nice. They get a patina versus getting gross looking,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? For a credit card, honestly, who really cares? It’s not actually a

⏹️ ▶️ John big deal. But if you were tasked with designing an Apple credit card and you had to go on the

⏹️ ▶️ John whiteboard and let’s list the attributes, the favorable attributes that a credit card could have and the

⏹️ ▶️ John use cases, right? The use cases would have to include being put into a leather wallet

⏹️ ▶️ John and being subjected to denim. Like those would have to be on the list. And the attributes would be,

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you could say looks good as an attribute. I think you’d have to put, for this product and every Apple product,

⏹️ ▶️ John either stays looking good or wears its age well. And those items

⏹️ ▶️ John are very often not on the list of things for Apple products. I think they are sometimes, like

⏹️ ▶️ John the unibody aluminum and glass laptops, for example, I think they wear pretty well.

⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the criteria is they look good when they come out of the box, and I think they wear well. They don’t stain easily, they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John chip, They don’t scratch as easily as many of the alternatives did. They don’t discolor like the plastic

⏹️ ▶️ John ones did or whatever. But it’s hit or miss. Some products age well and some products don’t. A lot of the iPods

⏹️ ▶️ John did not age well and they just look beat up and gross and not in a good way. But some of them did age well. Some of the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones aged well, some of them didn’t. This card seems like it’s not gonna age well because the design

⏹️ ▶️ John is this beautiful white sleek thing and if it gets like streaked with blue,

⏹️ ▶️ John not really a great look. So I don’t think this is a big deal, but it does scratch that itch

⏹️ ▶️ John in my head of like, you know, Apple, your things don’t just have to look good in the product

⏹️ ▶️ John shots. And when you take it out of the box, especially if you’re going to use and handle it every day for years on

⏹️ ▶️ John end, it would be good if they aged gracefully. They can’t be impervious. They can’t be magic and not get damaged,

⏹️ ▶️ John but like try to make them age in a way, age evenly or get

⏹️ ▶️ John a patina on them. Don’t say, Oh, well, here’s your brand new card. Don’t stick it in your leather wallet because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John silly and it makes it sound like what’s going to happen if you don’t do that is going

⏹️ ▶️ John to be an aesthetically unpleasing experience.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand why they had to publish this support document, even though it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous. Everyone’s always looking for ways to call fail on Apple. They’re, they’re,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re in a very high profile position. And if there’s any flaw with any new product,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they launch the press will jump all over them for it. I understand that’s the reality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re in. And so, if they didn’t post this document, there would be people whose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple cards would get beaten up, as all credit cards do, after, what, a few weeks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of being in a wallet at most? And they would take pictures and they would start a Reddit thread saying, look,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Apple card is defective. And it would be a big story, and Apple would have to deal with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a PR crap storm that day, you know, about why the Apple card

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is badly designed, because it was defective, because it got banged up in a wallet because all credit cards always do that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead, they designed it to be so sensitive to damage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they moved up the PR, you know, crap storm of dealing with this. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just caught on themselves in advance by publishing this support document saying, all right, look, here’s, you know, if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep your Apple card in pretty much any way that anybody ever keeps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit cards, it’s going to probably get banged up. You know, I kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see why they had to do that because of the scrutiny they’re under with anything new they launch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s still kind of sad that they had to do that. It is ridiculous It is a hilarious document

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read even though yes, they probably had to do it, but it is still funny it does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed happen to every credit card and Also as John said they also did design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one in a way that seems even more more completely distant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from reality than it was necessary. Nobody was forcing them to create a white

⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit card for one.

⏹️ ▶️ John It just happened to them. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, I can’t tell though. Like you mentioned that like they made a card that that is more susceptible

⏹️ ▶️ John to damage at this point. Nobody knows whether this card is any more susceptible to damage than any other credit card.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s less susceptible to damage. We just don’t know because we all just got them and they’re all brand new, right? But the

⏹️ ▶️ John article doesn’t say, and by the way, unlike your other credit cards, this one will be discolored. Like it

⏹️ ▶️ John could be worse. It could be better. It’s hard to tell because the article is very sort of matter of fact and gives,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the most cautious advice. Like if you read the instruction manual for anything you own in your life is hilarious. How they tell you

⏹️ ▶️ John like not to use it in the way it’s like Q-tips instructions telling you not to put them in your ears. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s the instructions

⏹️ ▶️ John that come with the product, and then there’s how everybody uses them. And with the Apple Card people are gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John put in their wallets and I think we still will see here’s what my titanium Apple Card looks

⏹️ ▶️ John like after six months in my wallet. Will it be better than if you had stuck a plastic card in

⏹️ ▶️ John there? Worse or the same? This article gives us no clue. But yes the choice to make it white. To give an example

⏹️ ▶️ John I have other metal-ish cards or cards that don’t feel like plastic to me and a lot of them are either

⏹️ ▶️ John like black or very dark blue and those might be getting all scuffed up from my leather wallet

⏹️ ▶️ John but I would never see it because it’s harder to see on a dark material and it’s not like that color scheme

⏹️ ▶️ John is foreign to Apple like they make you know space gray and you know dark colored

⏹️ ▶️ John computer stuff like the Apple TV for example and also

⏹️ ▶️ John dark colors and black cards have been like a premium thing so they could have actually gone in that direction maybe they would

⏹️ ▶️ John have made the card feel too out of reach for regular people and they’re going for the mass market to make it white but they could

⏹️ ▶️ John make a black version of it Maybe they still will make a black version of it or a gold one for the Apple Card Edition. But…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, DLC would prevent a lot of the problems that they’re guarding against here. Yeah, that’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s true. It’s kind of like if you make something beautiful and it really

⏹️ ▶️ John is more delicate than other cards, you ruin the beauty of it by having to stick it in some kind of protective

⏹️ ▶️ John sleeve or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think also the timing of this was pretty poor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco optics of like, Right now, right before what is hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the end of the butterfly keyboard era, right as Johnny Ive has exited,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think we’ve had the peak of the worst of Johnny Ive-style designs in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of ways over the last few years, I feel like Apple commentators and press are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hypersensitive to anything where Apple is designing something for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco purely visual appeal in a way that will make it less practical less reliable in the real world.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to have this come out now, when everyone’s very sensitive to that kind of thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seems to be exactly that. It seems to be like something that Apple designed in a vacuum that, you know, designed it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look good, but to be fairly incompatible with the real world. And whether it ends up that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way or not, that is what this document makes us sound like. This document makes us sound like this thing is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all designed to be used the way anybody ever uses credit cards. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think, it kind of like, it hit a nerve in the Apple community and press of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet again, they’re doing something that is form over function. And hopefully we’re at the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco end of that, but we’ll see how that turns out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you’re going to have a special sleeve for your Apple card that matches your special sleeve for your iPhone, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey interestingly,

⏹️ ▶️ John when my bank sends me my debit card, they always send it in a sleeve. So I just always put it in my

⏹️ ▶️ John wallet in a sleeve. So like all my credit cards are just in these little pockets, but my

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey debit card is in the sleeve that it came in.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God, John. Have you ever seen those little…

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You’ve seen like the little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like tear resistant material

⏹️ ▶️ John sleeves.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I mean, you’ve seen my wallet. It’s not, it’s basically, it ends up being like a pocket liner because it doesn’t, it’s not as tall

⏹️ ▶️ John as the card. And when I pull the card out, the pouch stays in the wallet kind of, but yeah, it’s one of those little sleeves.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some of your cards might come in them. People just throw them away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You already have protective sleeves for a credit card in your wallet. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John my

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey God.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just for my debit card, not for any of my credit cards.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. But it is nice. It does actually keep the cards nicer, because if you compare it to the cards that are just in the leather slots, it’s a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John nicer.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But why, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to…

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I do

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have sleeves.

⏹️ ▶️ John Who cares? I do have sleeves for this card, but I’m not actually going to put it in my wallet, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t matter. Oh my God, John. So you’re talking about like the thing that your global entry card comes in? Or comes

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey with? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have a global entry card, so I couldn’t tell you. But yeah, it’s a little sleeve, exactly the same size as the credit card. Often

⏹️ ▶️ John credit cards come in them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God. You know, everyone’s going to be so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John torn. I don’t know why

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re so oh god about that. It’s it’s it’s exactly like having a pocket The sleeve doesn’t unlike the phone where the phone

⏹️ ▶️ John comes out with the sleeve on it and it has to be removed It’s just like putting it in a pocket except my pocket is lined with mylar

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s what they’re made out of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s no wonder It’s I cannot believe you don’t have severe back problems worse than mike given that you sit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a four foot tall wallet Every

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John single day i’ve been thinning it out lately. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Three foot tall wallet every day because of all your stupid sleeves. Why

⏹️ ▶️ John would I be sitting on it? Oh my god,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s in your back pocket No, we’ve gone through this multiple times. I forgot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forgot how much of a monster you are. Anyway, can we move on? I’m getting so stressed out just thinking about your wallet.

USB-C in cars

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were written by a lot of the internet, a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sizable portion of the internet, to tell us that most modern cars actually have USB-C and typically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-A ports as well.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know of most, but certainly a lot of them. Like we never got percentages, but people would say, my car

⏹️ ▶️ John is X and it has some USB-C, whereas my car is Y. Like, and so we saw lots of car models, but we didn’t see

⏹️ ▶️ John enough of them to say that most new cars have it. But it seems like it’s much more prevalent than we thought it was. Indeed.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the other thing is that like, They didn’t get rid of the A’s, like almost all the cars, I think every single car

⏹️ ▶️ John that someone told us about, had USB-C, but also still had A. Sometimes the C was only in the

⏹️ ▶️ John back seat, but it only had A in the front seat. So we’re in some weird transitional period.

