346: Go Back and Pop Myself
03 Oct 2019Microsoft’s hardware concepts, Apple’s software issues, microLED laptops, and TiVo’s proposed innovation.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Casey's broken iMac
- Casey's broken Apple Watch
- Apple software quality
- iPhone X/XS → 11 Pro Transfer
- XDR Display Tech in iPads and MacBook Pros?
- Mac Pros + Avid + Chrome = 💀
- TiVo shows commercials before DVR recordings
- New Microsoft hardware
- Post-show: Marco's UISearchController woes
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Chapters
- Live from Microsoft
- High Ground, etc.
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- iPhone transfers
- Sponsor: Burrow
- MicroLED in iPads, MBPs?
- Chrome /var bug
- TiVo adding ads?
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- Microsoft Duo & Neo
- Ending theme
- “File a bug”
Live from Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hi everybody! We are live! Live from the show floor here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the Microsoft event, where we are covering all of the Windows 10 X10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live Surface events, and all the new Surface X hardware, with all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dual touch screens, and the folding dual X10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens. It’s going to be a whole big event. So we obviously have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire show devoted exclusively to Microsoft’s new innovations here, and we cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait to see what you do with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God, please no. I know I should probably care,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t think I care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the thing, I really respect Microsoft for trying. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have been pushing the hardware forward over the last five years or so with their Surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. And for the most part, you don’t really see anybody using those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big desktops and everything, but what you do see are a lot of people out there using the Surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablets and laptops. Those actually seem to have somewhat significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market success, not by anywhere near what Apple might get with some of their stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world of PC hardware, Microsoft Surface stuff looks like it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. It isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty decent. people seem to pretty much like them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I do have to give them credit, they do seem to make successful hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re grading on a curve of like, not again, not like Apple level success, but they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make successful hardware in the sense that it sells reasonably well for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is. People do seem to like it. It does seem to do what is advertised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part and not have too many horrible problems. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I give them ultimate respect for that. Like when they first started making weird Surface hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like back when Surface meant the giant table, and even the first one or two Surface tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, they were really weird and not very good and nobody bought them really. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve been pushing, they’ve been advancing and now they make pretty okay PC hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In some ways it’s pretty good even. So I gotta give them credit. The only problem is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t care about PC hardware, and we don’t care about Windows, and we don’t care about Surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Android and all the stuff that’s running that. We don’t care about any of that on this show. None of us are in those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worlds, really. Not anymore! The world of tech is a really big place,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for us to specialize. And we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cover Android stuff because we don’t use Android. We don’t cover Windows stuff, because we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Windows. So, you know, I don’t see a lot of anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us to cover here. The one thing I do like about it is how much they stick their finger in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s eye about laptops. I do really enjoy that, because Apple could use a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finger in the eye sometimes. Apple does not make good products when they think they’re on top and they start coasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is nice to see Microsoft poke fun at things like, all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digs they made about the keyboard and everything. Like, yeah, they do okay. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m proud of them for what they do, but we don’t live in that world at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny to me that you apparently either haven’t looked at the show notes or don’t care because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey item number one, two, three, four,
⏹️ ▶️ John five. I’m going with don’t care. Both of you still do not understand the show format.
⏹️ ▶️ John If we’re gonna talk about a thing, we’ll talk about it during the show. How is that so hard?
⏹️ ▶️ John learned anything, it’s that neither one of you can say, I don’t want to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John this and then proceed to not talk about this. If you ever begin any sentence with, we’re not going to talk about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone but apparently you two knows that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey going to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have said anything. I want you to say, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to talk about pumpkins and then just not say anything about pumpkins. Just try that as an exercise every day when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s possible. In my defense, I did read the show notes document, but I stopped at about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three topics into the topics because we never get through more than that in an episode. That is true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is true. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John very small. Thank you.
High Ground, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Apparently we should start with some follow up. I don’t know if this is even really follow up, but I’m going to call it follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to give everyone a few updates and also maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complain a little bit because that’s what I’ve been doing a lot lately. First of all, my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half died and now it’s back to life. It did not go back to the Apple store. Let me explain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It did not go back to the Apple store yet, but I was noticing very similar problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what I was having earlier, like where it wouldn’t survive overnight without just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard locking and things just seemed wonky. And I thought to myself, self, before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go to the Apple store and tell them to fix this again, why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t you eliminate the one thing you couldn’t really eliminate last time, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the software installation. So if you recall, last time before it went to the Apple store,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t get the SSD to work in real, I couldn’t even repair it, much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less format it, etc. So that’s why I threw my hands up and just said, Apple, please deal with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this time, things were just not seeming right, but weren’t as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey catastrophic as they were before. Thankfully, one of the first things I did when I had restored from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Time Machine Backup was I took all the detritus and cruft and garbage that was strewn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across my computer’s desktop and moved it off to the Synology. So God forbid something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened, I would be prepared and that mostly worked. And so then I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an internet recovery which put High Sierra on the iMac, which was a little unexpected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got very confused by why APFS wasn’t an option during the format and it was either Steven or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John or maybe Marco, somebody. It was always John. That’s right. I forgot. It’s always John. John pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that it was because the internet recovery was putting on High Sierra. And anyways, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put on High Sierra, then migrated to Mojave, and this was a couple of days ago. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far, it seems like everything is better, question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mark. So I’m really not confident in this iMac right now. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of similarly to it as I did my BMW before I got rid of it. But it seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working. Maybe there was some sort of software agita in addition to to the clear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, clear hardware issues. I also, while I’m thinking of it, got some feedback from someone who was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a former genius who kind of threw some theories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at me as to why I wasn’t charged for the repair. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are many, many different options, but it sounds like it is possible that there were no favors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called in. And like I said, I didn’t call in any favors, but nobody else, it seems, may have called in favors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just because Apple wasn’t exactly sure what did or did not fix the problem, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they might have just said, eh, the heck with it. We’ll just let this guy walk away for free. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to, now that the iMac update is done, I wanted to also update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my watch. My battery life has gotten considerably better as of, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are we on, what day is today? What are we on? 13.1.2 on the phone and 6.01 on the watch. Is that right? I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Something like that. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, the latest updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as of Wednesday, October 2nd have gotten me to the point that I can make it all day without charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again. My watch was brought off the charger 14 hours ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did a half an hour of exercise and I’m currently sitting at 21%, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great, but is livable. So I am mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy with that. I did, with both my watch and Erin’s watch for different reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not restore them. I’m sorry. I set them up as new. That did fix Erin’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems with not having photos on her watch. It’s one of the 13 different things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I threw against the wall to fix my battery problems, although I think ultimately it was the new versions of the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so my computing world is mostly better now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s still so much broken with iOS 13 though, and it’s driving me insane. Aaron is so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so annoyed because she’s a regular person. And to her, she just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent a thousand dollars on this phone that compelled her to go to iOS 13 and now nothing works the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should. And like mail particularly is such a dumpster fire in iOS 13.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just, I don’t, I don’t understand how a company as big as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple ships something that broken. I just don’t. And, and I, I, maybe I’m too far removed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year in, I’m too far removed from how big business works and how QA works in a big business, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t get how like let’s just pick on mail for a second. How is mail that friggin broken right now? How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen? And that wasn’t new. Mail has been broken the entire beta. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a brand new thing. It has been incredibly broken all summer and it seemed to only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly get better towards the very very end. I think ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can keep making excuses all we want. We can keep saying, well you You know, they didn’t, you know, last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year was the stability year and this year was the features year. And they had two years with the features then to catch up on and we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep making excuses. We can say, oh, they couldn’t hold up the iPhone shipping because that would, you know, be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big problem for the company. So they had to ship it when they did and they had to give it to the carriers a month early. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco million excuses. But the fact is, all of these things either happen every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year and so they’ve been doing it for a while. They should expect things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier carrier submission. They should expect things like when the iPhone has to ship. Like none of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is new. All of that is predictable under their control. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it comes to things like, oh, well, last year was super stable and lower our standards or raise our standards or whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not good enough. Like that’s not a good enough excuse for a company that’s running like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year old operating systems or more on the Mac side and having all these stability problems. We haven’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten to Catalina yet, which is a disaster as well. Like, thank God it isn’t out yet, like it’s about to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we have a problem there too. All the iCloud stuff that goes along with it, like watchOS is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself a mess, you know, iOS is a mess, the now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco renamed iPadOS is a bit less of a mess, but still in some ways messy. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I think it’s just bad management in the software quality side. Like somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I’m not gonna like blame a certain executive because I don’t know, you know, I don’t know how things went, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not, this beta cycle proves that something went seriously wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here in the management and direction and shipping and releasing of these software platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this schedule. They took on too much or they shipped too soon or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the case is, things went really badly and that lies right at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feet of management because they should have been able to see all of this coming months ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they chose to do what they did anyway. So rather than cut certain features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they decided to plow ahead. Rather than delay certain things, whatever, they plowed ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And certain things are still delayed. And it’s still, what’s left is still a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s hard to look at this and come up with any other conclusion other than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the software quality is being poorly managed by this company. And for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company the size and prestige of Apple, that’s not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, agreed. And, you know, I want to talk to John about this a little bit, because I think he will have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a more even opinion about all this. But looking at myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and particularly Erin, so I’m picking on Erin in a sense because she’s a regular person who doesn’t understand what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to write software. I can both be more annoyed and also more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forgiving, because I write software and I know how difficult it is. But if you look at it from our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash her perspective, Each of us just bought a brand new iPhone to the tune of like $1,200 or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, which was a choice. I’m aware it was a choice. I’m just saying we each bought a brand new iPhone. We each bought a brand new Apple Watch. So we’re each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like almost $2,000 a piece in a new hardware. And my Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not literally a brick, but it felt almost as though it was a brick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a week. What has it been, a week and change, something like that? I couldn’t get through a day without charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey halfway through the day. How is that possible that this is what they release? What an absolute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buzzkill it is to get this new toy that you’ve saved your money for, and then it’s just a piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of garbage that can’t get through the day. You can’t even get through 12 hours, or 6 hours sometimes. It’s just so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron has said to me a few times over the last week, I think mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a rise out of me, but somewhat seriously, why am I continuing to buy Apple stuff if it’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broken? Why? It never used to be this way. Why would I continue to do this? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know that answer I’ve had for?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yep, that’s it. That’s what I got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have a good answer. I mean, at one point, if you want to get an Android phone next, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that’s really going to be a lot better, Aaron, but I’m not the boss of you. If that’s what you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want, go for it. And it’s just very frustrating. So, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s put on a happy face, hopefully, or at least maybe you could explain to me How does a company this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big have this many problems? And maybe corollary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to that, do you think, John, that maybe this is stemming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from this one big splash every year release cycle?
