395: Receive Their Honking
10 Sep 2020Hopes and dreams for next week’s event, Epic’s Sign In With Apple problem, and driving lessons from John.
Episode Description:
- Please join ATP in donating to St. Jude
- Pre-show:
- A heartfelt “thank you” from Casey
- Sand running
- Sorry, California
- Follow-up:
- GUI method for deleting APFS snapshots
- Boot Camp Assistant
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /- Carbon Copy Cloner
- Xbox Elite Series 2 trigger adjustment
- Deer apparently are “opportunistic omnivores” (via Matt Harmon)
- Casey’s flashlight mini-review
- Mac Pros and waking from sleep
(1554.40.13.0.0 (iBridge: 18.16.12370.5.1,0))
- Marco’s least-favorite iOS Mail bug is fixed! 🎉
- Apple implementing promised changes to App Reivew
- Wait wait, John got a Finder bug fixed! 🎉
- Surtainly Not: Big Sur menu bar hack
- Apple/Epic update
- GUI method for deleting APFS snapshots
- Apple Event next week
- Game consoles and the future of Apple TV
- Post-show Neutral: John teaches his son to drive
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Chapters
- Casey feels things
- Running follow-up
- Donate to St. Jude 🖼️
- APFS snapshot cleanup
- Xbox Elite follow-up
- Deer dietary corrections 🖼️
- Replicating a Synology
- Sponsor: Bring Back Bronco
- Casey’s flashlight works 🖼️
- Mac Pro sleep follow-up
- State of Big Sur, iOS 14
- iOS 13 Mail bug finally fixed!
- App-review rule-change process
- Surtainly Not 🖼️
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- Crime and punishment
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
- Apple-event expectations 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Neutral: John teaches driving
Casey feels things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I give you a little bit of touchy-feely to start the show and a nice convenient place for you to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it if you so desire? **Matt
⏹️ ▶️ John Stauffer** Sure. Is that like forced touch? What are you talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rob Stauffer I would like to 3D touch you, gentlemen. **Matt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Stauffer** Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God. Rob Stauffer I told, I don’t remember if it was Aaron said it to me or I said it to Aaron,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but when we were debating me quitting my jobby job and being independent, And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my goal was to last until Declan reached kindergarten. Because at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the before times, there would be a kindergarten to go to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to say, like, did he actually reach kindergarten?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, he reached it. He’s not going to it, though. But anyways, he started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey virtual kindergarten on Tuesday. And my first goal for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Casey List World Domination Corporation was to last until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Declan got to kindergarten because at that point, like I said in the before times, the theory was he’d be going to school and although it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that Michaela’s chopped liver, but at the bare minimum, it would be nice if the elder child
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be able to be gone before I had to seek employment, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because at that point, I’m cheating Michaela, which still stinks, but at least I’m not cheating both of them from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time with me. But Tuesday, I made it. So I made it that long. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now the stretch goal of Michaela is what, like two and a half years away, two years away, something like that. So you never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that is a very random way for me to say thank you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone who listens to the show, to anyone who is a member of the show. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will be that sleazeball that turns this into a roundabout pitch and say, atp.fm.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be a great way to continue to keep me home with my kids, which would be lovely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, seriously, it is…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Listen, otherwise Casey’s kids will starve.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They will starve! No, but all kidding aside, it is a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbelievable… I was gonna say achievement, but that sounds too back-patty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an achievement. You are part of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t want to sound gloaty. I just want to sound appreciative that it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the show and other things, not just the show, but a lot the show, that I’ve been able to be home with the family.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s, that’s super awesome. And I think anyone who listens to the show, who patronizes sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ours, who is a member of ours, all of you, you have made my life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better, and I appreciate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mine too. So thanks. Go
⏹️ ▶️ John team. Let’s see if we can’t get that second child, first child treatment and keep Casey, and keep Casey independent
⏹️ ▶️ John through all of his children’s kindergarten.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something tells me that we’re all gonna have things to say about technology for at least the next two and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I hope so. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, all kidding aside, I have a genuine fear that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if it’s better or worse, that I have a genuine fear that one of you is going to just be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m done, either because it’s like a screw you guys or it’s just a, I don’t feel like it anymore. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that’s funny to me though is that that fear is stronger to me than the fear of one of you getting hit by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proverbial bus. Given that we’re all homebound now, I guess that does make sense, but prior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to us all being homebound, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JS Given that we’ve been doing this for like seven years and we’ve never even had an argument
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about anything. MW That’s true. JS Because except for show titles. MW And given that I live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on an island with no buses, like I think we’re mostly in a low risk category right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John MW There’s the sand bus. You could be out there taking a walk on the beach. Sand
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bus comes. You can’t hear it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. You know, this might be destroying your OPSEC, so hopefully I left you a clean edit point. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I was made aware of the sand buses on the island in which you live. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was described to me either via text or verbally, I don’t recall how. And then I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a photograph of it and it turns out, no, holy crap, there is a little, you know, a short bus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in the like, you know, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demeaning way, it’s just physically a short bus. And it’s driving on the sand. I would have expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to be like lifted with like, you know, humongous tires on it or something like that. But no, it looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a regular bus except, you know, a short bus, but a regular short bus just driving up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sand casually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, they are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re, they’re pretty, you know, knobby tires. They’re like, you know, half inflated. So they’re pretty,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, flat to the ground for traction and they are modified to be four by four buses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s wild. That’s super cool though. And yeah, you could get run over by it and it is quieter on the sand, I would assume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than it would be on the pavement. So be careful out there. They’re not that fast
Running follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you’re a runner now, so you can outrun them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the running on sand sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried that a couple times years and years and years ago, because everyone makes it look like it’s so fun and delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m not even talking Baywatch. I’m saying like literally people I’ve seen in person make it look like it’s so delightful and fun. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. Not in my experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s like somebody decided running, running, okay, needed to be made worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Someone said, you know what, this running I’m doing is too enjoyable, because everyone loves running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much, we need to find ways to make it harder. And so some people decided to try to run on sand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is not something I would recommend, and certainly not something I have any interest in doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I did want to take a very quick apology here. Last episode during the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exercising segment, we made a reference to running and how California with its awesome weather is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an easier place to run. This was a terrible time to reference California’s great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weather, because California is going through some terrible stuff right now. It’s really on fire. It’s not in a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place. So we’re sorry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think I piled on with you on that because making fun of the Californian weather is one of my favorite pastimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I feel like a big jerk. Yeah. So my bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree. You did sound like big jerks. I’m glad I didn’t say anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have picked out my favorite listener of the show. 6668
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guy. James Neil, who donated $6,668 to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. You are, bar none, my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listener of this show. And thank you, James, for doing the service that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of us, but really me, needed so badly, which was moving me off of the leaderboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the St. Jude website. James, just yesterday, as we communicated via email,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just yesterday, not one, but a veritable handful of ATP stickers was dispatched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in our failing United States Postal Service to send to you. And so I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to publicly thank James Neal, my favorite ATP listener, for buying my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love 6,668 times by donating to St. Jude.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by knocking KC star Aaron Liss off the top of the list. After only about a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, it really wasn’t that long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was not long at all. And you know what? If you’re going to troll somebody, you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to to do it, you’ve got to do it the way James did. You’ve done good by donating a genuinely extraordinary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pile of money to what I believe to be a really great charity, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hospital and all that. And beyond that, the message was James Neal star, or asterisk, I should say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re welcome, Casey. Just masterfully done from top to bottom. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And an extra thanks for all of our members, or all of our listeners who donated to St. Jude,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which Casey’s probably about to resell you all on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra thanks for all of not only for donating to this amazing cause, but also for the hilarious Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that so many of you did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your name and description fields. So many people were like, you know, name star, other name,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like Casey, like where the A was made of stars, like, oh, it was glorious. It was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s so great to be able to laugh so much at Casey’s expense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this thing that is a really good cause, and that is actually resulting in, you know, meaningful amounts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money being donated to a really, really good cause. So thank you all for both the goodness that came of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and also the amazing trolling of Casey in the process. I was laughing my butt off that whole next day reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am happy to be trolled in this way. Additionally, I am really perturbed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I swear to you, I looked and quickly proofread the form where I did Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ampersand Aaron list, but there have been ampersands all over these different names. So I gotta be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong. I gotta be wrong. As many people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody has proven that it does accept ampersands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I must have fat-fingered it. I swear I looked at, I mean, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not debating. I must be wrong, but my lived reality, let’s talk politics now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My lived reality is that I swear I looked at that ampersand, but I guess not.
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right. So anyway, so what are we talking about? So in September it is National
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cancer, is it National or Worldwide? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. It’s Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and so RelayFM and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey associated people like us are trying to raise a whole pile of money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude is a hospital where they treat all sorts of things for particularly childhood cancers and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do so for free in the sense that they do not charge the families just not even a cent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s such an incredible thing and it’s such an incredible place and it’s near and dear to all of our hearts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in many, many, many ways, but in no small part because our dear friend Stephen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hackett, his eldest son, his life was saved by St. Jude, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean that literally. And that’s really incredible and really phenomenal. And if I have to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trolled a little bit every September to try to pay that back, it’s well worth it to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if possible, please go to stjude.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and throw a few bucks their way. It would be great if you could throw $5, $10, $15, $100, $1,000, $10,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever you have. That’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever you have would be great. Again, I’m doing the easy sell. Hopefully, Marco will do the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean sell here in a second. But any amount of money you can donate to this cause is really great and we’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very hard during the month of September to raise money for St. Jude. So stjude.org.atp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In addition, by the way, before I forget, live listener Weed Mountain in the chat has an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea. They say, I think someone should do $6,669 as Casey Starr Aaron List.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just going to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so James Neil
⏹️ ▶️ John is at the top of the leaderboard now, but that That doesn’t mean you can’t beat him, person who’s listening now, who
⏹️ ▶️ John has this much money who wants to give.
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do $1 more, then you’re the top of the leaderboard. And yes, Casey will send you stickers because I’m volunteering him to
⏹️ ▶️ John Every person who reaches the top of the leaderboard will get stickers until Casey has no more stickers left, and then he’ll order more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order more stickers if there’s actually so many people who do this that
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a freaking question about James Neal, by the way. I don’t want to reveal anything because I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know anything about James Neal other than what he entered in the form, which is James
⏹️ ▶️ John asterisk space you’re welcome kamikaze um lots of people have been asking is this the famous
⏹️ ▶️ John uh hockey player i don’t know if it makes you feel better to think it is sure why not
⏹️ ▶️ John i don’t know maybe i
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not think so but i don’t know yeah it
⏹️ ▶️ John could be but maybe not i don’t know anyway if you want to beat James Neal whether or not he’s a professional
⏹️ ▶️ John hockey player six thousand six hundred and sixty nine dollars that’s all it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you too you can put whatever you want to say up there until someone else donates one more dollar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we turning this into Bodie McBoatface all over again?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, if it’s if it keeps raising this much money,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think it’s worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so it’s great that James Neal did this, but statistically speaking, there’s got to be
⏹️ ▶️ John more people who listen to the show who who can afford to give that much to St. Jude and it just feels like too much
⏹️ ▶️ John to do for a stupid podcast prank, but I’m here to tell you it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it isn’t, you know, it’s not like you’re donating money like into the air, like you’re giving it to this amazing cause.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is this is incredible. And I will I will repeat my sales pitch slightly from last week. In summary,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are all, many of us who listen to this show, about to spend stupid amounts of money on Apple hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t really need because it’s that season. And so if you’re lucky enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to set money on fire every fall to upgrade a one to three year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old computing device that still works fine but there’s just a new flashy one that you just want more, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to have the camera for my kids. Like, you know, whatever your excuse is, We all know that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly a purchase because we like these things and they’re nice, not necessarily out of need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least we don’t need them as much as we say we do or as frequently as we actually upgrade them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you fall into that camp, if you are lucky enough to be able to get all these fun gadgets in a less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needful way, you can probably also afford to drop a nice donation to St.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jude on the order of like 50, 100 bucks, something like that, more if you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re not in the setting money on fire kind of capability range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure you can at least give them like 50 bucks, 100 bucks. So please give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you can and thank you very much.