New Sony cameras

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And tell me about your new or your forthcoming camera since you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spending enough money on your Mac Pro You’re gonna buy a new camera as well

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, whether I buy it or not a Sony did release the new cameras that we were talking about new aps-c cameras

⏹️ ▶️ John the the numbers I guess wrong on the numbers they had now in addition to the 6,000 6,300 64 hundred

⏹️ ▶️ John and sixty-five now they have the 61 and 66, of course I think they I think the revised 64

⏹️ ▶️ John But the good thing is the 66 actually is the best one in almost all ways. The 66 is basically

⏹️ ▶️ John like the 64 It’s got the advanced motion tracking and the new color chip and all the other

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or whatever And it has in-body stabilization But the 6400 doesn’t have and it has the gigantic

⏹️ ▶️ John battery from the a7 series So the battery was fine in those things to begin with but now the battery is like

⏹️ ▶️ John twice as big it’s rated for like 800 shots or something and that’s a conservative estimate so

⏹️ ▶️ John No problem with battery and they made the handle bigger which both to accommodate the larger battery But also because people have been

⏹️ ▶️ John complaining the handle is small I thought the old one was fine. But anyway, a bigger handle is not whatever you call it bigger grip

⏹️ ▶️ John is not a bad idea so it’s about what everyone expected to be

⏹️ ▶️ John the only Surprises slash downsides as far as I can tell are that it still

⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t USB C Like it’s just like all the other of the alpha 6 whatever series. It’s that stupid mini

⏹️ ▶️ John USB, which is terrible like they didn’t it’s this this feels like the uh the

⏹️ ▶️ John final best revision of this generation of camera and i hope like the next one will be like

⏹️ ▶️ John a different number and i’ll have usb c on or something anyway no usb c also no usb 3

⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s still usb 2 with remaining usb

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco which

⏹️ ▶️ John is not great

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John weird for something released now yeah that’s what i’m saying like i mean it makes sense if you look at the line they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John all exactly like that but they revised all this other stuff and and they’re like, eh, USB 2 is fine. And honestly, it is

⏹️ ▶️ John fine. It’s only a 24 megapixel sensor, and if you’re not shooting RAWs, it’s not a big deal, and you can just take the SD

⏹️ ▶️ John card out, and yada, yada, yada.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like the A7 line went USB 3 like two years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, this is the cheap line, you know what I mean? And the other weird thing about the 6600 is no flash,

⏹️ ▶️ John which sounds like, well, who cares? And most people probably don’t even know these cameras have flash

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, but it does. It’s very cleverly hidden. It’s a terrible little, very tiny pop-up flash.

⏹️ ▶️ John Honestly, I’m pretty sure I’ve literally never used a flash on my camera, but all the other ones have

⏹️ ▶️ John it and it doesn’t make up any room and it’s very unobtrusive and you feel like yeah, you could have put the flash there, but maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John they make up for it with more weatherproofing or maybe they need more room inside for the chips or whatever, so it’s not a big deal. So

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, 6600 looks like a really nice camera. The more exciting news for me, I think, because

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still not sure about if I’m going to step up to the 6600, is they introduced

⏹️ ▶️ John a couple new lenses and the one I’m interested in is a new 70-350 zoom lens which

⏹️ ▶️ John is better quality than my zoom and has a longer reach and yes is twice as heavy and slightly larger

⏹️ ▶️ John but I think is depending on what the reviews say about it seems like it is the best

⏹️ ▶️ John option if I want a zoom lens that is not tremendously bigger and has better image quality

⏹️ ▶️ John and has a longer reach. It’s not a you know f4 through the whole range it’s the same whatever 4.5

⏹️ ▶️ John to 6 point whatever but it does have a longer region presumably has better optical quality. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to take a look at that and it’s not super expensive. So mostly good news on the camera

⏹️ ▶️ John front. I’m still debating, waiting, you know, anyway, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John going to be looking at cameras for a while, but come summer next year, uh, I

⏹️ ▶️ John might just get the new lens and use it on my existing camera, or I might be looking to step up to full frame

⏹️ ▶️ John depending on what they come out with there, but it’s still good news.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would say given your proclivity towards super zoom style lenses, you probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t wanna go full frame because you get so many more better zoom lens options,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like super zoom lens options with the crop sensor because making it full frame would be prohibitively

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive and expensive and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I still have, well, I can’t make an acronym of this, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I have full frame FOMO. I want more light in the camera. I

⏹️ ▶️ John want more pixels on the picture. I want the ability to crop things out. Like I want all of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t had that. Mostly the light thing, because I hate when I’m, you know, like I said, I do never use the flash. And in certain environments,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so dark that even with my quote unquote good camera, I’m not gonna get usable pictures without a flash,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m not gonna use a flash. So I basically get grainy, bad pictures, especially if people are in a dimly

⏹️ ▶️ John lit indoor room and they’re moving. Like weddings, like if someone is like on the dance floor

⏹️ ▶️ John in a wedding at night, I’m not getting good pictures with my fancy camera. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John like, I need to, if I had a full frame, I’d have a better fighting chance. There’d be less noise that have more of

⏹️ ▶️ John a chance of capturing the motion without ever being a blurry streak. Right? So I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like, you know, maybe I’ll regret it. Maybe I’ll get full frame and say it’s way too big and I don’t care. And everything you said about the zoom is true,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like I at least want to entertain the option. So I’m like we said a couple of shows ago,

⏹️ ▶️ John the A7 just with no letter four

⏹️ ▶️ John If something like that comes out, I might look

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco at it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I don’t know. Mac Pro is before that. Lots of money to be spent, lots of years to wait.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Plus, the TV

⏹️ ▶️ John is in the mix somewhere there. So it’s a long road to all these fancy things.

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Tesla Superchargers vs. others

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, all right I think it was episode before last we were talking about whether or not Tesla was a joke

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and one of the things I conceded was that Tesla’s supercharger network seems to be with it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey beyond beyond compare and Friend of the show Sam Welsom it of the wheel bearings podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is neutral but with people who actually know what they’re talking about about, he wrote me to point out that according

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to energy.gov in the United States, I am not making any claims about anywhere else in the world, just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the United States. He sent me a couple of screenshots that he took, and I will try

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to remember to put them in the show notes, but suffice to say, according to the U.S. government, Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has 737 stations in the U.S. and Canada, actually, for a total

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just shy of 7,000 outlets. Meanwhile, if If you combine all the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other kinds of electric charging together, the number jumps from 737 stations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 2,407 stations and actually a little bit fewer outlets.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s more stations with fewer outlets, 4,191 outlets as opposed to Tesla’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost 7,000. But the point is there’s actually a pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey parity from the looks of it with the The exception of the area of the country that’s, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the Northwest and Midwest, I don’t even know what states these are. I’m so terrible. Like Iowa and thereabouts.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not so great coverage there, but just about everywhere else, it looks almost toe to toe with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Tesla has. That was news to me. I assumed that if you were to buy anything but a Tesla,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the charging story is basically good luck. As it turns out, I think my dad might be within

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 24 hours of buying himself a Chevy Bolt. We’ll see how that whole experience goes if he actually pulls the trigger.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But as it turns out, there are more options for non-Teslas than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had expected.

⏹️ ▶️ John Shouldn’t be news to you because I brought up this exact same point the last time we were arguing about Tesla like six months to a year ago. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John I went to the exact same

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey website and looked up this

⏹️ ▶️ John info. A couple of key things about the screenshots you sent on this website. He actually sent screenshots

⏹️ ▶️ John of US and Canada. If you’ve limited to US, it changes slightly, but the main story is about the same.

⏹️ ▶️ John Also, he applied the filter that only looks at, you know, DC fast charging, like the highest

⏹️ ▶️ John level of charge rate. There’s a bunch of filters that you can apply that’s like you just want any kind of electric car

⏹️ ▶️ John charger or do you want the fastest fastest one like because the superchargers are all I think the fastest fastest

⏹️ ▶️ John one. So to be a fair comparison, you have to limit the non Tesla ones to also be the super

⏹️ ▶️ John fast fast chargers. And by the way, there are some super fast fast chargers in the non Tesla world that are actually

⏹️ ▶️ John faster than Tesla’s ones, mostly in Europe, but like the new Porsche

⏹️ ▶️ John Taycan or whatever the hell it’s called, that actually has like some 800 volts that

⏹️ ▶️ John are, that’s just the power inside of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it has some even faster charging things. But this is trying to be apples to apples, so you can play with this, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John put the link in the show notes to the website you can play with and look at it, but if you say, okay, set aside

⏹️ ▶️ John the super fast chargers, what about just chargers period, the numbers go even, tip even more in favor of the non-Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ John things. There is still the option of like, well, what kind of connector do you want? because there are a couple of different connectors,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So you can figure out based on where you live and the car you’re gonna buy, like look at what connector the Bolt has

⏹️ ▶️ John and how fast charging the Bolt can even accept. This is, I think, is a useful website

⏹️ ▶️ John for figuring out what your charging options are. But Tesla has the advantage of like

⏹️ ▶️ John all superchargers, as far as I’m aware, are more or less uniform.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretty much. I mean, there is variety between them, but it’s very, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really matter. Like it’s a variety in ways that most people don’t care about. What are they all, are they all fast? They’re all fast,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Like, like, I, I, forgive me, I forget like exactly like the specs for like certain, you know, DC fast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging SAE standards kind of thing, but, but all superchargers are considered like the fast kind.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think like level three, I think it is, whatever it is. But I think one major advantage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the superchargers have is they, they appeal to you in the same way that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like fast food restaurants in highway rest stops appeal to you. When you’re on a road trip,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know exactly what you’re gonna get. You know that if you are driving a Tesla, you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can drive pretty much anywhere, at least in the countries that they cover,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they cover the US very well, and they’re getting pretty good in Europe and Canada too, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that if you drive somewhere, you don’t have to look up in advance, like, wait, what is the supercharger?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it somewhere nice? Is it gonna actually be there? Is it gonna work? Is it gonna be enabled? Am I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be able to pay for it? Is it going to have the right adapters or whatever for my car