⏹️ ▶️ John Before we get to that, I think it’s worth considering that there are things that you can change in your behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John that will help with this issue, setting aside what we can and can’t do to change how Apple works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Buying an Android phone, yes, is one choice. Another choice is to not buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone on day one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s true. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know what’s worse. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John waited six months, probably the stability of the software will be a lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s safe to say that. Now, who wants to wait six months? No one wants to wait six months. People can’t even wait a week
⏹️ ▶️ John or a month. But that is a way you might be able to change
⏹️ ▶️ John how you purchase things, or Erin can change how she purchases things, to avoid issues like this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I’m aware, There hasn’t been an iOS release where six months
⏹️ ▶️ John in, it was still a buggy piece of crap. There have been releases where within the first
⏹️ ▶️ John week or two, there’s lots of things that are buggy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This may be the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s ever been. It’s hard to know, because your memory fades, especially if 13.2
⏹️ ▶️ John fixes it all. We’re all going to forget about this
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Maybe we’ll remember it because it’s lucky number 13. But yeah, that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John as someone who is relatively technically savvy, you and Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ John will have the choice to understand that that’s a thing. Now, that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John most people don’t know that’s a thing or should have to know, like that’s not on anyone’s radar. If you’re not listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to technology podcasts, you have no idea that this is even a thing, that you shouldn’t buy the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone on day one because the point zero software is bad and it gets better and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most people don’t even know the new iPhones are out until they wander into an Apple store a month and a half later, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, you know, or see an ad on TV or think,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oh, is that, did
⏹️ ▶️ John that just come out? Or has that been out for a month or a year? Anyway, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my suggestion to consider alongside getting an Android phone. And the question
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you know, why do we keep buying Apple stuff? It’s usually, as Marco just talked about in a part that may
⏹️ ▶️ John or may not be before this in the released version of the podcast, the alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ John are usually worse, or maybe not worse, are
⏹️ ▶️ John less to our liking, right? So, you know, you got complaints about the Mac, why not get a Windows computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well, how do you feel about Windows?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than I do about the Mac? And then, you know, so,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like we’re captive, but we are trying to, as consumers, we’re trying to make the best choice available
⏹️ ▶️ John to us. Is the best choice good enough? Perhaps not. Like, I don’t think you can say, is the best choice perfect? best
⏹️ ▶️ John choice might not even be good enough to Marco’s point. Like there is a bar and
⏹️ ▶️ John a reasonable bar of consumer expectations. And sometimes Apple doesn’t reach it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and as for how stuff like the shifts is clear that, you know, 13 had a bunch of stuff pulled from
⏹️ ▶️ John it at the last minute, pulling stuff at the last minute while it may be the right move is also risky because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you pull stuff at the last minute, then what you’re releasing is not the thing that you had been working on and testing for the past
⏹️ ▶️ John X months. Maybe a better move would have been to delay the
⏹️ ▶️ John phones, but I’m sure there are much bigger issues involving who knows what, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of, Apple has its priorities, whatever its priorities may be, whether it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John of tariffs or manufacturing costs or just
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows what it is, but they made their decision, right? And they have to deal with the consequences. And it seems like the consequences
⏹️ ▶️ John of their decision or that we end up with perhaps the buggiest release of
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS ever. Now, it does depend on what you’re doing with iOS. If you don’t, for example, use the Mail
⏹️ ▶️ John app, iOS 13 probably is less of a tire fire for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you just happen to use the parts of it that work okay, which I think is most of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s mostly all right. Maybe people don’t mind too much, especially with like a new update
⏹️ ▶️ John coming out every three days. Maybe this window of instability will pass us by.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not sure. Obviously, we’re all cranky about it because we know
⏹️ ▶️ John the intimate details of this stuff. But I’m wondering if people who aren’t listening to
⏹️ ▶️ John this podcast and who aren’t into technology, who just happen to get a new phone, feel the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. Obviously, Erin does, but she, I feel like, is definitely technology adjacent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, yeah, no, I mean, it’s, it’s a bummer. I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s disappointed about it too. Uh, as to how Apple ships something like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John in some, some respects, Apple surely knows where many of the bugs are. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly because Apple is always experiencing a version of the operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John that is far ahead of what’s released and there’s this, you you know, whatever release pipeline that puts out
⏹️ ▶️ John actual releases. By the time we see the release, Apple has moved on to the one where the thing that we’re worrying about
⏹️ ▶️ John is fixed and so on and so forth. So it’s difficult for them to get an idea of what the consumer experience would be like. But for
⏹️ ▶️ John apps like mail or anything that’s data driven despite their public betas,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s unfortunately reasonable to assume, uh, that
⏹️ ▶️ John are reason not to assume reasonable to imagine that there
⏹️ ▶️ John are things that there are things that customers may see that Apple has never seen. That’s just a fact
⏹️ ▶️ John of software life, unfortunately, especially when it’s an application that deals with data, because all of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mail and all of Apple’s test data and all of their public beta things, like it’s… you just don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the kind of over-the-shoulder metrics to know what everyone’s experience is like, and the channels for
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback are limited, and it’s like… how could they have shipped this? My mail
⏹️ ▶️ John is all blank! And maybe there’s something, you know, like it’s still a bug. Like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying it’s not their fault, but like this is again, the thing regular consumers shouldn’t need to know. But
⏹️ ▶️ John software developers, especially people who do software that has a server or data component know
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s impossible to know exactly how your software is going to behave when it’s in the hands of your consumers. And very often it’s difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to know how it is behaving. That’s why people put all those, you know, all that telemetry into their applications and have all
⏹️ ▶️ John this spyware installed because they want to know how is it going for the people who are using my
⏹️ ▶️ John application. And yes, they can sell that data and all the evil nefarious side of it as well. But the white
⏹️ ▶️ John hat side of it is, if you really wanna know how things are going for your consumers, you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John know like everything about how they’re using the app. Did they go to a screen and leave immediately? Did they go to the screen and their stuff didn’t display?
⏹️ ▶️ John How long are things taking for actual consumers? And my impression is that Apple does not
⏹️ ▶️ John put that much telemetry in their apps for obvious privacy reasons. But I’m willing to believe that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John out there thinking, Mail’s probably working okay for most people, right? It’s working for us, right? Yeah, I haven’t heard anything about it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the public beta, maybe one or two complaints, but I think we fixed those. Meanwhile, mail is completely unusable for
⏹️ ▶️ John some specific individual person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I take your point on that, and I think that’s fair, but the number one thing that’s driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me insane about mail is I’ll go to archive or trash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a message when I’m looking at a message on my phone. So I’m looking at a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey message, I go to trash it or archive it, and at that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point in every other version of mail ever, it would pop to the prior view controller, which is the list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of messages. A lot of times what will happen is the message in question will disappear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screen will almost entirely become blank, but I’m still looking at the message detail view controller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just sitting there, and I have to go back and pop myself, which is a stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing to whine about. I totally hear myself saying this and I’m thinking to myself, wow, you’re a big baby.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when you do this many, many times in a row, it’s infuriating. And to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like, how did you not catch this? It’s happening to me. It’s happening to Aaron. I’m sure it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening to other people. How do you not catch this? How is this not a thing? And the battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the watch, how do you not catch that? Like, how is this not obvious?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know there’s probably a million and six reasons how it could of slipped through the cracks. But how do you not catch
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the first one I think we have a good answer for, what you were looking for before, some sort of explanation for big corporations.
⏹️ ▶️ John That strikes me as the kind of bug that they absolutely knew about, but that they ship it,
⏹️ ▶️ John knowingly ship it anyway for the reason that you should know, Casey. Because bugs get triaged and prioritized.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that a data loss
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Is it a crash bug? No. Is it a security bug? No. Well, guess what? We’re shipping it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, that’s what it comes down to. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy, it’s a bug, you know, as we all know, everybody who works in a big corporation shipping
⏹️ ▶️ John software ships software with known bugs all the time. I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, it’s just a fact of life. Now, you know, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t get credit for the bugs you don’t ship, right? Oh, well, we didn’t ship any bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that erased all your mail, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a bad bug, and if it’s consistent, it seems like that’s definitely a thing that they know about. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel good about shipping software with bugs, I’m sure, but that’s the decision they made. You can make the decision
⏹️ ▶️ John of when do we ship, when do we not ship, and when you roll it all up or whatever they said, with
⏹️ ▶️ John all the, put things on one side of the scale with selling iPhones and manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John in tariffs on the other side of non-data loss, non-crasher bugs. Like, I don’t think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a single application that Apple ships that doesn’t have a huge list of
⏹️ ▶️ John known bugs, many of which will never be fixed, because they’re not crasher data loss. You know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, so that’s crappy. And the watch thing, here’s what the watch thing got me scratching my head about the watch thing. I have no idea what
⏹️ ▶️ John was causing it, but the watch thing is baffling because it is such a
⏹️ ▶️ John top-line performance characteristic where unless watchOS inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is so incredibly far ahead, I wonder how Apple could have the
⏹️ ▶️ John confidence to know that this product will eventually last
⏹️ ▶️ John all day like we said it would. Unless they had seen it last all day internally, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using some version of watchOS that’s way ahead of what they ship, shipping it seems like a huge risk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like shipping it and saying like, well, it doesn’t last all day now, but we’ll fix
⏹️ ▶️ John that in software in a couple of weeks. That’s a hell of a risk. And I’m thinking they wouldn’t take that risk.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they know what was killing the battery, but just didn’t have time to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, like, like the fix for that thing was too risky to shove in. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the only thing that occurs to me, because I’ve heard that story from now multiple people where the watch had terrible battery
⏹️ ▶️ John and some software updates went. It also could just be like day one or week one, like random,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the old days when you get a new Mac out of the box and you do spotlight indexing and it would make your thing slow to a crawl for the first
⏹️ ▶️ John day or two that you used
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the thing that Apple knew about and that sucked, but Apple could have some confidence to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’ll settle down in a week and you’ll be okay. So I have to think that the watch situation is
⏹️ ▶️ John like that too, that they shipped a thing that they knew either was bad because of bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, bad software or unoptimized things somewhere, or was like there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John initially setting up your watch with a new phone kind of grinding that’s going to kill your battery on the first day or two, but it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get better. But either way, I’m glad to hear that the battery got better, but that is the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that I would love to know the inside story on. Cause I, I would I would think that Apple would never
⏹️ ▶️ John ship a product With the hope that an upcoming software update
⏹️ ▶️ John will fix the battery life because battery life is a thing that people do notice It’s not something like oh my view
⏹️ ▶️ John controller didn’t pop off and I have to do some manual thing It is is sort of an existential
⏹️ ▶️ John threat to the product that you say you’re selling. So I have to believe that they
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t just hope that the battery life get better. They knew and it was just a question of time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I hear you and I almost entirely agree, but at the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, I can’t get past what a terrible purchase experience it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t mean purchase experience like going to the store. I mean, you know, I’ve got my new treat and I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use it and I can’t use it for more than four hours at a time because then it dies. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, like we would rake them over the coals probably worse if they said, know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we need another week on this watch. Especially if they said we need another week on this watch that you’ve already pre-ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we told you would arrive on Friday or
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Matz We wouldn’t. I don’t think we would. I think we’d say, good, fine, ship it to me when it’s stable. I think that’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what we’ve always said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly I’d like to think that, but I don’t know if that’s what I would be saying. I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just, it just, I keep coming back to it was just such a crummy several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days. And again, like, ultimately, it’s a computer on my wrist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can make a phone call to China with if I so desired. Like I really probably just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to, what is that? Who was the troubled comedian that was, you know, we’re in a tube in Spain,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John browsing the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Uh, what was it like? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco everything’s amazing. We have a chair in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You know what I’m saying? So like everything’s happy or everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having that moment right now. And I, and I am a little bit sorry for that, but the reason that I love,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe loved Apple so darn much is that these things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t happen. These are the sorts of things that would happen to Microsoft stuff years ago. I’m not saying now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m saying years ago, this is the sort of thing that happened on Microsoft stuff. It’s the sort of thing that happened on all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of other technology in my life, but Apple would never do that. It would always have it right. And it would always be right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or mostly right at least in the first, right out of the box, right out of the gate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just, I don’t know, cranky old man yells at cloud, right? But I just, I miss those
⏹️ ▶️ John Those days never existed. Those are just rose colored glasses. I mean, I think like 10, five leopard
⏹️ ▶️ John was so much worse than, than iOS 13. Now it mattered less to be fair. It mattered less because who the heck
⏹️ ▶️ John was running max at all back then compared to the number of people that own iPhones. Like I understand that it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John different scale, but Apple is always shit buggy software. This is probably the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ John unless one of you remembers an iOS that’s worse and that’s probably the worst initial iOS release, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it may also be the fastest fix. Certainly the number of updates and how close
⏹️ ▶️ John they are together has been faster than any previous point releases
