347: Not Enough Carrot to Take the Stick
10 Oct 2019macOS Catalina, disposable AirPods, and the bells of Arment county.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Casey's computer and 👽
- Follow-up:
- Where is FaceTime attention correction?
- "Coming this Spring"
- October expectations
- Disposable AirPods
- Catalina
- An aside about Apple's [lack of] API documentation of late
#askatp
- Why can't we family share contacts? (via Dan Stanton)
- Why don't Casey and John join the iPhone Upgrade Program? (via Cameron)
- What non-high-tech tech do we enjoy? (via Phillipp)
- Post-show: 🛎️
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Chapters
- Casey’s Computer Corner
- FaceTime attention correction?
- Shared folders delayed
- Communication limits delayed
- October predictions
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
- AirPods disposability
- Sponsor: Fracture
- macOS Catalina
- Documentation tangent
- macOS Catalina
- Sponsor: Clearbanc
- #askatp: Family contacts
- #askatp: iPhone Upgrade Program
- #askatp: Low-tech favorites
- Ending theme
- The Bells of Arment County 🖼️
Casey’s Computer Corner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what computer are you on right now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The fact that you even have to ask that question is really depressing. Really, really depressing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m on my iMac. I think last we spoke, nothing has changed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regards to the iMac. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still only had it repaired once and then you did a software restore, basically?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so I had it repaired once. I restored from Time Machine. Things got wonky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then last Monday, so not October, what is today? It’s the 9th, so not October
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 7th, but September 30th, I believe it was, I decided I’m just going to nuke everything from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey orbit. What is the genesis of that reference, John? John Greenewald
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re making me so disappointed. I use it, you use it, I’m like, yeah, we’re all on the same page. We all get
⏹️ ▶️ John this reference. But now you’re admitting that you don’t, and of course, Marco doesn’t. Marc Thiessen No, of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Greenewald What
⏹️ ▶️ John is the genesis of that? John Greenewald Aliens, the one with the S, the plural one. The second one, the James
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Greenewald I’ve never seen it. John Greenewald You’ve never seen aliens? Wait, hold on. There are two different movies, one called Alien and one called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Aliens. There sure is. That’s terrible. Are they related?
⏹️ ▶️ John They sure are. Because the first one had one alien and the second one had
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Spoiler alert!
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the plural. That’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right there in the title, Casey. Alien, that’s not terrible. That is classy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That is, before it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Aliens 2, more aliens. Furious 5 and the fate of the furious and fast
⏹️ ▶️ John five and all this ridiculous. We had alien and then it was followed up by aliens, which is a perfect way
⏹️ ▶️ John to amp up the sequel. Well, not being too loud about it. It’s like you get where
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m coming from. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey had alien and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a great movie and you all loved it. Guess what? Aliens also James Cameron. And it’s another rare sequel
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, let’s say, almost as good as the original. Some would say better. Some
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, oh, it’ll never match the original because it’s a different kind of movie. but I think we can all agree it’s a very good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. Totally. Totally. Marco, you and I are going to get right on that, right? That’s our homework you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and me? Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming neither of you have seen the original Alien, the singular one, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s like a 70s movie and that’s, you know, before your time. But Aliens, I think Casey at least would enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John if he’s not too scared.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If anything, I think Casey and I have proven to you, John, over the years, that whether or not a movie was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John nothing to do with whether we’ve seen it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John is we’ve never seen it. You’ve seen a lot of like garbage 90s movies. There’s a higher chance of you seeing it if it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John in your time. Whereas like the classic 70s movies you haven’t seen, but you’ve seen, and you’ve seen no
⏹️ ▶️ John garbage 70s movies, right? And you’ve seen few classic 70s movies, but 90s movies, you’re probably all, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve seen all sorts of trash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when Erin and I were engaged, she was living in Richmond and I was still in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charlottesville. And that meant I had lots of time on my hands with nothing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this was back when Netflix still sent DVDs, and I went on a binge of watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original versions of then-modern films that I really loved. So I watched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original Italian Job. I watched the original Ocean’s Eleven. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John watched the original—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The original Dodgeball. I hope you’re kidding, because if that’s a remake, I’ve got to watch the original right away, but I’m pretty sure you’re full of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I watched the original Gone in 60 Seconds. And I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s my, as we’ve long established, terrible sensibilities, but not a one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was any good at all. Even Italian job had Michael Caine, who I love,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my cocaine, and I absolutely love Michael Caine, and that movie was also terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have seen some things from the 60s and 70s and I did not enjoy them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s okay. So to come back around to my computers, a week ago Monday I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nuked the IMAX from morbid, as we discussed, that’s from the movie Aliens. That’s right, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aliens, not alien. That doesn’t matter. Anyway, it’s from some movie I haven’t seen. So, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since then, knock on my glass desk, it seems to be behaving considerably better than a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few days ago, I was attempting to use my Mac book
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I would start it up either from sleep or rebooting it and it would work for a little bit. And then it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey refuse all input from the mouse and the keyboard. Now, the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was clicking because, mind you, this is one of the, what’s the term for the fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trackpads where it’s all haptic, right? There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a 3D force. Whatever. Yeah, sure. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point is, it’s a mini haptic engine that’s causing the clicking. It’s not an actual physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motion that’s causing the clicking. And it was clicking, which typically indicates that somewhere deep in the software,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something is working. But I couldn’t change focus to a different window. I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do anything with the keyboard. It was just a disaster. And this happened reliably several times in a row. And I thought, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess it’s time to nuke this bad boy from orbit, too. So that’s what I did. I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an internet recovery, which actually, quick aside, works stunningly well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least for me on my very fast internet connection. So if you hit, I’m going to get this wrong, but it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Command Option R. Maybe it’s Command R. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John forget what it is. You got it. Command R is
⏹️ ▶️ John regular recovery. Command Option R is the one where it gets the latest version of the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, and then there’s like command option something else R that gives you the version that came with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the computer, again, off the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, command R does that because it’s just booting from your recovery partition, which probably has not been
⏹️ ▶️ John updated since you installed the original operating system or since it came with the computer. Command R boots off the recovery partition, I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sure, and the command option R is internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and I thought, maybe I’m wrong, it doesn’t really matter, but I thought there was another key modifier that you could do an internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recovery against the version of the OS that your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John with. Oh yeah, there probably is. I don’t know if we presented with you a menu or something. Once you go into the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the option to pull different versions, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so anyway, so I did an internet recovery and this was, I think the day that Catalina came out, it was this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past Monday or something like that. It was shortly after Catalina came out and sure enough, it gave me Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so far it actually seems to be working better, I would say. The iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in particular had a fair bit of cruft within it, but the MacBook, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it had very much cruft, you know, from years and years and years of the same load being brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward with each new computer. But even still, a couple of years on, I feel like the MacBook,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe it’s a placebo, but I feel like the MacBook is operating considerably better now. So my MacBook, and we’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this more later, my MacBook is on Catalina. I have not yet touched Catalina on the iMac. I’m not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure why, except that everyone seems to be up in arms about the thought of upgrading. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be fine, but I’m so scared to touch anything at this point that I figure I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait it out for a little while. But yeah, all seems well in my computing world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least for the time being. And I really am impressed. I really honestly am impressed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with how well the internet recovery worked on the MacBook because I have a gigabit connection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically both directions. And it didn’t take considerably longer than I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have expected. It took about as long as I expected, especially given that it’s a MacBook, which is slow and underpowered, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it worked really, really, really well. And so I think everything’s good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe it or not. I don’t know. We’ll see. you
FaceTime attention correction?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me gentlemen, I did not put this in the show notes, but as soon as one of you did, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of slapped my forehead and realized, oh man, I completely forgot about this. Did FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention correction ship?
⏹️ ▶️ John I check on my phone, but my phone is still not running iOS 13 because I’m a scaredy cat. Why don’t one of you check for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so where would this be? I’m looking in settings. Let me search for FaceTime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s assuming the search is working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s true too.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, don’t search. Just search with your eyeballs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking at the FaceTime portion of settings. I see allows FaceTime to access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri and search, FaceTime on or off, my Apple ID, where I can be reached, my caller ID,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FaceTime live photos, and blocked contacts. And that is it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can verify on 13.2, it’s exactly the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting. So I would say that no, it has not shipped. Where did we come down on this? If I recall correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that this was really cool. And I thought that both of you guys were kind of anti
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention correction. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, very anti
⏹️ ▶️ John for reasons beyond the technical because I just thought it was The wrong thing to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John accomplish I don’t remember what Marcos stance was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine was almost as anti as you basically like It’s a very risky thing to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do because if you do it even slightly wrong it really messes up badly
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was saying like even if you did it perfectly right and perhaps especially if you did it perfectly right Yeah, I’m still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like anyway We’ll add that to the bin of things that didn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ John make it into 13.0 or 13.1 or 13.2. Stay tuned. Brutal.
Shared folders delayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of, one of you has noticed that at apple.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey macOS slash Catalina slash features, we’ll put a link in the show notes, there is a genuinely long list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of features. I didn’t even realize this page was here. A very long list of features that are new in Catalina. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look closely, two of them have little asterisks next to them. One of them is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud Drive folder sharing, which I think I speak for all three of us in saying, we were very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited to have because we could have maybe stopped using Dropbox for sharing audio files between the three of us. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ John excited about that, I was not.
⏹️ ▶️ John not to be excited by iCloud Drive or folder sharing or anything related to it. Craig
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Dobson Well now I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very excited about that, but now I’m thinking, when it comes out, are we going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust it? It has had such a rocky summer. The reason it was delayed, it seemed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that the early betas were really bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like now it’s even, it was so hard apparently to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and get it right that they’re delaying it until next spring. So like, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it does finally come out, are any of us going to trust it? Like how long is it going to take for any of us to trust it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I feel like in this context specifically, so the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three of us are trying to share files amongst ourselves where presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these files will get caught up by time machine on each of our respective computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within an hour of them being generated. I feel like I would be okay with it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I would be too scared, but you never really know what can happen, especially when it comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to iCloud. I haven’t yet been burned by iCloud really badly and I almost wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that shoe is about to drop, especially given the conversation we just had about everything else, my computing life being a little rough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these days. But I don’t know. I feel like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has had themselves burned by this whole beta experience and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one would hope that they have learned their lesson and one would hope that they will not make this mistake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again. But I don’t know. With Apple, especially when it comes to services, can you ever really be confident ever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, a lot of their services do work well, but the ones that don’t they seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to never really fix in a way that earns that earns our trust.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean some of them some of them they’ve they’ve done a good job with. I feel like the the back end for the
⏹️ ▶️ John photos app, we had so many reasons not to trust it and there were bugs in the beginning and people did
⏹️ ▶️ John lose photos and have weird glitches and stuff but but overall at this point I think the photos back
⏹️ ▶️ John end has matured to the point where the vast majority of complaints about photos have nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with the back end and everything to do with the application that through which you use the back end. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the photo back end sinks. And that’s a hard problem. I mean, like, because photos are numerous
⏹️ ▶️ John and large and just ever growing. And, you know, there’s, I don’t think there are as many light users
⏹️ ▶️ John of photos, because I cloud drive, you can put three or four things there. And that’s it, right? Whereas photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you take any photos, presumably, if you continue to live, you will take more photos, and you probably don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John delete your old photos. And so it’s, it’s very, you you know, it’s a larger volume problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John The main reason I put this in the notes is we’ve talked about cloud drive folder sharing being delayed or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re thinking like, Oh, maybe it’s delayed till 13.1 or maybe 13.2 if you don’t be pessimistic.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as Marco already noted, this page from Apple says, coming this spring,
⏹️ ▶️ John which you’ll note is next year, like even by
⏹️ ▶️ John the fall or by the end of the year or in, you know, early
⏹️ ▶️ John next year, I guess spring could be early next year. But as has Marco also noted on Twitter today, this spring
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever you’re saying mid year, whatever could also mean like WWDC. I guess I guess the spring campaign WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, talking about the the main she quote rumor about second half or Q2 and it’s like or like, you know, first half, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, the first half of of the year ends in June. And so like, you know, anything that says, oh, it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, you know, announced by Q1 or Q2, like that could be WBDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Anyway, they’re, they’re giving themselves a lot of time, which is fine. Like, you know, that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s how long it takes, that’s how long it takes. None of us want them to ship this in a broken state. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, take your time and get it done. Hopefully you get it done before, you know, whatever’s after Catalina.