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to plug into it? Like there’s a whole bunch of question marks around a lot of this stuff because the, you know, this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the charging infrastructure in general is still in its early days, you know, and in the whole world. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a supercharger, you know, if you drive a Tesla, you know that you can go to supercharger X, Y, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Z. You can even tap on the map in your car and it will tell you whether they’re full or not and how many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bays they have and how fast of a charging rate to support and they’re all fast. Um, and you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly what you’re going to get. So there’s a level of predictability that for the same reason people choose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to eat fast food on road trips because they know exactly what they’re gonna get and they don’t have to take any risks, same reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and oftentimes in the same places, you get Tesla supercharging. If you go outside of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Tesla world, you just have to do a bit more legwork. You have to do a bit more research. Like if you’re going somewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should probably look up ahead of time. Not just looking at a point in the map of where a charger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, but look in more detail. Like, has someone posted photos of this charger? where exactly is it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Will it work? You know, all these little things you have to additionally check. So by going Tesla, you actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do have this kind of peace of mind that you know exactly what to expect, you know it’ll be there, you know it’ll work.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in most cases, you know it’ll be free, and so you don’t have to worry about like how do I pay for this and everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just kind of a nicer system, and I’m not saying that we can’t ever get there. Like, you know, we got there with gas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stations. It probably took a while when gas stations first came out. Like gas stations probably had similar issues, but now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that you can drive anywhere in America and most of the world, you can drive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere and you can stop almost anywhere you would possibly need a gas station

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there will probably be one. You can probably find one that is open at all times of the day and it will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work with your car and it will take your payment and you kind of know the infrastructure is mature enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know that’s there. With electric, we aren’t quite there yet outside of the Tesla world. It’s still very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco young and there’s still a lot of questions you need to answer. But with Tesla, you can be sure and that’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really nice thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think there is a fast food aspect of the non Tesla things in that there’s so many more of them

⏹️ ▶️ John and not all of them are like the full service fancy McDonald’s. Some of them are just like the quick McDonald’s. Some of them are just

⏹️ ▶️ John drive throughs like some of them. The equivalent is like some of them are not the super fast charging. Some of them are slower charging, but there are

⏹️ ▶️ John so many more of them that the odds are if you throw a rock in some direction, like what is the closest charger?

⏹️ ▶️ John The supercharger is maybe one or two around you but there’s like 75 of these other dinky things only

⏹️ ▶️ John one or two of which are the fast chargers but the whole rest of them are you know all right so it’s like the ubiquity

⏹️ ▶️ John is I feel like starting to become a factor with these other charging things and there’s more variety and they’re not all

⏹️ ▶️ John fast and so on so that’s why the comparison here is fast too fast and I think fast too fast there’s more or less

⏹️ ▶️ John parity albeit with the variety that you mentioned of like well how are they and how nice

⏹️ ▶️ John are they and the second advantage is if and when Tesla goes out of business and or is acquired, these independent

⏹️ ▶️ John charging stations will still exist because as far as I’m aware, they’re not affiliated with any individual car manufacturers, but are just like

⏹️ ▶️ John we charge you money for electricity stations, or like they’re third party companies whose only job

⏹️ ▶️ John is selling electricity to people with electric cars or whatever. Like I don’t think they’re like there’s a Volkswagen

⏹️ ▶️ John station and a Porsche station or whatever. So I’m not sure what will happen to all that supercharging

⏹️ ▶️ John infrastructure if Tesla decides to get out of that business or gets acquired or goes out of business or something

⏹️ ▶️ John but well you know the the idea that you would have to go to a specific gas station for your specific

⏹️ ▶️ John brand of car is not tenable long term and I feel like it’s just an anomaly here at the beginning of the

⏹️ ▶️ John uh the electric car era and you know teslas will be fine they can use the other chargers too right with adapters

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever so it’s not it’s not a big deal for the cars but it seems like something they can’t hold forever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know i I have to ask, and I’m looking mostly at you, John, are Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fans today better or worse than the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dark era of being an Apple fanboy? What I mean by that is if you say anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s even mildly negative about Tesla anywhere on the internet,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are a lot of very, very angry people that will come out of the woodwork to tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you that anything other than a Tesla is a waste of money and is a terrible decision. And by the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, you’re murdering the planet. You personally are murdering the planet. Nobody else is just you by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey besmirching Tesla. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I feel like this is…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. You’re just proving my point.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, what I can’t help but wonder is like, were our people, were like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac people and the Apple people just as bad in the heyday? I surely hope not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the Tesla fans are just intolerable. It’s gotten to the point that like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if I wanted a Tesla, I don’t know if I want to be associated with Tesla. Now I got over that for the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John BMW. Yeah, you got a BMW. No, I know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. I will be the first to tell you. I got right over it when push came to shove, but oh my word, the fans

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are so obnoxious and Elon, Elon occasionally can do wrong, but Tesla as a corporation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can do no wrong, there’s nothing wrong with anything Tesla does ever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the Apple fans probably were just as bad, but they had the advantage

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Internet not existing in its current form. I just had to be bad in isolation

⏹️ ▶️ John like their bed was not allowed to like the way their badness filter to people was like

⏹️ ▶️ John actual physical letters that they would write to like op ed columnists who said bad things about Apple or Max or something. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it was they may have been as bad, but it’s not the exposure wasn’t as bad like the experience

⏹️ ▶️ John of being around them wasn’t as bad because they didn’t, there wasn’t a means for them all to communicate to you or anyone

⏹️ ▶️ John else. And in fact, they wouldn’t communicate to you a random person, like, you know, they would only communicate to you if you were a columnist

⏹️ ▶️ John and then buy letters or whatever, which were much nicer than tweets and far less numerous. Second

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, uh, as obnoxious as Steve Jobs was, and as clueless

⏹️ ▶️ John as the various Apple CEOs were who were there at Apple before he came back.

⏹️ ▶️ John Elon Musk is worse. So and and he is he is allowed his his message

⏹️ ▶️ John and his self is allowed to transmit to many, many people. So I think that adds an extra

⏹️ ▶️ John spice of awfulness to the to the situation. It’s hard to say if though if Apple fans

⏹️ ▶️ John were in the current environment with Elon Musk as the CEO of Apple, I think it would be about the same

⏹️ ▶️ John because you know Apple fans Apple fans were probably I’m gonna say more

⏹️ ▶️ John justifiably angry because you know it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like I don’t know I can’t I’m not gonna say anything about I feel like the the

⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple stuff and Macs were less justly maligned than

⏹️ ▶️ John the complaints people have against Tesla let’s put it that way because Tesla does have problems

⏹️ ▶️ John like Macs were not you know know, arriving missing screws or with paint sprayed onto the

⏹️ ▶️ John tires. And, you know, like in general, even Apple’s worst days, it was still, you know, a nice product, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas some of the complaints about Tesla are not in keeping with the supposed stature of

⏹️ ▶️ John the company. And then when people complain about them, they get defended. And I feel like there was not much of

⏹️ ▶️ John not much defending shoddy workmanship on the part of Apple, mostly because there wasn’t as much shoddy workmanship.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just, it’s frustrating to me when I try to take a reasonable,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I try to make a reasonable point. I had said on Twitter, I forget how I phrased it, but basically like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was actually Sam Balsamit as well that had pointed out that the Roadster

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is basically abandoned by Tesla 10 years on. And I said, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that just seems kind of crappy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right? So is my Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know it’s not the same thing, but.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair. And actually, somebody said to me, well, what about iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Macs and so on? And I think there’s a big difference there because a car is sometimes the most or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe the second most expensive thing that any regular person would buy. Whereas a Mac, unless you’re John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracuse of buying a $100,000 Mac Pro, is not the second most expensive thing you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy in your life. And I know you were saying that to be silly. I don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ John know if it has to do with the expense. It’s more like just tradition. Like traditionally, cars are supported for a long

⏹️ ▶️ John time. Well, they just are right and in some ways Tesla not doing that is treating

⏹️ ▶️ John its cars more like electronics like phones Which it does in many aspects of his cars that are favorable. And

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s one Unfavorable one I agree that it’s bad because we’re used to a world where that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John happen But it does kind of fit with the idea of Tesla being a different kind of car company

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but let me look at all these these roadsters, you know, what happens to those batteries? What happens to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the metal in those cars, you know, nobody’s recycling them are they? And a lot of these owners,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they want to keep these cars longer than 10 years. I mean, God knows how those batteries are working, if they’re working anymore, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they want to keep them longer and they’re basically out of luck. And so there’s a video that Sam had tweeted and I had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey retweeted with comments saying, there’s a single guy, I think in Seattle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, that has basically become the Tesla Roadster expert

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he will service them to the best he can, sometimes to the point of like having

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new hoods machine printed, I don’t know the terminology, but you know, created based

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a mold from an existing hood that he had made himself because he can’t get parts from Tesla. And,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, we have stories of like a friend of the show, Arik, who he waited what, like four months

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a windshield for his Model 3. And so I pointed out like, this just seems crappy to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so many people came out of the woodwork. Well, they’re disruptive and oh, they’re pushing the car manufacturers in the right direction.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I don’t want a car that I can’t get a friggin’ windshield in four months. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would presume that that’s gotten better since Eric had his problems. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to- I mean, honestly, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably hasn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and that’s the thing. I don’t want any part of that. And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable take to have. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, the Tesla fans were not happy with me. Oh, no, they were not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re both correct. Like it’s like one. One is not a counterargument for the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other. Like you are correct that Tesla has had tons of problems. I’ve seen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with just like operations service, that kind of stuff. They do have tons of problems with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those other people are correct that Tesla is really disruptive and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very helpful to, you know, all of humanity that, you know, to push all this stuff forward as aggressively

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they have. And they we really have made the industry move in a pretty big way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that is all correct. However, that doesn’t excuse all their problems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think people on the internet are just bad at arguing, and they see any attack on Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an attack on all that good stuff, when in fact,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these can be separately discussed issues, and you can both be correct that Tesla is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing amazing things, and also they have tons of operational problems.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I think it is an interesting experiment, though, to see if one of the traditions

⏹️ ▶️ John of the audio industry that Tesla can break is the idea that you can continue to get parts for your car a decade later, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is absolutely standard. Like for any quote, unquote, real car company, if you have a 10-year-old