⏹️ ▶️ John after an initial release of iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A, first of all, it’s not fixed yet. B, it’s basically on fire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they’re having significant issues that are even to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of impacting, Like almost every review of the new iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has mentioned the buggy software. Many reviews of the new Apple Watch have mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the poor battery life. Like, it’s, you know, Apple is clearly, you know, prioritizing hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over all else, and it’s hard to look at the company and think they should do anything else. Honestly, they are, you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a hardware-driven company, and certainly a hardware-funded company. So it makes sense why they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prioritize hardware, but they basically, you know, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forced their customers to have really buggy software this time in order to get that hardware schedule, you know to be kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and It’s it’s hurting now It’s hurting the press reviews and it’s hurting the public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinion of their new hardware And I hope that’s really kicking them in the stomach like because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they they need that like this is this is not good enough And and it is they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t They should realize quite how expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is to to deprioritize software quality to make a hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release schedule like this. Like it seems like, I mean, again, I’m sure they considered this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they have smart people there. I’m sure they considered this would be expensive, but they should really feel how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive this was to maybe make better decisions in the future. Like for instance, like, you know, like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned, John, you know, they could, you know, they could delay stuff. You know, I, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as two things continue to be the case, this is still going to be a problem. number one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they keep releasing new hardware on the same schedule every year that seems very inflexible. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems, you know, based on things like the stock market, that seems unlikely to change. I think they’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always going to release new iPhones in, you know, the fall, probably in September for the foreseeable future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s such a big part of the company and its finances and everything else. The other thing that they could change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is disconnect the the major OS releases from the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases. Now, I know this is complicated. I know that, you know, you have, like, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t have just shipped the new iPhones all of a sudden with iOS 12, because new iPhones have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new hardware in them, and the new OSes have, like, basically, like, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drivers for that hardware, whatever the equivalent of that is in modern iOS architecture, like, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to test and certify that the drivers for the new hardware work in the OS that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. So it is a non-trivial job to backport the quote drivers for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 11 to backport those to iOS 12. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not so much of a non-trivial job if you plan it that way from the start. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the right thing to do here is to disconnect the brand new cutting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge software, which is so frequently hard to nail down a release date for, for quality purposes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s software, that’s reasonable. Disconnect that from the hardware release. So for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 12, or whatever the next year’s iPhones are called, develop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their drivers and test their drivers for iOS 13. Don’t make it iOS 14
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only so it bonds those things together in their release schedules. Develop the next iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iOS 13. And if it just so happens that iOS 14 is ready on time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, you never had to use it. But to have that contingency plan from the start, to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that be planned and be the the official target from the start, that you can ship those phones with iOS 13
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point whatever, I think that is a recipe for much better outcomes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better software quality, and then if iOS 14 has to slip until November, fine, it doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter. But that isn’t what they’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far. They’ve bonded these things together, and while they have reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they’ve done it, I don’t think they’re very good reasons, and they aren’t, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t the way it has to be. They can choose to do it a different way. They can choose to do OSs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differently bonded to hardware. They can choose to write the drivers for the last OS versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next OS. They just don’t do that yet. But there’s no reason why they can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve done that on the Mac in the past as well, having new Macs come out without an entire new major operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system. They would just have a new point release. The interesting thing about this whole conundrum is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple just learned this lesson after iOS 11. That’s what iOS 12 was
⏹️ ▶️ John about. So they swung, they said, well, we learned our lesson. We needed to concentrate on stability and
⏹️ ▶️ John speed and making old phones faster and not so much on the new features. They did iOS 12. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then just swung right hard back in the other direction. And so at 14, they’ll probably learn the lesson
⏹️ ▶️ John again. They need to get a steadier state and a longer memory. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a happy medium. Casey mentioned the beginning of this like is the yearly release schedule
⏹️ ▶️ John to blame for this and Marco was talking about decoupling them and all those you know decoupling is perfectly fine I said
⏹️ ▶️ John they did it with the Mac OS you know it is a little bit more expensive but it gives you more flexibility you could
⏹️ ▶️ John also go with like the infinite version where you just pick a name and you stop incrementing the number and there’s no much no such
⏹️ ▶️ John thing as a major big bang release anymore and it’s just incremental features forever and ever lots of reasons why Apple wouldn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that for marketing and so on and so forth But the thing I always come back to is whatever scheme
⏹️ ▶️ John you pick, big yearly releases, never any releases, just point releases,
⏹️ ▶️ John totally decoupled, independent timelines, or you know, they can
⏹️ ▶️ John all be made to work and you can screw all of them up. So if Apple wants to do, for marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons, like the current thing where they do a new OS and a new phone at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time every year, so on and so forth, it’s possible to do that and not mess up. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible to do that and not mess up as it is to do the Marco scheme or any other scheme. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John system that you come up with and schedule or whatever is possible to be
⏹️ ▶️ John successful at. You just have to have different trade offs. If they’re totally decoupled, you have more flexibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the other hand, you also can get into a situation where you bite off more than you can chew and like
⏹️ ▶️ John then 14 like doesn’t come out until two years later and then you, you know, paint yourself into a corner or whatever. You always
⏹️ ▶️ John have to pick what how many features can we fit? When do we decide if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a go or a no-go? What do we use to judge quality? And
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes they get it right and are very conservative, like iOS 12. And sometimes they bite off more than
⏹️ ▶️ John they can chew, like 13, and it goes terribly. So I’m all for changing the scheme
⏹️ ▶️ John if it seems like they’re having more difficulty with this system and want to have a different set of
⏹️ ▶️ John trade-offs. But I fully believe in every company’s ability to screw up any software release plan.
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, like, you know, it can be big companies for a long time, you say like, we had all
⏹️ ▶️ John these problems with strategy X of release. We’re gonna change the strategy Y that will eliminate
⏹️ ▶️ John those problems. And it does, but it comes with its own new set of problems. And five years later, everyone’s sick of those problems and they swing back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the other direction. So, you know, this is not related to Apple and quality, but
⏹️ ▶️ John people in the Destiny community know that this was a big week for Destiny because they released the big expansion
⏹️ ▶️ John and the game is now free. So there’s tons more people coming on to play. And Bungie,
⏹️ ▶️ John the creators of Destiny, had tons of server issues as the flood of people came into play.
⏹️ ▶️ John And gamers being gamers were all angry at them and yelling and saying, you knew this would happen, the game was free, you knew
⏹️ ▶️ John people would come. Why didn’t you just double your server capacity? Why didn’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John just provide more? And it’s like, that’s exactly what consumers should think. They have an expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John that, well, maybe not their free game, but they have an expectation that the game will work. That’s the consumer expectation.
⏹️ ▶️ John They shouldn’t need to know anything about software. All they know is I paid for game. I’m supposed to be able to play for game and I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t play for the game. They don’t have to be jerks about it. But anyway, that’s, I excuse them from not knowing. But as someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who has worked in server-side software my entire career, it’s just totally obvious to me why,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s why you might have a problem. Why is it that
⏹️ ▶️ John even today, when people say, you know, even today, even in 2019, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can release a new thing and then a flood of people go to use it and it has problems? Like, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course it does. Like there is no magical, even I’m willing to say that, that even with
⏹️ ▶️ John almost, you know, almost infinite money, it wouldn’t even be possible to
⏹️ ▶️ John predict how it’s going to be. The systems are so complicated and then we don’t fully understand them and we don’t account for so
⏹️ ▶️ John many different variables. And it’s like, and bungee’s doing exactly the same thing as Apple, only on a compressed timescale,
⏹️ ▶️ John not, not sleeping, scaring, scramming all my chickens with their heads, cut off, fixing problems as fast as they possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, launch day, that’s what it’s like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. How is the new Destiny stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John Once I can get logged in
⏹️ ▶️ John not get booted out in the middle of the thing, there’s some bugs, let me tell ya. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much less critical for when it’s a game, but I can say so far there have definitely been crashing bugs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John no data loss bugs, So thumbs up so far.
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iPhone transfers
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think we spent the time last episode or the one before, whenever it was, talking about our 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my case or 10S in Marco’s case to 11 Pro transfer because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, amongst many other people, tried the, I forget what the term is for it, but basically the direct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transfer between the two phones. And I did that with mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I did it with Aaron’s and it didn’t work exactly flawlessly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it worked pretty darn well for this having been the first year of it. And to kind of turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our frown upside down, uh, I wanted to commend that, uh, commend Apple in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the direct transfer worked pretty darn well for me. Comically, the thing that tripped me up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most, although it only took me a minute or two to figure out was that it didn’t transfer my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number from the old phone to the new phone, which to the best of my recollection always happened in years past.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I couldn’t figure out what to do about it. And I was really kind of stuck and wasn’t sure what to do. And then it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occurred to me, no, you idiot, you just move the SIM. That’s all you need to do. And then it worked no problem. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my recollection from a couple of years ago was that all I needed to do was restore backup and magically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything would work. Maybe my recollection was wrong. But anyway, all that to say that it worked pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn well for me. Marco, what did you do? And John, what did Tina do in order to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff between phones?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I did, this is the first year. Normally I do the, for the last couple of years I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing the whole like, you know, set up wizard thing where you hold the phone near the other one, take the picture of the cloudy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m talking about. And then it does like the direct transfer for some stuff and then it does iCloud for most stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this not the first year for that? I thought this was the first year for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well that the iCloud part of it, that’s been a few years old. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least one or two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, right. But what was new this year was the offer to do a direct transfer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I thought that would bypass the need to download all my apps again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It didn’t do that and it did take a very long time for me and took a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short time for some people. What we think, I think we’ve worked out here, is that the direct transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to transfer downloaded media between the two phones. So in my case, I had a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music downloaded to my phone. I think it might also transfer downloaded photos, but I’m not sure about that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so downloaded media, if you have music and movies and maybe photos, the direct transfer will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually transfer those instead of relying on the phone to redownload it from iCloud. So it takes a pretty long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a bunch of music down, or other stuff downloaded there. And it did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work for me eventually. And it was great, because all my music and stuff was there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It did successfully transfer like keychain logins, passwords. Slack finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learned to use the keychain API, so that was nice. So almost everything transferred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without needing to redownload. But then, it’s funny, after this big long transfer, I kind of assumed, because it took I think like two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or three hours, and I kind of assumed like, oh, now my phone will boot up and it’ll be ready to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And nope, it booted up and still didn’t have all the apps from iCloud. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was kind of annoying in that it just took a lot longer than I expected. But the result was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. And one little nice thing I noticed, I don’t know how recent this is, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you have test flight apps, they don’t transfer in this kind of thing. You have to launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test flight on the new phone and reinstall them from test flight. And one little nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that I noticed this year that I don’t think was there in previous years is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you do that, if you had it on your phone before and you reinstall it from TestFlight on the new phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it puts it back in the right spot on Springboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, I noticed that too. And I thought I saw, maybe I’m making this up, but I thought I saw that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have, there would be like proxy icons almost, that’s my term, not an official term, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was like a cloud and a down arrow, so it’s like download this from the cloud where the cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this context is TestFlight. So I would, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco could see the icon. could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the icon. I’ve seen that for other apps. I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen it for TestFlight stuff. That’s interesting. I may be lying to you about that, but I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so accidentally. But I think what that meant was you need to go back to TestFlight and download it. And I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll follow up next week to correct me. But I thought that’s what that was. I don’t know. John, how did
⏹️ ▶️ John So I suggested to her that she just do the, you know, hold the phone up in the
⏹️ ▶️ John little cloudy picture thing and then iCloud, restore from iCloud, back up. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew about the direct transfer thing, but I’m like, I don’t, I wanted to wait, she got her phone on day one, so I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to hear if people had success or not. So I told her the old fashioned way, and it worked fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then when we were, it’s not setting up a new phone, but we were transferring her old phone to my
⏹️ ▶️ John son’s, basically taking his iPhone 6 and replacing it with her old iPhone 10,
⏹️ ▶️ John I decided to do the direct transfer, mostly because I knew that he doesn’t have a lot of data,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I figured I’ll try it, see how it works. And it worked fine. It’s the same process,
⏹️ ▶️ John only instead of picking from iCloud, you pick data transfer from the other phone. The only tricky
⏹️ ▶️ John bit about it is there’s a whole bunch of screens to get through to get to it. I thought I had gotten to the screen where I
⏹️ ▶️ John could just plug it in and walk away and let them do the transfer. I had not, so I came back, like, it said this will take
⏹️ ▶️ John about 20 minutes. I came back 20 minutes later and realized there was one more confirmation screen or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John So stupid. But yeah, it seemed to work okay. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned SIM swapping before. Of course, we got a new case for the phone and I did
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing I always do, which is I put in the new case and then realized I forgot to swap the SIM. So I had to take the case off,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is very painful to me. You know, I want the case to go on once and off once, but what can you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I swapped the SIM and then to make sure everything worked after the phone was all set up and everything was transferred,
⏹️ ▶️ John to the thing I usually do, which is I call that phone from my phone to make sure that the new phone rings, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the new phone did ring, but so did the old phone. What? All right, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi calling, you know, it’s audio FaceTime, it’s internet, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let me fix that by making sure I’m doing the phone number and not
⏹️ ▶️ John like iMessage or FaceTime audio. And both phones still rang. And I just
⏹️ ▶️ John did the Homer Simpson’s Back into the Bushes thing, and I just turned off
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the old phone and walked away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the new phone does ring, and so I just turn off the old phone. And I’ve got the old phone
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in front of here, by the way. I’ve been looking at it while we’ve been podcasting. iPhone 6, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about how thin it is and everything. He managed not to bend it, which is amazing, because the first phone we gave him, the 5S,
⏹️ ▶️ John he bent, which is a hell of a thing. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco On a 5S, it’s kind of impressive. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It was bent pretty badly, too. Like, separating the layer is kind of bent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh. Yeah. Like, you can see inside the phone. But the 6 survived,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is very thin, but the most hilarious thing about the 6, when I look at it, as you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John front, okay fine, you turn around and look at the back, and you’re like, that’s the camera?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s so small and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco only one of them. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John small, it’s like, it’s hilariously small. It’s like a little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John baby camera. Looks like an iPod touch. Yeah, that’s what it’s like. And it does stick out, but
⏹️ ▶️ John barely. It barely sticks out, it’s like a tiny little, tiny little blueberry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember how much everybody cared too? Because that was the first one that stuck out. That was such a big deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like us. Like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my god, there’s a camera bump now. How could we stoop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to this level? It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t lay flat on the table. It rocks. Now it’s just like a giant mountain.