Communication limits delayed
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s one more item here that I hadn’t even recalled, but I saw it on the same feature page, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John communication limits, where it’s kind of like part of the screen time where you can limit who
⏹️ ▶️ John your children can communicate with during certain periods, maybe, or all the time. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when they’re in downtime, they can use the Messages app, but they can only use the Messages app to communicate to you and not
⏹️ ▶️ John to their friends or something like that. That feature is apparently so complicated that it’s also not coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a cool feature, though. I don’t remember them having talked about that at all, when I saw this in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember it, because I’m more attuned to the parental control-y type things, mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ John I, well, I don’t know. I do use screen time, and it’s basically like a
⏹️ ▶️ John bedtime enforcement mechanism, to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey say, just so
⏹️ ▶️ John the kids don’t secret their phones into the bed and stay up until 1 AM texting under the covers. They need to get sleep, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do want their devices to be useful in an emergency. So Apple has all these sort of exceptions where you can carve out,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if they’re stranded on the side of the road, they can always call you, they can message you, they can email you, they can do
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of things, but it’s very difficult to strike the balance between having a device
⏹️ ▶️ John that works in emergencies for everything they could possibly need, maps, so on and so forth, but also that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let them burn too many hours of sleep chatting with friends.
October predictions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Makes sense. Can we pivot ever so slightly? What are your guys’ expectations with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the remainder of this month and an Apple event? Because a week or two ago, I would have said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without question, there’s going to be an Apple event, you know, shortly before Halloween, just like there was last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year. And that is going to be the deal. There’ll be new MacBook Pros. There’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably be a new iPad Pro. We’ll get more details about your beloved Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God rest my soul. And we’ll probably get some of the things that have been promised software-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Photoshop for iPad. But, I don’t know, after seeing this Ming-Chi Kuo rumor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and some of the other talking heads like ourselves have started to pump the brakes a little bit on this, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I’m starting to waffle a bit and wonder, do you guys still think there will be an October event? And if so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you think will be there? And let’s start with Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The rumors are, the latest rumors are basically that new MacBooks with scissor keyboards are coming out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically next year by June. But that is actually, we’ve actually heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumblings of that same thing before with that same schedule. What those rumors didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mention is the rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro. Those rumors were about the other models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of various Apple laptops. The 16-inch is still unknown, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latest rumors of the 16-inch were that it’s coming imminently, that it’s coming this fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly even this month. So as far as I know, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as we’ve heard, rather, that hasn’t changed. So I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe, I’m still holding onto the dream that we’re getting the 16-inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I could really, really use a 16-inch laptop this weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so therefore, it’s gonna be announced next week because I need it this weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So thank you, Marco. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so to answer your question, there is still so much that’s rumored in the pipeline that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like it’s fairly imminent. So things like the little tag tile tracker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that the U1 chip is supposed to help locate. The rumored, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll talk about later maybe, the leaked image of the AirPods with the rubber tips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So some kind of new AirPods model. A rumored cheaper HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was rumored recently. There’s all this different stuff, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not to mention, like, when, maybe when the TV service launches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they’ll want to do something too. Oh, there’s also a rumored Apple TV hardware update as well. So like, there’s all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumored stuff about these kind of like, lower priority products that are all still waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the wings somewhere. And the iPhone event did seem like some stuff was cut out of it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still holding on to hope. I’m not actually hopeful for iPads. iPads seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rumors are all saying next year, and that’s fine. The iPad Pro was just updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one year ago, and they tend to be on a year and a half or so cycle, so that would be totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I still think there is room for a smaller event that would be the 16-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, new HomePod, new AirPods, new Apple TV, maybe something like that, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Tile Tag Tracker thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I started to get doubtful about the iPads after the phone event just
⏹️ ▶️ John had the cheap one. It’s like, why wouldn’t they save that for the iPad event? Oh, maybe there’s not gonna be an iPad event. But it seemed like it
⏹️ ▶️ John was still a thing that they could do. But this new rumor about the next iPad having a,
⏹️ ▶️ John what they keep calling a 3D TOF, or time of flight camera, which is basically a camera
⏹️ ▶️ John that emits stuff, I think it’s light, and tracks how long it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John to bounce off things. This stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I mean, it might be, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if it’s IR, if it’s visible light, if it’s a laser, if it’s, you know, whatever. Anyway, it times
⏹️ ▶️ John how long it takes to hit something and bounce back to it to get like a good, a better depth map
⏹️ ▶️ John for the purposes of AR and all that other stuff. That’s the rumor that the next iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John has that on its rear camera. And also coming along with that rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John is, and it’s coming in the first half of next year. So that I feel like if there’s any foundation at
⏹️ ▶️ John all, kind of squashes any hope of a boring iPad Pro update, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John take the existing iPad Pro, put an A13 in it, you know, that doesn’t seem like it’s gonna happen. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco said, the 16-inch rumors continue to be that this is a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could announce at any time. Obviously, all the rest of the laptops have
⏹️ ▶️ John never really been rumored for imminent release and are probably into the next year. That’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the laptop can carry an October event. Now, what do you have besides the laptop? I think you can have the
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop and like one other thing and it’s fine. I don’t think all the things Marko listed
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna be there. You can have laptop and the tiles, fine, there’s your event. You can have laptop and Apple TV, fine, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your event. You can have the laptop and the earbuds, fine, there’s your event. Because if Apple’s smart, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I don’t know if this is the right PR move, but I think it would make everyone feel better
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to make a very big deal about how great this new laptop is. Now, they don’t have to have sort of any self-flagellation
⏹️ ▶️ John about, oh, we made a bad keyboard, we’re so sorry. But they know that we know that they know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re just like, this is, look at our amazing new laptop. This is the best laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve ever made and we’re really proud of it. They can say all positive things and we’ll get the subtext. The subtext is,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not crap anymore. And you know, actually they have to make it not crap, right? So new keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and one new port, that’s all we ask and we’ll probably get half of that, so.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, yeah, we’re hungry for new laptops. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John tends to make us think when they say like, this is what all our laptops will look like going forward. Presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John this is that moment that we’ve been waiting for for so long. So yeah, I think they just need that laptop and one other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And surely of all the stuff that was possible for release in the September event, one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things should be ready to be announced alongside. Maybe not shipping. I mean, forget about shipping, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you got an event, you can announce stuff. And especially for things like the noise canceling
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods, which I remember thinking about that way back when I’m like, how can you make an air pod noise canceling? But I kept thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of the air pod as like a current air pod. You can’t make the current airport prod noise counseling,
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose, because it doesn’t seal your ear canal. It just kind of rattles around there, which is fine
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re just emitting sound. But if you want to counteract outside sound, you really have a much, you have to have a much more controlled
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of sound chamber. So you got to plug it up. So anyway, the rumors of those things are
⏹️ ▶️ John air pods that look more like, I don’t know what you would call them. Are they they’ll call those in ear? I think they’re just like
⏹️ ▶️ John not quite in ear, but squishy into ear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, they look like power beats, but without the ear hook. Yeah. What do you call that style of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your thing? I you know, they they’re not quite in your monitors because they don’t really seal. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t I don’t actually know what that style. It’s just like it’s a rubber tipped ear
⏹️ ▶️ John earbud. Basically, it used to be the only kind of earbud before. I think they started popular as
⏹️ ▶️ John the kind that don’t actually squish into your ear canal in any way like the AirPods just kind of You know
⏹️ ▶️ John are grasped by the funny little cartilage in your ear and they just hang out there But they don’t shove into your
⏹️ ▶️ John ear hole in any way whatsoever And before that if you had said earbuds you would have thought of something
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks like these AirPods with a little rubbery tip Maybe changeable tips. Maybe that’s too much for Apple. Anyway, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the power beats have changeable tips. It’s really nice actually
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I suppose they have to make the changeable tips because if it’s shoving into your ear canal it’s it’s harder to
⏹️ ▶️ John come up with a one size fits all even harder than it is for the airpod so i suppose it has to be changeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and like this i’m actually i’m really hoping they ship something like that because i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the power beats so i have both power beats and airpods i i don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the airpods frequently because they are not very comfortable on me even with the little like aftermarket silicone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wraps that i put around them like that makes them a little bit better but they’re still not very comfortable on me the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beats which have those changeable rubber tips and they come with three or four sets of them in different sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those fit me very well, but they have the giant ear hook and the giant case to accommodate that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so they’re a much bigger thing that’s harder to pocket. If Apple can make something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s close to AirPods in size and form factor, that can also have a pocketable case like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods do, but that has that rubber tip for a better, more comfortable fit, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am so in on that. I really, really hope they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because you always wanted to use the AirPods, but they don’t quite fit your ears.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So this is another
⏹️ ▶️ John chance for Apple to not fit your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ears. Well, and not only that, but if they have this kind of changeable tip thing, that also means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that even if Apple totally blows it and doesn’t give you multiple tips, other people can probably make them and sell them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because they probably will have one of those little like stick port things on it that all these headphones do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would take two seconds for a third-party manufacturer to design something that could fit it if it’s any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of removable rubber tip.
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⏹️ ▶️ John Can we talk a little bit about this has been going around in another podcast and in our various slacks and I know we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about it in the past, but I want to revisit it again. The idea of oh, I know why it came up because there was a story
⏹️ ▶️ John about how you can get Apple to replace your airpod within the batteries go dead. The idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that air pods are completely sealed and you use them and eventually use them for a certain amount of time and the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer holds a charge. And then what recourse do you have? Because you can’t change the batteries. Apple can’t change the batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just have to essentially either throw them away, buy new ones or get them replaced. And the story, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we should find a link for the show. It’s for this. But the story was like, if you know the magic words to say, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John go into an Apple store and be like, I’ve had these airpods for two years and now they last like 20 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I get a battery service? Can I can I get the battery service for them? and they charge you
⏹️ ▶️ John less than the price of new AirPods and essentially give you new AirPods. Like they don’t actually change your batteries, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not much less than the AirPods, they get to pay $98, and then you get two refurbished
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods, which is cheaper than $160, so maybe go in and say battery service. Obviously if
⏹️ ▶️ John your batteries are crappy within the one year warranty, they’ll just give you new ones for free or whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we find it hard to go see the other options, but anyway, this is renew the debate about, Is this product
⏹️ ▶️ John a good idea? Like, yeah, we all love our AirPods, but it’s another Apple thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John sealed batteries. And unlike some of the other sealed batteries, this literally can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be replaced because it’s just totally glued in there and there’s no way to get it out without destroying the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So once those batteries die, which they inevitably will because lithium ion batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John only last a certain number of cycles and then they’re no good. It seems wasteful
⏹️ ▶️ John to throw them out. Well, I don’t wanna say it seems wasteful. Look, here are the different angles on why it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John One is that it costs you lots of money. You pay $160 and that lasts you 18 months, then you have to pay another $160, and then you get 18 months. That’s not a great treadmill to be on.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are not a cheap product. No one wants to keep paying for that, says
⏹️ ▶️ John the person who buys a new phone for $1,000 every two years. Anyway. Or a new computer for 12 grand every 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. I think you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just 12? Yeah. Yeah, that’s laughable. Well, we’ll see. Boy, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, the, so there’s the, that’s the cost argument. It doesn’t feel good to spend
⏹️ ▶️ John that money. Second is environmental argument. Uh, you buy this thing and you
⏹️ ▶️ John just throw it away and then you buy another one and you throw it away. Um, what’s, is there a third argument? Let’s say you got cost environmental,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, as a right to repair angle. I mean, I feel like you have the right to try to repair that, but they’re assembled in such
⏹️ ▶️ John a way that it’s not going to happen. Uh, I mean, yeah, I think, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John those are the two major angles cost environmentalist is some other thing that I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about them and we talked about it last time. And last
⏹️ ▶️ John time I was, I think where I came down was I would rather have an air pod with a
⏹️ ▶️ John changeable battery on it would be a worse product given the technology that existed
⏹️ ▶️ John at the time, uh, because it would have to be bigger and bulkier and it wouldn’t be as sort of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John lightweight and svelte and perfect and beautiful as the, the air pod is. But
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re on our second generation of earbuds now, and it’s been a few years, and I think it’s worth revisiting the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of these particular harms and how they could be mitigated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have such mixed feelings about this. I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this is an example of consumerism kind of run amok.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I happily spent almost $200 on my AirPods 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with wireless charging case, just two years after I spent 150 bucks or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was on the AirPods 1. I use my AirPods every day. I freaking love these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still think they might be the best Apple product I’ve ever purchased. And if they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made appreciably worse by having say a removable battery, that would make me really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really sad. And that being said, it is bananas that in probably another year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a half or whatever it’s been since I bought this set, I will be buying yet another set of AirPods. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is bananas that the old ones are probably just going to end up in a landfill somewhere. And that’s really, really
⏹️ ▶️ John JS Is it really, really crummy? How crummy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MR. MCMANUS Well, I think it’s really crummy from an environmental perspective. JS But why?