APFS snapshot cleanup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. We have a lot to go through, but I’m sure it’ll be quick, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about, John, a GUI for APFS snapshots, if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was Ask ATP last week where someone was asking about how to get that space back that’s being taken
⏹️ ▶️ John up by snapshots. And I was saying you can use the tmutil command line, but it’s kind of fidgety and maybe you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to delve into that. And it would be nice if the OS had a GUI for it. We had two main suggestions for how to solve this
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. One was the boot camp assistant, like the little app that comes with your Mac that you run
⏹️ ▶️ John to essentially set up boot camp on your Mac as part of the process where it like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know makes a new partition where it’s gonna install Windows or whatever it first apparently purges all
⏹️ ▶️ John snapshots just to like free up space and everything so some people saying hey if you just want to clear
⏹️ ▶️ John the snapshots just run boot camp assistant I suppose that would work but I’m a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John leery of going through the process of boot camp assistant and being confident that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not like hitting the next button in the little wizard like one time too far because I don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John want to install bootcamp on my main drive. And so just using it for the side effect of cleaning
⏹️ ▶️ John snapshots seems not great to me. But anyway, that is an option if you like that better. Second
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that was suggested is Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a great disk cloning program that I own and
⏹️ ▶️ John use for various purposes. Lots of people said that had a GUI for snapshots. It does have
⏹️ ▶️ John a GUI for snapshots, but it shows no snapshots from my disk, whereas tmutil list local
⏹️ ▶️ John snapshots shows seven snapshots. So there’s some disparity between what that GUI shows and what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John actually there. It may just be showing the snapshots that you make with Carbon Copy Cloner because it can do a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of APFS snapshot stuff, it’s very cool, but it doesn’t, it seems like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a general purpose GUI for removing snapshots, because like I said, it didn’t show any, but I know I have some because I can
⏹️ ▶️ John listen from the command line tool. So that’s all I’ve got so far, but I just didn’t want to list those because many, many people wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John in to tell me about them.
Xbox Elite follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then tell me about the Xbox elite series 2 if you please
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s super expensive controller that I talked about as part of our sponsorship last week a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that I forgot to mention one I was talking about the trigger activation point like how it’s good that you don’t Have to pull
⏹️ ▶️ John the triggers as far but it feels kind of bad because they hit these stops, right? So you have to decide between a good trigger feel and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know faster reaction time Another option that I saw and I was setting it up But decided not to go with is the
⏹️ ▶️ John software that you use to configure these Oh, it’s Windows software. So I was in Windows when I was doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s where I’m playing destiny. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can set a
⏹️ ▶️ John trigger activation point in software so you can leave the triggers on their full throw,
⏹️ ▶️ John but tell it to activate when you just push them down 10% which seems like all that gives
⏹️ ▶️ John you the best of all worlds. Now it’s the good trigger feel and also it activates immediately. But to me that just felt weird
⏹️ ▶️ John to have sort of a hair trigger like the trigger has this huge amount of travel, the only the first 10%
⏹️ ▶️ John of it counts then after that it’s just wasted so I decided not to do it go with that but if you want to it’s an option
⏹️ ▶️ John also a lot of people asked about reliability of these controllers obviously I just got it so I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John what the reliability is but I have heard from a lot of people who had the original lead and the series to
⏹️ ▶️ John that surprising amount of issues with switches going bad after a short period of time always
⏹️ ▶️ John after the warranty runs out because apparently the warranty is not very long but a shorter period of time than you would think. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes me think about like, I don’t know if I don’t, I’ve never owned a luxury car, so I don’t know if this is true
⏹️ ▶️ John of luxury cars, like the idea that if you’re going to make, you know, hundreds of thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of a thing and you’re going to sell it for years and years, you can afford to do a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of sorts of reliability testing. Whereas if you’re going to sell a hundred of them, maybe you didn’t test every single
⏹️ ▶️ John little part of it so that it’s completely durable. So like if you get some kind of boutique car that they only make a hundred
⏹️ ▶️ John of, it could end up being significantly less reliable than a Honda Civic that they are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make thousands and thousands of. And I think it might be the same way with console controllers, where
⏹️ ▶️ John the controller that comes with your PlayStation or Xbox has been tested to death
⏹️ ▶️ John because they know they’re going to ship thousands and thousands of those. It’s not the world’s greatest controller. It’s not super expensive. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John metal and magnetic and you know, have all these fancy features, right? But it is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John well tested and whatever those durability testing machines so that it’s not going to go bad. That’s why you don’t hear about,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, don’t get the Xbox because the controller goes bad after a year. People buy Xboxes and they use the controllers for years and years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re fine. Yes, all controllers can eventually break and if you spill water on them you have problems and so on and so forth, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty durable. But this boutique $180 controller apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they didn’t do enough durability testing or it wasn’t, you know, monetarily worthwhile for them
⏹️ ▶️ John to do enough durability testing, but it seems to have worse reliability than the super cheap controllers. That’s one possibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other possibility is that every time it breaks, someone wails out so loud the whole internet hears them because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on a controller
⏹️ ▶️ John and something broke on it. So it could be magnified by that. And the final thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of people recommended the PS four back button attachment, which lets you put like paddles on the underside of a PS four
⏹️ ▶️ John controller. I had been watching that thing when it came out, but I didn’t decide to buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I said, you know what, I should just get that like months and months ago. I figured I should just get that. I should try it. But then they were out of stock everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if Sony just stopped making it or whatever, but I did manage to find one thanks to a listener who
⏹️ ▶️ John gave me an inside connection to get one of these, so I have the PS4 back button on its way to me and I will let you know how
⏹️ ▶️ John that is when I get it.
Deer dietary corrections
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last week, I somehow allowed you two jerks to force me to talk about my culinary habits,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I had talked about this particular kind of rice-a-roni that I make occasionally, and we’ll talk about that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a second, but in the process, I was telling a story about how I came from a family wherein mom made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a meatloaf once and she threw it out in the backwoods in Connecticut, and we had tons of deer there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time, and it never got eaten after like a week. And then you guys very rightfully pointed out, well, wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t deer herbivores? And that never crossed my mind before. And then Matt Harmon saved the day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and wrote in to say, I’ll save you guys some videos of deer eating birds, but they’re technically opportunistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Yeah, and I should have known this because where we live,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a huge problem of deer eating people’s trash. And they don’t just eat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the plants out of the trash. They’ll eat many kind of foods in there. They’ll eat pretty much any food they find.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I guess I should have known that, but didn’t. Sorry to all the deer out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who I misstated your food preferences for.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited to see a video of a deer leaping through the air and biting a bird out of the air. I mean, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they eat them after they’re already dead. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know if they, I’ve never considered them as like hunters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of other animals, but yeah, maybe I don’t want to see that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Either way. And then with regard to the rice roni, I only got a little bit of feedback. Thank you listeners genuinely for not lighting me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up about this. There were a couple of very angry people about this rice-a-roni thing. Let me just make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it clear. This happens like two, maybe four times a year. This is not like a weekly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rice-a-roni night. So everyone don’t worry. Aaron cooks us nice, nutritious meals pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much all the time. I would, if I wasn’t a disaster in the kitchen, obviously, because I’m cooking rice-a-roni when I’m cooking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, we’re okay. We’re not going to keel over and die. I promise. Bye.
Replicating a Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a request for help with regard to replicating a Synology from one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place to another. A lot of people wrote in to tell us a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things. Thomas Barak was the first person or perhaps the best summary I saw. And Thomas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote, hi, Hyper Backup is the client. Hyper Backup Vault is the server.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as with Apple TV, Apple TV+, Apple TV, the app, Apple TV, the hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all these things, like I feel like the Synology naming convention is truly terrible. But again, hyper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup is the client. Hyper backup vault is the server. Thomas continues, put the vault in the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at your parents’ house. This is the one that was going to receive the backup. And use hyper backup to copy your entire Synology. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is better than a sync. If you delete a file in your Synology and you’re syncing, it gets deleted on the synced machine. A regular backup allows you to go back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in time and get files that are no longer on your home Synology. Hyper backup can do incremental backups, so the first one is the longest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have not yet tried that, because my parents’ internet connection is still wonky for reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can get into in the post show if you care. but you probably don’t. And then finally, Evan J. was the first I saw, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many, many people wrote in with a video from Linus Tech Tips, which I’d heard of but never seen before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there was an episode where, I think it was a sponsored episode if I’m honest. But nevertheless, they talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about setting up a technology. And they very briefly ran through how to set up Hyper Backup and Hyper Backup Vault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was very convenient for me to watch. So thank you for all of you who wrote in with regard to that.
Sponsor: Bring Back Bronco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by a new podcast called Bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Back Bronco, the Untold Story. This is the story of a truck and the story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a country. The rise, fall, and rebirth of the Ford Bronco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a metaphor for the last 50 years in America. The Ford Bronco is one of the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beloved brands in American automotive history, but when the last Bronco rolled off the assembly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line in Wayne, Michigan on June 12, 1996, is the end of the brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the start of a lot of questions. This 8-part serial podcast is a 50-year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco odyssey of blood, sweat, and dirt, taking you from the dizzying heights of the post-war boom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the most watched police chase in American television history and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year’s rebirth of the Bronco. Host Sonari Glinton goes on the road trip of a lifetime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find out why Ford killed the Bronco and meets the passionate fans and team of Ford employees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who went underground to bring it back. Season 1 digs into questions that tell us about as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about America as it does about this iconic vehicle. The OJ Simpson chase, see I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reference, happened more than 25 years ago, and yet there are still a lot of questions about its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impact. For the first time ever, they will take you inside Ford to discover what was happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that night. Inside a Ford factory, inside the Ford call center, and inside the chairman’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco office. And almost as soon as the last Bronco rolled off the line, people began scheming for it to return.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco From fans in the hills of East Tennessee to renegade employees within Ford, they followed the desperate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attempts to revive the brand. So join Bring Back Bronco as they go inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ford’s most secretive building, Studio S. This creative laboratory gave birth to the Thunderbird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mustang, and even the original Bronco. Inside, designers struggle to turn the the Bronco mythology into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality. So search for Bring Back Bronco anywhere you listen to podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We will also include a link in the show notes. So once again, Bring Back Bronco, this great new podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the rise, fall, and rebirth of the Ford Bronco. Our Our thanks to Bring Back Bronco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
Casey’s flashlight works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I took my fancy pants flashlight, Marco, and I took it into a big long tunnel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, how did it go?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It went very well, actually. I appreciate the suggestion. It occurred to me that in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the privilege of touring the tunnel before it opens, I donated the princely sum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of $100 to this foundation in order—I mean, $100 is a lot of money, but I mean, in the grand scheme of things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not that much. So anyway, I donate $100 to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charity thing, to the Blue Ridge Tunnel Foundation, in order to help them turn this into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a park sort of thing. And then it occurred to me earlier today, I spent $100 for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the privilege of going in and what, $70, $80 on the stupid flashlight in order to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it through the tunnel? I mean, I’ll use the flashlight other times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I believe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John about $70, yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it was funny to me that it was almost the entire cost of the trip, if you will, to go and see this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, the Blue Ridge Tunnel, I’ll put a link in the show notes, I think we talked about it briefly a few episodes ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suffice it to say, it’s a nearly mile-long tunnel that was dug in the mid-1800s, and it was dug from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each direction toward the center, and when they met, they were like six inches off or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, I think it was even better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that. It was like a quarter of an inch or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever it was, it was preposterous. And so I did tour it. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first hundred or so meters slash yards were a little creepy, I’m not going to lie,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the flashlight worked well. It was plenty bright, even on the high but not turbo setting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And once I got through the first 100 yards or so, I felt like, oh, actually, this is just cool. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not creepy at all. And again, I’m very glad I had the flashlight. The turbo setting, which is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it’s like 1,100 lumens or something like that and can only last for a couple of minutes, that thing’s bright, man. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is super bright. I wish it could go more than two minutes, but it gets seriously hot. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember if I ever talked about it on the show, but if you shine the flashlight against your hand, you know, with like a couple inch gap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the flashlight and your hand. In the turbo mode, which is this, you know, 1100 lumen mode, your hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starts to hurt from the heat after just like five or 10 seconds. It’s preposterous how much heat that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing throws when it’s in the turbo mode. So again, I appreciate the recommendation. We’ll put a link in the show notes if you care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the flashlight worked out super well. And if you happen to live in West Central,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, Virginia, over in the Waynesboro area, supposedly sometime in the next couple of months the Blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ridge Tunnel will be open to the public and I highly, highly, highly recommended. It was an extremely cool experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you should check that out.