⏹️ ▶️ John The back of the phone for the camera and the phone itself is much thicker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was also the slipperiest phone I think they’ve ever made. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they solved the doesn’t lay flat on the desk problem All of us need cases. For real.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, in settings, cellular, calls on other devices. Do you see what the story is there?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That could be what it was. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. Like, the thing is, the phones were near each other, and they’re both on the same Wi-Fi. So I’m like, it’s probably just
⏹️ ▶️ John the phones knowing about it. Because I didn’t erase the other phone yet. It just didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the right SIM in it. So anyway, it’s fine. Like, this phone
⏹️ ▶️ John is going off. It’s going up into the attic, and it won’t receive calls anymore. and the new phone
⏹️ ▶️ John is receiving calls, so it’s all set.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m surprised you’re not erasing it before putting it in long-term storage.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so tell me one of you about XDR Display Tech being in iPads and MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pros sometime between 2020 and 2021, maybe, possibly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought this rumor was interesting because it’s our old pal Ming-Chi Kuo,
⏹️ ▶️ John who is actually fairly accurate with the parts leak type rumors. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the part in question is badly described in this article, I’ve amended
⏹️ ▶️ John the quote here. You know, they’re talking about high-end iPad and MacBook models with mini LED. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it said mini LED displays. They don’t have mini LED displays. People keep talking about this and they keep calling
⏹️ ▶️ John them mini LED displays. Not what they are. It’s mini LED backlights in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of LCD displays, which is that’s the XDR technology, right? between late 2020 and mid 2021. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John got me thinking, by the way, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John specifics of the tech, there is a big step up from the XDR because the XDR is
⏹️ ▶️ John like seven, I don’t know, 576 backlights, like
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny little LEDs forming the backlight, which is a lot, although I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not all independently controlled. Anyway, the new one is supposedly using 10,000 LEDs,
⏹️ ▶️ John which sounds like a lot, but it is way smaller than the number of actual pixels still. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED has the advantage that there is no backlight that’s controlled with a bunch of stuff in front of it. Every single pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John is its own source of light. An actual mini LED display, every single pixel will be made
⏹️ ▶️ John up of tiny little LEDs. That’s not what this is. This is a backlight that is more
⏹️ ▶️ John granular than one big light and more granular than three regions, you know, They keep increasing the number of regions
⏹️ ▶️ John 10,000 is a lot of LEDs, but it may be a smaller number of regions even less number of LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I’m interested in this story is I’m trying to imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John How it could possibly be true because this this particular technology
⏹️ ▶️ John having a big grid array of Lights essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a bunch of layers sandwiched in front of it culminating in the typical layers that
⏹️ ▶️ John make up an LCD is really thick and I can’t imagine how you could fit
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook without making it hugely thick and also hot right I mean if you look at the cinema display
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR with 500 little LEDs in it it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not thick for the hell of it they use all that space there’s lots of stuff inside there including fans
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna to make one for the iPad or a MacBook with, you know, 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ John LED backlights inside it, I don’t understand how that can
⏹️ ▶️ John be the right thickness. So it got me thinking like, oh, maybe it’s, you know, maybe they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR displays that aren’t as big as the giant one. Maybe this rumor is just off, or maybe there
⏹️ ▶️ John is an advancement in this type of display technology that I’m not aware of, because they are making televisions with
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and the televisions they’re also kind of thick but maybe they’re thinner than the
⏹️ ▶️ John than the cinema display XDR. Anyway I’m interested in this rumor just because it’s a head-scratcher in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of feasibility and I would just dismiss it as like oh whatever but you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s from a source that has been right in the past so I’m willing to entertain the idea that either
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an entirely different product or that Apple has found a way to make the cinema display
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR technology much much thinner. Stay tuned in 2020 or 2021. Moving
Chrome /var bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A week or two ago, maybe even a little more than that, there was something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that happened wherein a bunch of some sort of professional like audio or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video software, I don’t recall what it was in front of me. Thank you, Avid, would just stop working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of a sudden and nobody really knew why for like a solid, I don’t know, 12 to 24 hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it turns out, you know, even though I just spent, especially me, spent some time saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps yearly releases aren’t the greatest. Well, it turns out daily releases or whatever Chrome is on these days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may also not be the best. So in certain situations, which I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of Avid or computers dedicated to Avid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ran into, in certain situations, Chrome would cause the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what, not be bootable or something like that? Tell me about what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. This was kind of amazing. It turns out, it started being reported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as, oh, there’s something up with Mac Pros running Avid that are bricking. And at first it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pros are bricking. And then it became Avid is bricking them. And then eventually what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figured out is that it had nothing to do with Mac Pros or Avid. It just so happened to spread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot among that community first because many people who run Avid and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people who run Avid run on Mac Pros disable system integrity protection for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason. I don’t know if it’s due to those weird little like anti-piracy keys they use or whatever it is, whatever the reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people running some of those pro tools disable system integrity protection. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were running on a Mac with system integrity protection disabled and you happen to run Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it happened to run this update in just, I guess just the wrong way, it would delete your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash VAR folder, which on a Unix system is kind of a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, John, did I get that roughly right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I actually deleted the symlink, because slash var on a Mac is actually a symlink to slash private
⏹️ ▶️ John slash var. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so the Chrome, Chrome was what we were talking about before, of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John deciding to go to what Jeff Howard called the infinite version, which is like, don’t worry about versions anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John The application will update itself as new updates appear. You don’t have to worry about it at all. every time you run it, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John basically be the latest version. Occasionally, maybe we’ll nag you to reboot, to restart the program if you
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t done so in a while, right? That’s what Chrome does. It does that with this background process called Keystone
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever that you’ll see running on your Mac for many years that is responsible for doing updates.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is basically might as well be like a, you know, the poster child for system integrity
⏹️ ▶️ John protection. System integrity protection is supposed to, as the name says, protect the integrity of your system, meaning there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of your computer that are the operating system, and it should
⏹️ ▶️ John not be possible to mess with them. They should be invulnerable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you try to delete them, you shouldn’t be able to. And this, as we all know from the stories at the beginning of
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS X, is a real problem for real users. Because a user would boot into Mac OS X coming from classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, and they’d see this folder called library, and they’re like, well, I don’t want any of this library stuff. It must have just come with a bunch of books,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they would delete it. And that’s, will render their computer inoperable because your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John needs those files because they’re part of the operating system. And they’re going to say rightly so. How am I supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John know what the heck is part of the operating system? All I know is I see a bunch of stuff that wasn’t there before. It doesn’t belong to me. I don’t want it and I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to delete it. System integrity protection makes it so that you can’t delete it. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, more recent versions within the past few years of Mac OS X hide the library folder and do all sorts of stuff to try to prevent this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line, there’s the UI aspect of it of not putting things in people’s faces they don’t understand. And then there is
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of security and reliability aspect of it, which is don’t let people delete that. It should
⏹️ ▶️ John be impossible to delete it. That’s exactly what system integrity protection does. It makes it impossible to delete
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are essential for the operating system to even boot the computer. Disabling
⏹️ ▶️ John system integrity protection, I can imagine lots of reasons why they might do it. You already mentioned the dongles,
⏹️ ▶️ John software that hasn’t been updated to account for it, software that expects to be able to spray its files
⏹️ ▶️ John into directories owned by the operating system, just because that’s what it’s always been able to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very difficult to transform a PC operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system from a world where programs can write anything anywhere, as long as you give them permission, to a world where
⏹️ ▶️ John certain things are absolutely positively off limits. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco also, I suppose,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe possible that those computers were running a version before system integrity protection
⏹️ ▶️ John came out. When I saw this story, I immediately thought, oh no, I have Chrome on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Does my Mac even
⏹️ ▶️ John have system integrity protection? But guess what? System integrity protection was introduced in the
⏹️ ▶️ John latest version of the operating system that my Mac can run. So I do indeed have system integrity protection.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is indeed enabled, which is good because I do run Chrome and it probably did run that updater. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, why does system integrity protection exist? To protect the operating system from bugs in other
⏹️ ▶️ John programs, like say a bug in an update that accidentally deletes an essential part of the system
⏹️ ▶️ John without which your computer won’t boot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My favorite thing about this, I think, is the official Chrome, or I believe this to be the official
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chrome statement on it or Google statement on it. Chrome update impacts some macOS systems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Impact is an understatement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, for real.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They describe what’s going on and then update number two, September 27th, 2019.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A new recommendation has been added in place of the previously provided terminal commands. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommendation is as follows. To recover a machine that has been affected by this bug, use the directions found here to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reinstall Mac OS from Mac OS recovery. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John brutal. Honestly, I was surprised when I saw these, you know, there was
⏹️ ▶️ John like a bug report thread where like, oh, here’s what you do to fix it. That’s just like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a tech person telling other tech people here how you can fix it. But thinking that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can put instructions, like that you know how to restore things the way they were,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re probably mostly right. But Apple changes stuff like that all the time. The bottom line is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s part of the operating system that you deleted. You may know how to put it back
⏹️ ▶️ John now so that it works, but are you sure you got everything? And what about the next version of the operating system and the next version
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth? Now, this is not gonna be a persistent problem because again, the infinite version and they’ll just move on and no one will ever
⏹️ ▶️ John install this version of Chrome again and that version of Keystone will be gone, yada yada. But
⏹️ ▶️ John telling people the fix for our bug is to paste a bunch of these commands into the terminal as root
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a great solution. So although it sounds ridiculous for us to nuke and pave
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, reinstall the operating system, that is really the official supported way to
⏹️ ▶️ John fix it. If something borks your operating system, you probably should reinstall it because
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows if your supposed fix running a bunch of commands as root is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to work. And it’s just another opportunity for you to put in typos or whatever.