⏹️ ▶️ John car, Chevy, a Ford, a Honda, whatever, of course you can get parts for it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Especially if it’s a common car. I mean, Tesla only makes a few models anyway. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not like a rare, exotic, one-off thing that they made. And even then, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John what the standards are for how long parts are in inventory. I’m sure someone in the auto industry can tell us. But it’s a really long time. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the only real reason for it is tradition, essentially. I’m sure there are reasons way back when. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it does make you, it is a way these car companies earn, trust, and

⏹️ ▶️ John last a long time. Because once one car company does that, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, I have my Model T. And 30 years later, I can still get parts for the Model

⏹️ ▶️ John T, Ford still makes them, it makes you have a certain level of affection

⏹️ ▶️ John and trust in Ford that they stand behind their product or yada yada. Again, assuming the car company doesn’t go out of business

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And now they all do it because once one does it, it’s like, well, we want that trust from

⏹️ ▶️ John our customers too. And it just becomes part of the industry. It’s like, yeah, we keep parts on hand for X number of years or we XS

⏹️ ▶️ John manufacture this many and we have this math that says this is how many parts we need to have in inventory to satisfy the need

⏹️ ▶️ John because cars do go away after a certain point and all that stuff. But I’ve kept many of my cars

⏹️ ▶️ John long after they were 10 years old. And it never occurred to me that I could bring it in, and they would say, oh, I

⏹️ ▶️ John dented the oil pan on my Civic on this very steep apron, because there’s such

⏹️ ▶️ John low ground clearance on these exotic cars like the Civic. Very steep apron on a gas station

⏹️ ▶️ John in Georgia. And that car was more than 10 years old when I dented it. And it didn’t enter my head that I would go there, and they’d say, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t get an oil pan for your car. What do you mean you can’t get an oil pan for your car? It’s a Honda Civic. It’s like, oh, it’s more than 10 years

⏹️ ▶️ John old. They don’t make those parts anymore. Maybe we can custom design you one if we can mold it from and stamp

⏹️ ▶️ John it from Another thing that you can get from a junkyard or we just assume the parts will be an inventory But there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John reason to assume that we don’t assume that a 10 year old Mac will be able to run the latest software or will Be supported

⏹️ ▶️ John in any way Although I think of it Can I get parts for this? I

⏹️ ▶️ John think not. I think Apple won’t sell new parts anymore for this I would have to buy used but different

⏹️ ▶️ John industries have different standards for that. I think probably at this point the auto industry

⏹️ ▶️ John the consumers in the auto industry wouldn’t accept the idea that this different kind of car company says, no, you can’t get parts

⏹️ ▶️ John after 10 years. But who knows? Stranger things have happened.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I just, I want, I really want the traditional car manufacturers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who understand how to do service and how to do parts and things like that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kind of get a grip and start going electric. And they’ve all pledged it to some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree or another. But I really want an e-Golf to be more interesting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than it currently is, even though it is very interesting. I want the Polestar to come out, the Polestar sedan. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey granted, these are all probably way too expensive for me. It’s still early, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t imagine that Volkswagen or Polestar slash Volvo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will have the kind of rookie mistakes that Tesla has. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I know I understand that electric cars have fewer moving parts, but they still get bumped into from time to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to time, you know, you still have rocks that hit windshields from time to time. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I, I don’t think that just saying, you know, a lot of times when I complain about this sort of thing, people, you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to need to get a service as much because there’s just less stuff to go wrong. Well, yeah, true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Especially compared to my BMW, which tried to explode its engine on the, on the hour, every hour on the hour, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still, you need breaks from time to time. No, you need less, you need, you don’t need breaks as often because we’re generally breaking. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. But you still will eventually need breaks. You will eventually need a windshield.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You will eventually bump something and need a fender. Like, these are all things that happen to cars.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It can just happen to you, John, I’m telling you. So, I don’t know. I just, I want everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be happy and I want Tesla fans to be less obnoxious. Take hands for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody.

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple just today has come out with a statement about the Siri kerfuffle from a week or two ago

⏹️ ▶️ Casey entitled, Improving Siri’s Privacy Protections. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of stuff in there where Apple talks about what does or does not happen with Siri,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what does or does not leave your phone. But I think most interesting to me are the passages

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to what they call grading. And they say, before we suspended grading, our process involved

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reviewing a small sample of audio from Siri requests, less than 0.2 percent, and their computer-generated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey transcripts to measure how well Siri was responding to and improving

⏹️ ▶️ Casey its reliability. So for example, did the user intend to wake Siri? Did Siri hear the request accurately? And did Siri respond

⏹️ ▶️ Casey appropriately to the request? Siri uses a random identifier, a long string of letters and numbers associated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a single device to keep track of data while it’s being processed rather than tying it to your identity through your Apple ID

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or phone number. And they pat themselves on the back for that being unique. And so they move

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and say, OK, so that’s what was happening. Here’s what’s going to happen. First,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by default, we will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions. We will continue to use computer-generated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey transcripts to help Siri improve. Second, users will be able to opt in to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey help Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests. We hope that many people will choose to help Siri get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better, knowing that Apple respects their data and has strong privacy controls in place. Those who choose

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to participate will be able to opt out at any time. And third, when customers opt in, only Apple employees,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as in not contractors, will be allowed to listen to audio samples of the Siri interactions. Our team will work to delete

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri.” I think there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some things to quibble about in here, but by and large, it was written for human beings,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not for lawyers, and I think it solves most, but not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all, of our problems. So starting with Marco, how do you feel about this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a pretty good summary, actually. First of all, of these three action points,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main three takeaways from this piece, The third one about them now being employees, as opposed to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco contractors, it’s kind of nothing. That’s not really a meaningful change.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple always said they had the same standards for contractors that they would have for employees, for privacy-sensitive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like this. The fact that they are now going to be only employees and not contractors, I think, is a technicality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t mean much in practice. So let’s focus on the other two. The second

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, that use of audio will now be opt-in, is fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s great. That is, I think that that is the way it should have been all this time. I think maybe Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now thinks that as well. That’s great news. That is the right decision. The only thing I really have to quibble about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is point number one, where they basically say that the use of transcripts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not only, you know, not only is it not opt-in, you can’t opt-out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, the only way to not have transcripts used is to not use Siri at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so all these employees now will still be able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to review the text transcripts of what you told Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically as long as they want. And all of them. You can’t go in and delete one where you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally said something that was caught by Siri that might have been sensitive information, you have no control over it, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically the text of the transcribed text of what you said has no privacy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think that’s good enough. I think Apple can do better in that area. And I understand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they probably do want a lot of data to train models and to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, you know, human review for, you know, making stuff better and everything. They do need a source of data.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they were really only looking at 0.2 percent, clearly they have enough data.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t necessarily need all of it. There might be other ways to get it. So So one example, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they should make the opt in apply to both things. Make the opt in apply

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to both the audio and the text. That honestly sounds to me like the right move.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If people choose not to, like if they see the option somewhere, maybe it’s during the setup wizard and they choose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to opt in to the audio, do you think they really are going to know that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their text is going to be reviewed anyway? Like that’s, it’s almost misleading. I think it goes against

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people’s expectations and it goes against common sense. Like if you say, no, you can’t analyze what I told Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in audio form, I think I would assume that would apply to text form as well. So now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re left with a situation where if you are concerned about, you know, humans

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing what you told Siri or hearing what you told Siri, still your option is don’t use Siri,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is an increasingly, you know, obtuse answer to that concern.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think this does solve some of the problem, but it doesn’t go far enough. I would like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see them go further and make the opt-in also apply to text. And if they really need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more data, one thing I saw suggested by a few different people today was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some kind of report a problem button on the Siri screen when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gives you a response, the same way you see it on the voicemail transcripts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see why they can’t do that. Maybe pride is one answer. they don’t want to appear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as though there might be a problem with Siri. But like, look, the jig is up. Everyone knows Siri has problems all the time, right? Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one is fooled by, by that button not being there. No one is giving the impression, Oh, this, this thing is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfect. It’s wonderfully, it works every time. It never mishears me. It never says something dumb

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in response like that, that, that jig is up. Like we all know Siri is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, kind of unreliable and not as smart as we always want it to be a little report, problem button

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Siri response UI would give them an easy way to get lots of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco data that is hand-picked by the crowd-sourced everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be exactly the kind of things that cause problems that here is a specific example

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where Siri didn’t do what I wanted. Perfect! That’s exactly what you want. You want people to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to send that in, which is why they put it on the voicemail transcripts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that this seems like an obvious solution that they probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should do instead of all this garbage or in addition to all this garbage, but in the meantime if they if they are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to do that I don’t see why audio recordings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were deemed private enough to have this opt-out behavior now or this opt-in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco behavior now. But the text transcriptions of those was deemed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not important enough to have that privacy?

⏹️ ▶️ John We have some explanations for some of this stuff. So first of all, I think the reason that they

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t announce the thing that I originally suggested when we talked about this, like you just said as well, like the

⏹️ ▶️ John just in time reporting of a problem when people are the most primed to report it because they’re angry that Siri did something dumb

⏹️ ▶️ John is simply because that requires implementation and time and they’re struggling

⏹️ ▶️ John to get iOS 13 out and they just don’t have it. They’re not going to announce it when they don’t have it. I wouldn’t be surprised if that appears,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they I mean this announcement took long enough as it was. They’re not exactly nimble here. They can’t announce. Here’s what we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ John to do. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do that. We’re going to do that because they can’t do that yet. They could put that in development

⏹️ ▶️ John and plan it for iOS 13.3 or something, or maybe or maybe it’ll be pushed iOS 14,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they have to make an announcement now. So I think that explains why they don’t have the UI solution that we all think

⏹️ ▶️ John is what they should obviously do just because they’re not ready with it. So in the meantime, the

⏹️ ▶️ John second question, why is audio treated differently than transcripts? There’s a couple of angles on this.