Mac Pro sleep follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me, John, about other people who have similar woes as you with regard to their beloved
⏹️ ▶️ John This is Jan Halsman who says that he experienced the same Mac Pro problems as me, and he went through
⏹️ ▶️ John the same things as me, SMC reset, NVRAM, or whatever, and he just gave up. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, well, I’ll just, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John help Beta 6 fix the issue. And he’s happy to report that since Beta 6’s release
⏹️ ▶️ John with the new boot ROM, apparently it fixes the issue. And we have, we have the the versions that are included with beta 6
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we’ll put them in the show notes but they’re so long uh but it’s good and i got this report from a lot of other people that
⏹️ ▶️ John basically beta 6 came and their mac pros that previously wouldn’t wake from sleep do wake from sleep this
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me happy not because i’m planning on installing betas but because i had this fear in the back of my mind that my
⏹️ ▶️ John obscure problem like maybe was some weird one-off thing with my computer or whatever and it would just never get fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the the you know the final version of big sir would go out and i’d be afraid to even install the release version because
⏹️ ▶️ John like what if i install the release version and i can’t wake from sleep I could be in the same situation again but it sounds like beta
⏹️ ▶️ John 6 fixed it so I feel better about the release version now unless it breaks again in Beta 7, so I’ll be watching for that.
State of Big Sur, iOS 14
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you notice that, I mean, you probably don’t even use SMB very much, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SMB is completely hosed in beta 6 now that you have to like manually load the kext each time you reboot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to get it to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I saw you say that, but like, I’m not putting it to Big Sur anymore, except on the DTK. And when I’m on the
⏹️ ▶️ John DTK, I’m just using Xcode. So no, I have not noticed that. But that sounds crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was not because I happen to see it. I think it was Daniel Jalka that had put a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweet of his own or somebody else’s in front of me. And if it wasn’t for that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would never have figured out what was going on, because it looked like a networking failure rather than a, like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what Samba is right now failure. So yeah, it was very, very peculiar. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have decided that even though I was very enthusiastic about Big Sur at first,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m kind of backpedaling on that a little bit, and I think I’m gonna wait it out for at least a month or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, definitely. I mean, it’s, first of all, like, if you’re a podcaster, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, including I think still everything by Roger Miba, which we all depend on a lot, simply don’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Big Sur because they changed some critical functionality that these apps use. And so it basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t work yet. And they’re working on it, but I don’t think it’s ready yet. And so that’s one problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then also, Big Sur is such a big change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to so many parts of just basic stuff like window Chrome, the way widgets are drawn.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a huge change to the OS’s fundamental functionality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. So much of it is really still very rough around the edges. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been in beta now all summer. Summer’s over. We’re nearing likely release times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think it’s anywhere near ready yet. I really hope that they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push too quickly to get the first Apple Silicon Max out there, which will require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and therefore will probably require it to be released. But it’s so not ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s still, here we are in mid-September and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like every time I use Big Sur, which isn’t even that often because I’m using it only on the laptop, every time I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it I run into graphical glitches and other weird behavior stuff. I mean, heck, even iOS 14,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last couple of betas of iOS 14 have been buggier than the earlier ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the summer. So we’re coming in hot with the software this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Among other issues I’ve had with it, Spotlight has stopped working sometimes and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requires a reboot. Apps, instead of zooming in when you launch them, instead of zooming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in from their icon, they sometimes will get stuck sliding in from the right. Who knows why?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my favorite bug of all time, the other night my phone wouldn’t charge via Qi charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until I rebooted it. Oh, neato. That was a fun one. So yeah. I’d say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, don’t jump on these releases on version.0 if they come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out any time soon. Give it some time. they could use a bit of time.
iOS 13 Mail bug finally fixed!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, I have amazing follow-up. A bug has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed. I have been complaining on this show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for about 14 or 15 months that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since iOS 13 beta one last summer, there was a bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in iOS mail where periodically new messages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would stop appearing in the list. And the only way to see your new messages was to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the inbox view to the root screen and then go back into your inbox view and then they’d be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And this was infuriating because you just seemingly stopped getting mail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what was actually happening is the messages were being inserted at the bottom of your inbox instead of at the top so you just weren’t seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them if you had more than five messages in your inbox. But it was really frustrating and that’s a horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug because you could be missing email without realizing you’re missing anything. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug persisted through every single version of iOS 13 to the best of my knowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if it’s in 13.7. However, I can verify that bug has been fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not in iOS 14 Beta 1, not in iOS 14 Betas 2 through I think about 5 or 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, as of the last few weeks, that bug is fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have confirmation it is fixed. Finally, the Apple Mail bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that prevented new messages from showing up sometimes is fixed. Since last year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so happy. Finally, something’s getting better. Hooray!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I can honestly say iOS 14 is better than iOS 13, in this one very important to me way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, well that’s exciting.
App-review rule-change process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So maybe since you’re having such good luck, you can get some changes made to AppReview.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. I don’t even know what to say about this. So supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is implementing some of the promised changes to AppReview, and you can now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggest changes to the guidelines, and there’s a place where you can do that online.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this was announced earlier this summer, I think right after WBC, or like the second day or something, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something and we talked about it, how this was potentially really, you know, it sounds really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco groundbreaking that they were making these couple of changes. This was seemingly like directly in response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the hey, brouhaha that happened right before WWDC. So, basically, yeah, two things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they weren’t going, they were no longer going to delay like minor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug fix updates over guideline violations, except for the related to legal issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s nice that basically they wouldn’t like delay your like 1.0.2 update because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you they disagree with your in-app purchase stuff like they would give you a chance to get that bug fix out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then work on whatever they want you to work on like in the next version and yeah as you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey they also said that you could appeal decisions more easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is kind of already had that but also that you could suggest changes to the App Store rules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John covered it well when this came out. It’s hard to suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes to the rules and expect those to go anywhere because you’re suggesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the changes to the rules to Apple, who made the rules. And the judge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any argument you make is Apple, who made the rules.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I can’t imagine that this is actually going to result in any meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes Because if Apple thought the rules should be different they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would change them If you if Apple says here’s the rule and you say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I disagree with that What are your chances of them saying? Oh, okay. You know what we were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know turns out you changed our mind We’re gonna change this rule now for everybody like that. It just it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is is much more likely to end up in just some lip service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and no real meaningful changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the way I’d phrase it is that it’s not, it doesn’t, you know, this sounds good from a PR perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the chances are probably about the same as they ever were that things will change. Because in the past, Apple has certainly changed the
⏹️ ▶️ John rules. And in the past, people have complained about the rules. It’s just that there was no official, formal system defined
⏹️ ▶️ John for this, right? So I think the odds of the rules changing are the same as they’ve ever been. App Store rules change all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John and developers give feedback all the time. And those two things are connected in some way,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now there’s an official channel for them to be connected. Like there are already examples of people saying, oh, this Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something dumb because they didn’t have a rule that covered my specific case. And I used the new system
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, hey, my thing should fit within the rules and Apple agreed and they changed the rules. That
⏹️ ▶️ John happens all the time. And it’s always happened all the time, but it’s like you’re saying, Margo, is it gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John happen more now that we have this official channel? No, it’s just a more
⏹️ ▶️ John formal recognition of a process that was already happening informally. And your odds are probably about the same as they ever
⏹️ ▶️ John were. If you point something out and Apple’s like, huh, we hadn’t thought about that, they’ll change the rules. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they always would have done that. It’s just that now that you’ll get like, essentially like with Marco’s bug report, now you’ll be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to see, I did a thing and they told me in response to that thing, they changed the rule. As opposed to the old system, which
⏹️ ▶️ John was, you complain about it, and at some point in the future, the rule changes if Apple agreed with you, but they never
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, we changed this rule specifically because you asked about it, right? And in the same way now, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they may tell you, we fixed this bug because you reported it, but they might’ve already known about that bug, you couldn’t have duplicate, multiple people
⏹️ ▶️ John could have reported it, it’s a similar system. So these are all good positive changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes just having an official channel is a perceived advantage,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if in practice, it doesn’t increase your odds of getting any changes. The one thing they found
⏹️ ▶️ John below in this though was, You know, the bug fixes no longer delaying, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, guideline violation, uh, issues or whatever. When they
⏹️ ▶️ John announced that and then like the next week someone was like, I tried to, uh, to send a 1.0.1
⏹️ ▶️ John update and apple blocked it because I have some problem with IAP. Right. I thought they said they weren’t doing that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And apple’s response was, I think I don’t know if this is an official apple response, but someone said, you know, secondhand,
⏹️ ▶️ John they heard that, oh, well that whole thing about not delaying bug fixes, that starts when iOS 14 ships. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well don’t announce it and then say, oh, we’re not doing that yet. So there’s a whole bunch of people who said, I thought they weren’t doing this
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. They said they weren’t gonna delay things. And so that’s the main reason I put it in the follow-up is apparently didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to wait for iOS 14 release. But as of now, I guess, now Apple won’t delay it. Now, why
⏹️ ▶️ John did it have to wait? Why couldn’t, as soon as they announced it, that be the rule? I don’t know. Like, it takes a long time for
⏹️ ▶️ John big companies to do anything, but starting now, those things they said they were gonna do, they’re going to do. So good job, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So I should have mentioned this earlier. Apparently, John, you’ve also gotten a bug fixed by Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, just wanted to update that bugs do occasionally get fixed. There was a simple bug in the finder that I reported on like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the early big serve betas, and it actually got fixed and it wasn’t a duplicate. So I got to actually see
⏹️ ▶️ John that it got fixed without just noticing that it got closed when the duplicate got closed. So there we go. Bugs are being
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed. It’s exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine that. This is a test. This is a test.
Surtainly Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then tell me about the big sir menu bar, please so
⏹️ ▶️ John this is interesting we’ve talked about the big sir menu bar and how Not how
⏹️ ▶️ John translucent it is, but how much it shows through what’s behind it in a weird kind of smeary way I
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually took a run at trying to fix this a while back What I was trying to I was actually doing as
⏹️ ▶️ John part of switch glass It’s like I’d be cool extra feature to have that maybe I can make the big sir menu bar be opaque wouldn’t that be cool?
⏹️ ▶️ John right and my idea was to just put a big white window behind the menu bar. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I messed around with that, and I was pretty sure that I could get a big white window
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the menu bar, but the menu bar did not care. Like it’s like, yeah, I’ve got a window underneath me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t care. Like the menu bar in Big Sur was as of the betas that I was doing, it was hard coded
⏹️ ▶️ John to only look at the desktop background picture and decide based on the desktop background picture
⏹️ ▶️ John to do a smeary thing. And so then the other option is like, okay, well, how about you just put a big white stripe
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top of your desktop picture. Apparently the menu bar, the way it sort of samples
⏹️ ▶️ John the desktop picture, it’s not simply sort of showing through the pixels that are behind it. So even if you put a white stripe
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top of your desktop picture, it doesn’t quite do what you expect. It’s a complicated algorithm. So
⏹️ ▶️ John A, it doesn’t care what’s behind it, and B, it doesn’t just show through the pixels that are behind it. So that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to, and I gave up. I’m like, well, I guess this is not gonna be a feature of SwitchGlass, so I just let it go by.