TiVo adding ads?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that was almost a sad day for John, but there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sad day for John recently. It sounds like you’re going to have to divorce your TiVo, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Lots of people are upset about this, but I think I have a slightly different attitude towards it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the news as of, what, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John older news, but it hasn’t changed since, is that TiVo, well there’s two sets of news.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tivo is making new hardware, which yay, Tivo’s not out of business and they’re making new hardware. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John was excited about that for those two reasons. I was also excited because the new hardware is not bent. For people who
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, the current line of Tivo products come in this
⏹️ ▶️ John jauntily bent box. It’s like, imagine a little rectangular box, but like bend it
⏹️ ▶️ John about a third of the way through it. Like literally bend it so it’s up like a little, you know, like a little tent.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s terrible, you can’t stack anything on top of, and they’re noisy and annoying and I don’t like them. We
⏹️ ▶️ John have one of those in the house. But, you know, and they ship them for years and years, so finally they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to ship hardware that’s not bent. So I was excited about that. But the news that I’m not so excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about came a little bit later, which is that TiVo is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John basically add pre-roll advertisements in front of recordings. So you go to your TiVo,
⏹️ ▶️ John you find a recording, you hit play to watch the recording and rather than playing the recording what it will do first is play an
⏹️ ▶️ John ad and then play your recording. Which is terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John because most people have TiVo so they can skip ads and TiVo touts all of its ad skipping features.
⏹️ ▶️ John They haven’t gone all the way to the old replay TV thing where they automatically skip all the commercials for you but they basically
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. They have people put little waypoints in all of the popular programs so to skip commercials
⏹️ ▶️ John you hit a single button that jumps past all of them immediately. It’s really nice. But then they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna insert their own ad. Now you can skip their own ad as well. So
⏹️ ▶️ John practically speaking it impacts your experience
⏹️ ▶️ John by adding one more mandatory ad skip. And also people
⏹️ ▶️ John have said that it’s slow because it loads the ads from the Internet and you know it’s actually worse
⏹️ ▶️ John experience than just skipping an extra ad. But it’s basically that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside the practical things sort of spiritually thinking ethically, emotionally, morally.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not what anybody wants from TiVo. It goes against everything that
⏹️ ▶️ John their loyal customers, their few remaining loyal customers want out of TiVo.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you may be asking yourself, or maybe Casey’s asking himself, how how could a corporation do this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think we all know the answers, right? TiVo is not doing great.
⏹️ ▶️ John When the companies aren’t doing great, it isn’t surprising. It’s sad, but it’s not surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John when they do something desperate to try to make more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I can, although I think they’re making a terrible mistake, as everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks they’re making a terrible mistake, I can actually argue for the other side of it. And the other side of it is this.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have this small set of loyal customers. they could be making the
⏹️ ▶️ John calculation that we can afford to annoy them
⏹️ ▶️ John because where else are they gonna go? What are they gonna switch to? The whole
⏹️ ▶️ John reason they’re using TiVo is because they think that they don’t like their cable company’s
⏹️ ▶️ John DVR. They think that they can’t get by just using streaming. Like that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still using TiVo. If they thought otherwise they wouldn’t be using us at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re basically trapped because we are the last player standing in the standalone
⏹️ ▶️ John boutique, very expensive DVR that you run yourself. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John about to go under. We need money. Can we squeeze more money out of our customers
⏹️ ▶️ John by showing the mandatory ads that they can skip? It’s a terrible mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are so many other ways you could squeeze money out of those people, like say doing that for everybody and then
⏹️ ▶️ John charging an additional fee to not do that because we would all pay it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John again, these are all people who think that they still want Tivo, but I can understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why they think they actually have a captive audience. Their audience is so small and so desperate and so loyal
⏹️ ▶️ John and have so few alternatives that they’re making the calculation that
⏹️ ▶️ John this won’t push them over the edge to say, I thought that I couldn’t use my cable companies DVR, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is going to make me try because now forget it. Tivo has completely betrayed
⏹️ ▶️ John me. They don’t even have a way that I can pay them money to make this go away, which is like the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John sin. Because that’s basically what Tivo people do. They pay huge amounts of money that other people don’t pay for a
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly better in their opinion experience. Tivo could have just charged more
⏹️ ▶️ John money or put in the ads and charge people to skip. They’d still be screaming, don’t get me wrong, because people pay like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I pay the big upfront fees for like lifetime, so I don’t have to pay them on a monthly basis, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently that’s still not enough money. So if you came back to those lifetime people and said, oh, now you’re gonna have a monthly fee
⏹️ ▶️ John again, or you gotta pay another 500 bucks or whatever, people would be up in arms, but they’d be less up
⏹️ ▶️ John in arms than if you make them watch ads or make them skip ads. So
⏹️ ▶️ John good old TiVo. I actually prefer this to them going out of business
⏹️ ▶️ John because at least gives me the option, right? I can leave TiVo or I could not leave TiVo. If they go out of
⏹️ ▶️ John business, I don’t have that option anymore but I will say that this made me look at the uh… the
⏹️ ▶️ John Fios DVR to see what state it’s in uh… which is something I had never done before
⏹️ ▶️ John uh… practically speaking unless they screw it up even more I probably will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John get one of these Divos assuming they’re still in business at the time I need to get a new one the only thing that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John scaring me about it is I didn’t see a large capacity model that’s one of my complaints about the uh…
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones you get from cable companies they tend not to come in high capacity So you can store like 100 or 200 hours of HD and
⏹️ ▶️ John my current TiVo store is like 500 hours or something insane. It’s like twice as big as the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest one you can get from the cable company. And we, you know, we’re always at like 85% capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John or more and we have to sort of manage to that. So that’s why I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John probably still end up buying one of these. I’m hoping I can do like a DNS black hole on the
⏹️ ▶️ John address for the streaming. But what I’m really hoping is that the incredible bad press
⏹️ ▶️ John that TiVo is getting about this bad press, like anyone talks about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco TiVo, the incredible bad reaction,
⏹️ ▶️ John the incredible bad reaction they’re getting from their loyal customers will make them think twice about this and say, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John we shouldn’t do this. Because if they had thought, if they’d made that calculation like, look, our customers are captive,
⏹️ ▶️ John one look at literally anywhere this story appears from anything said by
⏹️ ▶️ John any actual TiVo customer, and they would know, well, 100% of the TiVo customers who have commented on the story who had said they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John leaving TiVo, unequivocally. Like that’s it. But you know, as to we’ve miscalculated,
⏹️ ▶️ John we thought they had nowhere to go. They’re going where they’re, where they’re going. We don’t know, but they’re going.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a terrible decision. Tivo needs to reconsider the fact that this hasn’t shipped yet. It makes me
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s time to reconsider because they are right. And that the customers really don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any place great to go. They straighten the box and they add ads, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just do one of those things and it’ll be much better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, like, maybe it’ll be fun for the program because, you know, if I get one of these things, I’ll get to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you just exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how grim it is. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and setting aside the ad thing, the new software
⏹️ ▶️ John for TiVo is so bad. Not in terms of, like, bugs or, you know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John data loss crashes. No, not in terms of that. In terms of the UI. Both on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s an iOS app for TiVo, and on the actual television device, it is worse
⏹️ ▶️ John than the previous UI in every single way, in hilariously obvious ways that I could go on about
⏹️ ▶️ John for hours and hours and hours. It just boggles my mind how they could screw things up
⏹️ ▶️ John so incredibly badly. To give just one example, which grinds my gears every time I look
⏹️ ▶️ John at it, on the iOS app, they change from a text
⏹️ ▶️ John list of episodes, like you go into a show and it’s, here’s all the episodes of the show and it would show that just you know
⏹️ ▶️ John just a list and it would have the title of the show and a date you know some basically like list view right
⏹️ ▶️ John they went from that on iOS to a thing that shows thumbnails
⏹️ ▶️ John and the thumbnail is very often a single static screen that is the same for every
⏹️ ▶️ John single episode like it’s just like a you know a splash screen for the show I don’t know if other
⏹️ ▶️ John shows don’t have this but all the shows that I watch it just shows the same image from every single thumbnail it’s horizontal scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, they’re little 16 by nine things. They’re like little TV screens. So you can fit maybe three
⏹️ ▶️ John or four or five of them, depending on what orientation you have your iPad in. So they scroll horizontally. The whole rest of the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is wasted where you could have a list. They scroll horizontally, no text. What episode is that? What
⏹️ ▶️ John episode is that next to it? They’re literally identical. There is nothing on them to distinguish them from each
⏹️ ▶️ John other. So if you go into a show and you say, I want to see episode number five
⏹️ ▶️ John or episode number 11, you’ve got to count squares. One, two, three, four. Or what if you’re looking by title?
⏹️ ▶️ John Tough luck, you can’t see the title. If you tap on it and go into a detail view, then you can see the title.