⏹️ ▶️ John MCMANUS Well, because it’s just very wasteful. JS It’s very wasteful as compared to what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, I think it pales in comparison to the other waste that we will generate over that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. How much mass is in an AirPod? And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey how much mass is in
⏹️ ▶️ John every disposable plastic cup you get from a fast food restaurant in a month or whatever? Sure. Like, AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John are very small and very light. Now, there is a manufacturing cost because they’re not just simple plastic. Like, there’s electronics inside
⏹️ ▶️ John them. There’s mining that goes into that. They have a high, they punch above their weight in terms of environmental costs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the bottom line is, they’re very small. There is very little actual mass in these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I think about a replaceable battery from the environmental perspective, it’s like, I mean, like the cost thing
⏹️ ▶️ John aside, from an environmental perspective, if you had to throw out, what percentage of the mass of
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods do you think the battery is? Over 50, surely, right? 60, 70%, 80% of the mass is battery?
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re like, this isn’t wasteful, I’ll just put in a new battery. you’re basically throwing away 80% of the device anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not a particularly environmentally friendly 80% because lithium ion batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John are not great at sitting in a landfill. But mass wise, as
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to almost anything else that we consume and throw out, a wrapper, a waste, packaging,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever from, it’s so small. Every two years you throw out like the equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of 1 18th of a golf ball worth of industrial waste. That’s nothing compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to the amount of crap that the average person throws out. And how many AirPods are there in the world given that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like a $200 wireless earbud that nobody actually really needs?
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, as compared to like anything else that you can imagine, plastic shopping bags before
⏹️ ▶️ John they were banned everywhere, cups, fast food cups, containers, like just
⏹️ ▶️ John all the plastic stuff that comes in the packaging of all the food that we buy, every package thing of strawberries
⏹️ ▶️ John and blueberries or whatever. And yeah, some of that can be recycled and you know, see that depressing,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, what was it? 99% invisible. I forget. Some depressing podcast episode about exactly how grim the recycling situation
⏹️ ▶️ John is. But bottom line is, AirPods are really small. Now, it’s not saying we should throw them out. I’m saying of all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that you should be concerned about waste wise, I feel like you can offset that waste by
⏹️ ▶️ John buying three fewer plastic cups per every two years.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’ve offset most of the plastic. manufacturing and the sort of the microchip
⏹️ ▶️ John part of that or whatever, I can see where, you know, that’s that again it punches above its weight in terms of how much energy
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes to actually create these things and all the mining involved, but it’s still so tiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John so tiny compared to almost anything else. The old laptop that you have, how much more electronics
⏹️ ▶️ John is in an old laptop that you’re no longer using that you maybe didn’t throw away because you remembered how much it cost,
⏹️ ▶️ John but bottom line is you’re going to eventually throw it away if you didn’t sell it immediately because it becomes obsolete.
⏹️ ▶️ John And phones the same deal. Like it’s just, AirPods, environmentally speaking, I’m not saying it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter. I’m saying it is not the top of my list for concern.
⏹️ ▶️ John And furthermore, that replaceable batteries does not really help the environmental story for these.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like lithium ion batteries are not great for the environment because they have a limited number of charge cycles. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when they’re done, we don’t have a good way to dispose of them. Again, a single
⏹️ ▶️ John Nissan Leaf that didn’t come with climate control for the battery to save cost and therefore destroys
⏹️ ▶️ John its battery in like three to five years. How many air pods worth of lithium ion battery
⏹️ ▶️ John cells are in a Nissan Leaf? All of them? All the air pods ever manufactured? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe. And it’s so I don’t I don’t think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good solution to the environmental thing. Even replaceable batteries, although it would make people feel better, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually solve the environmental impact of AirPods, which itself is tiny. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Yeah, you make a really good point. And can we just address that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I drive combustion cars? Because anytime anyone says anything about the environment, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have to address the fact that we drive a car that does not burn or burn electricity, good grief, that does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not use electricity. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John can we just think that’s- Paul Smith It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey incredible mileage. It’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John 1.5 liter four cylinder,
⏹️ ▶️ John aspirated. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin You get a lot better mileage than me. But The thing is, you know, you can what about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your way all the way down when it comes to really anything but particularly the environmental stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am just so tired of hearing what about your car. But anyway, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come back to the actual point, you make a very good point actually that these things in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of mass alone are not big. And even if millions upon millions of them have been produced, well, there’s been millions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and millions of accords produced and we don’t know where all of that scrap metal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ended up And we don’t know where all of the car batteries that have ever been replaced in the history of time have ended up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don’t know where Marcos prior Tesla’s battery pack ended up And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I think you’re right and maybe maybe it’s one of these things that I’m majoring on a minor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I mean, I don’t I’m not really my engine is not really that revved one way or another about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this But for the purposes of this discussion, maybe I’m majoring on a minor when it comes to the air pods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think it is unfortunate that there is no way to keep them going You know, the advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say my car and yours, John, and maybe Marcos is that even when we’re done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with them, in theory, they can continue on in the hands of somebody else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and continue to be used as a car. And then hopefully eventually when they are no longer being used by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone else, they will be, you know, piecemeal taken apart and used in other cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or sold for scrap metal or what have you. But I just, I kind of wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so hard because I kind of wish that I had a computer with a removable battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, so I could easily prolong the life of that computer and do that myself. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, my first Mac laptop had a removable battery, if I’m not mistaken, and it eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swelled and it got replaced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was pretty easy. And I kind of miss those days. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that being said, I freaking love carrying my MacBook Adorable. I freaking love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my AirPods fit in the little change pocket in my jeans. And neither of those things would be true, to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, John, if they were easily serviceable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So the cost angle is the other part of this. Like, let’s set aside the environmental thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like, you know, the environmental thing, we’re stuck due to battery technology, no matter what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does. If they had 100% replaceable batteries, it wouldn’t help the environmental factor. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if they had 100% replaceable batteries, it could definitely, if Apple price is right, help the cost.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because although the battery is over 50% of the mass of AirPods, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not over 50% of the cost, I would imagine. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m overestimating how
⏹️ ▶️ John much the integrated circuits in it cost. But either way, I feel like if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to do the right thing and make people happier with their AirPods that eventually came out with removable batteries,
⏹️ ▶️ John when the batteries died as they definitely will with current lithium-ion technology in a year or
⏹️ ▶️ John two, you know, when they when they get so annoyingly run down, Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ John sell you new batteries for a reasonable price. I don’t know, 50 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe 60 bucks for two of them for a pair like, you know, that’s, I feel like the margins
⏹️ ▶️ John and that would be good given the size of these batteries, right? You know, as Marco would know, you know, how big a lithium-ion
⏹️ ▶️ John battery can you get for one of your weird flashlights? How
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco much mass is in that battery as compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to how much mass is in the Apple ones. I know the Apple ones are odd shape and the Apple, you know, anyway, I feel like there’s plenty of
⏹️ ▶️ John profit margin in that. And you could bring in your AirPods when you buy the new ones and give Apple your old batteries, which
⏹️ ▶️ John they could then, I don’t know, try to recycle. Is there some way to recycle lithium ion batteries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, in general. I mean, I don’t know about these specific ones that they’re using in AirPods, but yes, you can like, you know, extract some stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of lithium ion batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, again, the mass is so small that it may not be economically worthwhile to do that, but it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John right thing to do. And if you get people into your store and they’re willing to, again, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the fictional AirPod with an unscrewable battery stick thingy. Go into the store,
⏹️ ▶️ John give them 60 bucks, give them your old little stick, screw in the new ones. And what you’re actually doing is you’re saving,
⏹️ ▶️ John like once you unscrew the battery part and you realize this is what I’m saving, these two little turds here that weigh
⏹️ ▶️ John like nothing, it’s like yeah, that’s where all the amazing magical smarts are. You could prolong the life
⏹️ ▶️ John of your AirPods until they eventually die from earwax impaction as all AirPods, I presume,
⏹️ ▶️ John will eventually. Just keep shoving them in your ears and they get pushed
⏹️ ▶️ John into that little mesh grill. And anyway, right to repair and right to remove earwax.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to be openable.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like that is a worthy endeavor because it makes a product that people will
⏹️ ▶️ John be more satisfied with. Apple, like, oh, doesn’t Apple, Apple wants you to buy a new $160 one. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple would be fine with you buying very high margin, $60 lithium
⏹️ ▶️ John ion batteries that weigh as much as a bird’s feather every 18 months.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would be better with you buying AirPods every 18 months, but unless they can keep adding new features, that
⏹️ ▶️ John road is harder for Apple to go down to say, every year
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna give you a reason to buy, you know, a brand, or every 18 months, we’re gonna give you an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John real reason why you want to buy a new pair of AirPods. Instead, right now, we have
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy new AirPods if we want to keep using them because the battery ends up lasting 20 minutes and that really just
⏹️ ▶️ John makes them not useful for their intended purpose for most people. So I’m rooting for Apple to get
⏹️ ▶️ John replaceable batteries in their AirPods eventually, but not really for environmental reasons.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about Catalina. We glanced off of this earlier. I told you to recap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from just a little while ago that I do have it on my MacBook Adorable. I do not yet have it on my iMac and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far so good just a few days in. Um, I also wanted to quickly before I pitch to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys and ask what your state of status is, uh, I wanted to say that having just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reformatted to use Windowsism, uh, reformatted both of my computers and started from scratch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Surprisingly refreshing. I feel like the iMac in particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a lot of cruft and garbage and junk on it that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even, couldn’t even keep track of. And I don’t know what about it. Maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, all a placebo, but having this like new, fresh installation, even of Mojave has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey felt really, really good. And I really, really recommend it if you haven’t done this in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’d be curious, Marco, particularly when I stop talking, how you feel about the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of doing that? Because last I’d heard, I thought Marco, you, and maybe John as well, were carrying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically a build that had been migrated from, I don’t know, 15 years ago, carrying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it through all the way to your iMac Pro today. And as a final quick note,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to call attention to Homebrew Bundle, which I wrote a small blog post about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this week, and I’ll link that as well. But Homebrew Bundle is kind of like Bundler for RubyGems, if you’re familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that at all, and basically lets you put together a file that Homebrew will use to look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at to install a whole bunch of software on your computer. And that doesn’t necessarily mean just command line stuff. It can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac App Store stuff. can be gooey stuff, all sorts of different things. And I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that having done this and worked out exactly what I wanted in my my brew file, as they call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it worked out working out exactly what I wanted my brew file for the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and getting it kind of locked in there. It made it that much easier and less daunting to go ahead and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and refresh and reformat my MacBook Adorable, because all I had to do was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run this brew file. I just worked on the week prior and 90% of the stuff I needed was automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installed, which was really, really great. So let me start with Marco two questions. One, are you running Catalina?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if so, where and to are you still carrying around a like 10 or 15 year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old builds for lack of a better term.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in typical style, I’m going to answer your second question first and answer your first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey question later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Second question is, am I still carrying the same installation? Yes. I I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two unique Mac desktop installations during my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using career since 2006. I forget, or since 2004, rather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget when I did the second one, but it’s old. So, like, I did one for a few years, then, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reset it, did a fresh one, but last time I did the fresh one was a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To answer your first question a little bit later, before that, to jump back for a second, your homebrew thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I read this blog post, I was very interested because, as you mentioned, that it doesn’t just install command line stuff. I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curious to learn about how it can also install other apps that are not, you know, that are like in the Mac App Store and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But my concern, or my hesitation before I invest any time into this, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of having a script to set up a fresh installation of Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that idea. I tried making one of those using Homebrew for some of my command line stuff, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, about a year ago. And as has been the case with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most package managers ever, and especially for me with And especially for me with Homebrew,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like if I write the script, get it all working,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I buy a new computer in six months, the chances of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the script still working are extremely low. And the chances that I’m going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mess with it and fix things that have broken in the meantime is almost 100%. And therefore…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Of course you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have a new version of your package manager
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for the new OS. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that before you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it set up. Right, but it’s like, this gets me every time with package manager stuff, and especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Homebrew. Homebrew was so bad about this because they changed stuff so often. Like, I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard time getting excited about this stuff because I don’t need to set up, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I had to set up five computers this week, I would get one of these going, if I didn’t have any kind of other automation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, I would get one of these things going and that’d be great. But for my actual need for it, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is setting up a new computer maybe once or twice a year, it’s so unlikely that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually going to end up saving me time because I have to mess with it the next time I actually have to use it because it breaks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I hear you. I really honestly do. And all I can tell you is that I first started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working on a brew file like a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago when I was at my jobby job, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last jobby job. And I think I did have to make a couple of small changes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I’ve lamented before, homebrew is a blessing and a curse. the error messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is both obnoxious and not very useful. There were a couple of things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I needed to tweak, but it was very, very low impact. For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still had this proof file from 18, 24 months ago and it almost entirely worked as is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I totally sympathize with what you’re saying. You are not wrong, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a lot to these proof files. It’s not like I’m running shell scripts or anything like that, which actually those don’t really change over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. But you get my point, that there’s not a lot of execution that’s happening here. I’m just pointing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Homebrew at a bunch of different either Mac App Store IDs or brew package names