⏹️ ▶️ John but Tyler Hall has a good webpage explaining his attempt to hack this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it clever? It’s a type of approach that I would have dismissed without trying it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think I continue to dismiss it and not wanna try it, but it shows how
⏹️ ▶️ John desperate people are for this to work. So Tyler found the same thing that I did, that you put a window behind the menu bar, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything, right? But you can put a window on top of the menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, okay, Tyler. Yes, you’re right. You can do that. But if you put an opaque window on top of the menu bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t see the menu bar anymore. He’s like, aha. But the way I fix that is, can you guess without
⏹️ ▶️ John reading the article?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you make the window slightly transparent.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just read the names of the menu and draw them yourself on top of your window that you put in the
⏹️ ▶️ John So he’s basically drawing the menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John The good part is you get to choose your own font and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John he just draws the words on top. And then they don’t highlight yet. He had the highlighting
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of working, but as you can imagine, like trying to get that to work and be responsive
⏹️ ▶️ John and keep up with changes in the menu bar is an absolute nightmare. So I don’t think this is a valid
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to this problem, but it’s, you know, 10 points for desperation programming,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, I’m just gonna draw the menu by myself. I don’t need the OS to do that. That’s incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So but no, but the main reason I put this in there is that kudos to Tyler
⏹️ ▶️ John for trying this out. But in the article where he talks about this, he brings up some stuff that I had
⏹️ ▶️ John forgotten about all the past keynotes. One of them was like he dug out the, I talked about this on past
⏹️ ▶️ John shows that how Leopard was the first translucent menu bar and that Apple wimped out because
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just too darn translucent and they made it more opaque in the shipping version. When
⏹️ ▶️ John Leopard was announced on stage, there was a segment where they were talking about the new desktop in Leopard. This was when
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs was still alive, so you should watch the little segment. It’s like a two-minute clip that he has there. And one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that was on one of the slides about the features of the new desktop was
⏹️ ▶️ John prominent active window. That was listed as a feature of the new look of the desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically, that you can tell which window is active, which is something we talked about on past shows with Big Sur, how
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to tell. So Tiles also got videos showing active versus inactive windows
⏹️ ▶️ John in Big Sur versus what they were like in Leopard. Another big selling point in Leopard, by the way, was unified appearance,
⏹️ ▶️ John which, you know, they basically got rid of brush metal and made all the windows look the same, right? But it’s just funny to see prominent
⏹️ ▶️ John active window on an actual slide with Steve Jobs standing in front of it as a feature of their new OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is the same presentation where translucent menu bar was also pitched. So there’s some good and there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. Take them both and there you have what, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The facts of life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah! All right! God, I was really put on the spot there. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sweating. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was a paraphrase for the first part, but you got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s intense. I guess I can just check out for the rest of the episode, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, are you going to get that one? No. Bye.
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Crime and punishment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Epic and sign in with Apple. Ooh, this is, this is gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, is it? Well, so when I first read this, I was like, this is disgusting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I thought about it. Well, Epic broke the rules. Like Epic is being a bunch of jerks, but then, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it seems like if Apple wants you to treat this as like a, what is it a common carrier?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think when he made this point a few episodes ago before I was able to, and it really made me mad. But like, you know, if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants to treat so many of their services as like a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can rely on always, you know, including the App Store, then they should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey act like that. And, you know, there are a million and seven reasons why sign in with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may not work with Epic anymore. It could be something as simple as a certificate that expired that they can’t recreate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, oof, it’s a bad look, man. I don’t dig
⏹️ ▶️ John it. As of this recording, all we have is a tweet from Epic that says, this is from Epic Games itself,
⏹️ ▶️ John it says, Apple will no longer allow users to sign into Epic game accounts using Sign-in with Apple as soon as September
⏹️ ▶️ John 11th, 2020. If you use Sign-in with Apple, please make sure your email and password are up to date. So this is Epic communicating
⏹️ ▶️ John out to its customers. And they have a web page that will put in the show notes, it says, if I was using Sign-in with Apple, what do I do
⏹️ ▶️ John now? Because Sign-in with Apple is going to stop working, right? And the angle Casey was taking
⏹️ ▶️ John on this of like, Oh, you know, Epic broke the rules, and this is a consequence, and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John forth. I feel like it’s the power, crime, and punishment angle, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is not constructive in this debate of like, they did something bad, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John deserve to be punished, but how severe should the punishment be? How many lashes with the stick should
⏹️ ▶️ John they have? Or are they signed a contract, they have to agree to it, here are the consequences.
⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to want to frame this as, if you’re Apple, you should do what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good for your business and the ecosystem and not spend all
⏹️ ▶️ John your time thinking about exactly how harshly the rule breaker should be punished as a lesson to the others
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, unless that somehow you somehow think that’s going to further your long-term goals. So in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a bunch of complicating technical factors. As we discovered when we were looking into using Sign-In with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John in the ATP membership program, atp.fm slash join. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John We discovered that in order to use Sign-In with Apple, but you need to have an app. Like it’s basically made for like apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether on the Mac or on an iPhone or iPad. You need to have an app because when you go to create a sign
⏹️ ▶️ John in with Apple thing, it says just tell us what your app is. And you can’t get past that part as far as, Marco told
⏹️ ▶️ John us anyway, without putting in some kind of app. So we talked to Apple about that and said, is this, do you actually need
⏹️ ▶️ John an app? Can we just make like a dummy app or whatever? And they were like, eh. You know, like you can, technically
⏹️ ▶️ John yes. You can just make an app and have it just be a dummy app. But it just seems like it’s not made for that. So we said, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well it’s not, it really wants you to have an app and we’re just not gonna use it for our purposes. You can see where this is going
⏹️ ▶️ John with Epic. Epic Games’ entire development account was terminated. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John if Sign-In with Apple only works with an app and that app was part of an account that was just terminated,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see all sorts of technical reasons why Sign-In with Apple may eventually stop working
⏹️ ▶️ John with the associated app that no longer exists in the account that no longer exists. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously Apple’s backend is complicated and they have all sorts of databases and stuff they probably only soft delete
⏹️ ▶️ John things. It’s not like they’re actually deleting the stuff or whatever, but you can imagine that their system is not set up to
⏹️ ▶️ John support sign in with Apple associated with an app that no longer exists because the account that belongs to it was
⏹️ ▶️ John terminated. So there are technical reasons to explain why this might be bad. But again, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna take the crime and punishment angle and I don’t wanna take the, oh, technically this is hard angle. The real angle is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, do you want sign in with Apple to be successful? Do you want people to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey use sign in with Apple? We know
⏹️ ▶️ John the stick with sign in with Apple we’ve talked about, which is like, hey, if you make an app and you use any kind of third party
⏹️ ▶️ John login, login with Facebook, login with Google, you have to also offer sign in with that was a good move, because
⏹️ ▶️ John sign in with Apple is good. And you don’t want all these apps using a login system that you don’t control. And you just have to
⏹️ ▶️ John have as an option, you’re not forcing people to use it. So a sign in with Apple then has to compete with sign in with Google sign in with
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook and creating your own account, right? Or if if apps don’t want to use sign in with Apple at all, they can just
⏹️ ▶️ John have their own sign in system. So I was a proponent of that rule. But now
⏹️ ▶️ John after this, everyone is looking at this right or wrong. Developers are looking at this right or wrong and saying, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna use Sign-in with Apple because if Apple can yank it away at a moment’s notice and yanking it away,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, okay, well, you’re yanking it away from the developer. But the real impact is the tens,
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of users who use Sign-in with Apple with your account. And now you have to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John to them and say, oh, because of something that you don’t care about having to do with us fighting with Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John All of your user accounts are about to disappear, so you better come to our website and enter an email address and associate with the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John before it all goes away. Again, right or wrong? You can say, well, those, you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have the wrong picture of it. It’s actually all Epic’s fault or whatever. This, events like this make developers
⏹️ ▶️ John feel less safe using Sign-In with Apple. And that is Apple’s problem. Not how much should I punish
⏹️ ▶️ John Epic, not what are the technical limitations of terminating someone’s account and so on and so forth. Apple’s real problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want Sign-In with Apple to be successful, you have to make developers confident, especially now where it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a new feature. It’s not well established yet. It’s just getting going. Something like this can really
⏹️ ▶️ John make signing with Apple unattractive. Because you’re forcing everyone to offer it if they have with
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook or Google, it’s not like it’s gonna disappear from apps, but it’s going to make developers
⏹️ ▶️ John less likely to promote it, more likely to keep offering Facebook and Google and Twitter or wherever else
⏹️ ▶️ John as alternate sign-in services, and in general, just being more wary of it. And that’s bad for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. So I hope Apple is looking at this and thinking, we should do whatever it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John on our backend to make sure sign in with Apple continues to work for Epic under these extraordinary circumstances.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not because we like Epic and not because we think they didn’t deserve it or do something wrong because we totally did. And we’ll get to that in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Apple really is mad at Epic. But because if we want sign in
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple to be successful, we need to make developers feel comfortable using it that it’s not going to go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if developers are irrational or wrong or not understanding the limitations,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact is, every single sentiment I saw from a developer online today was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I am now more scared of signing with Apple than I was before, and that’s bad for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I actually am gonna take a slightly surprisingly forgiving approach on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco particular point. I mean, you’re right that pragmatically, Apple has a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their hands with PR, with Sign in with Apple because of this. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that, a lot of people are saying Apple is taking this away, and I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the people who assumes that this is actually a technical side effect of the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account disappearing. I don’t think Apple separately decided to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them, to take this away from them. I think this is just what happened, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John and Casey said, online services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco related to apps that depend on some kind of, you know, certificate or identifier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something that is associated with the app. And so if the developer account gets terminated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the app is gone, then it is reasonable, I think, that some of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services will stop working. Like, if the account is totally gone and the app is totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the store, people at Apple who are designing these services presumably thought, well, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business is over, that app or that service is over. If the app is just gone, the developer account is gone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s a significant business disappearing thing. This I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat unique that Epic’s app is gone from the store and the developer account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gone, but they still are trying to run a business. They’re still, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that wasn’t something that they did intentionally. Well, asterisk, they basically
⏹️ ▶️ John did. And people still have the app installed. That’s the most important feature. Even though it’s gone from the store, people still have it installed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what you’re saying is why I mentioned like it may be irrational for people to be wary of it. Because if you think about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it’s like, if you are a developer and you’re afraid of this scenario happening to you, what it means is you develop
⏹️ ▶️ John an app, your Apple support sign in with Apple, then Apple removes your app from the store and deletes your
⏹️ ▶️ John developer account. And you’re like, yeah, but I still want sign in with Apple to work. You will still want it to work with what? They deleted your account
⏹️ ▶️ John and removed your app. You have way bigger problems than signing with Apple not working. So like, from
⏹️ ▶️ John a rational perspective, it’s like developers shouldn’t be worried about this scenario because if this scenario happens to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have so much bigger problems than signing with Apple at working. But it doesn’t matter. Perception is what matters.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the perception is, sign in with Apple. I gotta be careful of that because Apple could quote unquote take it away at
⏹️ ▶️ John any second. Apple can take anything away at any second. They can take your app away, they can take your developer account away. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of the whole, you know, Apple having lots of power. So rationally speaking, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think this instance should make people more wary, but I think it does make people more wary. And that’s why,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite everything you said by the technical limitations, I think it would be a smart move for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to heroic measures to preserve sign-in with Apple for their
⏹️ ▶️ John bitter enemy because it will make people more confident using sign-in with Apple. They’ll be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if Apple totally terminates my account, at least I won’t have to deal with the headache of dealing with user accounts and all my