⏹️ ▶️ John The first is, and this is silly, but is actually true. There is some protection,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, for, uh, the, the transcriptions based on how bad

⏹️ ▶️ John transcriptions are. Like if we all assume that the transcriptions were accurate,

⏹️ ▶️ John it would be like, well, they can have the transcription, but that’s just garbage anyway. It always gets it wrong. What I’m saying and that sounds

⏹️ ▶️ John terrible but it’s actually true because like I think in in our mind no one assumes that the transcriptions are the same

⏹️ ▶️ John as the audio in terms of fidelity because the audio a human can listen to and have a good chance of understanding but

⏹️ ▶️ John transcription may be just gibberish like especially in cases where it gets it wrong because maybe there’s noise

⏹️ ▶️ John in the room or whatever the second thing is in the Morgan Freeman problem as I described

⏹️ ▶️ John them when we first discussed this part of the Morgan Freeman problem is solved by transcriptions.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you hear Morgan Freeman’s voice and you know who it is, suddenly you’re much more interested in

⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re saying. But part of the problem isn’t solved. And if Morgan Freeman references the name of the

⏹️ ▶️ John new movie he’s doing with Steven Spielberg, that would be in the transcription. And now you know to be interested because you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John looking for keywords, like whatever movie title is, or Disney, or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John even if you don’t hear Morgan Freeman’s voice. And speaking of Morgan Freeman’s voice, this gets back to something that I think was clarified

⏹️ ▶️ John in this that Gruber wrote about in his post about it, in case you just read before,

⏹️ ▶️ John the original stories were saying that the information was

⏹️ ▶️ John mapped to your Apple ID for like a really long period of time. But what Apple says, and what is apparently true about it

⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s never mapped to your Apple ID. When they get this information, it is associated with a random

⏹️ ▶️ John number that Apple cannot map back to you, your phone, your Apple ID, anything, from

⏹️ ▶️ John the get-go. Like as soon as Apple stores this, It is stored quote unquote anonymized.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now obviously, if they have your voice and you’re Morgan Freeman, they can figure out who you are. Obviously, if you say

⏹️ ▶️ John something that identifies yourself, you know, if you reference your home address

⏹️ ▶️ John or the first and last name of somebody in your family, like it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John unidentifiable, right? But it is de-identified. And we originally had thought when we were discussing

⏹️ ▶️ John this that not only was it like mapped through Apple ID, but it stayed that way for a really long time. So I’m glad to hear that

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not actually true. They do anonymize it to the extent possible

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of the metadata. The data itself, yeah, that might be used to identify you because you

⏹️ ▶️ John may be saying things or whatever. Again, the transcript, I feel like being slightly better than the voice because you do

⏹️ ▶️ John like voice print analysis or something to hunt somebody down or whatever. So I feel like the situation

⏹️ ▶️ John was not quite as bad as we thought it was. This is an announcement of saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what we can do right now, Essentially without changing our software in any radical way, which we hope they do

⏹️ ▶️ John do eventually right but for now They have to say here’s what we’re doing. I’m also baffled by the transcript

⏹️ ▶️ John thing because like Discussing this in a couple of slacks

⏹️ ▶️ John in the past few days like what can you? What can you do with just the transcripts in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ John getting things better? Maybe you you know, sometimes if you look at trend you do it when you talk to Siri and it makes a reminder and

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like Like, what did I say that produced this word? And sometimes you can puzzle it out.

⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe a human could puzzle that out, but it’s really helpful to

⏹️ ▶️ John be able to hear the audio. So with just the transcription, what’s so important about just the transcription

⏹️ ▶️ John that it has to be, that it’s for everybody? As Marco pointed out,.02%

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you have 500 million users, like it’s like a million people, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John if you just left it to the opt-inners, If everything was opt-in, probably more than enough people would opt-in.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just need a tiny sliver of people to opt-in. I think a fraction of a

⏹️ ▶️ John single percent take rate for opting in is apparently adequate because that’s what they’re choosing to do now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not- Right, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it is kind of baffling why the transcripts are global. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a thing they could have done now. Just like they made the other thing, they’re gonna make the thing opt-in, which I feel like is just one

⏹️ ▶️ John screen and a preference thing. If they had made transcripts opt-in, it would have been a cleaner

⏹️ ▶️ John win. Um, so I would love to know what the decision making process was,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, and why, you know, maybe, maybe the, the calculus is that

⏹️ ▶️ John people actually won’t care about the transcripts. And I can understand, again, I can understand the thing is the recording

⏹️ ▶️ John sounds more personal and people know the transcriptions are garbage anyway, but it does seem weird. And it is like the

⏹️ ▶️ John tiny blemish on what would otherwise be a fairly clean PR win, especially with the part

⏹️ ▶️ John about clarifying about the identification. because I feel like that was the worst part of it, that they would have audio recordings

⏹️ ▶️ John of you, uh, that if you didn’t read all the fine print, you didn’t know were happening. That’s something that by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ John the people have been pointing out since the story came out, they’re like, well, Apple told you this was happening. Of course they did. It’s always in the fine print, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point was it’s not what we expected. Like no one reads that. We all know nobody

⏹️ ▶️ John reads. It’s like, yes, it’s all, it’s always in the fine print, but nobody reads it. And we’re basically going by what we

⏹️ ▶️ John expect from Apple. So this was again, you know, and to Apple’s credit, Apple didn’t come back and say, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John just so you know, we told you about this two years ago and everyone was fine with it. That’s not a defense

⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple knows nobody reads that stuff, right? They, Apple understood the actual problem is here,

⏹️ ▶️ John expectations versus reality and they weren’t matching up. So they’re trying to get them realigned, but I am glad to hear that it was,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the identified from the beginning. Um, and then they just have to address the identified

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, which is the data which should all be opt-in.

iOS 13.1?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the last, what is it, 24 hours, 48 hours, we’ve gotten an iOS 13.1 beta, which is different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey since iOS 13.0 isn’t out yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t seen a lot about what the differences are other than that some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that were taken out seem to be added back. I know Federico was very excited about some shortcuts related things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that were added back in. What’s going on? trouble in paradise for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple these days. It sure seems like 13 has been way more of a cluster than anyone expected,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially since we all thought that they had so much time to work on a lot of these features

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last year in theory, although it’s never quite that simple. What’s going on?

⏹️ ▶️ John And lucky 13. I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mean, so

⏹️ ▶️ John this, I think the situation is not particularly unexpected and also not

⏹️ ▶️ John that different. So the unexpected part is like, well, you know, I was told they pulled stuff out of it, shouldn’t they have had more time to work on the 13 stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not like they there’s a relatively fixed number of people working. So the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John point was bump those features and get all the people

⏹️ ▶️ John to continue to work on 12, which they did. And I think 12 was a good release. And it was very stable. And if you got to accomplish their goals and

⏹️ ▶️ John major old devices faster, the reason it did that is because all those people who would have been working on those

⏹️ ▶️ John features that got pushed to 13 weren’t working on those features. So it’s not like those features got such a long time to

⏹️ ▶️ John be worked on, those features were put aside. No one working on them, like frozen in

⏹️ ▶️ John time. And then more or less, you know, and all those people were working on 12. And then when all

⏹️ ▶️ John the 12 work was done, they resumed work on the 13 stuff. So it’s not true that

⏹️ ▶️ John those 13 features got like twice the amount of time they got like 1.5 the amount of time. And

⏹️ ▶️ John obviously they were challenging features because they’re the ones that got bumped out of 12. They didn’t bump the easy stuff out of 12. Right. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t particularly surprise me that there might be problems. What does surprise me is exactly how many of they are and how severe

⏹️ ▶️ John they seem to be. Sometimes that happens, right? And we’ve heard stories about

⏹️ ▶️ John not just features, you know, that they’re having trouble with, but features that have been rolled back to say, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John we were working on a new version of this subsystem and it’s not going to make

⏹️ ▶️ John it. So bring back the old subsystem and remove all the features that relied on the new subsystem.

⏹️ ▶️ John Presumably so that those things can come back in 13 one and 13 two or whatever. Right. But

⏹️ ▶️ John that if that happens is usually a big deal and that seemingly happening on multiple fronts and 13

⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t bode well now as for the iOS 13.1 beta This kind of overlap

⏹️ ▶️ John where people are working on 13.1 and 13.0 at the same time pretty much always happens

⏹️ ▶️ John What normally doesn’t happen is the 13.1 beta is distributed to developers before the 13.0

⏹️ ▶️ John happens very often and 13.0 comes out on the same day the 13.1 beta comes out. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not weird inside Apple for them to be overlapped, it’s weird for them to be overlapping externally.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the explanation for that is, rumors say that 13

⏹️ ▶️ John was given some extra time to bake, but they have to commit to a

⏹️ ▶️ John shipping version of 13 to be on the iPhones that they’re gonna announce in a week or two. So

⏹️ ▶️ John they basically had to say, freeze a version of 13 for the new hardware,

⏹️ ▶️ John set that aside, continue working on the quote unquote real 13 for everybody else,

⏹️ ▶️ John and also get going on what we know is going to be 13.1. And they have to do all of that,

⏹️ ▶️ John not at the same time, but overlapping in many ways. Because as much as they can

⏹️ ▶️ John give 13 more time to bake and more time to develop or whatever, this is the question we were all asking

⏹️ ▶️ John ourselves back when they’re doing this. Would they bump the iPhone date? The answer is no. The iPhone is coming out when it’s coming

⏹️ ▶️ John out. It has to have 13 on it. So job one was get something that will

⏹️ ▶️ John work on the new iPhones and be relatively stable, ready in time for the iPhones, because that is not moving.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if it means just abandoning everything and rolling back subsystems to previous versions, just get it done. And then even the 13.0

⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna have stuff missing from it. And then 13.1 hopefully looks more like what 13.0

⏹️ ▶️ John was supposed to be. So this seems like typical software project management. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part, despite it, you know, not going well over there at Apple, these

⏹️ ▶️ John are the kind of decisions we want them to make if it’s not working and it’s crappy. Delay

⏹️ ▶️ John or boot it out. Don’t ship it like that. We’re hoping that’s what they’re doing. It’s disappointing when a feature