⏹️ ▶️ John How does that even happen? At first I thought it was like a bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe it’s just for some shows. That is just one sample of the
⏹️ ▶️ John huge downgrade that is the modern TiVo software. And I have the modern TiVo software because one
⏹️ ▶️ John of my old TiVos got a bad hard drive and I got it replaced under warranty, and the replacement unit they sent
⏹️ ▶️ John came with new software. there is a way to downgrade it I didn’t want to bother going through it because my
⏹️ ▶️ John quote-unquote main TiVo still has the old software TiVo was really
⏹️ ▶️ John swinging and missing lately but that is not surprising for companies that are are not doing well.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We already covered the new Microsoft stuff in the pre show. So we’re good on that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Actually, yeah, I did have some things to say about this. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how long we want to go here. But it’s not about the products themselves. Most
⏹️ ▶️ John of what one Metacom before we get to the products, to put a link in the show notes, I did the typical
⏹️ ▶️ John Google thing for like, you know, I search for Microsoft Duo Neo, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I expected, after scrolling past a couple of things, I’d find eventually the link to Microsoft’s site,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Where they, you know, the official pages. Because if we’re gonna put something in the show notes, I don’t wanna put like a Wired story or
⏹️ ▶️ John a link to the Verge, let’s just go to the Microsoft site. As far as I could tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no Microsoft site for these products. Oh, cool. Maybe I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will grant that I did not go past the first page of Google results, but I did manually go to Microsoft.com
⏹️ ▶️ John and I didn’t see these products on the homepage. And it just shows how accustomed I am to the Apple way of doing
⏹️ ▶️ John things where they get up on stage, they have a thing, they say, look at this great new stuff and this is coming in the fall
⏹️ ▶️ John or coming whenever, blah, blah, blah. And then as soon as they go off stage, you can go to Apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably on the homepage, some big image about one of the things they showed and maybe see
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller images about other stuff. Like there’s an official site. I don’t think there’s an official site for these products yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll link to the Verge story, I guess. But anyway, what I wanted to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John in relation to these products, which we should describe briefly, is not the products themselves or the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John systems or all the reasons that Marco already outlined about why
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we’re not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in them and tend not to cover them, but a larger point. But so description, These are
⏹️ ▶️ John basically foldable devices where it looks like a
⏹️ ▶️ John big or a small book where each half of the inside of the book is a screen. When you
⏹️ ▶️ John close it, the screens are facing each other. When you open it, the screens are flat. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a continuous screen like all those other cell phones with a big piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of plastic across it. It’s two screens with a hinge between them. There is a gap, there is a crease. It is two
⏹️ ▶️ John physically separate screens connected by a hinge. There’s a little one, which is called the Duo,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a bigger one, which is called the Neo. The bigger one is like laptop sized, and it comes with a little keyboard that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can lay on top of the screen element. And the little one is, I’m not gonna say it’s phone size,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s phablet size. Yeah, I guess it’s phablet size.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the main thing, for these, and I was like, today, yesterday? Hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John time, plus I’ve been playing Destiny, so I haven’t had a lot of time to look at these.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Time flies when you’re playing Destiny. Yeah. Something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. The one thing I wanted to talk about is kind of the same thing we talk about with the foldable
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. What advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John do we see to having two screens? And I want to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about the smaller one
⏹️ ▶️ John The bigger one, I think I have clearer answers. But the smaller one, I’m kind of left with the same question as the foldable phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s pretend that this was awesome. Let’s pretend it ran iOS. like pretend whatever you want,
⏹️ ▶️ John like setting aside anything that may keep you away from it. Do you want, do you think you would
⏹️ ▶️ John want, would you find useful something like this where there are two screens that fold in on each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t see advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I don’t know. I got to imagine there would be one, but sitting here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I, I don’t have the famous idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean I can, the obvious thing you can think of is, well, you can see more stuff. We all want to see more stuff. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why bigger phones are nicer than smaller ones. You can see more email messages Things are bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John with a crease between them. You can’t really see one thing bigger, but you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John two things, right? You know people like multiple monitors. What’s the advantage like I I get that I get the same
⏹️ ▶️ John exact reason Why you’d want two monitors on your Mac is why you want two screens on your phone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s you don’t carry your two monitors in your hands, so I’m looking at this device.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, okay it’s thicker than a phone. It’s about
⏹️ ▶️ John phablet sized. Would I ever use
⏹️ ▶️ John both of the screens? Like, you can have it folded up like a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and just use it like a really thick phone with one screen that you can’t see because it’s not facing you, but would
⏹️ ▶️ John I unfold it to look at that second screen? Would I go into like productivity mode with my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone phablet thing? Would I take it out and say I’m I’m gonna set it up in front of me and fold
⏹️ ▶️ John it like a little laptop or hold it like a paperback book and read a book, one on each
⏹️ ▶️ John page. Almost every scenario I can think of, I’m just like, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. It would be more cumbersome for me to do that. It would never make up for the additional weight and
⏹️ ▶️ John complexity and size and heat and everything with that utility because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a phone-sized thing. Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we’ve crossed some
⏹️ ▶️ John threshold and we’ve gotten to the point where it actually is small enough and it won’t bother people
⏹️ ▶️ John and suddenly we’ll see people in one smooth motion pulling this thing out of their jacket pocket and flipping it open like
⏹️ ▶️ John a paperback book and looking at it and have Instagram on the left and Twitter on the
⏹️ ▶️ John right or been messaging somebody on the right and it’ll be like an awesome dual screen experience and they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John fold it back up in one motion and shove it back in their pocket. Because you can imagine that if it was thin enough and light enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could maybe pull it off. But I feel like we’re not there yet And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I don’t think the util, I don’t think this is a thing that we should be
⏹️ ▶️ John shooting for quite yet. Like it seems like something that should remain in the lab. Now it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to say because I haven’t used one. Maybe, maybe it’s awesome. Maybe the utility will be clear as soon as you get one. You’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I can’t go back to an old phone because I can see so much less and I can’t set it up as a mini laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of me when I sit down in Starbucks or whatever. But looking at these pictures, I am,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sold on the utility of that small sucker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I have no argument here. I also sitting here now, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really sure what’s getting like Mike so jazzed about the galaxy fold or whatever it is that he’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, extraordinarily horny for, uh, whatever it is. I mean, if it makes him happy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fine. Cool. I’m sure I’m sure there will come a time that I will want something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an, in an Apple product or Android, depending on the way things are going, which I know that is Android. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know. It just seems to, right now, today, it just seems way too clunky to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I think I get the appeal. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do. The whole reason why big phones are popular is because we want, when we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it, we want the biggest possible screen we can get. And unfortunately, we also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want something that’s small enough to fit in pockets and bags and everything. And that’s oftentimes harder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the appeal of the folding phone, which this kind of isn’t, but the appeal of a folding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone is you can get a much bigger screen with a smaller footprint when it’s in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket or back, right? So that makes sense as a theory of like why this is cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, I think, you know, as we’re seeing with the first generation of foldable phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are just kind of barely fumbling out the door, it seems like there’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of like just physical, real world reality problems with these things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re just not there yet. And so the Surface Duo that we’re talking about now, like, you know, I haven’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of us have seen these in person yet, but like, you know, looking at their images and videos and stuff they announced today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sure looks like, yeah, that would be really cool if it was maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five years from now and we’ve had all these times for advancements. You know, right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like a really big, clunky, thick, heavy thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has some really cool functionality that I would use sometimes, but not most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, most of the time we, like, most of the time we’re using our phones, most of us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least, I think we’re doing things that don’t require a massive screen. But sometimes it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice to have one. You know, it’s like, if you’re doing something with media, obviously, you’re looking at like photos, video, whatever, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice to have those things. Great, but, you know, if you’re just like, trying to read like an email,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t make a huge difference how big your screen is, right, or if you’re messaging, doing text messaging,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is probably the most common thing people do with their phones. Screen size doesn’t matter a whole lot. It matters in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sense of how big you can make the keyboard and that can affect typing accuracy and stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you get beyond a certain point, like this diminishing returns, what they’ve achieved here seems like it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of halfway between a phone and a tablet. In a way, phablets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were, phablets now, we just call those phones. Like what we used to call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phablets when that was a word, like that was like, you know, five and a half inch or six inch display. It’s like, we just have those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now in our regular phones. But this is something else. This is like significantly larger than that, significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thicker. And I just, I don’t, I think it’s just too clunky for most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to want this for the value it provides. And so down the road,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when, you know, as John said, like, you know, when technology advances more, this could be really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what’s interesting though also is that the Surface Duo is, while it was announced today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re saying it’s not going to come out until the holiday season of 2020.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is still a little bit over a year out if it’s on time. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is still like, they’ve barely even been able to achieve this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even this is not imminent. So we’ll see what happens, you know, as this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually comes out, if it actually comes is that which is a big if. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in what they’re showing today, which is probably best case scenario, it just looks like it’s a bit too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big and clunky for what people actually want. But hey, you know, we could be wrong. Look, big phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised us back when phablets were the first thing. We were all making fun of them and saying, oh, who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna hold up an iPad to their face? And now we all basically hold up iPads to our faces. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out that all the rest of the time that we’re using it, we aren’t holding up to our face. no one cares
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how big it is and we all just hold it. You know, it might be that, you know, first of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, you know, while pants pockets are the way that most, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco men hold their phone, that isn’t the case for most people. You know, a lot of people carry bags
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, there’s lots of ways that we can carry things like this, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the utility is high enough, people will do it, people will buy it. and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t like you know exactly what individuals like me or you might want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a market for it. Like if you wanted to care like if I carried some kind of bag or purse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with me every day and this would fit in there and I kept my phone in there anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got a lot more leeway and how big that phone can be before it gets on will be compared to a pants pocket and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I could have like much of a tablets functionality in a footprint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer to a phone, that’s pretty cool. That would have high utility for me. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I’m really curious to watch this. I’m hesitant to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outright say, oh, it’s too big, no one will use it, because we’ve been burned predicting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like that in the past. But I’m also hesitant to be super optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about something that is still more than a year away, if it goes well. So, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Real-time follow-up, Microsoft does in fact have pages for these products. We’ll put the links in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why they’re not linked from their homepage, I have no idea. Maybe they are linked and I just couldn’t find it. But anyway, there are pages.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that they’re not coming out until late next year explains why there’s not much on these sites.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, that’s fine. The size thing, the screen space, the utility,
⏹️ ▶️ John the size stuff, I see that. The part I keep getting hung up on is the folding.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, this is modified somewhat by the fact that lots of people do use folio cases
⏹️ ▶️ John for their existing phones. Like, have you seen people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco who take out
⏹️ ▶️ John their phone and they actually do have to open it before
⏹️ ▶️ John can use the phone? What they’re usually opening, though, is a very thin
⏹️ ▶️ John flap over the phone and then there’s the phone or anything. It’s not an equally sized computerized
⏹️ ▶️ John device that they have to fold over. But the phone habits
⏹️ ▶️ John that I see people, you know, performing in public is people
⏹️ ▶️ John look at their phones a lot. People take their phones out and put them away a lot. That motion gets repeated.
⏹️ ▶️ John The people with folios do have an additional thing in that motion. I’ve got my pouch to deal with, right? They’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John their little flappy cover. But all those things are significantly less cumbersome than
⏹️ ▶️ John actually unfolding a, you know, a device that is equal
⏹️ ▶️ John parts electronics on both sides, let alone folding all the way back on itself on that big hint, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, it almost strikes me as a play at a smaller laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John than a play at a larger phone because it just just doesn’t seem like it would accomplish
⏹️ ▶️ John the job that I see these phones performing, which is to be ready at hand at a moment’s notice to look
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John take it out, to take it out, send a text and put it away to see who was that that was texting
⏹️ ▶️ John me because when this thing is closed you can’t see anything there’s no screens on the outside unlike some of the other folding phones
⏹️ ▶️ John right I just feel like it’s the utility of this device is trapped
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the clamshell it’s not up to the task of being your ready-at-hand
⏹️ ▶️ John you know quick phone like device it’s so silly that we call these things phones or whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t it seems like it’s a filling a different role, which is fine. Maybe there’s a role for it, or a role for people
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t use their phones like that, who don’t pull out their phone and see who it was they texted them, who don’t take a
⏹️ ▶️ John spare moment and waiting in line to read Twitter, right? If that’s not how you use your phone, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is much more appealing as a, you know, as a phablet type thing with more utility.