⏹️ ▶️ John users will still have account identifiers that I can map back and, you know, the whole nine yards. Like, that’s what you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do sometimes with services like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I don’t think Apple has the, first of all, I don’t think they can make web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services that are that resilient to these edge cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shown repeatedly that they can’t, or at least that they won’t. But ultimately, as a developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this shouldn’t affect your choice whether you sign up with Apple or not. This should affect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your choice whether you have an iOS app or not. Because if my app is gone from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the store, whether or not my developer account still exists, is gone from the store and I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowed to put it back, my business is over. That’s it. Overcast is done. It’s over. If I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have an iOS app, it’s done. That is the bigger risk here. Now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think what this means, and what you’re saying, John, with Apple’s problem here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and being more pragmatic, this just goes to show you shouldn’t be offended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that signing with Apple is going to stop working. You should be offended that Epic’s developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account was suspended, because that’s the actual cause here. And that’s the part that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like it might have been an overreach with this, with this, you know, dispute that they’re having.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Removing Fortnite from the app store for violating the rules seemed at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time to be, you know, well, yeah, of course, they’re going to do that. That is, you know, whatever you think of the rules.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a reasonable reaction for Apple to have had as a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco counteraction for Apple to take. Epic’s app violated the rules blatantly, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it gets kicked out of the App Store until and unless they decide to fix it. That’s one thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then to also kill their entire developer account, like whatever it was two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later, that seemed like extra punitive and an extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overreach, and that had much more destructive outcome than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just removing the app from the store temporarily while they worked this out. And that’s the part that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to be mad at Apple for something, get mad at them for that. Get mad at them for killing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this entire account, you know, two weeks after they removed the app from the store,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly out of spite. Like, the account removal was seemingly out of spite. Like, it wasn’t—it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t seem like they really needed to kill their developer account. It seems like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found a justification to do it, and then did it. did it, and that’s what’s causing the extra ripple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effects of all this other stuff. So get mad at that, but I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has anything to do with sign-in with Apple, and I don’t think developers should draw any conclusions related
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sign-in with Apple based on this. Draw conclusions about the cause of this problem, that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business, that everyone, that all these users and this company expects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go on in other ways, and eventually possibly back in this way that this business is going on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the developer account was killed. That’s the real problem here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can just hear the crime and punishment people saying, but Mark, you don’t understand. The contract clearly said if you violate the rules,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can terminate your account. And so Epic had to know this would happen and therefore it is all valid and useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I would say the crime and punishment angle of what did the rules say? What did you agree to? What did the contract say?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a court. We’re not debating whether it was legal to do these things, right? There actually is a court case
⏹️ ▶️ John going on about that now, but like, I come back to the same perspective. Was this the best move
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple in terms of the whole big picture, the future, long-term
⏹️ ▶️ John developer relations, customer satisfaction, like whatever, you know, continuing
⏹️ ▶️ John to have fortnight on the store. There are so many factors that mix in here. And anytime Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does not use a holistic lens to guide its decision making, but instead falls back to
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps the crime and punishment mindset, which is like they broke the rules and these were the rules, therefore we’re going to do it. Use the
⏹️ ▶️ John contract you signed. It said we could terminate your account. Guess what? We’re terminating your account. That’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe that will hold up in court. We’ll see, but it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right move. The right
⏹️ ▶️ John move isn’t what the maximum extent that you are legally entitled to according to your
⏹️ ▶️ John lawyers. That’s not always the right thing to do. Again, corporate relationship management. Sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s more important to smooth over the relationship than to quote-unquote win the argument.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of arguments, as you would expect in all these type of giant corporate legal cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is counter-suing Epic. We know that Epic was suing Apple to say, give us all our things back.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course in all these cases, the other party says, well guess what, you’re suing us? We’re suing you because you can sue anybody for anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And these companies have a lot of lawyers, so they are, if you want to read Apple’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it’s called, complaint document. it’s filled with all sorts of flowery
⏹️ ▶️ John expressive language about how terrible epic is and how mean they are. Uh, and speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of being mean to each other, the latest mean thing that epic did and the final bit, I promise on the epic apple thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John week, uh, epic before, I don’t know when they did this, but always on the same
⏹️ ▶️ John day that the, that the epic games account was terminated, epic through their server side
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff turned off in-app purchase in Fortnite. So now the only option is to buy the V bucks directly
⏹️ ▶️ John through through Epic before it had the in-app purchase and also the epic one. And they said see 50%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people chose the cheaper option. Now right now as we’re saying this the only option available in Fortnite
⏹️ ▶️ John if you still have it installed is to do it through Epic probably because you can’t do in-app purchase if you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a developer account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was gonna say that actually might be forcing them as well. It almost certainly is
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But there you go, like, just one final wave goodbye. Which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, see ya. Millions of people have this installed and they’ll be giving us money, but maybe not because this new season started
⏹️ ▶️ John and they can’t play it. And so, everybody’s a loser, as usual, and the court cases wind on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, but John, here’s the thing. You know, iOS is the most secure platform. And it’s the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secure because it has rules, man. It has rules and policies. What do you expect? Hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John Crime and punishment. You knew the rules, you disobeyed them, now you get the punishment. Is the punishment just? Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s best for all of us as a collective? I don’t know, but it’s the punishment. So now you will receive it and that is just.
⏹️ ▶️ John Crime and punishment people like they just I don’t they just sort of I don’t want to say the a word
⏹️ ▶️ John authoritarian, not the other a word, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I just I was thinking the other one. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John just just rush rush to the aid of whether it’s rushing to the aid of Epic, this billion dollar company or rushing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the aid of Apple, just to say like they are they are the they They are the power wielder
⏹️ ▶️ John that I subscribe to, and therefore, their written rules and their contracts
⏹️ ▶️ John are automatically just and are the best thing to do. And I continue to argue this from the perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John of trying to help Apple help itself by doing the right thing for
⏹️ ▶️ John the collective, and the collective being, as we’ve said before, customers, developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the thing that bothers me is I hear people say like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, you know, we care about the user experience here at Apple. We care about the user experience and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the user experience is paramount. That’s all Apple cares about is user experience. It trumps everything, darn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And that’s why Apple only allows in-app purchase through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s thing because it’s safer and people can trust it. It’s for the better user experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s better than having to enter a credit card. better than any other way. Uh, oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, we’re taking away Fortnite because somebody was mean. Like, is that better? It is taking that away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better for me, the Fortnite player. I’m not actually a Fortnite player, but you know what I mean? Like, is that better for me? A Fortnite user?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. Doesn’t feel like it. Like, it doesn’t feel like this is better for Fortnite players to have Fortnite disappear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the app store. It doesn’t feel like it’s better for Fortnite players to have no access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the next season or whatever they call it. Like, I don’t know. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some amount of sympathy for the crime and punishment people because yeah, I mean, there was a clear set of rules that were broken, but at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same time, like you can’t say that Apple only cares about the user experience and then in the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breath say, but we made the user experience way crappier
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well. But what you’re getting at is not a crime and punishment angle. What you’re getting at is like, you know, that if you
⏹️ ▶️ John let big companies violate the rules because they’re important, see Facebook or whatever, but if you just let
⏹️ ▶️ John Epic get away with this and didn’t take fortnight off the store. That’s bad for the big picture, not from a crime
⏹️ ▶️ John and punishment angle, like we must punish to show that we have the power. Everyone knows Apple has the power. If you let
⏹️ ▶️ John Epic get away with that and give them no punishment, like that’s bad corporate relationship management, too. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John now you’re announcing to the world that you can walk all over us and do whatever you want. And if you’re big enough company, we just won’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. And you can you know, like you do not want that to happen. You want to work it out
⏹️ ▶️ John between the companies, which apparently whatever those talks were, they fell down or you know, if they happened at all, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what you don’t want to think is, what do I do to make sure I don’t look weak
⏹️ ▶️ John or that I punish them so I scare other people away? That’s not a good dynamic. It’s also not a good dynamic for it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a free-for-all. So you have to strike a balance. When you’re striking the balance, if what’s in your head is like
⏹️ ▶️ John saving face or trying to intimidate other things or, worst
⏹️ ▶️ John case scenario, if you just get angry and you’re like, I want to punish them because punishing them feels good, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the worst headspace to be in, Right. And again, I’m personifying Apple, which is a big company with lots of people. I’m sure they talk
⏹️ ▶️ John this out and have lots of strategies, but in the end, it is run by people and people, people are people.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why should it be Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and Apple’s Apple’s run by people with pretty thin skins in certain areas. And, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, this does appear, I said, I believe like the second weekend, like they seem like they looked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they lost their cool a little bit on this. And that’s how it seems. I mean, you’re right. They had to do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Epic basically walked up and punched him in the face, right? Like what Epic did totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco justified removing Fortnite from the App Store. That I have no argument
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. Not only did not only should Apple have removed Fortnite from the App Store, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to. They absolutely had to. Epic blatantly violated the rule,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intentionally like punched him in the face. So yeah, Apple had to enforce the, you know, the rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they enforce it to most other places. they had to kick it out of the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t have to do the developer account. That’s, and the developer account suspension has caused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many of the knock-on problems that are not so clear-cut in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s favor. They even caused the judge in the court case to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically tell Apple that this was a bit much. The
⏹️ ▶️ John judge said it about deleting the other account, the other one that the Unreal Engine is developed on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which Apple was going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John if the judge did like-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the judge stopped them. Which was even more of an overreach. So like Apple, like clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store removal is justified. The developer account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suspension and what Apple even wanted to do was to bend in the other one about the SDK. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is clearly like, it looks so much like Apple lost their cool with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re doing things out of spite or anger or just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanting to flex in such a big way that they intimidated Epic out of being able to fight the main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-app purchase policy part of this fight. Almost all the parts of this that make Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look really bad are a result of that area of what they did, not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco removing it from the App Store for violating their rule. If you look at this from the big picture, again, you have all of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corporate relationship issues, you have the developer relations issues, which just keep compiling, or keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compounding, rather. Certainly what’s going to amount out of this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increased regulatory scrutiny. I don’t think, you know, the judge in the case is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look kindly on Apple’s actions on this because they sure haven’t so far. And so there’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these other bad outcomes for Apple or negative effects from Apple that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come from them having pushed too far with the punishment, way further than they had to with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developer account terminations. I feel like Apple was not thinking strategically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they went for that. they were just thinking with anger and with spite and with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big giant flex to show their power to try to intimidate this first lawsuit out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco existence. And that’s not a good look for Apple and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategically probably unwise. And it’s kind of hard to see, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to see this company that we like acting this way that seems not only mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also like ill-advised.