⏹️ ▶️ John that was, you know, advertised and shown isn’t in the point. Oh, but honestly, we’d all rather have the point Oh, with the old subsystem

⏹️ ▶️ John and working and wait for the point one or point two or point three for the feature. Like these are all the correct decisions.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re all software developers. We know how it goes. Especially, can you imagine if you had something like an iPhone launch that was like

⏹️ ▶️ John literally, apparently unmovable? Like these iPhones are being made. They’re gonna ship. We need to put

⏹️ ▶️ John software on them. We need to start making, we need to literally start making them and putting them in boxes now. So they need to

⏹️ ▶️ John have some software that we can put on them. Because if we put it on the box without software, it’s not good. So like

⏹️ ▶️ John a date like that, that you have to, I feel bad for the people at Apple. And then that’s just like throw everything overboard until

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing works enough to ship on a phone. And that’s not an ideal place to be, but if

⏹️ ▶️ John they pull it off, like that’s how the sausage gets made. I mean, if you’ve ever worked on any big software

⏹️ ▶️ John project, you would be lucky to have a project that is as successful as iOS 13. Most of them are

⏹️ ▶️ John way bigger disasters. So I’m kind of glad I’m not working at Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John right now. I’m a little bit afraid of the software, but in general, from a distance, I think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John doing all the right things. I say until they actually ship something, then we see what they actually ship. But assuming

⏹️ ▶️ John what they ship works, okay, thumbs up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have much to add to that. I obviously iOS 13 has been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way rougher than previous versions have been. And we got some rumblings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there might have been this Craig Federighi email, what back in July, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that basically like they were trying to find ways to like buy time and move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff around because quality wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t where it had to be. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know we’re just seeing some tiny little part of that. Like we’re not really seeing all the details about what was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco done or why or what their intentions are. But what we are seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like, you know, a reasonable result of that leadership

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decision, which was probably the right decision. So it’s weird. As a developer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t like it because now I have two beta trees to worry about, neither which are stable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. As a user, I still don’t think what, you know, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was beta 8 of iOS 13.0, which is the last beta that was called iOS 13.0, I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using that until this afternoon and day-to-day use it’s stable enough but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still having annoying bugs like mail still isn’t loading new messages

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my all inboxes view until I go back to the home screen and back into all inboxes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco These have been problems since the very first beta that still aren’t fixed. So I think 13.0

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still a disaster, but they seem to be doing what they have to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to let the iPhone ship on time. And I’m guessing, you know, if iPads

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait, then maybe the 13.1 can be the first version that’s on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads, and 13.0 is only an iPhone release just to get to the new hardware. Who knows, they could do stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And whatever that ends up being, it’s probably the right move,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it means getting a little bit more time for the quality to get worked out.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to guess that the build that is on the phones of their manufacturing right now is not a build that

⏹️ ▶️ John ever shipped to developers, both because it’s got all of those special libraries that they presumably strip out

⏹️ ▶️ John for the triple camera and whatever other weird new features, you know what I mean? But also because

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems clear that they would have to have dedicated a team and a build in a target

⏹️ ▶️ John just for the hardware. And it didn’t have to have anything in common with the betas they’re shipping to developers

⏹️ ▶️ John for 13.0. Never mind how far behind the betas they ship to developers are. It just seems like that’s a whole different branch.

⏹️ ▶️ John So my hope is that when people open up their new iPhone whatever pros,

⏹️ ▶️ John that they have a build that no developer has ever been subjected to, that it works OK,

⏹️ ▶️ John that mail isn’t a disaster like you described, And that basically the day they open it up, or

⏹️ ▶️ John a couple days later, they’ll be able to update to 13.1. Because the thing is, they need to get the software so it can be put

⏹️ ▶️ John onto the phone so it can be put in boxes. But they don’t need to send those boxes to customers

⏹️ ▶️ John as early as possible. They could try to make it so that you can order your phones

⏹️ ▶️ John on launch day, because that’s what they care about is get your money and everything. But they won’t arrive until

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever weeks later. And that’s their target date for 13.1. So you take it out of the box, and the first thing it does check

⏹️ ▶️ John for updates, it finds 13.1 and you get 13.1 and nobody ever has to use whatever shambling beast

⏹️ ▶️ John of 13.0 build they put on those things. That’s an optimistic scenario, but I feel like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John plausible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How many times does that happen that you’d get a brand new iPhone and you would have at the very least a point release waiting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you?

⏹️ ▶️ John All the time in the old days, if you didn’t buy on day one, if you bought like a normal person, sure, sure,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’d get it and it would be some version that’s like a point or two back. I remember that for a lot of my iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s less so now, maybe because there’s a lot of turnover, or maybe because they’re better about inventory. But day one,

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like you usually have to wait at least a couple of days for the point release.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I feel like that’s happened to me in the past for sure. I just also feel like it’s been a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But maybe that coincides with me just starting to buy iPhones on day one because I’m an impatient

⏹️ ▶️ Casey jerk. But I don’t know. It was not…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The idea of that does not sound delightful to me. I haven’t had the experience of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey opening a console on Christmas morning only to have it go through 13 hours of updates, but that’s just not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun. Like I have had the experience of getting an iPhone and having several hours of trying to get it activated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey under AT&T. That I do not miss at all. But I haven’t had like a software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey update cycle that I can remember. I’m sure it’s happened, but not that I can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember in years.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And that just does not sound

⏹️ ▶️ John fun. Hopefully that doesn’t happen that much anymore, but I feel like the the most significant experience

⏹️ ▶️ John that it may be in both of your futures is not so much when you get the new toy and you take it out of the box

⏹️ ▶️ John and it needs software update, but the servers down or something. But when you get a gift for your child

⏹️ ▶️ John and they want to use the thing and the servers now, I very clearly remember when we got

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was the original PlayStation four and PSN was down for like two days and my son

⏹️ ▶️ John did not. Hey, didn’t and still doesn’t understand how the internet works. All I knew is why is it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that I cannot use this PlayStation that

⏹️ ▶️ John we just PSN is that I was like, what is PSN? And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey why is it down? And why can’t you

⏹️ ▶️ John fix it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please, dad, please.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, dad, fix it. Why did you even get this thing? It obviously doesn’t work.

⏹️ ▶️ John PSN. Why PSN? I will remember that Christmas for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was sad too, to be clear, but when it’s your kid, it’s a whole other level.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host for running servers. Go to linode.com

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco my favorite host at any price point. And they happen to be by far the best value I’ve seen in the

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So their plans start at just $5 a month. They get to a server with one gig of RAM in the Linode cloud.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You pick your Linux distro, you pick your resource level, you pick your node location, what data centers you need to be in.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can have add-on services if you need them, like manage backups or load balancing. And then you’re all set.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you need any help, their support is there. They have great support. I use it here and there for various needs and it’s always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been wonderful. You can resize your instances at any time, of course, up and down, depending on your resource

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs. In fact, just this past week, I was expecting a surge in server traffic because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a change I made in my app. And so I doubled the size of all my web servers, instantly. Like it took,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I was done in like 15 minutes. I’m doing a rolling update across all of them. Super easy to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now, when the storm has calmed down, I know I’m gonna be able to scale them right back down.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the only difference I’m gonna pay is the hourly difference of the couple of days they were on up to a certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monthly cap if I happen to hit the monthly limit. Super easy to use, great host. I love Linode.

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#askatp: Hire a photographer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing to lose. Once again, linode.com slash ATP code ATP 2019 for a $20 credit. Thank

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff and sponsoring our show. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And let’s start with James Gates,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who writes, in this world with everyone taking pictures, when would you as in you specifically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hire a professional photographer? Full disclosure, I’m an amateur photographer thinking about going into the business full time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I still think there’s potential to make a living even in the seemingly saturated industry. So this is one of the,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, ask ATPs, which I think I lamented, uh, in a prior show that I answered via email

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only to find it show up in the show notes. But my answer to James was basically like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a wedding, of course. But the only thing I could really think of is times that I felt it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really important to have all four of us in front of the camera. You know, if I’m at a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey birthday party for one of my kids, I don’t mind not only taking a bunch of pictures, but also handing the camera off to like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my dad or, you know, or Aaron on occasion or, or whomever to,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take a few as well. I can’t think of anything else offhand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I would be, where I would really, really, really want pictures that are professionally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey done and I guess maybe, uh, pregnancy shots, like we had a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend of ours who is a professional photographer do them, you know, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we could have had my parents, it wouldn’t have come out as nice by any means, but it would have been okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, John, when would you as the fellow cheapskate pay someone to take pictures

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you and your family?

⏹️ ▶️ John We pay someone to take pictures of me and my family every

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey year. We

⏹️ ▶️ John take yearly family photos, yearly photos of all the kids or whatever. Obviously, as you

⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out, like the easy answer to this and it’s totally true is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco if you

⏹️ ▶️ John want everyone to be in the picture and you don’t want to do the tripod and run type thing, you have to hire somebody. Otherwise, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not in the picture or whoever the photographer is not in the picture. And so that applies to family photos, but also in

⏹️ ▶️ John general, like first of all, I’m not a professional photographer, presumably and this is absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ John true. Professional photographers can and will take better pictures than I will. So there’s a reason you pay somebody.