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever the case may be, and it’s just going to fetch them. So there’s so little moving parts in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the brew file. Obviously, there’s a ton of moving parts behind the scenes, but in the brew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file itself, there’s so few moving parts that I’m not too worried about keeping it up-to-date between OS releases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But again, I totally hear what you’re saying, and especially if you’re the kind of person that only does this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once every five years, then this is kind of useless. But for me, I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having this as a tool in my tool belt. So if I get a new 16-inch laptop, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can just run this file, and it will make all my software just get magically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installed in one shot. And Marco, as someone who buys computers as often as I change underwear, this seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like something that might appeal to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You change underwear about once a year?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, I was waiting for that. I was waiting for it. Fair play, fair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play. Yeah, and to be fair, like, while I just said that I hardly ever change over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and start fresh on my main desktop Mac, I usually will start any laptop I get fresh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I usually do buy about one laptop a year. So it’s yeah, I do need this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I need it just infrequently enough like about once a year, maybe twice if it’s a really crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, or maybe every two years if I’m if I’m exercising some self control. But you know, like I need it infrequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough that it usually breaks and it drives me nuts. But anyway, so going back to your original question about Catalina,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not yet installed it. I installed the early betas here and they’re like on second partitions, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not upgraded my main partitions to them. I didn’t even keep up with the betas. I eventually just stopped caring and have just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abandoned those partitions. I haven’t booted into Catalina in months now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because ultimately I, the only reason I wanted to boot into it was to develop for Catalyst or play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with SwiftUI UI live previewing and I quickly learned that A, I wouldn’t have time for either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those things this summer or fall and B, I quickly learned those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things were very, very, very early and had still lots of problems and so I didn’t want to get into it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m mainly looking at Catalina now as a user, not as a developer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as a user, there are so many downsides and removals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and somewhat hostile changes in Catalina.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Such as what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, all the permissions stuff, all the 32-bit apps breaking, all of the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dialogues and exceptions. A lot of stuff has changed under the hood for various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. The new partition thing, which might, who knows what little problems that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might cause for various like scripts and other apps and everything. All the crazy stuff you have to do like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get terminal to work correctly, they changed my shell on me. There’s so many changes that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be little pains in the ass to me that I have to look at the other side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say, all right, what’s the benefit here? What am I getting for this? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s also the risk, by the way, of quality issues. It’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear that Apple has released all the software this fall, not because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s ready, not because it’s good, but because it was time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, I, as a user, I’m not particularly excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to jump into this. I’m scared about it because I know that there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be regressions, there’s going to be feature losses, I’m going to probably have to replace some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old software, or I might not I might even know that very quickly. It might take a while to even realize that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know there’s gonna be some friction involved in getting through all the apps permissions dialogs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting, you know, fixing terminal, all this stuff. Like, I’m gonna have to probably fix my PHP and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nginx setup again using Homebrew to rewrite my entire script again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, this happens with every OS. So, there is a significant cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me as a user. And I look at, well, okay, what am I getting for it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t see it. I’m not motivated at all. I’m not excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to jump into it because it seems like what you’re getting with Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Apple really needs a lot of this stuff. Like, it benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple to remove all this crap and change all this stuff and lock everything down even more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it really benefit me? I’m not sure a lot of it does. And so for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just not enough carrot to take the stick, I guess. Like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not enough good stuff here to motivate me to want to update. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to mention the fact that I’m concerned about quality and so, you know, I will eventually update to it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably, I might last another like, you know, point one or point two, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m sure like, I’m sure whenever the new laptops come out, I’m gonna buy it immediately and so I’ll have Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. But, you know, otherwise, like on my desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not motivated yet to upgrade because there just seems to be not enough upside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s significant possible downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I think the key thing you just said was on my desktop, because the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that I really was enthusiastic about putting Catalina on my MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was Sidecar, which is the Luna Display-esque, you know, use your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad as a secondary display when you’re perhaps away from the house. So as an example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not use it this morning, but this would have been the sort of time I would have. I went to Wegmans, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a local fancy pants grocery store, kind of in the vein of Whole Foods, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was sitting in their little cafe area and I was using both my laptop and my iPad. Now today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just so happened I was doing different things on both, but generally speaking, especially if you have, oh, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, a 12-inch laptop, that would have been the perfect opportunity to use Sidecar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am really excited to use it. I did use it very briefly when I first installed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Catalina just to try it out. the literally five minutes I used it, it seemed to work really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. And so I think if you’re the kind of person who likes having two displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’re, I don’t know, on a great occasion, then maybe you would enjoy Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a laptop. But I think that’s ultimately why I am not in a huge rush
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put it on my iMac. Like, of course, I want the new shiny, but to your point, Marco, on a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, there’s nothing that I can think of off the top of my head that I can point to that makes me say, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what I need Catalina for and I need it for now. It’s my OS and I want it now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m curious how long both of us last before our iMacs, well in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your case, iMac Pro gets Catalina. Any other thoughts before we punt to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think what’s going to finally make me do it is when I want to start playing with Catalyst. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Overcast, I’m finally catching up with some of the stuff I wanted to do this summer. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would still like to do a Catalyst app. I still have a lot of work to do before that’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea, but I’m probably going to do it over the next month or two. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guessing I’m probably going to upgrade, I don’t know, in a month or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. And sitting here now, to the best you’re willing to share, you view Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a Mac app as more important or interesting to you than doing something with SwiftUI?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At this point, yes. I think Catalyst is going to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the next few years a lot less than Swift UI will. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clear, looking at what they’ve done with Catalyst, and what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco considered okay, and what’s some things that seem not okay that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re considering okay. It seems clear to me that Catalyst is not going to be an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area of heavy investment for for Apple. I think the direction they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go is SwiftUI. Because SwiftUI, Catalyst is like, let’s put iPad code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a window and very lightly reskin some parts of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be kind of Mac-like. Whereas SwiftUI is, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let people write higher level code that doesn’t give a lot of the specifics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the operating systems can deal with with these specifics differently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that are native to them. That’s probably the better approach for cross-platform code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it does seem like SwiftUI is like the ultimate plan of where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple wants us to go in the future. And it seems like Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a stopgap. You know, Catalyst is our carbon to the carbon-cocoa divide of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago. And so it will serve survey function, but I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much investment it’s going to get. And it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s going to be the focus of a whole lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excitement or necessarily high quality apps. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s also just, I mean, part of it, it’s still super early. Like everything else they ship this summer, it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ready yet. In a lot of ways, there’s still some pretty annoying limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just like oversights. Like one of the things that a lot of people are facing is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t share purchases and it can’t be the same bundle ID and you can’t like there’s all sorts of like weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff because like there it’s still two separate app stores and so it’s a whole thing. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not excited about catalyst at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I view it simply as a tool like I’m as excited about catalyst as I am about App Store Connect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a tool that I that I you know will have to use to achieve a goal I want, but I’m not excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I hear you. And for the record, I think that that is the correct call. Not that you really need my approval. But I think Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably makes a lot more sense for you than doing something with SwiftUI. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I view them as somewhat related, since both of them to be used properly really do require
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So it makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And SwiftUI, I think, is going to be very important to me in the future. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of want to hold off. My initial plan of SwiftUI was to redo my Watch app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with SwiftUI first, learn it there on that much simpler, smaller canvas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and smaller problem space, and then be able to apply those skills to other stuff in the main app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s probably still what I’m going to do. I haven’t started yet. That’s probably still what I’m going to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even doing the Watch app in SwiftUI, SwiftUI itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still so early and still so, almost everything Apple has done recently, so poorly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco documented and undiscoverable. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as mentioned before, the error messages are comically hostile and it’s still very obtuse in lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ways. I might even wait still on that. SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, has a much more exciting future than Catalyst. In the present,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly, I’m not that excited about either of them. Paul
Documentation tangent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we do a quick tangent, if you don’t mind, and you can just through the magic, yeah, through the magic of editing, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just put this somewhere where it makes sense. How is the documentation so bad this year?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How is this a thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, it’s not just this year. I think it’s worse this year than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in previous years. But almost all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new APIs that Apple has released over the last few years have very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little to no documentation. There are so often that I have to jump into the header file for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something just to see what the heck even the methods and properties do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of that, with Swift not having header files, how do you deal with that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t had to deal with that yet, but that’s going to be an issue. And even the things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t header file based, a lot of the APIs, the documentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, oh, go watch this WBDC session video from three years ago. That’s the only time this was ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And that just grinds my gears so much. It’s so unbelievably frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, Apple says, here, developer, here’s this magical API that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we allege will do exactly what you’ve wanted to do. But you figure it out yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, it’s just so frustrating. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand that it is more important to have a functional API. And you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of going on a tear about about this briefly earlier on Twitter, Marco, and I agree with you. It is more important to have a functional API,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which doesn’t always work these days with Apple, but it is more important to have a functional API than it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfect documentation. But it is genuinely unfortunate and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frustrating, and I would almost go so far as to say unfair, that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is expecting all these developers like you, like me to adopt all these new APIs, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet there is no formal documentation for them. I know that some of the developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal to Apple will put just unbelievably good documentation in their header files.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Look at the collection view header files and how unbelievably good they are with all of the ASCII art that’s in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But is there any good collection view proper documentation on any of this stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t seen much. And a lot of times, it’s like you said, go to the dub dub session and you’ll be fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s just not acceptable. And it makes me wonder if the people who are writing like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CollectionView and some of these other things are taking the time to do this header documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that because something outside of their org is preventing them from doing the real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentation? Is it that the lawyers are holding it up or the people who, maybe it’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey org that writes the documentation, which actually is probably the case, and they’re just behind or slow or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gosh knows what else. But man, what a frustrating and silly self-own, at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I mean, honestly, that’s kind of the story of a lot of the Apple stuff recently. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second ago that it’s probably a separate team that writes the documentation. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems, first of all, that’s probably true. And it seems like that should be an easy thing to scale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, one would think. Because you don’t have to have the engineers who wrote the stuff be the ones who documented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. And it seems like it should be relatively easy to the development of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs, like you can have people who make documentation. You can have people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who make sample code and sample projects. Like that seems like it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to hire totally separate people to do those things. One of the biggest problems that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a developer with Apple’s APIs, in addition to the lack of documentation, is that a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the APIs simply don’t work. And it seems like no one on Apple ever actually tried to use them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is like yet another thing that you would think a similar orthogonal group could do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a group of people at Apple employed who just try to build something with every new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API they make using only the public stuff that developers get to use. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve faced so many problems over the last few years of seeming like I’m the only person who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to build on something or building on an API that’s like two years old and finding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco critical flaws in it where it doesn’t actually work. And it’s like, has anybody actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipped anything, using this API over the last two years, because you can’t. And it seems like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with so much other stuff, they don’t seem to actually be even trying it before they ship it or after they ship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, John, I’m sorry. We got on a tangent, which was my fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So tell me, how do you feel about Catalina?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And how many decades has this Mac Pro been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in existence? Has that build lived?
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, before we get off that tangent, I’m really surprised that Marco would be even considering
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift UI in any form except for the fact that it’s your only option if you want to do like good watch get
⏹️ ▶️ John apps like that’s because Swift UI is it’s not as young as the original Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s close the only reason I say it’s not it’s because the uh the integration with Xcode necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John is much richer than the original Swift had because of the whole like you know real-time updates of the
⏹️ ▶️ John UI and the thing or whatever Swift 1.0 didn’t have that but other than that I would imagine Swift UI is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably going to go through the same sort of tumultuous series of changes that Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 2.0 through 4.0 went through. Hopefully not syntax wise and breaking your
⏹️ ▶️ John code wise, but it’s got a long way to go. Like we see the promise, you know, it probably
⏹️ ▶️ John much more so than with Swift itself. I think we see what Swift UI could
⏹️ ▶️ John bring when it gets more full featured, when the tooling gets even better, when, as you both
⏹️ ▶️ John complained, the error messages get better. And, and by the way, their message, it’s not just a matter of like writing good error messages.