⏹️ ▶️ John I if I cared more about epic, I would like all these things. I’m always trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to give Apple advice on what I think they should do. That’s because I care much more about Apple than epic. I could give
⏹️ ▶️ John advice to epic to say epic if you want to do what’s right for your customers and for your business
⏹️ ▶️ John that what you’re doing is stupid and that would also be true. But I care so much less about epic that I’m not making. Maybe if Bungie
⏹️ ▶️ John ever gets in a fight with Apple, I will. It will be harder for me to pick sides. But the reason I’m arguing
⏹️ ▶️ John from the perspective of Apple is trying to say Apple, what you’re doing is stupid for yourself. What Epic’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing is also probably stupid for themselves, but I don’t care that much about them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John just want to make that clear, even though I’m always coming in quote unquote on the side of Apple, what I’m doing is telling Apple they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong choices for all of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s why we do every Apple complaint on this show, because we like Apple. Like we,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we love their, we love being their customers. We love their products, most of them and you know we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it was something that we didn’t like like we don’t we don’t talk about Windows that much because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of us like Windows so we don’t like we don’t need to nitpick every detail about it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just not something we even care enough about to do that we don’t really talk about Android even when they do stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff because we don’t care about Android because we don’t use it and we don’t love it we love Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and that’s That’s why we care so much about the parts of it that aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, what would you do if you were Apple right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, boy, this ship has sailed on so many things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing. What would you do today?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know. At this point, I feel like with the court cases in motion, usually
⏹️ ▶️ John what tends to happen is that both parties have to get to the point in
⏹️ ▶️ John the case where they can smell which way the wind is blowing and then you cut a deal based on who has an advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I don’t I don’t think now is an optimal time for Apple to try to deal like that that time has passed for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when these court cases go through and the lawyers on both sides have an idea of like, does
⏹️ ▶️ John it look like we’re going to win this? It does look like they’re going to win this. Then you end up with like a settlement to just make it all go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the settlement is structured based on both of their reckons about who is probably going to win or not. Right. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like that’s the time to deal. But yeah, what you do is you make some kind of deal like epic. clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks their cut is too much. And I’ve said said this, the Apple’s got too much. We said this on past programs
⏹️ ▶️ John that I personally have absolutely no problem with Apple cutting favorable
⏹️ ▶️ John deals with Netflix and Amazon and all these things. In fact, I want them to cut more deals. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is unfair or anything that like an individual developer doesn’t get the cheaper price
⏹️ ▶️ John and Amazon does just because that’s the way the world works, That would be
⏹️ ▶️ John successful corporate relationship management, the big powerful partners you have, try to keep them
⏹️ ▶️ John happy in a mutual beneficial relationship, even if it is quote unquote unfair, because why, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John for how long did Netflix get a better deal than everybody else? Who knows, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were a developer of an app, that might seem unfair to you, but bottom line is we’re all happy we had Netflix for that
⏹️ ▶️ John time. And it makes sense because your app, you are not Netflix, right? So you don’t have that kind of cloud, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have no problem with that structure. alternative would be if Apple just can’t stomach that and really wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to ride this whole train of where we treat everybody equal, which has never been true, but they really want to go that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fine, Apple, like the way you make a deal with somebody who is upset about the cut you’re taking is you work out
⏹️ ▶️ John something with them that you have to give something to if what you have to give is like I know they already gave
⏹️ ▶️ John by doing 85 15 for the second year of subscriptions and that was good. Make a similar gesture,
⏹️ ▶️ John lower the rate for everybody, lower the rate for everybody subject to a certain new set of rules that just happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to be gerrymandered to include Fortnite. Like there’s tons of tons of options you can do that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has done in the past. It just seems like these two couldn’t quite get it together. And now it’s an all
⏹️ ▶️ John out shooting war, right? And you know, you don’t want it ever to get to that point. But here we are and having a bunch of court
⏹️ ▶️ John cases. But anyway, when it comes time to settle, yeah, depending on how the things go, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John may have to give a little bit, right? That’s how these things work. Everybody has to come out unhappy about something,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? There’s no magical deal where you can smooth it over with Epic, but Apple gets everything they want. And vice versa.
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Apple-event expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s an Apple event next week. Yay!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta say, I’m having a hard time being excited about Apple’s new stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now because their attitude is so off-putting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is gonna be a hard Apple season for me to get excited.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have that problem. I’m very excited about it. I know Marco is very upset about this. He’s very disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John in his good friend Apple is doing things that he doesn’t like. But, and I’m disappointed too, but I am
⏹️ ▶️ John super excited about our Macs and whether or not our Macs arrive in this event.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re supposedly coming before the end of the year. I’m getting a lot of pressure in this household to get another laptop for the
⏹️ ▶️ John kids to do remote school stuff. And I am mightily resisting that because now is not the time
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to buy an Intel laptop. And I keep saying, just wait, just wait the arm. And then I hear, but when are they coming?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, I don’t know, but before the end of the year. So I am excited about
⏹️ ▶️ John our Macs. I’m super excited about all that stuff. I’m even kind of excited about iOS 14 because I had to install it on my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad to use the Xbox controller thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John As for this event, well, let’s talk about the invitation. The invitation with another weird
⏹️ ▶️ John treatment of the Apple logo. The word is underneath it, our time flies, period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please join us for a special Apple event from Apple Park, watch online, blah, blah, blah. September 15th, 10 a.m. Pacific
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Time flies and the logo is a swirly kind of Apple thingy.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Kremlinology on this that I’ve heard is one, the obvious one, Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the things that is rumored to be announced here. Time, that makes sense. Time flies, Apple Watch, fits
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly. Another is time of flight sensors, which have been rumored to appear on a bunch of Apple devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it sends out something and sees how long it takes to bounce back and using that information judges depth as
⏹️ ▶️ John a better way to do depth for AR and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t we already have that on the iPad Pro that changed nothing except that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that the LIDAR one? I forget. But anyway, I think the rumor is that it’s coming to the phones though.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this isn’t supposed to be a phone event. And then the final one I feel like is time flies is the whole like COVID time
⏹️ ▶️ John warp where time has no meaning anymore and no one knows what the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey date is. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like time flies. Is it time for an Apple event? What’s happening? I don’t know. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors are that I’ve seen in this is that don’t expect iPhones because
⏹️ ▶️ John In the earnings call, Apple said the iPhones are going to ship later this year by a few weeks or whatever. The
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that the iPhones are going to ship later doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be announced later. So that’s not confirmation there
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t be iPhones. But it seems like the sort of hinting to the world of
⏹️ ▶️ John leakers and other news sources is trying to set expectations that you shouldn’t expect an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if we’re not expecting an iPhone at this September 15th event, what should we expect?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think watches seems most reasonable. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPads. I mean, I could see them lumping watches and iPads together and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saving the phone for later. I could also see actually we’re probably due for Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and come to think of it, if you look at Apple.com or at least if I last I looked a day or two back, oh no, they changed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. A day or two back though, Apple.com was like nothing but Apple TV stuff or Apple TV plus or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John called. because the Emmy Awards, yeah. When you say iPads, though, I think what you mean is the low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, getting a nicer version with, there’s a bunch of rumors, like the one that’s not gonna have Face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID, but it won’t have a Home button either, and just basically bumping the bottom-end ones, because the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pros just recently got updated, so this would be, I forget,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco did they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Pro? They got updated, but it was literally only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that little sensor on the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, they enabled the other GPU core.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right, and I think they might all have the full RAM now instead of just the big one, something like that. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not a real update.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, the only iPad rumors I’ve seen have been like, oh, the low-end iPad is gonna get the look of
⏹️ ▶️ John the pros, but it won’t actually have Face ID. One of the rumors was like Touch ID would be in a power
⏹️ ▶️ John button on the side or something. It’s a really confusing crop of rumors, but anyway, low-end iPads potentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John The over-ear headphones I saw floating around in the rumor mills, obviously we’re not keeping too much
⏹️ ▶️ John of the rumors on this, but there’s a bunch of things that could potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John be announced, plenty to fill an event, especially an online event where they don’t have any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John minimum time they have to fill, they’ll just announce a bunch of products and when they’re done announcing it, the thing will be done. Potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John also the first ARM Mac, I mean, maybe like they said before the end of the year, but
⏹️ ▶️ John September, I don’t know. It seems early for me for Mac, but that’s what I’m rooting for 100%. I have no expectations,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I would love to see an ARM based laptop up here because I would immediately order it for one of my children.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I don’t know if I’m really in the market for anything, because I was on Clockwise earlier today, and one of the questions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, what are you excited for at this event? And I would like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey small watch, what is it, 40 millimeters? Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a wonderful size.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a wonderful size, but with cellular, it’s not the best battery life. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even use the cellular that often, and my phone is almost always near my watch, unless I’m going for a run.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And man, the battery life on mine has been not good recently. And-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beta? No, no, no, no, no, no beta, no beta, nothing like that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just feel like it’s not been great. I’m not beta on my phone, not beta on my watch, nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I really feel like battery life would, more battery life on the small watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly with cellular, would be welcome. But there’s nothing else about this watch other than the battery life that I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s time to upgrade, because it’s a Series 5. Like, it’s very nice. I do like it a lot, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what else I really want. I guess blood oxygen sensing would be kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of convenient right now, wouldn’t it? But I mean, I don’t know what else I want,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I always say this and then they announce something that seems mundane, but I’ve decided it’s going to change my life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and about half the time I end up buying that hardware because it’s going to change my life even if it doesn’t. So who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know, in terms of hardware, the watch is pretty good right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, battery life aside. I’d really like a new Apple TV though, actually. I would really like a new Apple TV because I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still rocking my original, I don’t remember what generation this is, but the original of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the swipey remote 1080 Apple TV that’s on my fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4K screen. And I’ve been waiting for a year now to get a new 4K Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and move this one to bedroom duty, but it hasn’t happened yet. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s imminent, right? Right? Anyone?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I want to talk about the Apple TV angle But I want to give Marco a second to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about any other things that he’s looking forward to or expects in this event
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the Apple watch I I’m interested. I’m like I’m Watching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m interested You know the series 5 with the always on screen was a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco departure I’m actually I should plug also our last episode of under the radar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where David and I basically, we did our annual thing of spend Dan Riccio’s hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surplus. Which the idea is like, technological progress marches on and every year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you kind of get like, you know, some efficiency gains through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco progress of technology and so how do you, how would we want Apple to spend those gains?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes they spend those gains making the things smaller and lighter and thinner. Sometimes they spend those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gains making the things faster. Sometimes they spend those gains adding power hungry features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or sometimes it’s some balance of all of those things or some of those things. And so the Series 5,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right Casey, the battery life, at least in the 40 millimeter, the small one, which is the one that I wear as well, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series 5 battery life is not great if you do battery hungry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like running, you know, more than like an hour of workout mode or cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming, especially streaming audio over cellular is pretty rough on the battery. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have had actually a couple times when my watch ran out of battery before the day was over during those heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage days, where I was doing a workout. It’s like doing a run outside,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording the GPS of the run while streaming audio over the cellular is about the worst thing you could possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. And on those, if I did say a half hour run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with workout mode, cellular, GPS, audio streaming, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that evening it’ll be at 15% or 10% or it’ll have to go into low power mode. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a great thing. But the Series 5 had this amazing always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on screen that spent a lot of that surplus battery that we had in previous generations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I mostly want from the Apple Watch is just a small evolution of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s already, processor-wise, it’s already fast enough for everything that I need to do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All I want is more battery life out of the watch. And what I especially want, again, this is stealing from under the radar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so go listen to that please. But what I especially want is for them to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re gonna spend battery surplus on some kind of new feature for the watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want it to be letting apps update more often in the background and letting them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use more CPU time when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the software restrictions on watchOS of how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly stingy it is with giving apps any kind of CPU time or letting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps back on update more frequently or letting complications get updated more frequently. Those are all for power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs, you know, to minimize power usage. And those are really just massively holding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back what apps can reasonably do and do well on watchOS. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything they can do to raise those limits or to let apps update more frequently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, all those, that will have significant, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to see and hard to quantify, but real benefits to the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice, how it actually is to use the watch, both Apple’s apps and especially third-party apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve given up on wanting custom watch faces, and that’s more of like an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS thing anyway. Like we would see that kind of thing probably at WBDC, not during the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware event. So that’s already, it looks like it’s not gonna happen this year. I still want it to happen, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I don’t think they’ll ever do it. Yeah, I mostly just want for the watch, like an evolutionary,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s have Series 6 make everything a little bit nicer and maybe add one little novelty somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If we’re looking at like our traditional exit interview