⏹️ ▶️ John Second thing is, presumably, and this is also actually true, they have better cameras than I do. So there’s that,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they have places where you can go to pose your family in front

⏹️ ▶️ John of some kind of nice backdrop or whatever. So anyway, we do that every single year. It’s just a place in the mall.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice. They give us all the digital files. We used to have this actual one specific photographer that

⏹️ ▶️ John we went to who we went to for, I think our children’s lives from infancy until they were like 10 or 11. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then she like went off to either be freelance or work somewhere else. And we were all sad. But but yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the obvious one. The less obvious one is every once in a while, mostly on my wife’s

⏹️ ▶️ John whim. We had someone come and take pictures of us like just, you know, outdoors

⏹️ ▶️ John in a park or like in some scenic thing or when the fall leaves, you know, whatever. And those

⏹️ ▶️ John people do more sort of artsy things and have us do stuff. And it’s something, first

⏹️ ▶️ John of all, if you did it yourself, you’re, you know, you’re the only if someone in your family is doing

⏹️ ▶️ John it, that’s just one person. And then one person’s taste and ideas, getting someone else in who has their own ideas and has

⏹️ ▶️ John way more experience than you ever will taking pictures of people and their families because that’s what they do for their living. They’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John have ideas about how you can pose and what might look good and what would be cute and you know what angles to take

⏹️ ▶️ John and where what part of the park to take you to or whatever. So we did that a couple of times too

⏹️ ▶️ John and you know depends on the person and how good they come came out. But that’s the answer to

⏹️ ▶️ John you know why might you think of doing it if you if you are or whoever the photographer is in your family

⏹️ ▶️ John the only person who ever takes your pictures is a sameness to it and sometimes it’s nice to get someone else’s eye in the mix

⏹️ ▶️ John and someone who is, you know, one would hope going to be a much better photographer than you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that that very last part is what’s key to me. We you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it used to be back like, you know, in the bad old days that to be a photographer, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed to have a nice camera and access to, you know, printing resources

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that and people would pay you because you had a nice camera and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t and so when some important event would happen you would take your nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera and you may or may not have artistic abilities or you know much training

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you had a nice camera you could be a professional photographer and what has changed obviously is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know in in recent decades and especially recent years everybody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a nice camera now so that is no longer a differentiating factor. Most people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like your wedding photos from 20 years ago,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could take photos that good almost on a smartphone today.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at least if the light is good enough you might not be able to even tell if you took it with a smartphone. And if the light isn’t good enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even like you know a very very like entry-level mirrorless camera would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to do that kind of quality today. So the technology is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now widely democratized, available to way more people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, almost everything is digital now, so there’s a lot more simplicity there than there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be. Printing is now available to almost everybody in great quality for very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little money from various online services and photo books like what John got.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the stuff, the gear, the technology,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is now available to everyone. You no longer need to hire a photographer to get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody who has a good camera, because chances are, if you care at all, you probably have a good camera

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already. But what you can’t replicate is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only having another set of hands and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an eye to look through a viewfinder and click a button when everyone is actually in the frame, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for you to take your own family photo because if you need to be in the family photo,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you can do the whole timer on a tripod thing, as John said, but that’s limited in what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can do and not easy and everything else. So there’s the physical

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, like you do need another person to operate a camera sometimes for practicality reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also a good photographer, which they aren’t all, but a good photographer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a better eye than you at taking pictures. So it isn’t just about the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech. It isn’t just about having nice cameras. A good photographer is able to capture pictures

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you wouldn’t have captured even if you had all the gear in the world. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what a good photographer can do. They have the eye for composition and lighting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and operating the technical details in ways you might not have thought of. That’s why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like really good photographers can take amazing pictures that you and I could never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco take with like a three-year-old iPhone. And meanwhile, we have like all these fancy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras and better phones, and we don’t take pictures that are that good. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, like a good photographer, not somebody who happens to own a good camera, but a good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco photographer has a better eye than what most of us have. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you hire a good photographer when that’s something that you value,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s for an important occasion like a wedding or family photos,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new baby, whatever else, that is when you hire a professional. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is still plenty of value for that even now that we’re all carrying pretty good cameras

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time in our pockets. And even now when you can get even better than that, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get a really awesome camera for like 600 bucks that is like a really nice, you know, everything. You can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get all that, but you still need photographers because they know which photos to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco take and how to take them. And that is something that no amount of technology will ever do for us.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the good camera thing is still an issue though, because we all have phone cameras, but in particular,

⏹️ ▶️ John as we’ve discussed when, you know, talking about the fake background blur or whatever, because nobody has standalone cameras

⏹️ ▶️ John unless you’re into photography, nobody has a camera that can actually blur the

⏹️ ▶️ John background and have a shallow depth of field on it. So if that’s the only reason you’re hiring somebody, obviously you want it

⏹️ ▶️ John to also be a good photographer, But the fact is, who has a

⏹️ ▶️ John camera anywhere in their life who’s not into photography that can take a good shallow depth of field

⏹️ ▶️ John portrait of their kid? Most people don’t. Most people have pictures of their kids and this pin sharp background

⏹️ ▶️ John with all their junky toys laying on the ground. And so even if you had someone who wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John a good photographer, their pictures will at least look different than yours. And you’re like, ooh. Well, maybe not, because maybe people

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell about the fake blur. But I can tell. And so for me, that would be a reason to hire someone with a better

⏹️ ▶️ John camera than me because they can, you know, take pictures in more challenging conditions

⏹️ ▶️ John that will look good. I mean, with my current camera, you’re right. The difference, especially if you’re in a well-lit studio or isn’t that

⏹️ ▶️ John big, but I think fewer people now have good cameras than they used to. It used to be that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John smartphones didn’t exist. And I feel like more families would have like a random 35

⏹️ ▶️ John millimeter Pentax as the family camera, you know? Even if they weren’t into photography, just because what were

⏹️ ▶️ John the options? was only, well this is way before your time, but it was only kind of in the 80s when, you know, these

⏹️ ▶️ John Instamatic Kodak cameras with these tiny little negatives started becoming more popular. But

⏹️ ▶️ John before that, you know, in the 60s and 70s, you’d have a family camera and that camera

⏹️ ▶️ John was way better than, you know, the Kodak disc camera. Like there

⏹️ ▶️ John was a dark time for a long period. And today that camera is probably about as good, you’re right, as an iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ John But depending on what kind of lens you had, you might have actually be able to get a shallow depth of field picture out of one of those family

⏹️ ▶️ John Pentax’s from 1975. And today, you know, that’s not true. Nobody has those cameras anymore except

⏹️ ▶️ John for photography nerds.

#askatp: Nextdoor, etc.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco Silva writes, what do you think about message apps or services for communities?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which do you use? Which do you like using? Which grind your gears? I’m assuming this is like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Discord and Slack. Is that what we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ John This is not what Marco is referring to is things like next door.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco messaging

⏹️ ▶️ John app services for communities. That’s code for next door and other similar services.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, next door is a complete waste of time. I’m on it. It’s stupid.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize I wasn’t aware of any others that are equivalent. So that’s all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got. I am not on any of these things and I feel like I’m missing nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of value.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is correct.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wish I could name the competitors, but there are multiple services that are like this.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not on them either. Here’s why I’m not. Here’s why it’s not that they all grind my gears. I think they’re all

⏹️ ▶️ John misguided in a particular So people don’t know what this is like next door is like a

⏹️ ▶️ John Place where you could exchange messages based on your geographic locality So you’re not interested in what somebody

⏹️ ▶️ John in two states over has to say you’re only interested in what’s happening in your neighborhood you know, and so people can post

⏹️ ▶️ John things like You know lost dog a rabid raccoon on the loose

⏹️ ▶️ John Construction here trees down on this road, whatever and it’s all like local to you and

⏹️ ▶️ John you know honestly, you can say whatever you want problem with these services is I I think it silos

⏹️ ▶️ John a particular set of concerns. Like next door is not like slack where it’s like we’re just a messaging thing. You can

⏹️ ▶️ John talk about whatever the heck you want. It’s like no, everyone should talk about stuff that has to do with our neighborhood.

⏹️ ▶️ John It narrows the scope to things that are happening in our neighborhood, which seems like it would make sense. Like, isn’t that good to have a

⏹️ ▶️ John purpose built channel for that? But the problem is if that’s the only thing that is sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of expected to be discussed there, it attracts the kind of of people

⏹️ ▶️ John who are unhealthily obsessed with things happening in the neighborhood. Now, this includes all the people

⏹️ ▶️ John who are racist. And every time someone who walks by their house, whose skin tone is two shades darker than theirs,

⏹️ ▶️ John flips out about it. So there is that whole venue, but also the people who think the police are watching them

⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, like they’re they’re constantly worried that someone’s trying to rob their house

⏹️ ▶️ John or just, you know, general gossip or just like because the only thing that you can discuss there

⏹️ ▶️ John is stuff going on in communities, again, not technically, you probably type anything you want, but socially like that’s what the thing is supposed to be used

⏹️ ▶️ John for. It ends up, you know, the people who are the most active are the

⏹️ ▶️ John people who are the most likely to be overly concerned,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say, with things that are happening in the neighborhood. So it just becomes a cesspool of all the worst instincts around us

⏹️ ▶️ John as opposed to and I’m gonna almost say something nice about Facebook here as opposed to something like Facebook, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is like people can write about whatever they want. They can talk about the TV show they just saw. They can talk about the vacation

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just on. They can argue with each other about politics, but there’s there’s no specific topic

⏹️ ▶️ John that is expected to be discussed on Facebook or on slack or on Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ John for that matter, like these sort of more open messaging platforms. Those don’t necessarily devolve

⏹️ ▶️ John into only the people who are paranoid about, you know, the raccoons coming and stealing their medicine, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the only thing you can talk about in next door. If you so if you participate in next door, either you become one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John people or you realize you are surrounded by those people. Neither of them is a good scenario.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s fine to be engaged with your community, but engaging with your community is a full bandwidth

⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing. It is not a narrow bandwidth. Let’s talk about the dark skinned people who are walking by my house and

⏹️ ▶️ John how they’re trying to steal my packages. Like it’s not healthy for anybody. I wish those services would just go

⏹️ ▶️ John away, I think they’re doing more harm than good.

#askatp: Terminal themes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Finally, Mike Taffet writes, what are your preferred themes or color

⏹️ ▶️ Casey schemes for Terminal? And I got to look this up because I don’t remember. Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course it is, because it’s the most professional. That is my preferred scheme.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I get a new Mac, if I don’t, you know, like migrate, which I don’t think I ever have actually migrated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from an old Mac, I will open Terminal for the first time. It’ll be blindingly white. I will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to preferences, on pro and then I won’t look at it again for years,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John which is exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John what you describe pro I don’t know what that looks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like. It’s black background white text. I don’t know. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the defaults that come with, you know, terminal.