⏹️ ▶️ John Structurally, are things about the way SwiftUI works that’s going to make it very difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John be sensible. And they have to come up with solutions for all of those problems. It’s not just, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t have time to make a good error message. It’s like sort of the tooling around React or any
⏹️ ▶️ John other kind of various event-driven frameworks where things happen
⏹️ ▶️ John asynchronously, where just getting a stack trace tells you nothing. And just getting an error
⏹️ ▶️ John from the point where it occurs tells you nothing about where it originated. because of the nature of the execution
⏹️ ▶️ John model and the fact that it is declarative and not imperative. And you’re not controlling when everything happens. Things just happen in response
⏹️ ▶️ John to things that you declared, but you’re not quite sure what thing you declared caused that thing to happen at that time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a hard problem to solve. So for how long Marco stayed away from Swift, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John really surprised that he’s even looking at Swift UI at all, except when forced, like with the Watch app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That just tells you how bad WatchKit is. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, because it’s an upgrade over just describe a window for me and I’ll put it on the screen for you. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least you get to use two interactive elements and you can like draw things and stuff. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like WatchKit is like that much of a bane of my existence whenever I go near it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate WatchKit so much that I will tolerate learning the new craziness with SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John WatchKit’s that bad. Yeah, and plus you would imagine like, there’s not that many controls on WatchKit and so
⏹️ ▶️ John even with the current limits of SwiftUI, plus or minus the error messages, you’re not going to have that many controls on screen
⏹️ ▶️ John at once. They’re not going to be that complicated. So it feels like it actually is a good fit for a first foray. But then,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll have to change all that code next year and the year after as they break stuff or, not quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John improve, they will improve things. And that will mean your crusty old original Swift UI stuff has to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, that’s okay. I rewrite my watch app every couple of years anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who doesn’t, right? Really quickly, Scott Horn on Twitter just posted, which I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was is very well put. If you can’t properly document your API, the chances are that it works as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intended are slim to none. Documentation forces testing. And I think that’s a very good call.
⏹️ ▶️ John Documentation forces testing. So optimistic.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right. Forces testing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what tells you if your API works? Tests. That’s what tells you your API works. But here’s what documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John does. Documentation, this is why I always press it work and no one ever believes me. So I’m the only person
⏹️ ▶️ John who thinks this. But it is actually right. Writing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey documentation. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John course it is. Everyone else is wrong, John. You’ll agree with me. You’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey say, writing documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John for your API, your code, your library, is a great way
⏹️ ▶️ John to let you know if you have a good API. Because if you find yourself struggling to explain how
⏹️ ▶️ John something works, if you find yourself having to write paragraph after paragraph, including caveats and prerequisites
⏹️ ▶️ John and assumptions and everything, you have a bad API. It may work great, and the tests may all
⏹️ ▶️ John pass. But then you’re like, when it comes time to explain the purpose of this function, explain what
⏹️ ▶️ John arguments it takes and what it returns under what conditions. If you end up writing a choose your own adventure novel
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey underneath that thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? You just discovered that you’re, and that’s why you can’t leave, that your API is bad. You can’t leave this to
⏹️ ▶️ John the end because at the end when you’re all done, like we wrote our API and people are building on it and all our tests
⏹️ ▶️ John passed and it’s awesome and we did performance improvements. Now finally the last step, the cherry on top, I’m gonna go write
⏹️ ▶️ John the docs and you’re like, oh my God, this API is terrible and we have to change this.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There’s no way I can
⏹️ ▶️ John explain to a user how to use this API. Like I’m embarrassed for myself that I have to say these words like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I can do this, but if you pass that and does that, make sure you do this, but don’t call it in this context. And it just like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John God, what have we done? Like it works, but like, so you can’t save the documentation at the end. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to write the docs, maybe not at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle, because you will learn that your
⏹️ ▶️ John API is screwed up through writing the documentation, or someone else will learn and come tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well put. You’re right, I did end up agreeing with you.
macOS Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I’m going to stop talking. Marco is hopefully going to stop talking. Tell us about Catalina.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’m going to tell you about my, you know, so I do upgrade installs on my Mac forever. I
⏹️ ▶️ John am pretty sure that I have files on my Mac that came from classic Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Wow, that’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because remember, you know, my blue and white G3 was purchased with and ran for most of its life
⏹️ ▶️ John classic Mac OS. Eventually it ran Mac OS X, but I installed it on top of my installation of
⏹️ ▶️ John classic Mac OS. So yeah, I’ve just been, I just peeked in my library
⏹️ ▶️ John preferences folder and the oldest file I have in there was last modified in 2003 So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey files that 3D both of
⏹️ ▶️ John your use of the Mac You can know that you know, they’re old files from classic when they the
⏹️ ▶️ John file names don’t have file name extensions That’s a good way to tell Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that that’s what I do
⏹️ ▶️ John and I will continue to do with my installs. Although it’s like transferring
⏹️ ▶️ John to the new Mac Pro is gonna be, I gotta figure out how I can actually connect them with a cable
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not ridiculously slow, because you can like, firewire to thunderbolt to
⏹️ ▶️ John USB to, maybe I’ll just do ethernet, I don’t know. I’ll figure something out, but it’s gonna take a while, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a lot of files.
⏹️ ▶️ John Catalina, obviously I’m not running in on this Mac, because I can’t. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John womp womp. I feel very similar to Marco in
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s not much pulling me into Catalina and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of stuff keeping me away. Aside from bugs, like, oh, I’m afraid the first version will be buggy or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s the whole 32-bit apps going away. I have a lot of 32-bit apps, most of which I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John saying my goodbyes to, like, all right, I’m going to live without you, saying my goodbyes to drag thing, all
⏹️ ▶️ John my games, and Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there’s a lot of stuff, but there’s a couple ones that are really just, I bought a new version of Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John Office because the version of Microsoft Office I had was so old that I don’t know if it was 64-bit or not,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was like, let me just solve that problem. The one that’s really killing me though is Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John CS6. And I checked Photoshop CS6 as soon as I knew that Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ John dropping, it was like two years ago when they made the announcement like, this version will run 32-bit, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John they stopped talking. It’s like, okay, well, the next version won’t. I’m like, well, I have to buy new Photoshop. And I did a little, you know, get in,
⏹️ ▶️ John I launched Photoshop on my Mac and I got info, oh, Photoshop CS6 is a 64-bit process. Everything’s fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I forgot about it and then I redid it. I downloaded like that, Sinclair Software has this Go64
⏹️ ▶️ John application that will just scan your thing for 64-bit applications and, or 32-bit
⏹️ ▶️ John applications. And, you know, Photoshop CS6, it’s a 64-bit application. I’m okay, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I did notice a lot of other 32-bit things with the word Adobe in them. I’m like, I wonder what’s that?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a question I have. I meant to tweet it earlier today. I’d already have the answer by now if I had tweeted it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’ll just, I shouldn’t ask it on the program, but anyway, because I don’t want a million people
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell me, I’ll find out next week. But the question I have is if I upgrade to Catalina,
⏹️ ▶️ John can I even launch CS6 or will I, you know, like is this 64-bit app, presumably it will launch,
⏹️ ▶️ John will it immediately crash because some Adobe utility won’t work or is it like you can launch it, but you can’t use like Bridge
⏹️ ▶️ John or some import functionality that I never use. Like, I’m a very light user of Photoshop,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I do want to have it. I’m accustomed to it. So I don’t, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pay Adobe a monthly or yearly fee for Photoshop because I use it
⏹️ ▶️ John so rarely. Like, I basically use it as like an image resizer,
⏹️ ▶️ John slight modification, you know, like I do, you know, whatever weird t-shirts designs
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re doing, sometimes I do in Photoshop, you know, or mock-ups. Like, I don’t use it that
⏹️ ▶️ John much. It’s not worth it for me to pay even like $5 a month for Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John or the equivalent yearly fee. And you can’t, as far as I know, you can’t buy Photoshop anymore. I bought CS6
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically because it was the last version that wasn’t infected with Creative Cloud, not infected.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m not against that model, I think it’s fine. It just doesn’t fit my use of Photoshop. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John a professional person who makes their living using Photoshop, put it that way. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna upgrade to Canolina, there’s Photoshop. And that’s currently my
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest barrier. That and there’s one application my wife uses for budgeting that she’s saying her goodbyes to
⏹️ ▶️ John and she’s told me before she left on another one of her trips, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade my computer when I’m gone
⏹️ ▶️ John I know that my budgeting application will not be supported anymore and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m auditioning a new one, but until that happens, you can’t upgrade it. So there are a couple of things keeping me away from
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And the main thing pulling me into it is, I’m not really interested in Sidecar,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I am interested in like the new applications, believe it or not, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to watch 4K video if I wanted it, yay, mentoring the modern era. The new version of photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John I spend a lot of time in photos and I’m always hungry for a new version of photos, which tends to be tied to the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John This new version of photos might be good, might be bad, But, you know, any
⏹️ ▶️ John change is an opportunity for things to be better, whereas, you know, just for the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John eh, here’s photos, it’s never gonna get any better until the new version. You know, so I do wanna see that. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John my favorite plugin for doing books, the books that
⏹️ ▶️ John I print, Mimeo, that is not ready for Catalina yet either, so I gotta wait for that update. There’s an update coming
⏹️ ▶️ John soon that will make it work in Catalina. And all the preference, not the preference,
⏹️ ▶️ John the permission dialog stuff, I’m not really too worried about that. It will be annoying, but I’m the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of user that can handle that, assuming I eventually defeat it all and it goes away.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, the iMac hasn’t been upgraded, long way of saying. But I did willingly upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John the laptop, the MacBook Air, because, mostly because I want screen
⏹️ ▶️ John time, because that’s the kids’ quote-unquote homework laptop, but it’s also their bypass of screen
⏹️ ▶️ John time. If they want to watch YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John of the night, can do so on the laptop. So I also I just want to see what
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like. I had a Catalina installed on a separate APFS volumes on in my
⏹️ ▶️ John AUS container on the iMac. So I’d seen Catalina before I’d run a bunch of the betas. I’d looked at it like not like I’m too surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John but I upgraded the MacBook Air to Catalina. So far
⏹️ ▶️ John seems fine. A little bit wonkiness around Apple ID stuff as usual. Like it’s always not a great
⏹️ ▶️ John first run experience. Like you know a bunch of permission dialogs this app wants to do that. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to allow this app to do that? Yeah, blah blah, go through all that thing. Then I go into system preferences and I go to the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID screen that’s got like a red badge on it that’s like, you need to update your Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John settings or something. Like, alright fine whatever enter your Apple ID password, alright fine. Enter your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John password, alright fine. And then it grinds for a really long time and then it’s done grinding
⏹️ ▶️ John okay I guess I’m done but the badge is still on the thing. It’s like closest in preferences. And then later
⏹️ ▶️ John I come back to the computer and it’s like, you need to update your Apple ID settings. I
⏹️ ▶️ John went to the desk like six times. The badge never went away. I kept asking, what do you want from me? What am I,
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to update my Apple ID settings? Then do it. It never did it. I just logged out. I set up the kids’ accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I launched all the stuff and got rid of all the permission dialogues for them. I set up screen time on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, which I’m assuming will work, which is a big assumption because I have to say, these screen
⏹️ ▶️ John time reports for family sharing, like where you can see what your kid’s usage is or whatever across all their devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John How long has that been out now? A year and a half, two years? It has never worked right and continues
⏹️ ▶️ John not to work right. Some devices don’t show up at all, some activity doesn’t show up at all. Sometimes I go into my kid’s screen time
⏹️ ▶️ John report and it’s just blank. There’s like no activity. Activity will appear here once people use their devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh really, once people use their devices, two years later something will show up here? Sometimes it shows up, sometimes I can
⏹️ ▶️ John see one device but not another, like it’s really bad. It’s really, it’s so unreliable. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what am I even getting reports on? You know, like I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything reported from my son’s
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, but I do see his phone sometimes. And it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s one of those features
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like, is this a feature or is this a thing that like might work sometimes, but you know, check back later. Same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, the weird first run bugs in Katalina. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John actually kind of interested in seeing the new music app and having the, all the
⏹️ ▶️ John device stuff in the Finder. Like most of those UI changes and the new applications I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in. The new, is the new version? I think Maps is not the new good version, right? Messages
⏹️ ▶️ John got changed a little bit. Anyway, I am interested in a new OS, but I’m just scared to lose
⏹️ ▶️ John all my stuff and scared to break things. So on the laptop it goes, and you know, I have to say
⏹️ ▶️ John other than my complaints about those weird things, it’s been okay. Like it hasn’t crashed.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems to be running fine. It’s not making the fan spin. I, you know, I did a full time machine back above it and
⏹️ ▶️ John that all seemed to go well. So, you know, I don’t recommend people
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade to Catalina, but it has not been disastrous to me so far.