⏹️ ▶️ John With Mike and his love for the foldable phone stuff, there is a certain amount of like techno future
⏹️ ▶️ John lust of like, wow, it’s just like we talked about, Expendable screens like the fact that it is all one
⏹️ ▶️ John screen that you can actually do the thing that I said You couldn’t do earlier on this which is see
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing larger Have a video playing bigger than it could play I don’t think you’d want
⏹️ ▶️ John to play video with a big split down the middle, right? but if it’s actually all one screen like those bendy
⏹️ ▶️ John phones are trying to be you could in theory unfold it and Watch a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John on the plane just on your phone Don’t have to bring your tablet because look how big the screen is when you unfold your phone Obviously those
⏹️ ▶️ John foldy ones have serious problems with the folding part. We think we talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John before. That technology is nowhere near perfected. Taking something that is made
⏹️ ▶️ John of some kind of plastic or polymer and bending it back and forth, eventually it’s going to crease or bend
⏹️ ▶️ John or crack and then the crap gets inside them. And it’s like what Microsoft is doing is much
⏹️ ▶️ John easier to do engineering wise and a better solution engineering wise. They can make two solid,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, even waterproof, basically phones and connect them with a good solid hinge. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no weird bendy plastic part. There’s no gaps where crap can go in. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco none of that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a problem. But you got a big crease down the middle of the screen. So I understand the trade-off they were making, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John does, I can’t imagine Mike being as excited about this because it’s not cool in techno,
⏹️ ▶️ John not as cool in techno futurey as the all one screen thing. This one though, I think could actually
⏹️ ▶️ John work and not break within the first 24 hour period. Unless Casey washes his car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. That’s true, that’s true. That’s a pro tip. Don’t have this with you when you’re washing Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. I do wonder though, it’s been a while since we’ve had phones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had moving parts, besides camera lenses shaking around and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The haptic engine. Yeah, but to have a giant hinge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as something that is put under a lot of stress every single time the phone is used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is gonna be a hinge that you’re operating thousands of times over the lifetime of this device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is dealing with lots of potential stresses. Some of the times that it is being operated, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have some grit or dust or something in there, and you might be jamming it up somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is going to have to be some kind of cable that runs between the two halves,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that probably some big ribbon cable that goes between them or something like that. So that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wear out or break or pull away from whatever it’s mounted to or flake out or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder, back when we had phones that folded and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything was a lot simpler technically, and people were not using their phones nearly as often as they do now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there wasn’t nearly as much in those hinges and everything. Now, I almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonder, is that gonna be a problem where many of these devices might have significant physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues with usage over time? It’s actually pretty hard to develop a hinge that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that good and that sturdy and that reliable under all the crazy conditions that people put their phones in now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a good point with the flip phones. Like, it’s exactly what I was saying about the Folio before. So the aspirations of this Duo
⏹️ ▶️ John product are that it is possible to use it kind of in a laptop mode. They show it in the video, like, oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John could open it up and have the flat screen on the table be like a keyboard, and the other part kind of up like in an
⏹️ ▶️ John L shape, that’s your screen, right? So the hinge has to be, has to have a mode where
⏹️ ▶️ John it is stiff enough to support itself. But all of the things that have
⏹️ ▶️ John succeeded in the market for phones have had the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to flip open and close quickly. Flip phones, we’ve seen that little motion, take out your phone, you flip it open.
⏹️ ▶️ John And more importantly, when you’re done, snap. Close it right back up. When we had
⏹️ ▶️ John flip phones, that’s how they operated. You could do that because they either didn’t have a screen
⏹️ ▶️ John on one side or had very sturdy plastic screens or whatever, but like they were treated in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that you would not want to snap something like this closed. They weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John as delicate, let’s say, as our current smartphones, where if you were to take two smartphones
⏹️ ▶️ John and slap them together with
⏹️ ▶️ John ferocity that we closed our flip phones, that would not be a good idea. They
⏹️ ▶️ John would last probably a few of those snaps and eventually they would crack. And so this hinge has two things,
⏹️ ▶️ John this design has two things against it. One, the hinge can’t be really loose, and yet loose is exactly how you’d want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be, like a folio case. You want it to be loose so you can flip it open real easy. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what we demand of our devices, whether they be flip phones or a phone in a folio case. If you had a folio case with a hinge
⏹️ ▶️ John that you had to pry open, no one would buy that case, it’s terrible, right? But two,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna have aspirations to use it like a laptop, it has, the hinge has to at least have a mode
⏹️ ▶️ John where it is stiff because it has to support the weight of the screen screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath the keyboard screen. So it is not just a challenge to make a hinge that is
⏹️ ▶️ John durable enough, but I think part of the challenge is also to make a device that can be flipped opened and closed
⏹️ ▶️ John in the way that thus far we have demanded of our phones while also not shattering itself
⏹️ ▶️ John when doing that, while also having a mode in which it is stiff. So it is quite an engineering challenge. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming they will solve it by not doing any of that and simply making it like a laptop hinge, which is already
⏹️ ▶️ John a challenge. That’s the same challenges, but presumably laptops are not opened and closed as much as this would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although again, I get back to my, you know discussion before Will this appeal to people who
⏹️ ▶️ John need to look at their phone every two seconds? Or will is only appeal to people who basically use like a like a lap laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John in which case you’re basically just making a good Laptop inch which is itself a difficult task. Yes. Ask
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone who’s had a Mac laptop repaired for a ribbon cable stuff or whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the characteristics that would make this useful as a phone seem counter to
⏹️ ▶️ John the characteristics that would make it good as a as a little mini laptop thing. So it’s quite a challenge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keep in mind also a few other factors here. Number one, anything their phones can do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will idly fidget with that. So if you have a phone that can open and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close, we did back when we had headphones, people would just idly flip it open, flip it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closed. It’s just as like an idle animation. They would just fidget with it anywhere they were, all day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long, just fidgeting. People do it with AirPods cases now. So that’s gonna be a problem, number one. It’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the number of open-close cycles on these things is gonna be way higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a laptop. And number two, back when we had flip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones, phones were heavily subsidized by the carriers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on only two-year contracts at most in most places, and they didn’t cost $1,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now, if you’re gonna have something like this, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they talked about pricing, I’d be surprised, but like, you know, assume like some, some like dual screen phone, this is probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like what, $1,500 maybe? It’s not gonna be cheap. And so you’re gonna have this $1,500 unsubsidized phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re, that, you know, most people want something like that to last them at least two or three years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then add to it this, you know, moving part that is critical to its operation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, geez, that’s, that is a recipe for disappointment. And I think this is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of also why all of the, you know, like the Samsung Galaxy Fold and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other one was, like I think that’s why these products are having so much trouble getting to market also, because like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna be a problem with any foldable phone, any phone that can open and close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not a basic clip phone. They’re all gonna have this problem. And you’re just battling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against physics at some point here, like, you know, to design a thing that can take that kind of abuse at, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in such a small size and have all those characteristics and be affordable and be mass-producible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you’re just asking for trouble here. So I think it’s gonna be a while before any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this stuff is good, and it might never happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ve been discussing this in the context of foldable phones, because that’s really what I wanted to talk about, but it occurs to me that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea if the Surface Duo is meant to be a phone in any way whatsoever. Like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John may not be the intention of the Microsoft device. I’m just, you know, so forgive me for seeming to slam
⏹️ ▶️ John the Surface for a thing that it’s not even intending to do. I think it is just a small laptop, in which case a lot of these problems don’t go away, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking of the larger thing that we keep seeing, which is phone-ish size devices
⏹️ ▶️ John that are foldable with the idea that you get more screen space, but then it can become a smaller size
⏹️ ▶️ John to fit in your pocket or something. So setting aside the Duo itself, just all the foldable phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John many of which are similar in size to the Duo, in fact, that’s kind of what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m getting at, that like, are we ever gonna get to the place where a foldable thing replaces the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that we’re all using and now calling a phone? Or is this only of interest in sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of the laptop space? And we’ve known a little while, but to briefly touch on the, it’s larger
⏹️ ▶️ John sibling, the Neo, it is a much more understandable device. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically laptop sized. It’s the same thing. Like if you didn’t see anything next to it for scale,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be like, is that the Duo or the Neo? They look basically identical. They may even be proportionally identical,
⏹️ ▶️ John but one is much larger, one is like a laptop size. If you can imagine a modern MacBook where
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of a screen and a thing with a keyboard and trackpad, it’s just got a screen and a screen. We talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John when the Touch Bar came out as the natural evolution of the screen slowly expanding to play a laptop. There was another laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John that actually was released recently from maybe Asus or something. It’s pronounced Asus, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it has like a half a screen. Like if you can imagine a Touch Bar
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s four inches high. Have you seen that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, but yeah, I know what you
⏹️ ▶️ John mean. Yeah, like the expansion of screens on there makes sense for all sorts of reasons and it doesn’t make sense
⏹️ ▶️ John for all sorts of reasons. The natural extension of that is like, just make it all screen, then it’s infinitely
⏹️ ▶️ John configurable. You could use it as a one larger screen with a big seam down the middle if you want. You can use it with the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen that’s on the bottom as like to draw on and then you can look at stuff. There’s all sorts of things you can do. They’ve added into
⏹️ ▶️ John the mix here. And if you want a hardware keyboard, you can just lay the hardware keyboard like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of smart keyboard, lay it on top of the screen. And I’m sure there’s some smarts that let it know the keyboard is laying
⏹️ ▶️ John there and scrunches stuff up and you know. It’s much more interesting because no one has
⏹️ ▶️ John notions that they’re going to be carrying this in their pocket or whipping it open and closing it. It’s just a very
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting laptop. And seeing people ship the sort of one and a half screen laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is exactly what we need people to do. Try things out and see if there
⏹️ ▶️ John is an an arrangement that is actually good. That the half screen laptop sounds like such a mongrel thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but looking at it and looking at the various applications, like it occurred to me
⏹️ ▶️ John that like there’s lots of. I found it appealing. I found it appealing in some ways,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then I also looked at it and said, yeah, but if you can do that, you should just make it all screen. And Microsoft is
⏹️ ▶️ John not the first one to go all screen. I think there’s a couple of PC vendors that have sort of two screen
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops. But then you got the keyboard problem, right? Because no one wants to type on an on-screen keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you could have an external keyboard, and then what are you even doing, right? Finding the sort of, the
⏹️ ▶️ John form factor that everyone agrees is pretty much okay is
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult. We’ve been with the same laptop form factor, basically since the PowerBook,
⏹️ ▶️ John that introduced the form that we currently know as laptop, which is a screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John clamshell, a keyboard that’s shoved back up against the screen, and a pointing device right in front of you in the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the PowerBook design. Before that, laptops didn’t look like that. After that, all laptops look like that. And we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck with it slash enjoying it for many, many decades now. Is double
⏹️ ▶️ John screen the thing that’s gonna replace it? I mean, maybe, especially if Apple keeps going the way it’s going with its keyboards,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you can slap a hardware keyboard on top of it. But I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John someone besides Apple is trying it out because I am not yet convinced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I wonder, like, do we need to replace this? You said, what’s going to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next form factor or the decided on form factor for laptops? And I think we’ve already had it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we solved this problem. We solved the laptop problem. We like laptops. I think the market has proven over and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over again that in this era that we’re seemingly in for the last five to seven years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of just massive, throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks, how many screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can we put on things, how big or small can we make them? There’s been this massive era of experimentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s been going on. But I think overall, I think what the market has actually shown us is, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, laptops are great. We like laptops the way we’ve had them. Just keep evolving them slowly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not trying to make radical changes like getting rid of the entire keyboard and trackpad section. It turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops are great. And so are tablets, and so are phones, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need not necessarily converge. We are fine having multiple devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, all of the, for all the years that, like, you know, you mentioned the PowerBook form factor, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, that did define things for a long time, but the PowerBook form factor was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that much of a massive step over what came before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It was a gradual evolution into this is what laptops are, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole industry kind of consolidated on this one thing of making everything look like Apple’s laptops, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything was fine for a long time. And once we figured that out, we didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep changing everything. We just refined it and made it better. Until the last few years, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started making it worse. But up until the last few years, we just kept making it better. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like we’re so, as an industry, we’re so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco innovation-happy right now in the hardware area, in the form factor area, that we’re just doing a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff, and just throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, seeing what sticks. I feel like everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so quick to try to replicate the success of the smartphone, and then the smaller success of the tablet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re so quick to try to replicate that everywhere we can, because there’s a lot of money to be made if you succeed at it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’re reinventing things that don’t need to be reinvented. The laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great. The laptop is fine. And there are still ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can make the laptop form factor better without dramatically throwing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of stuff about the window like the way these dual screen things do and by getting rid of the keyboard and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we need this. I don’t think the world needs this. I honestly don’t. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the world decides it needs this, it’s gonna be similar to how when tablets came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, a lot of people who were very innovation happy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future obsessed, a lot of people said, oh, well, laptops are dead, computers are dead, everyone’s gonna be using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablets only. And what actually happened is, laptops and computers are fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some people use tablets only, but most people use tablets and laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that might happen, you know, this to me looks more like a fancy tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a fancy laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, to that point though, I feel like the evolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the evolution of laptop is the current what you’re calling tablets as a separate thing. Like the Surface,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, to name just one thing, but even just all of our friends who we know who basically have a weird floppy laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they’re choosing to do that, despite the fact that there are advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John that we often cite for an actual laptop over those weird floppy things. I think kind of the surface design, the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason you see Microsoft Surface around, and the reason you see people using iPads with keyboards,