⏹️ ▶️ John What color is the cursor?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gray, I the fact is, I don’t even pay enough attention to know. So I can tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as per usual, I am not hypercritical.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and there’s transparency in the background to Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it

⏹️ ▶️ John is open to pro window. It’s like mild. It’s mostly black, but it’s mildly transparent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yikes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So what is the correct answer, gentlemen?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, uh, I in a, in a shocking twist, this we, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you and I, Casey should have the reversed options here. Mine is basic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I am really going

⏹️ ▶️ John to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be

⏹️ ▶️ John Dave

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matthews. My, mine is just the, the, which I think is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the default it is the white background with black text and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no transparency or anything. I like regular white terminal windows.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know this is very unusual for nerds. Usually nerds want everything black, you know, black everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like white. I used to use black like back in the day like when I worked on like, you know, Linux

⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers and stuff. But now I just use white everywhere and it’s fine. Most of my windows are light color backgrounds.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You I’m in like, I don’t use dark mode in the OS. I’m in, you know, mail

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and messages and Safari all the time, Xcode, all these other apps. Textmate, I also use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco light background, dark text. So, I’m just, I don’t get the like, blindingly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco white thing that you said. I don’t see it that way. And it’s fine. And I will say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the font side, I was a Monaco holdout for a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time. I would even do the little tricks, whatever was required to make it so that even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when there was anti-aliasing in the rest of the system that my terminal windows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Xcode and and textmate would never use anti-aliasing. It would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Monaco like pixel font. What eventually killed that for me was Retina. When

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything started going Retina, there was no good way to have Monaco on a Retina screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just, you know, having like the fixed pixel bitmap font just never looked good on Retina. Even if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you doubled it, it just it still didn’t look good. So I am now reluctantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Menlo regular 11 point person in my terminal and Xcode and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before we move on to John, so forgive me if you said this, and I just totally missed it. But is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Xcode white background as well? Because curiously, my Xcode is, you know, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the default background is, I do use Fiera code, I think is the name of the font, which I quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like. That’s like a programming specific font, Fira Code, F-I-R-A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Code. But my Xcode windows are white, and I’m totally fine with that. But something about terminal windows,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to have black. I think because of all the time I spent on DOS, where it was a black screen with white text

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on and so forth, well, sometimes green, but anyway, and sometimes orange if memory serves.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But having a dark background for something that vaguely resembles DOS to my lizard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brain is I think a requirement, which is funny because I agree with you. It seems like you and I would be the reverse here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, you know, we’re both conundrums.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco John, what is the…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, my Xcode is also white. The only thing is I don’t use Menlo and Xcode.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When Xcode introduced San Francisco Mono, I just went with that. And so I just checked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m I’m using SFMono regular 12 in Xcode. So I use Menlo regular 11 in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Terminal and SFMono 12 in Xcode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what is the actual correct

⏹️ ▶️ John answer? So I customize my color

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey schemes. I enjoy the

⏹️ ▶️ John Terminal. It’s customized. My color scheme is creatively named John. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve ported that from all. I have a bunch of schemes, actually. John is my default

⏹️ ▶️ John one. I’ve ported that probably from developer preview 2, you to whatever the first time you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to make settings. It is white background. I think I talked about this at length on several

⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts, but most recently on the episode talk show I was on, uh, my whole thing with the Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ John a white background, black text because that’s what printed the printed word looks like. And that’s what I always wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ John All my windows, including my terminal windows, uh, Monaco nine, because I am not retina,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still rocking the non ND alias Monaco nine or, or trying to,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m actually, Yeah, I’m still it’s still working. I just sent a screenshot of it Obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John when I go retina, I just like Marco I will have to bail because there

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t you know The time is over but hey, I’m staring at on retina screen. It still works for me

⏹️ ▶️ John The only twist I have and it’s all opaque right the only twist I have in this in terms of the color scheme

⏹️ ▶️ John is 100% red cursor

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just 255 0 0 why

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John interesting red block cursor I put a screenshot of my terminal in the, yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey got his screenshot, yeah. I don’t know why I did that. I think when I was coming up with my color scheme,

⏹️ ▶️ John I just couldn’t decide and I made it 100% red. And like, why is it a block instead of the, like the I-beam?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like my equivalent of Casey’s DOS thing. I think it’s because the block cursors in the

⏹️ ▶️ John VT220s in like the, in college were block cursors. And so I

⏹️ ▶️ John associate terminal with Unix. And so I’m imitating the VT cursor. I would never make

⏹️ ▶️ John it a block cursor in like a BB edit or something. But in Terminal, I use the block cursor, and I make it bright red. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it looks nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I do use a block cursor because I believe it’s the default. Until this moment, I never even thought you could change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I don’t think I will change it. But I got to say, I actually kind of understand the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco red. Because it does make it highly visible, so you can always spot where it is very easily on screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that actually isn’t that crazy of an idea.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, why is it 100% red? Probably because I just put the R slider all the way to the right

⏹️ ▶️ John at one point, and that’s just what I stick with. And the nice thing is if I ever need to recreate it on a new system, it’s easy to get that

⏹️ ▶️ John color again. It’s not some weird shade of taupe or

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco something.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, that’s what I do. I am kind of in a bind when I go full retina of what font I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ John pick. Menlo is a contender. There’s a bunch of SF Mono and Consolata,

⏹️ ▶️ John Consolas. There’s a million monospace fonts that I’ll have to sort of have a bake off and see what I pick. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on

⏹️ ▶️ John the retina computers, a monospace bake off? Yeah, I don’t even know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like,

⏹️ ▶️ John is memory the default in

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Terminal? Yeah, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John so. Like, on my wife’s computer that’s red, and like on my laptop at work, like I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t even care.

⏹️ ▶️ John The other important thing is I do tweak the Terminal in lots of other ways, like I turn off those stupid marks, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John know the marking thing? No. I don’t know if you know about that. Let me look at Casey’s screenshot

⏹️ ▶️ John to see if you have it turned on. You probably do, like, they have a thing that’s on by default, believe it or not, in Terminal, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have any custom settings, that every time you type a command, it puts a mark in the scroll back you can jump back

⏹️ ▶️ John by command at a time, which is a cool feature, but it puts these little turds in the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey window. That’s what all those things are. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what you’re thinking of. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t think I have that on. Those

⏹️ ▶️ John little brackets? Yeah, you gotta turn those off. That’s an option. And a bunch of other stuff, I have infinite scroll back. I

⏹️ ▶️ John have the preferences change a lot, but in terms of the appearance, those little turds are another thing that I was sure

⏹️ ▶️ John to turn off the second they arrived. They came a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey couple years ago. Where is that setting?

⏹️ ▶️ John I hate the settings in Terminal. If anyone who works on Terminal, I know it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like a one person, half of one person works on terminal. But if you’re listening to this program, please

⏹️ ▶️ John rethink the model of how the properties

⏹️ ▶️ John of terminal windows are determined when a window was created and how

⏹️ ▶️ John the properties of a window are modified once the window exists, as contrasted

⏹️ ▶️ John with how the settings that could be used to spawn future windows are modified. It is such a muddled

⏹️ ▶️ John mess in terminal. Yeah, it is. If I just see a single window and I want to change just the attributes of that window, but

⏹️ ▶️ John not the attributes of the preset that we used to create that window, it drives me mad. Plus there’s a bunch of other options that are in the menu. Someone

⏹️ ▶️ John just needs to rethink that UI, but that’s never going to happen because terminal is low priority. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad all these features exist. Do we want Apple to rethink terminal, really?

⏹️ ▶️ John Just the UI of like, decide if it’s going to be like, like have a set of presets

⏹️ ▶️ John and have them totally divorced from the settings of individual window, but have the UI be the same for both, but make it clear

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re editing the attributes of one window versus when you’re editing a preset. Like, I feel like we have

⏹️ ▶️ John the technology to do this, but anyway. The marking thing, I have no idea where it is. I would have to dig it out.

⏹️ ▶️ John It took me a while to figure out what it was when it first came out, and then once I turned it off, I forgot where the heck it was. But it’s in

⏹️ ▶️ John either the menus or the settings somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, DoorDash, and TechMeme Ride Home.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. It’s accidental And you can find

⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Anti-Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental Accidental They

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental Accidental Tech

⏹️ ▶️ John Podcasts So long

casey@Caseys-iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John You can make your cursor an underline. Ugh.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Why would you do

⏹️ ▶️ John that? Monstrous. And you can make it blink of course. None of your cursors are blinking,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? No. No. Alright, just making sure. You can’t see it in a screenshot so you never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I have to have, like, for most of the time I am working at my computer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco including right now, even when I’m not actually coding, the vast majority of the time there’s a terminal window,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least one terminal window, visible on my screen. So it can’t look too crazy. And if it was like a blinking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cursor like all the time on my screen like off in the corner off to the side. I don’t know. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John if it blinks in the background. I might just blink in the foreground. I’ve never turned it on so I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John to try it. Casey’s Mac is predictably called Casey’s Mac and he has that name without the apostrophe but

⏹️ ▶️ John with a hyphen shoved into his prompt.

⏹️ ▶️ John Be civilized and give a short name for your computer to appear in the prompt or omit it entirely because

⏹️ ▶️ John honestly do you need to know that I mean maybe you do need to know what machine you’re on, but I feel like you could

⏹️ ▶️ John just call it iMac or give it a some other name that is an identifier. But Casey’s iMac without the apostrophe

⏹️ ▶️ John and with the hyphen is not good. And with capital letters, it’s just it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey throwing everything off

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a monster, like an animal. Even that is really bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey His

⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive is called Macintosh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey HD. Uh, I don’t know what that is. That’s true. That’s probably true. Let me know the volume. Yep,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s correct.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mine is

⏹️ ▶️ John also called Macintosh HD. I think we went over this, but we had like an Ask ADB question about what we

⏹️ ▶️ John name our hard drives. You two are not long-time Mac users. know that you have to rename your hard drive.