Sponsor: Clearbanc
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by ClearBank. ClearBank is changing the way entrepreneurs raise money
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#askatp: Family contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ClearBank, stop pitching and get back to doing what you love, growing your business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s bring back Ask ATP. I think because we’ve been just full of stuff to talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve skipped it for the last couple of weeks. And so let’s bring it back. Dan Stanton writes, with the advent of family sharing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking of, why do you think contacts have been ignored? In my mind, contacts in a family should be bucketed just like calendar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entries, yours, mine, and ours. Dan’s wife doesn’t want to see a couple hundred of my work acquaintances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in her address book, but it would be nice if I updated random aunt’s info that my wife got to change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you all experience this issue? Any creative solutions?” Yes, this is a problem that Erin and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I face. Because I’m, I don’t know, like a pack rat of contact information,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have the kind of official contact list of the family, but that causes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin to oftentimes have to ask me, oh, what’s so-and-so’s address? What’s this person’s phone number, what’s this person’s email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey address, and so on, which is fine, but it’s frustrating for both of us. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know of any fix. I would imagine that if you had some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of Google app set up, which we actually do, maybe you could share
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contacts that way, or perhaps I could log Erin into my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gmail account and I could have both of us sharing our contacts with my Gmail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account even if she doesn’t look at my email. But that seems very, I don’t know, kludgy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t have any really good solutions, but Dan, I feel your pain. Marco, I get the feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have not a lot of input here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, we, Tiff and I both have contacts. We occasionally have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask each other like, hey, can you like iMessage me that contact card for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we could get it. But we don’t have so much overlap that it’s a frequent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. But that being said, I would love for Dance for Post Solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here to bucket them as yours, mine, and ours. That would be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We do that with 1Password. We have a 1Password family set up. And so we each have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our own vaults, but we can also put stuff in the shared area that we can both access. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that would be wonderful. But Apple’s not historically great at supporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that families need to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just trying to Google to find out exactly how long ago No iLife is an Island episode of Hypercritical was.
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact same problem again. It occurs to me, like I usually complain about it in the context of photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John but contacts is a perfect opportunity for Apple to work out what are, I was gonna say to
⏹️ ▶️ John be fair, but I was gonna say, what are difficult issues? Like it’s not easy to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way where the UI makes sense to people. It is a difficult interface problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like context, as I’ve complained about in the past, just for a single person, the current
⏹️ ▶️ John siloed version of context, still sometimes doesn’t work for inexplicable reasons. We went through on this
⏹️ ▶️ John show several episode run of trying to figure out with like, context aren’t syncing because the images are the wrong size
⏹️ ▶️ John and it just silently doesn’t sync. And you would never figure that out if you didn’t listen to Weird Tech Podcasts or for
⏹️ ▶️ John us if we didn’t have listeners who knew this weird information and told us that we then broadcast in our Weird Tech podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I kind of understand why they haven’t done the harder thing because they can’t even get the
⏹️ ▶️ John easy thing right all the time, which I find endlessly frustrating. But if and when they tackle
⏹️ ▶️ John this idea, contacts is a perfect place to do it because the data volume is so much lower than photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s just text and some small images. And the number of contacts you have does
⏹️ ▶️ John not, as I mentioned before, grow with essentially without bound like photos does because you just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John keep meeting that many people like you know
⏹️ ▶️ John for yourself maybe if you’re like a salesperson and you want to keep everything on contact they just keep growing but in general people
⏹️ ▶️ John have a much smaller number of contacts than photos it doesn’t grow as fast and the data is really tiny so this would be a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John test bed apple to finally figure out a solution to hey families
⏹️ ▶️ John exist and you know you figure that out and you can make a family and by the way families
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to have two three four copies of grandma’s address. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s got their birthday and someone has the anniversary and someone has the address but you have the old address but you have the new
⏹️ ▶️ John phone number. It’s it’s a nightmare. We all do it. It’s like, which one of our address books has
⏹️ ▶️ John this person’s address and so many things are duplicated. Family perfect. They’re all they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all of our family. It’s not like I just have my parents and my wife just has her parents. We both have both parents right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Common friends. When an address is updated. Now we have to update in both places.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now every time I have to do this thing, like every time I want to contact somebody or mail somebody something in the mail, which you
⏹️ ▶️ John rarely do these days, I have to diff both of them. I have to say, here’s what I have for the address,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what you have for the address, which one was updated more recently and which one looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s more right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s when we mail people things, like we mail Christmas cards every year to a bunch of friends and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like, that’s contact hell. As
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh do you have, what, didn’t they move, what do you have their address?
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the more recent one? Yeah, right, exactly. Well, I updated this more recently, but I don’t know if the address
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey recent, because you don’t have per times the fields and the
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And it’s so bad. And this is the case where it is a regression
⏹️ ▶️ John from the old system, which is you’d have a family address book of this little black book somewhere in your house that you’d write
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s addresses and phone numbers in. And when someone updated their address, you’d update it in one place. And
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple people in the family could pick up that address book. So I feel like we have the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John to solve this problem. Apple has not tackled it, they totally should. And here’s the thing, Dan is asking for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, any creative solutions. There are all sorts of quote unquote creative solutions. I don’t recommend any
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. I know because my parents who apparently still want that old black book
⏹️ ▶️ John have tried so many different things to achieve this because they have almost
⏹️ ▶️ John all the same contacts. They don’t want them to have separate pools of things. They get very frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ John when they have to update it two places or it’s just in one place. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a nightmare. They’ve tried all the terrible things like trying to sync it through some third party service
⏹️ ▶️ John or sharing an Apple ID. Do not do this. Like any way you go off the sort of the way Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John wants you to do things, you’re just asking for more problems and bugs. And even if you can get it to work for some brief moment in time,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will eventually break and you’ll end up with duplicated or lost contacts and just the pain and suffering
⏹️ ▶️ John of using, of sharing an Apple ID but also wanting to have your own separate Apple IDs
⏹️ ▶️ John and then trying to figure out what’s what, it’s not an easy thing for people who are not
⏹️ ▶️ John tech enthusiasts to keep track of and it does eventually break and they can’t fix it and they get even more frustrated so
⏹️ ▶️ John there are creative solutions but I don’t recommend any of them. Please just, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to solve this problem for us. And it’s not that hard to solve and they should do it in context. It’s a great first
⏹️ ▶️ John place to try it so take Dan’s recommendation Apple and do this now. I would prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do photos, because I spend more time interacting with photos than with contacts, but I understand that contacts are easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, if there’s an app in the App Store that does this and does this well, I would love to hear about it. So please tweet
⏹️ ▶️ John are apps that do it well. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Because anytime you’re asking an application to programmatically modify
⏹️ ▶️ John one of your sort of precious data sets, oh, programmatically modify my contacts in response to something
⏹️ ▶️ John else, the potential for danger is big. And again, I’ll endorse the idea that you can update your,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can back up your entire contacts database from within the contacts application. I recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John that. The data, again, the data set is small. You will make a little archive file. Worst case scenario, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can just destroy everything, delete everything, delete it all from iCloud, delete it all from
⏹️ ▶️ John your, just delete, delete, delete, and then restore it with your contacts database. I think it’s lossless. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John had to do it a few times, so I hope it’s lossless. If I’m losing something, I haven’t noticed what I’m losing. But unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, it’s so easy to do that. Make an address book database backup, make five
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, stick them in a little folder, stick those in Dropbox, have them go to Time Machine, have them go to Backblaze, like have a
⏹️ ▶️ John million backups, then start your experimentation and enjoy your life and contact hell as
⏹️ ▶️ John they duplicate and copy all over the place and revert back to old versions and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, also I’d really like to quickly reiterate what Marco said about 1Password. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went to 1Password for families right when that was first announced. And I cannot speak enough good things about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1Password in general, but particularly about families. And it is extremely convenient to have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Marco said, my personal vault, my limitless vault, which is my LLC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a family vault. So things like social security numbers or something like that can go in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family vault, whereas a login to Twitter that Aaron doesn’t ever need can go in my personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vault. And stuff like that is super convenient. And we do the exact same thing as you and Tiff, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot recommend it
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. It’s right there in the name, One Password for Families. And it seems like someone at One Password understands
⏹️ ▶️ John what families do when they live together and exist as a family.
⏹️ ▶️ John March 11, 2011, by the way. No, our life was an island. We’re not at a 10-year anniversary, but we’ll be sure to celebrate that.
#askatp: iPhone Upgrade Program
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cameron writes, Casey and John don’t always upgrade their phones every year. Why not use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPhone upgrade program? For me, a couple of reasons. First of all, it used to be, and I don’t know if this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is true, that you needed to unfreeze your credit in order to join the program, and I’m just too lazy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do that. Secondly, I don’t always buy AppleCare, but as recently discussed on this very program,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am glad I did this year. Third of all, I’m kind of allergic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to having something that I don’t own. I mean, obviously I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own my home outright, but I really try hard not to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a loan of any sort if I can avoid it. And that, to the best of my understanding, is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what this is. Now, last I had looked, it’s not really costing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users of the Upgrade program money. When it first came out, I remember doing the math, and it was within a nickel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of if you were to take the cost of the iPhone plus AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus and add that up, and it turns out if you divide by 24 or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was the exact monthly price. They weren’t like fleecing you or anything with the iPhone upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey program, and I presume that’s still the case. But, I don’t know, I just don’t really like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey owing people money if I can avoid it, and that’s what this feels like to me. So it’s probably not a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logical answer. It’s probably an emotional one, but I’m an emotional being. John is a logical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being. Why aren’t you on the upgrade program, man?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want the control of when I get a new phone and when I don’t. Like having another, as John
⏹️ ▶️ John Rock was another eel, another like sort of payment and contract and thing I have to remember
⏹️ ▶️ John that exists in terms of service. And it’s just so much easier to say like, when I want a new phone, I’ll buy one. When I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want one, I won’t. It’s a much simpler relationship. And as you noted, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a money, even if there was a discount, even if you saved money by doing this, I probably still wouldn’t do it just
⏹️ ▶️ John for the convenience reason. Because who knows when I’m gonna buy a phone again. I have been getting one every two years,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they could come out with a phone that I really don’t like and I would keep my phone for an extra year. And I know you can do that with the upgrade program,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s just one more thing to have sort of running in the background that you have to keep track of. And yeah, it’s not
#askatp: Low-tech favorites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Philip writes, what non-high-tech tech do you like at the moment?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which items have had a nice impact on your lives? Philip continues, for example, I have a nice hairdryer that automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lowers the temperature when it gets hot and that’s just so especially nice. I came up with two answers. One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of cribbing what Philip had said. We recently joined the early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2000s and got electric toothbrushes. One of the nice features about this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they will, obviously they’re shaking and there’s a motor running as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re brushing your teeth, and they will change the RPM or do something so it sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an obvious change in pitch when you need to move to a different section of your mouth, and then it’ll turn itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off after a couple of minutes or whatever it is, when you can be all done. And I really like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Do you think electric toothbrushes were invented in the early 2000s? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My point was a long time ago. My point was a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Aren’t they from like the 50s? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, okay. Well, these
⏹️ ▶️ John ones tell you when you need to move to the next tooth. Exactly. Otherwise, you would
⏹️ ▶️ John just grind that one tooth down to nothing. You’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey well, this part never told me to move. I didn’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do, you guys. I didn’t know what to do. And then the other one, which is probably an even better answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, I don’t know if there’s like a technical name for this. The one that I found that most closely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resembles the one we have is listed as, in all caps, cast iron apple peeler.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it goes on for another 35 minutes with different words and, I don’t know, random
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff to spam the search engine. But anyways, in game, the search engine, what this is is you put an apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a series of three spikes and attached to those spikes is a hand crank.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you crank this apple through like a circular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cutter. And then there’s a thing around the outside that peels the apple at the same side. And in summary, what you end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with is apple slices that are peeled when all you have done is turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a crank for a while. It is magnificent. And this particular one I’m looking at is 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks on Amazon. And I generally follow the Elton Brown school
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of thought, which, you know, you know, don’t have a unit tasker that’s a waste and certainly you can do all this by hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sure, but if your wife makes a phenomenal apple pie as mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does, and you want to make sure that she does that as frequently as possible as I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then one of these is super helpful and it saves a whole ton of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you say it saves time, but speaking of wives, my wife is actually a very fast apple
⏹️ ▶️ John peeler. She’s one of the kids, one of the kitchen skills that I don’t have, which is the, you know, the thing where you cut with
⏹️ ▶️ John a paring knife towards your thumb,
⏹️ ▶️ John to peel things. I, I cannot master that skill. I mean, I can do it, but it’s clumsy
⏹️ ▶️ John and slow and I take off way too much apple. She can do that with any shape thing, potato,
⏹️ ▶️ John apple, or whatever. And this thing goes whizzes right through in two seconds. But you do have to mount
⏹️ ▶️ John it first. And so I would be interested to see an actual competition starting from apple on table
⏹️ ▶️ John between mounting and whizzing and unmounting.