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the outgoing model as it’s about to be replaced, I think the Series 5 is mostly great and I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many complaints that aren’t related to every Apple Watch. I have some complaints, believe me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they aren’t things I expect to change. And a lot of them are like design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nitpicks about the faces and stuff. So anyway, moving on to other items,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to see an update to the iPad mini. For totally selfish reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my son’s is slowly dying or slash being killed, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, I think about almost two years old now, but it’s still the most current one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I would like to see an update so that if and when it gets fully killed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I decide to replace it, I’m not just replacing it with the exact same one for the exact same price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I bought two years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John dying? What’s dying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it? The lightning port is having significant problems charging. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on some research and some Twitter responses, this is actually a known issue, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the current generation of iPad mini. You know, part of it is due to, you know, the way kids are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of heavily use iPads. They’re always plugged in. So there’s always like some pressure on that charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port as they’re like holding the iPad with the charging cable in it, using it. So there’s like, you know, flexing that goes on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s also apparently some like significant firmware issues specifically with this model and charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where charging cables often aren’t recognized for a long time after they’re plugged in. And there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems buggy as well. So there’s some kind of issue with this that we are hitting that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not super happy about. But anyway, separately from that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I’m with all the rumors. I don’t expect to see iPhones quite yet. And so beyond that, you know, this could be the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessories, Things like headphones, I would love to see the over-ear headphones. It’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too soon to see any kind of significant AirPod update, but over-ear versions of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AirPod Pros would be very interesting to me for like, well, if I ever travel again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, I would also love to see Apple TV like everybody else. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep having to buy them because they keep either dying or we keep buying more TVs, and I feel terrible having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought so many of the old Apple TV, the very old Apple TV 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t even know what I would want out of a new one. I mean, I’ve given up on the remote ever being better. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re, I don’t think, as long as Alan Dye is in charge of what Alan Dye is in charge of, I don’t see anything like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting better. So, and he still is, so I don’t expect changes there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, we can dream. I just don’t wanna have to, again, same thing with the iPad Mini, I just don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to keep buying the same thing for the same price it’s been for years and years, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either make it cheaper or make it better. Like that’s what technology does. But ultimately, I do have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concerns as voiced earlier about where the software is right now. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS or macOS are really in a very releasable state right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS is closer, like iOS 14 could be released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I guess it would be in some ways, like my mailbug, it can be in some ways better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than iOS 13 has been for a year. As soon as
⏹️ ▶️ John they fix that mail bug, you’re like, ship it, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, yeah, right. But there are still little bugs in Springboard and stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel very beta. That being said, some of these hardware releases are probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be nice, and even though I’m kinda mad at Apple right now in general, I think they’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get me to buy some stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John will. Your wallet will get over it. Yeah. So back to the Apple TV, and transitioning to this
⏹️ ▶️ John item that I’m probably gonna clear out of the notes here. The item is from
⏹️ ▶️ John June 11th. In the notes it reads, PS5 hardware reveal. That’s right,
⏹️ ▶️ John the PlayStation 5 hardware was revealed in June, but we’re not in June anymore. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, the reason I wanna talk about it today is related to the Apple event, and it’s related to the Apple TV, and it’s related to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox, which also made a bunch of announcements, actually recently, as in like yesterday, or the day before,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whenever it was. Um, so the PlayStation five hardware reveal briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, I don’t know if you two probably saw it. It, what it looks like is a regular game console
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of swoopy and it’s like vertical and all the, the photo shots or whatever. The thing you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John realize when you look at it is just how huge it is. You thought Xbox was huge. Lol. PS five is huge.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lol. It is the biggest console you’ve ever seen. It’s like comically big and
⏹️ ▶️ John like Sony is careful not to put it next to other hardware, but in all the sort of scale drawings
⏹️ ▶️ John that people had it’s I don’t even know it’s gonna fit in a place where my place it was but anyway it looks like a new controller
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s white and blah blah blah the interesting part of it as compared to the ps4
⏹️ ▶️ John announcement is they announced two models one that has an optical drive and one called the PlayStation 5
⏹️ ▶️ John digital edition that does not have an optical drive in typical Sony fashion at least in the release of PlayStation 5
⏹️ ▶️ John first they showed the controller and we talked about on the show then they showed the console they still haven’t announced
⏹️ ▶️ John I think as of our recording a shipping date and they still haven’t announced prices. And
⏹️ ▶️ John since June, that’s been the case, right? Maybe they’re waiting for Microsoft to go first. Maybe they just haven’t decided
⏹️ ▶️ John yet. But that led to a lot of speculation looking at the PlayStation five, the one with
⏹️ ▶️ John about the optical drive saying, all right, well, I mean, I’m not gonna use the optical drive. Never even had an optical
⏹️ ▶️ John disc in any of my PlayStation’s. So I’ll get the one without the optical drive. Will the one without the optical drive
⏹️ ▶️ John be cheaper? If it is cheaper, how much will it be cheaper? Because that you know, that blu ray drive
⏹️ ▶️ John is not that expensive in in terms of the components, right? But maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll make the other one cheaper as a loss leader, or my hope, and this is not gonna happen, but I would have loved it if they
⏹️ ▶️ John made the digital edition one without the optical drive, made it more expensive and gave it more internal storage. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, hey, you don’t need, who doesn’t need optical disks? People who
⏹️ ▶️ John are willing to pay more to store everything on internal storage or to use the external storage expansion,
⏹️ ▶️ John which will also be very expensive because it has to be the super fast SSD that qualifies according to their specs
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. So make the digital one more expensive. People’s heads would explode if that happened. I don’t think it’s gonna happen
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway I’m probably gonna get the digital one. This is all relevant and relevant to Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John because Microsoft in typical Microsoft fashion has now announced all their stuff and they didn’t hold stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John back. They’d shown the Xbox Series X a while ago. It’s that black monolith thing I think we talked about on the show
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s Xbox Series X and the whole naming scheme was like this is Series X but we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have other series that are different versions of this console. Xbox naming is a mess, it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s naming look beautiful. But this generation of console is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to consist of, as far as we know now, the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series
⏹️ ▶️ John S. And these are not the Xbox One or the Xbox One S or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One X. And the Xbox One is not the first Xbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes, it’s, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Microsoft has two consoles as well. We’d seen the Series X, which was their big powerful one, and we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John compared that, and we talked about how they were gonna use a constant clock speed, and big fans, and this big vertical tower thing, and it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John weird, and everyone’s using SSDs and all that stuff. The Series S was the other shoe to drop. The Series S
⏹️ ▶️ John is the smaller, much smaller, like 60% the size of the Series
⏹️ ▶️ John X, less powerful console, lacks an optical drive. So if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you’re like, oh, it’s just kinda like the PlayStation one. The only difference is the PlayStation just took one giant console and just removed the optical drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Microsoft has, their optical driveless one is actually smaller. How can it be so much smaller?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the smaller one doesn’t do games at 4K. It’s up to 1440p
⏹️ ▶️ John at 120 frames per second, whereas the big Xbox Series X one
⏹️ ▶️ John is up to 4K at 120 frames per second, right? So this is for if you don’t have a 4K TV or you don’t care about 4K, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the Series S will upscale to 4K for your 4K TV. But if you don’t care about the resolution, This
⏹️ ▶️ John plays, like what games, this plays, in the previous generation I could say
⏹️ ▶️ John this plays Xbox One games. What the hell do I say now? This plays Xbox games? This plays Xbox Series
⏹️ ▶️ John X slash S games. They both play the same games is what I’m saying. This is a next generation console. This is Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ John next generation console. They both play the same games. But the Series S doesn’t play them at 4K. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like the only difference, right? So maybe you wouldn’t even notice the difference depending on how far away you sit from your TV. Because again, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John upscale to 4K if you needed to or whatever. It can play video streaming at 4K, so you can watch Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John in 4K and everything like that, but it’s way smaller, presumably maybe quieter or whatever. But here is the
⏹️ ▶️ John killer. Microsoft announced prices and a ship date. So their ship date is released on November 10th,
⏹️ ▶️ John pre-order starts September 22nd. So now it’s up to Sony to say what they’re gonna do. Both of them are aiming for holiday
⏹️ ▶️ John this year, right? But Sony hasn’t announced it yet, right? But here’s the pricing. The Xbox Series
⏹️ ▶️ John X is $499, which is less than a lot of people expected. $500 is still a lot for a game console, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, it’s a launch console of their most powerful thing. The Series S is $299. You know what else
⏹️ ▶️ John is $299? The most expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV. This is Apple TV’s problem, as Marco said, either make it good or make it cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, it’s that expensive? The Apple TV, the 64 gig Apple TV is, oh wait, no, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John getting this wrong? No, it’s like $199.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s $179 versus $199, right? Still embarrassing, $199 versus $299.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple TV does not play games $100 less well
⏹️ ▶️ John than the next generation Xbox console that just doesn’t happen to do 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know the Apple TVs are powerful. I know the GPU is good, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John as a gaming platform, to be even within shouting distance of the next
⏹️ ▶️ John generation Xbox console, granted the wimpy one without an optical drive, you know, the Apple TV doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John an optical drive either. That’s a bad situation for Apple TV to be in. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that box is just, I don’t know what they’re thinking with the Apple TV. Is that what is, what market
⏹️ ▶️ John are you aiming at? Because I don’t feel like it’s a particularly premium experience
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of streaming stuff. I think some of the built-in software on televisions is starting to compete with Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe the Roku stuff and the Fire Stick are still a little bit janky, but some of the TV built-in stuff has the advantage of being built
⏹️ ▶️ John in and can be pretty snappy and has a good picture quality and supports all the features. Anyway, Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John has got serious problems. They need to fix the remote. They need to fix the price they need to make it a high-end thing or whatever. But back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the console world, this pricing is a problem, potentially a problem for Sony, and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John the ship date is a problem because that Series S console,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you set aside the sort of spec wars and just sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like desire to have the best of everything, if people are honest with themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John and especially if they don’t have a 4K TV, there’s no real reason as far as we can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John right now to get the Series X. The Series X also has double the internal storage, it’s 1TB SSD instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of 512 or whatever, but $299 is a very attractive price for
⏹️ ▶️ John a launch of an next generation console, even if it’s the Wimpy version. And everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks, and I agree, that the PlayStation 5 will not be able to come close to $299, either
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them. People are thinking that the good PlayStation 5 is going to be $600, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re saying, well how much can they remove? They remove the Apple II drive, because that, as far as I know is the only difference. I mean, obviously they could do storage
⏹️ ▶️ John size differences if they wanted, but it seems like the only difference between the two PlayStation 5s is one has an optical drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John one doesn’t. How much can one optical drive cost? $10? Yeah, 30 bucks maybe? We’re not talking a lot of money here.