⏹️ ▶️ John is because that is a potential new iteration of the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a different decision than to screen. It’s basically screening keyboard as separate things where sometimes you just use the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen and the keyboard as an accessory that you can arrange. And it’s a different set of trade-offs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside the operating system, I don’t view that as like, oh, tablet and laptop. I view that as
⏹️ ▶️ John a redefinition of the sort of, or a new form factor for the same job
⏹️ ▶️ John as a laptop with a different set of trade-offs. And it’s one that actually has gained some traction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously it hasn’t replaced laptops, and I would argue that it’s not better than laptops, But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a thing that people use. It’s not a curiosity. Like you’re not shocked if you go out and play and you see someone take out this big floppy
⏹️ ▶️ John foldy thing and whether it’s a Surface or an iPad and start typing on it, right? That
⏹️ ▶️ John has some traction, which makes me think it has some utility. And that, some of the things, the utility
⏹️ ▶️ John that has are also shared by these dual screen things, right? And then you have more flexibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can use it just as a tablet. You can have flexibility about what you use for the other space and how you
⏹️ ▶️ John arrange it and whether it’s a hinge or a stand and you know, like Surface has both of them. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s something there and I’m lumping that in with laptops, despite the fact that we all just call them tablets and in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple world, they run an entirely different operating system. That’s whole big, this is whole big thing. Really it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the thing that I can put in front of me where I can type and look at a screen at the same time in a laptop-y kind of way.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would lump that in there. I don’t see as many people using a dual screen, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s because they don’t like the keyboards, but I feel like the jury’s still out on
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And the point about the laptops, the PowerBook being an evolution of what came before it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in some ways, yeah, cause it’s an unfolding thing with a keyboard and a screen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the diversity of things with keyboards and screens and they fold it like where the hinges
⏹️ ▶️ John were, even the first Apple laptop, the Mac portable was not a clamshell. Many laptops were not
⏹️ ▶️ John clamshell. So even just clamshell, as in where there’s two halves that are the same size with the hinge at the back, That wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John a given for a long time in the PC industry, let alone the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John PowerBook design, which is shoving the keyboard back and having a pointing device. Because there was no pointing devices, which is docile. The entire bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John of the laptops was keyboard, and the top part was screen. There was nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you had, and then when pointing devices came, the PC laptops had a thing where they shoved like a track pad on the
⏹️ ▶️ John side of it. It could have been that track balls back then, if you shoved a track
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ball on the side,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, a track ball on the side of it, it could have been the case that a pointing device along the right or left
⏹️ ▶️ John edge could have been the thing. Because hey, I don’t have a hand coming out of the middle of my belly button. I don’t know about you.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why is the trackpad in the center middle of the thing? How is that the right call versus not having
⏹️ ▶️ John a pointing device on the left or the right side? It seems obvious in retrospect, like, oh, all they did
⏹️ ▶️ John was move the keyboard back and put a pointing device in the middle. But for whatever reason, that was the arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that stuck. And unfortunately, getting back to the experimentation, whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ John something succeeds in the market It doesn’t necessarily reflect whether it’s a good idea. These Microsoft things could fail
⏹️ ▶️ John for the same reasons that Marco outlined in the beginning, because people might not be interested because they run Windows. There’s all sorts of like
⏹️ ▶️ John platform ecosystem, marketing, reputation, historical reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ John a good product can fail and a bad product can succeed. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John PowerBook design is a reasonable compromise and is better than having a pointing device
⏹️ ▶️ John left and right, but there is something to be said about the fact that it was Apple and Apple has a reputation and lots of people copy Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re good at designing, yada yada. In the same way that there are many Microsoft products and designs that
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple did them, we would be going gaga over them, but we’re not going gaga over them because they run Windows and we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like Windows. And Microsoft is not in the power position in the PC industry, and Microsoft is not
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the big players in the phone world. And you know, a million reasons why these things
⏹️ ▶️ John might not succeed to the degree that we, that they quote unquote should or would and under ideal conditions. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, someone needs to try these things out. If only so people with a more viable
⏹️ ▶️ John platform can copy them and be more successful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Eero, Squarespace, and Burrow, and we will see you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, oh it was accidental. John
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. It was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M And T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental. Accidental. They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech
“File a bug”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They finally fixed my bug in 13.2 beta 1. Hooray!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They finally are going to stop corrupting my navigation bar whenever you touch the search bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, can you describe either for me, an iOS developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or preferably for those who are not iOS developers, what was the behavior that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was broken? Alright, so, anyone who’s still on 13.1, you will see this. Open up Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the root screen is a search box. tap the search box, then tap outside of the search box,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then tap something like a playlist or anything, then tap back. You will see in the navigation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar at the top of the screen all of the items start accumulating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They no longer transition, they also no longer work, and that bug will persist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until the app is forced quit and restarted. Cool. Yeah. I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many bug reports a day now that iOS 13.1 is out from people running this. This was a bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all summer during iOS 13.0 betas, this bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not there. This bug was introduced in beta, I forget, two or three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iOS 13.1. So not even the first build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the bug fix update introduced this horrible navigation bar bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it isn’t just overcast. There’s a couple other apps. you will suffer from this bug if you use UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Search Controller in a certain combination of conditions. Where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not auto-hiding and everything. And UI Search Controller, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing for non-developers out there, UI Search Controller is the API that Apple has provided for a number of years now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that I think it was called UI Search Bar Controller or something. This was the rewrite from a few years back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing where when you have a navigation bar at the top of an app, you can integrate a search box into that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the, in the way that when you start, when you tap it, a cancel button appears. Sometimes it moves up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and replaces the contents of the bar with the search box only. So anything, any like title or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icons that were there before it slides up and replaces it. As you scroll, that box might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go away or it might not. These are all configuration options. And then as you type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you get results, It overlays what was on the rest of the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a list of results that you can then tap and get into it. This is all the role of UI Search Controller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This class has been notoriously buggy in iOS, which is why they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep having to rewrite it. And in iOS 13, they rewrote it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in iOS 13, the rewrite actually did fix a lot of previous bugs and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has overall been pretty good, except for this one little thing, but there have been so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many bugs related to this during the beta cycle. So many weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layout problems and other issues with UI Search Controller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and little gaps appearing between the search results in the background and stuff like that, all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of weird stuff we had to deal with this summer with this class because they rewrote the whole thing. And then for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to throw in that middle finger at me at the very last minute with iOS 13.1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then ship it to all their customers. Oh God, it’s been a hard week. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna keep being a hard week. And my solution to this was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I guess I can rewrite the screen to not use a search box anymore. Like that’s ultimately what I want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the search box is just too buggy. It’s just, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t like having to rely on this all the time. I also don’t like how it looks in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current prototype three column mode for iPad and future Mac app. So I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get rid of the search box, but that’s a much bigger job and it’s gonna take time. So in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need the search box to work. And today, the very first beta for iOS 13.2 came out and the bug is fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search box works. So I’m just hoping beyond hope, two things. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, please for the love of God, don’t break it again. And number two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how quickly can you ship this bait to customers as 13.2? Because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am getting so many bug reports every single day from the stupid navigation bar corruption bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, I just can’t wait for this. I hope they actually keep this fixed, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope they actually ship this very, very soon to customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you file a radar on this one? I
⏹️ ▶️ John course not. It’s a waste of time. I was gonna ask if your radar had been updated or if they just suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed it, but you didn’t even file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And that wouldn’t have mattered because my radars never get updated. When I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get over myself and file radars, most of my bugs remain open with no response forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even the ones that are fixed, they won’t ever tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me. You know when we get the people who email us and say, hey, just checking in, just wanted to see if you got
⏹️ ▶️ John my past, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey spam PR thing? Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John yep, yep. I’m doing that with my radars now. So I have a radar for, if I, on
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife’s computer, if I do customize toolbar in Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John to customize the toolbar, Safari immediately beach balls and hangs forever. 100% reproducible. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I filed that as a bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and we did some,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, cyst diagnose and other stuff, and
⏹️ ▶️ John people had some theories, but anyway, I filed it as an official radar. So I’m like, it’s 100% reproducible hang.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was afraid they would go away. I was afraid like some update would come and it would just go away and I wouldn’t be able to reproduce it anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I would have a useless bug report, because I’d be like, does this still happen? No. But every once in a while I’d check.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, I wanted to check to actually customize my toolbar and I totally forgot about it. It’s still there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that bug has not been updated. So I went back to the bug and I said, just so you know, this still happens on
⏹️ ▶️ John insert new versions of all the software that I’m running. And maybe I’ll do that every couple of months, right? Until
⏹️ ▶️ John the bug goes away. So just so you know, this still happens. Did you get my last email?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just checking in to see if you got this bug report. They didn’t even mark it as duplicate. Like that don’t know what happened to mine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh yeah, duplicate and then whatever. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing. No, that’s the thing. Like when they do mark it as duplicate, it used to be that you got no response ever after that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least in, sometime recently they changed it so that you can see the status of the bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s duplicated to. You can’t see like the title or anything about it, but you can see whether the bug is closed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not. So that’s at least nice. But even then, most of my bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally don’t even get that far. they don’t even get a response at all. They just, they literally just stay open forever. And you know, I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could have put tons of time into it. You know, I file lots of things here and there like that are like super,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, like I filed a bunch of AirPlay 2 bugs because I want to support AirPlay 2 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still can’t really do it very well. Um, and you know, so I filed all those got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no response whatsoever. I filed bugs about watch kit and the only time I ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got anything that resulted from it was when I also made a blog post about it. And even then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t get responses to the bugs, just those things might be fixed the next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, never run to the press.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey right? Except it seems to literally always help. Except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it always, always helps. And more importantly, not running to the press seems to not do anything at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have like a bug that I want them to fix. I just want to fix my broken computer because I want to customize my toolbar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t care what the bug is. Like, I’m sure it’s some data bug. I have some file that’s corrupt somewhere. that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. I don’t I don’t care about that. I just I literally want to customize my toolbar in Safari. That’s all I want. If
⏹️ ▶️ John someone says, oh just delete this file and it’ll go away. I haven’t gotten to the point where I’ve deleted everything
⏹️ ▶️ John because you know I don’t want to lose all my settings and preferences and everything but I would love to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to fix it without totally removing every single one of my preferences