⏹️ ▶️ John going sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep with the little pairing. But yeah, these things are super cool for me because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible at peeling apples. If I had to make an apple pie, I would love to have one of these things. My parents had
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I don’t think we have one. if we do, it’s probably lost somewhere in the house. But yeah, she makes apple
⏹️ ▶️ John pies with her paring knife. But if I had to be involved, I hate
⏹️ ▶️ John peeling oddly shaped things. Yeah, these things are really cool. Plus, they’re fun to watch. If you have kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John get them in the kitchen to watch the little peel go flying off. I think it’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. Marco. I recently did an episode of Dubai Friday, our friend’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful podcast. And I talked all about flashlights, my love of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern LED and lithium battery based flashlights. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will refer people to listen to that episode and specifically I think my two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco favorites right now are both by Phoenix, the PD25 and the LD12. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will put links to both of those in the show notes. The PD25 is a little bit smaller but uses a kind of non-standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of battery type. The LD12 is almost as small, both of them are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar brightness and uses AA’s or the crazy battery that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a AA but is lithium and rechargeable and red. Which off the top of my head I think is a 14500 battery, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, beside that I want to also refer back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that I recently took out of the closet for the season. My beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Patagonia Micro Puff hoodie. We had a very cold couple of mornings here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week, and this is a jacket that weighs less than most hoodies and is warm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to be your only winter jacket if it doesn’t get too cold where you are, and certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by far my most frequently used jacket in the winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Powell Jon, I don’t think I ever got your answer, did I? I think we skipped ahead after you were commenting on my beloved
⏹️ ▶️ John John Williams No, I’m going to, speaking of Margo’s flashlights, I’ve been aware of the
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy flashlight world for, I mean, since the internet exists, I I think that’s where I discovered it, the internet. I think one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, that wasn’t the first webpage, but very soon after
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey webpages became a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John people would have put their cool, you know, their everyday carry, I think that term came later, but people
⏹️ ▶️ John would put their cool little flashlight stuff in there. I’m like, oh, these flashlights are cool, I would love to get this. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John LED technology, it’s lithium ion batteries, they can be small and powerful, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John as LEDs got cheaper or whatever, but that’s where I’ve always run into a problem. Every time Marco recommends
⏹️ ▶️ John these, I’m like, I really want one of these cool flashlights, And then I see the prices and I’m like, I don’t want it that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously I’m not. They’re so expensive compared to like, compared to, you know, a $5 stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap, like especially now you can get cheap LED flashlights for like
⏹️ ▶️ John no money. I want one of the good ones, but I want them to be less money. They’re so expensive. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t bring myself to do it. So I continue to limp along with what I consider to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John series of really terrible flashlights that cost $3 each and they last like three years.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like a dollar a year. It’s like, boy, I’m not gonna live long enough to recoup the cost of these other
⏹️ ▶️ John flashlights. Mostly I use them for morning dog walks when it’s pitch black because I live in New England.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s to be able to see the poop to pick it up. Right, so you need a flashlight, but I wanted it to be a small flashlight so it can be in my pocket
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. So the ones I have now, you know, I get along with. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John would like one of those cool ones. When you put the links in, maybe I’ll look at them again. Are they still like 60 bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 60 bucks is what a good nerd flashlight costs. Yeah, it’s too much. Agreed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they seem to last forever. I started buying good nerd flashlights probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about almost 10 years ago now. I’ve yet to have one die. They’re really good. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built very heavy duty. I figure
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to lose it or break it. I don’t think it’s going to die. I think it’s going to get lost somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John or the kids are going to lose it or I’m going to break it in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’d have to try pretty hard to break these. I’m not saying that you or your kids can’t do it if you’ve really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John tried, but like- They’re very good at breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. Yeah, it would be, you know, it would take, you know, some doing to break one of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Losing it, I think, would be the bigger concern, but yeah, if you are willing to spend 60 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a little flashlight, these are delightful, because it’s delightful, like, first of all, like how heavy duty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just, you know, well-built they are, and also just like, how much light you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of something that is so tiny compared to what we all grew up with. Because the world of LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now higher voltage lithium batteries, it’s really amazing what you can get in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very tiny flashlight.
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole street know exactly where I’m picking up the poop? I don’t need to be that bright.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you don’t have to, there’s a button on it that you select your brightness level. But most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have it on full brightness. But it is nice to occasionally, if I want to, when I’m walking my dog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at night in the winter and I want to scan the poorly lit street ahead of me for like, is there a deer or a raccoon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a cat ahead of me, I wanna know that. Or a skunk, gotta watch for the skunks. Yeah, like I need to know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s nice to amp up the brightness for a minute while you scan around and then turn it back down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you ever, has your dog ever gotten skunked?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’ve dodged that, fortunately. Be glad. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard. All right, so my, what is this, non-tech, non-high-tech
⏹️ ▶️ John product at the moment. I talked about this same thing on another podcast, just like Marco talked about his on another podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John And mine is cheap. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. I do most of the
⏹️ ▶️ John dinner cooking. And so I spend a lot of time cutting things. And the world of fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John knives is very much like the world of fancy flashlights, where you can just go nuts. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more like the world of watches, actually. Because at a certain point, performance characteristics stop being meaningful. And now you’re buying
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, a while back, after a series of knives, I was fine with it. We
⏹️ ▶️ John got a set of knives from a local place near my wife that we got when we were married.
⏹️ ▶️ John We still have that set of knives, so it’s fine. It was cheap. We didn’t have a lot of money. We were married in our early 20s. We got
⏹️ ▶️ John a set of knives, but it’s still sturdy and working, and so good investment.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they weren’t great knives. So I’ve always been looking for a good chef’s knife
⏹️ ▶️ John to replace my wedding knives. maybe 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago or whatever, one of the many nerd cooking shows that I watch, I think it might have been Cook’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Illustrated, I don’t even remember, might have been America’s Test Kitchen, did a thing where they test a bunch of knives
⏹️ ▶️ John and they pick their favorite, and their favorite was this, how do you
⏹️ ▶️ John say this, Victorinox, the Swiss Army Knife Company, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Victorinox Fibrox Pro Chef’s Knife 8-inch. And you can still
⏹️ ▶️ John buy this to this day, and I’m very glad because I don’t want it to be like one of those things where I bought it and then like
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna get a new one in a decade and then no longer make it. I just had that experience with my garbage can, by the way, my garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John can finally broke after like a decade, I’m like, oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t wanna have to shop for a new garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John can, I just want this exact same garbage can again. I did find almost the same garbage can, I bought two of them, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course you did.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this knife, it’s not like a great knife as in terms of like how knives
⏹️ ▶️ John are, how much carbon is in the carbon steel, how fancy is the handle? It is like the most straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ John knife you could ever possibly imagine, probably made of a middling quality of steel.
⏹️ ▶️ John The handle is just cheap textured plastic, and that’s exactly the way I want
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s like the OXO Good Grips of chef knives. It’s $36 on
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon, and we’ve had ours for at least 10 years, probably longer. I just bought
⏹️ ▶️ John a second one out of paranoia. Like the first one was perfectly fine, I didn’t want a second one, because I’m like, I just need to have another
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these. Like, it’s like my main knife. I
⏹️ ▶️ John cut, like every night I cut something with that knife. I use it all the time. I’ve got a knife sharpener,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is again, probably a Kredi knife sharpener. I don’t care, I’ll put my $36 knife into my Kredi automated knife
⏹️ ▶️ John sharpener. I feel perfectly good about that and it’s worked great for 10 years. So if you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a chef’s knife that you’re happy with, maybe you have a chef’s knife that costs $120 that you don’t like because it’s weird
⏹️ ▶️ John and uncomfortable, get this knife. the OXO Good Grips with Chef Knives, and it’s so cheap that you won’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John if you dull it or sharpen it badly or, you know, it gets caught in the garbage disposal
⏹️ ▶️ John and gets bent. It’s 36 bucks. Get this knife. I should make an infomercial like, you can’t afford not to buy this
⏹️ ▶️ John knife. Four and a half stars on Amazon. That is an accurate
⏹️ ▶️ John rating. It is not a fancy knife, and so you will feel good about using it. The only thing I have to say is when I bought the new one, I
⏹️ ▶️ John noticed like the ridge on the cheap handle, like the mold, a cheap molded plastic handle with a textured plastic. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a ridge on it, but apparently that goes away after a while because I looked at my old one and it’s not there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I started using it and eventually it wears down. But yeah, get this knife. It’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Fracture and Clearbank. And we will talk to you next time!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental Accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to to accidental accidental tech
The Bells of Arment County
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Listeners of our show will know that you occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear the ringing of a call bell in the background of our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. It sounds something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s that bell sound I always hear? It’s so weird. I’ve been listening
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for years. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand when that bell sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears. So this bell sound originates with our friend Merlin Mann,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who has a bell like this and would occasionally ring it, accenting a joke or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mostly early on, I heard it mostly on Back to Work. And then of course it has migrated to other shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. And he is the master of these bells.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of mastery of the bells, by the way, this complaint has been voiced by listeners, and I kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of agree with them. You may have different things to say as the performer of the bell. This is your instrument.
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand that you may have your particular techniques, but… Oh, no. Traditionally speaking, a
⏹️ ▶️ John bell of this kind should be rung by tapping and allowed to ring. And people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like it when you mute it after hitting the plunger. Are you doing that on purpose or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just? Yes, because I learned that from Merlin. All right. You know, Merlin used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just ring it fully like that and let it ring out, but then as he developed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the comedic stylings of using the bell, he would have a really quick joke and do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quick little hit and move on. He’s got a fever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s not a cow. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less bell anyway, so a while back around like you know we started the show. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what like twenty thirteen or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey forever yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so yeah, I occasionally I have a whole folder of sound clips that I I’ll occasionally drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in to you know punctuate a joke or be funny or be a reference to something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or or you know delineate sections of the show or else. And forever ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I clipped out a sound effect of Merlin’s bell doing that short bell, that short ring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I used that for a little while here and there. And it was, you know, some clip I stole from back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work for like two seconds. Turns out this was all before 2016 that I would occasionally use that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we developed this joke on the show that I didn’t want to overuse Merlin’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bell because it’s his. I don’t want to like steal or ruin his gag. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I I didn’t want to overuse it. So we kind of came into this pattern that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only would use the bell during, right after John mentions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file systems, either file systems in general, the file system, or a particular file system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and only the first time during a show.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just want to point out that that’s not like a thing that you do sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very consistent. Literally every single time you hear that bell, I have just
⏹️ ▶️ John said something about file systems. So it kind of amazes me that people can listen to the show
⏹️ ▶️ John for years, literally for years, and not pick up, like you always say, how good humans are at pattern
⏹️ ▶️ John matching, and they find patterns when they don’t even exist. This is a definite pattern, intentionally put there
⏹️ ▶️ John very consistently, and yet it doesn’t connect
⏹️ ▶️ John to a lot of people listening. And maybe they’re tuning out because I’m talking about file
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey systems, and they’re not even listening, and then they hear the
⏹️ ▶️ John bell, and it brings them back and they don’t know what I just said, so maybe I’m to blame here. but I’m always,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s why I don’t answer them. Like, and I’m not doing it to be mean, but I don’t wanna explain why the bell is. I want people
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of discover the bell on their own. I mean, now obviously, Marco’s explaining it, and I think that’s fine after 60 years
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been podcasting or whatever the hell it’s been. It’s fine to explain it in the after show where half the people probably won’t listen because
⏹️ ▶️ John those same people probably think that when the show says, now this show is over, they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey well, turn this podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John off. Yeah, pro tip, the show is not over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, before we go any further, I would like to point out that, to the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my recollection, once Marco acquired a physical bell, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco jumping slightly ahead here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I get to, yeah. Yeah. Once Marco acquired a physical bell, I cannot remember a time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that John has mentioned one of the qualifying phrases, file system, APFS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera. I cannot remember a time that John has made mention of one of those things and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has not immediately rang that bell with his hand. It has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreal how consistent he has been over the course of the, I don’t know, two or three years that this bell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. So I was using the sound effect. I would just put it in during editing. I would use the sound effect for the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple years. And because, you know, we talked a lot about, you know, file systems. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, you know, John was known for it. And we got a tip a couple of months before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WWDC 2016 that they were going to announce a new file system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I thought wouldn’t it be funny if I brought a bell into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keynote and rang it when they said file system like during the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and but I didn’t have one so I ordered myself a physical bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured I have to get a physical bell then I have to teach myself how to do the short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ding that I was using the sound effect for the Merlin was doing so So I went on Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ordered a bell, and the one I ordered, unfortunately, had a much higher pitched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound. It was like the wrong note. And what I was trying to do was match the sound effect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d been using exactly. Have it be the exact same bell tone, so that nobody could even tell that I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now using a real one. And in fact, still, people who listen to the livestream are still very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised that it’s a real bell the first time they hear it. That yes, this is actually a real bell that I’m hitting now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since early 2016. But anyway, so I was trying to find exactly Merlin’s bell. First one I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the wrong note. And you can’t really search Amazon listings for what is the frequency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this bell’s ring. You know, none of them really have that information published. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so eventually I just asked Merlin, like, hey, what’s the one that you got? And he sent me this link,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll put it in the show notes and it’s of course, of course this is what Merlin has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is this like gag ring bell for service, like by this brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accoutrements, or Accoutrement, I don’t know, it’s probably French. And it’s like this like gag gift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bell, the kind of thing you’d get like in a Spencer gift. Like this is the bell, all right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I thought, okay, so I ordered that, got it, and sure enough, it was a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco match. I’ve been using that bell ever since. I’ve been bringing this bell everywhere we do a live show. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought it to WBDC like literally four times, or three times. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traveled with it to and from the beach, like anywhere I’m going to where I’m recording this show, I bring this bell.
⏹️ ▶️ John You forgot to, by the way, for the WWDC thing, you forgot to mention the best part of that story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, well, yeah, so I actually did bring the bell into the keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t announce it during the keynote. They did announce it during the State of the Union, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can hear us discuss this on ATP episode 174, titled A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ding in the Room. I can tell you that somebody brought a bell into the State of the Union and didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell anybody, including all the co-hosts that were sitting next to him, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit it real hard, and it was clearly audible in the stream and in the video. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had this bell, been traveling with it all these years. This year, when I brought it back from the beach, it got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all rattly. Like something, here, I’ll show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what happens. You bring anything to the beach, it just destroys it. It’s the salt air. And it’s, yeah, like, it’s just, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has become mechanically wrong with my bell, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so it sounded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right again. It was just all
⏹️ ▶️ John rattling. You have the right to repair that bell. It’s not glued
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I’ve tried, right? So I went back to the original Amazon listing that I bought in 2016, and I ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself two more. I figured, let me get, I’ll get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey spare. Okay, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ll get, because, I mean, one lasted three years with a lot of travel. Let me get two more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can leave one at the beach. That’ll cut out a lot of the travel and have like a travel bell, and that’ll be it, okay. And it was a third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seller. It was all that was selling there, But they arrived a few days later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it wasn’t the blue box novelty ring bell for service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a generic Grafco call bell and instead of sounding like this, it sounds like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is totally the wrong note. Oh no! Oh no! And by a lot too. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s totally wrong. It’s way higher. So I thought, oh god, okay. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I requested a return. I went back to the same listing which still had the picture of, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice blue box one I was looking for. and I went to a different seller that was listed there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I ordered two more from them. And I figured, you know what, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in case this is wrong, these aren’t very expensive. There was another one that was significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more money. It was a whole different seller. It was like, so normally the regular price was $10 each.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The one I was ordering the second time was $14 each, and there was another seller that was selling them for $30 each,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I thought, you know what? Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word. Just in case, these gotta be two different listings, two different companies, maybe this bell is out of production
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re like scalping people for the cost. Fine, I need them, so I ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two of the $14 ones and two of the $30 ones from two different companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All four arrived, all four of them are from a company called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honest Medical or HPMS or the Therapy Connection. The mailing labels are very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar and all four of them are the wrong note. Oh no! They’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same generic Graphco Bell. So I have now three different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sellers that have sold me the same generic Bell. All of them seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be exactly the same company behind them. And now I’m getting into like, oh God, like this is like an Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, right? Like, because this is like, this is the problem with Amazon. Like, there’s so much room for like BS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and arbitrage and scams and counterfeiting and generic stuff. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically this listing has been corrupted by like, you know, this company is entering these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as that item when in fact they are not that item. They are like a generic similar item, but it’s not the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco item that’s listed or pictured, right? You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, speaking of third-party sellers, I had a weird experience with Amazon recently too. I mentioned my garbage can that I wanted to get more
⏹️ ▶️ John of. I’m scouring the internet trying to find the garbage can. Eventually I track it down. Who sells it? Of course, it’s, you know, I found
⏹️ ▶️ John it at Walmart. So I ordered it at Walmart. But I don’t know if any of you have ever ordered online from Walmart.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t know how to deliver you things that you order on the web. They literally don’t know how to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re so bad. It’s like half the time I order stuff from Walmart, I just assume I’ll get an email three days
⏹️ ▶️ John later that says, yeah, that thing you ordered, we don’t actually have that. Nevermind, your order’s canceled. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I also found that on Amazon, similar deal to this bell, sketchy looking listing, third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John sellers, you just send and cross your fingers, right? So a couple days later, what arrives at my house
⏹️ ▶️ John is two gigantic Walmart boxes. They’re brown cardboard boxes with the Walmart name and logo
⏹️ ▶️ John wrapped all around them. It’s like a blue Walmart decorations all over them. And I’m like, good old Walmart.
⏹️ ▶️ John Finally, you know, bank makes an error in your favor. Walmart sent me two garbage cans when I just ordered. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John double checked, I went back to my email receipt. I’m like, yep, I ordered one garbage can and Walmart sent me two. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of makes up for the 800 other times that you canceled my order without sending me anything after waiting three days.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then I also noticed that my little Alexa had a yellow ring on it. And I said, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I already said it, whatever. I said, Alexa, notifications. And it told me that shipment
⏹️ ▶️ John had arrived from Amazon containing a garbage can. Like, I did order
⏹️ ▶️ John one garbage can from Amazon and one from Walmart, but what arrived at my doorstep were two Walmart boxes. So as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I can tell, Amazon sent me a Walmart
⏹️ ▶️ John product. Like, it’s not ambiguous. It is in a Walmart box that is identical
⏹️ ▶️ John to the box from Walmart proper, but they obviously both came from the same place and arrived
⏹️ ▶️ John on the same day. And they’re both from, so like, I order something at Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John and Walmart fulfills it? Like what is going on? The same way that you order a thing from this listening,
⏹️ ▶️ John different sellers for different prices and the same stupid product that’s not that product shows up, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand what’s happening in Amazon or what even is Amazon anymore? Is it just
⏹️ ▶️ John a place where you press a button and then somehow things arrive at your like, how is it’s like going
⏹️ ▶️ John to to Burger King and ordering a quarter pound of a cheese and getting a Big Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? What? I don’t understand it at all. Yeah, I continue your Bell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story. All right. So so I was now in possession of six of the wrong kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bell at various prices from 10 to 30 dollars each.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna you’re gonna corner the market on Bells on incorrect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bells. Yeah, right. And meanwhile, of the three orders I placed so far, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three of them had the same return address and a very similar company name, even though they were all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three from totally differently named Amazon third-party sellers. And so clearly there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these companies who put themselves as lots of listings at lots of different price points, even though it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company. They’re just making all these shell companies, I guess, or fake names, who knows. So I thought, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, you know what? Amazon is killing me here, they’re useless. Meanwhile, I was searching eBay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the brand and everything. I was looking all over the place. Couldn’t find them anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And finally, I found using Google Shopping, there was this other site, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going to name for their protection, there was this other site that had the listing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of exactly the bell I was looking for. It had the picture of the right box and everything. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally. It was $21 each. And I’m like, you know what? I’m getting four of them. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just obviously this is so hard to find. I’m never gonna be able to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them again. It’s like you know John likes you know it’s like John Gruber holding on to his old apple keyboards like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you get you know if I can find this for sale for God’s sake, I’ll buy them all right and never want to have to do this like do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. So I so I buy order four of these bells from this random other site.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They arrive a few days later and I look at the man label And it says, Honest Medical,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Therapy Connection. It’s the exact same company that was sending them from Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was like, you’ve got to be effing kidding
⏹️ ▶️ John me. They have all the bells, obviously. They’ve cornered the market on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bells. Sure enough, I open it up, and it’s the wrong bell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s four of them from the same damn
⏹️ ▶️ John company. They just keep sending you the same bells they sent you before. You return
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey them and get a refund when you order them again
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco from a different thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John send in a lot of bells to this address and they keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them no, but like I still had them all like you know I peak time. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bells in my house, so so because I was like we know waiting for the ups got to come pick up the returns. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you should do a top four and bells top four bells and all the bells are that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly so like so here I am I’m like you got it like no matter what I get no matter it’s like groundhog daily. No matter what I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing shows up. Oh my God, so so and it turns out this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other site I had found was just like an Amazon front site. Like I emailed them all pissed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. I’m like, you know, you, you, I demand a refund. This is not what was pictured. Clearly you’re just reselling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon stuff. They responded not addressing the accusation that they were just an Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shill site, but their return label that they gave me was a PDF of an Amazon return.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, so, you know, clearly, so I fell for one of these arbitrage sites, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to get a refund. Uh, we’ll see. So I’m like, you know, I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, blocked at every turn here. What the heck am I going to do? I went back to Amazon. I went to all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other sellers. There aren’t that many sellers of this Bell listed, but you know, they were all that same company, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different names. There was one company in the list that they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer shipping times than the rest and their listing, like all their info, like that they give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Amazon, like it looked a little bit different than the rest.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, before you get to the end of the story, I wanted say what I would do in this situation when I’m and what I
⏹️ ▶️ John do do when I’m trying to in this exact situation I always try to find if they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John in business the actual manufacturer of the product and I hope to hell that that manufacturer has
⏹️ ▶️ John a website so whoever makes this ring for service novelty Bell for Spencer gifts
⏹️ ▶️ John find the company that makes it go to their website and if they don’t have online
⏹️ ▶️ John ordering at the very least get like the exact part number and start searching based on that rather than trusting
⏹️ ▶️ John the picture. Now, maybe it’s not possible with a novelty bill, but that’s my usual technique, so continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, so, yeah, and I try, but this appears to be no longer produced for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly quite some time. So finally, I found this one seller that looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit different than the rest, and I emailed them, and I’m like, hey, here’s exactly what I’m looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you verify whether this is exactly what you have or whether you have this other thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they responded and they’re like, yes, we actually have the real thing. We only have three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left. Great. I placed an order immediately, not from Amazon, but from their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site directly. I got my bells. What shows up a few days later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is three of the correct bell. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, uh, you know, for whatever price, I think 20 bucks each, whatever it was, 15 bucks each. I finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the correct bell. I have three of them now that work and one of them that doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so finally, I’m going to hoard these for the rest of time, or at least for the rest of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however long ATP runs, I’m going to hoard these bells and now finally I have them. But it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know this is kind of, you know, not a great end to a story, but that I finally got the right thing. But just like, it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of shows like how messed up the whole Amazon ecosystem is that like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get, you know, one company dominating the listings for this thing, selling a counterfeit item
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from all these different names, all these different price points, plus this arbitrage site that was off to the side that was
⏹️ ▶️ John this counterfeiting a garbagy item. It’s like it’s counterfeiting like an Apple product or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s counterfeiting a Spencer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. No, they’re counterfeiting a $10 bell. Oh, God. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I finally have the right thing. And that’s it. That’s my story.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you should save the quote unquote broken one
⏹️ ▶️ John am. Good to have the parts. And I feel like if you have two broken ones, maybe you can make one working
⏹️ ▶️ John one out of it. It’s still interested in exactly how this thing broke. I feel like it could be. I tried to repair by the garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John can, but I have some, if I’m, I tried using crazy glue that worked for like two days
⏹️ ▶️ John as it usually does. I have some mechanical ways I could try to fix it, but I’m saving, I’m saving the body just like
⏹️ ▶️ John my cheese grater so that I can eventually make one whole working garbage can several years now.
⏹️ ▶️ John The garbage can situation was pretty grim because like what I wanted was a garbage can
⏹️ ▶️ John that has a lid where you touch a thing on top of it and the lid opens so I didn’t want a foot
⏹️ ▶️ John press thingy right and where it is in my kitchen it has to open on the narrow
⏹️ ▶️ John side right so it has to be you know wider than it is long it has to be like a rectangle and the hinge has to
⏹️ ▶️ John be on the short side of the rectangle right because that’s that’s just how our garbage can is and where it’s placed and that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to change unless we get our kitchen totally remodeled just try finding a garbage can that’s like that
⏹️ ▶️ John they either all have foot pedals or they’ll open the other way like price was no object materials were
⏹️ ▶️ John almost no object I didn’t care it’s just impossible to find except for my one garbage can that I found
⏹️ ▶️ John almost almost the identical garbage can I found the only difference is that there’s slightly textured plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John in an area where the old plastic used to be smooth which I’m afraid will make it slightly harder to clean that part of it but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not really visible unless you’re right on top of it and you can see that it’s textured so I got two of them and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John keeping them cheese gritters still can’t find any
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of those if anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ever finds like
⏹️ ▶️ John cheese gritter just just buy me one I will pay you for them as long as the prices are reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ John got a $75 spatula that I didn’t buy. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my gosh. But what is the right spatula? I mean, I would have paid $75 for one of the correct
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing is, if you don’t have a working one, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s the spatula.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a working one and it’s no, you know, but the cheese graters, I know that they break and the bells, apparently now you know that they break.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you should be more gentle with your bell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta stop traveling with it. Shoving it into suitcases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a sock in the middle so doesn’t ring.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should get one of those custom fitted cut foam like carrying cases for the bell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah! You can margo this up. How expensive can you make this $10 bill. $150 custom cut pelican