⏹️ ▶️ John how much does it cost Sony to buy that optical drive? And they’re gonna sell millions of these things
⏹️ ▶️ John and they probably buy tons of optical drives for their actual Blu-ray players if they still sell those, right? So the
⏹️ ▶️ John parts cost isn’t that much. So if the big, good PlayStation 5 is $600,
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you imagine the digital edition being less than 500? And 500 is the price of the good Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the features. So this is gonna be interesting. And also the ship date of November 10th. The fact that Sony hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even announced the ship date, does that mean Sony’s not even sure if they’re gonna hit holiday season?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or is their ship date gonna be later? If Sony ships after
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft, like if their ship date is after November 10th, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Sony has some problems here. Sony, I feel like still has a good reputation with gamers. People like it, people like the exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ John titles, everything’s going for it. It’s a leader in this generation of consoles. But
⏹️ ▶️ John come holidays, especially in these COVID times, you wanna get the kids a new next generation
⏹️ ▶️ John console, one of them costs $299, and the other one starts at $500. Boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna be a tough sell. So, I mean, I’m still getting a PlayStation 5, obviously, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a little bit worried about Sony this generation, and I’m also worried about Apple with the Apple TV, which now
⏹️ ▶️ John has a competitor that, you know, play, you know, a next generation gaming console for $100
⏹️ ▶️ John more than an Apple TV. And it comes with a controller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, Apple will sell you a set of Mac Pro feet for that same price, the $299.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the Mac Pro feet are the next generation console feet for your
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. Like, at least they’re the best. That’s what you were saying. Like, if you’re gonna make a
⏹️ ▶️ John set-top box or whatever thing, you know, anyway, If you’re gonna make an Apple TV type thing and you want
⏹️ ▶️ John it to cost a bazillion dollars, at least just make sure it’s the best. Like, I mean, I think we agree those are the best wheels available
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac Pro. So yeah, you’re paying way too much for them. But when you get them, you’re like, but they are nice wheels. You get
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple TV and you’re like, is it really that nice? Eh, hmm. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can play games at 4K, I suppose, but you can’t play the kind of games that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be able to play on the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or PlayStation. Yeah, I mean, and what Apple would probably argue is like, well, I mean, first of all, they don’t care about what value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they deliver. Second of all, there is that 329 iPad in the lineup. So I think that is their $300 gaming device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the Apple TV. Apple’s heart was never super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into Apple TV gaming. And it also seems like Apple’s heart is not super into the Apple TV hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product at all in general. And it’s always been kind of like the Mac mini of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it remains a product in their lineup, but it’s never much of a priority for them. And I think what has become clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that there’s not much market for that kind of device anymore. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially not much market for a premium, if you consider the Apple TV premium, which in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways it is, and in some ways it isn’t. The ubiquity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now of smart TVs, quote, has really taken a lot of wind out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sails of this market for premium TV connected streaming boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, because now you have these two massive competitors that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the Apple TV was first kind of coming up, didn’t exist. You have extremely cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming things you can plug into TVs that will also play Netflix and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you have smart TV stuff being built in to almost every new TV. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t buy most good TVs without all that smart stuff built in. It’s there whether you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or not. If you buy it, like a halfway decent TV, it’s gonna have all these built-in apps and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there’s decreasing need for Apple to even make the Apple TV at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think their effort in the product line reflects that. And that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also doesn’t help that the most recent generation of Apple TV has been so mediocre.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m not talking about just the 4K, I’m including the whole Siri remote generation. You know, it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so mediocre in so many ways. So much of what Apple seemed to want for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app ecosystem didn’t pan out. You know, the Apple TV, the, you know, the app-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV was always a mediocre entrant in the market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now the market’s gone. And so while I still use them almost every day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’d rather, like, I have smart TVs now, and I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the TVs built in garbage because, you know, the Apple stuff is nicer in many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways, and I trust Apple a little bit more with privacy stuff. But I have to admit the difference is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting smaller and smaller. Like we recently had to set up a new TV and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was out of HDMI cables. And so I couldn’t, I have an Apple TV ready to go for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but I couldn’t hook it up because I didn’t have a cable for a few days. And so we just watched Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the built-in app on the TV. And it was a little worse in some ways, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was mostly fine. Like I always hear, whenever I invest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavily in the Overcast UI. I will often hear from like pragmatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users or friends, like, you know, it’s not really worth investing so much into this, because for the most part, you like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit play, and then most of the time you’re using the app, you’re not looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at or operating the UI. Like you’re just listening to your podcast, right? That’s kind of how TV stuff is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, when they showed all these demos of browsing real estate listings on your TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and buying clothes on your TV and stuff, Like that kind of stuff, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS and platform sophistication might matter. But what most people ended up actually doing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their Apple TVs is watching Netflix and stuff. And the difference between the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV watching Netflix and any other device in the universe watching Netflix is not that big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a difference. And whatever differences there are, are kind of minimized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the nature of watching stuff on TV. like the podcast app of like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can design it as much as you want, but the reality is, you’re hitting a few buttons and then you’re just laying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the remote and watching something. So the actual time you’re interacting with this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not that high, especially as a percentage of time you’re using it. And the differences are getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller and smaller over time as the built-in TV stuff is getting better. And I don’t expect any of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in smart TV makers to ever be as capable of making good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software experiences as Apple is. Notice I’m saying capable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like, Apple is capable of making great experiences. They largely haven’t on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV, but they are capable of it when they try. But I just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see how this market matters anymore. And even Apple, they even brought their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content services to other TVs now, because I think even they saw, you know what, this market’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a hill to die on. Like trying to get somebody to pay an Apple relevant price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for an Apple version of something every set-top box is, or every TV is including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free, that’s a harder and harder sell as time goes on. So I think for the same reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple just bowed out of the Wi-Fi router business, it wouldn’t surprise me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they just kind of let the Apple TV business slowly die because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their contribution is less and less relevant and what they really want is services revenue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, which they can now get by spreading their content services onto everyone else’s TVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Apple TV, it’s less and less necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s totally the reason why they put Apple TV under the platforms is when you have a services business, you don’t artificially
⏹️ ▶️ John limit yourself by saying you have to get an Apple TV. That would be ridiculous, right? But I think that Apple should absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to make the Apple TV. They just gotta figure out, like you said, which direction do they wanna go? You either gotta make it way cheaper,
⏹️ ▶️ John which they can do. Like Apple is totally capable of making an Apple TV that
⏹️ ▶️ John does essentially all the things that it does now except for maybe you not play games as well for way less money
⏹️ ▶️ John in one of those little tiny stick form factors. Or they have to actually make a high-end streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John box that has high-end features, that has a remote that people like, that
⏹️ ▶️ John more people recognize the value in. You know, that it’s not just a little bit better than the built-in TV features,
⏹️ ▶️ John but a lot better in ways that people appreciate. And then you can sell that for more money. What they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do probably is compete with gaming consoles because again, if you look at the Xbox Series S,
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I don’t know what wattage it’s taking, but it’s probably like a 100, 200 watts in there. It’s got a gigantic fan. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wants to compete with that level of gaming power, it has to compete with that level of electrical power,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a whole different ball of wax. You can’t have these tiny little things with silent or non-existent fans inside them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not the puck market, right? But they can compete
⏹️ ▶️ John in a premium streaming box with a updated version of the Apple TV with a much better remote and
⏹️ ▶️ John better OS and features, right? And the reason I think they need to stay in this market is, it’s not so
⏹️ ▶️ John much that, you know, that selling the hardware is important, is that Apple, I think, needs to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to have an app platform connected to your television. Televisions will all have
⏹️ ▶️ John all these apps built in, right? That’ll have Netflix and it’ll have HBO and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John But maybe if you buy a TV and then like a new, you know, whatever, Hulu and
⏹️ ▶️ John CBS All Access go out of business because Disney dominates them and there’s, you know, a new service
⏹️ ▶️ John pops up. How long is it going to take for your TV manufacturer to have the app for that service versus how long would it take for
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple platform to have an app for that service? Apple I think needs to continue to cultivate
⏹️ ▶️ John something you can buy for your TV that runs apps vended from an app store that’s run by Apple and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just the cost of doing business for them. I don’t think they’re ever going to be an important player and they’ll have to pick a direction
⏹️ ▶️ John for the hardware to be either cheap or good, but I think they need to have that platform
⏹️ ▶️ John because that platform is an advantage. The advantage of like, we don’t know what people are gonna do with this, but you can make games
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can make this and you can make that. And it turns out shopping for sweaters in real estate is not the killer app feature, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if there is a killer app feature, if Apple doesn’t have a platform that connects to your TV, they’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John participate in it. So I think it is important for Apple to continue to be in this market. They should, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they should just accept it as a cost of doing business. And they just need to figure out how to make
⏹️ ▶️ John their product a little bit better so it’ll be more palatable. Like I don’t, you know, whether it’s a hobby or not or whatever, like they
⏹️ ▶️ John just need to be there because if they’re not there, someone else will fill that void. And one of the other players
⏹️ ▶️ John will become, oh, they’re the app platform that if there’s some new killer app for television that no
⏹️ ▶️ John one ever thought of, it’s gonna appear on their platform. It’s gonna appeal on, I don’t know, Roku, on the Amazon Firesticks,
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Google TV things or whatever. Because all the competitors are there, Apple needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be there because I think, you know, apps that you can download from a store and run
⏹️ ▶️ John on your television is a reasonable idea. And we’ve seen lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of useful versions of that. Mostly streaming apps for now, but gaming is a potential thing, but who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows what the future will hold. So I really hope Apple doesn’t give up on this, like the Wi-Fi, hell, I want to take Wi-Fi routers
⏹️ ▶️ John again, but I really hope Apple doesn’t give up on this. They just need to do a little bit better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I echo what you were saying, Marco, that when I first got my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4K TV, which is an LG, I started using the onboard apps and like Disney Plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we still use all the time because I wanna watch in 4K and I don’t have a 4K Apple TV yet. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Disney Plus app is not demonstrably worse than the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV app. It is not great, but it is not worse than the Apple TV app in my personal opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plex, I haven’t tried in a while, but Plex was definitely way better on the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than it was on my actual TV. Although I really am not the biggest fan some of the UI changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plex has made recently. And so I should actually go back and try the TV’s Plex app one more time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But all told, I agree with you guys both that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still want an Apple TV and I still am looking to buy an Apple TV to plug into there, but I think I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey survive without it and that was not the case just a couple of years ago. And, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, granted I hadn’t bought a TV in like 10 years, but you get the point, like it wasn’t that long ago that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that that was the case. And I hope that Apple doesn’t give up on this particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey platform. But I think of all the platforms that I participate in of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s, this would be the one that I would shed the fewest tears over if it did go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, the sort of no-brainer updates that Apple needs to do just for the keeping up with the Joneses things, they need
⏹️ ▶️ John to update the HDMI 2.1. They need auto latency mode. They need variable refresh. They need
⏹️ ▶️ John just all the features, basically all the features of the of the new HDMI standards and all the features that the new television
⏹️ ▶️ John support. That’s just to keep up, right? I think Apple’s already got Dolby Vision and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they’ve got the HDR standards handled and they have the adjusting frame rate from a previous releases, but those
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI 2.1 features I mentioned, all the TVs support them now. Streaming boxes are gonna follow.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple continues to not update their thing, eventually not only will it not be premium, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be recommended against because you won’t be able to play games at a higher frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rate or, you know, play games with less input lag with the auto low latency mode and all.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of features that modern television support that Apple needs to keep up with. So even if they do nothing except
⏹️ ▶️ John for give you another puck with that horrible remote, they just need to bump, like bump the internal specs,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe give it more storage and let it support all the new standards of HDMI 2.1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to me, the number one thing they need from my point of view is to drop the price. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause it’s so egregiously out of line with the rest of the market right now. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing when Apple has a premium offering and they charge a premium price, and you can look at it and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, it’s more expensive than the competitors, but it’s so much better. It’s worth it. You know, it’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the quote Apple tax, it’s actually a better product and you’re paying to get something nice. And I’d say that’s true of, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, many of the products Apple sells, that you are actually paying a reasonable price for the quality you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for the competitiveness that you’re getting. That’s not true for the Apple TV. I don’t think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever has been, and it’s now like it’s less true now than it’s ever been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the competitors are so capable and so cheap and so ahead of the curve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a lot of those spec things. And the Apple TV is just sitting there, just ancient and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super expensive still, and pretty half-assed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got an Apple solution for that. That gets back to the price comparison to the Xbox Series S.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ship a new Apple TV with updated HDMI like I said, maybe fix the remote,
⏹️ ▶️ John include a gaming controller, keep the price the same. Because the expense of Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John plus a $50 gaming controller is now within $50 of the Xbox Series S, right? And I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, an Apple TV with a gaming controller doesn’t suddenly become more capable of games,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it becomes more capable of games for people who don’t wanna buy another controller to use with their Apple TV. And if they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna pair one of their console controllers and you know, like, I know it doesn’t seem like a big barrier, but it’s like, hey, if you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John a PlayStation, just pair it with your Apple TV. you got an Xbox, just pair it like but that is a barrier. If you buy this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and for the same price it came with a first party Apple controller, more people
⏹️ ▶️ John would view it as a potentially viable gaming platform. Granted, maybe just for young kids or whatever, but like, look, it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John with a game controller. Here you go. Like, and yes, you can play games to the remote. And yes, you can buy third party controls. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can pair other ones. Just it’s it’s just a psychological barrier. If Apple wants this to be taken seriously in any
⏹️ ▶️ John way as a gaming platform, and it is perfectly capable for many genres of games even if Apple doesn’t have the big AAA
⏹️ ▶️ John titles. Now, you’ve got this good GPU in there, even on the current model. For a new
⏹️ ▶️ John one with a better GPU and a better CPU and system-on-a-chip and the whole nine yards, supporting the new
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI standards with high frame rate and 4k output, ship it with a controller and then you can keep the price the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it will seem more reasonable because, hey, you’re getting a free $50 controller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t want a free $50 controller. I don’t have any interest in having a game
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, keep the price the same with the controller and then make
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the one without the controller $50 less.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because I mean the reality is Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming has been such a flop for so many reasons really. Not having the controller in every box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a big reason for sure. Because and their early requirement for the first few years of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV, of the tvOS version of Apple TV, their early requirement that all games must
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also work with the little stupid remote and couldn’t require a controller, That rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now gone, but it used to be that way, and for a long time. So the combination of those two things really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did make it so that it was basically dead in the water. But even if Apple really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried to make the Apple TV a serious gaming platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gaming platform at all today, I don’t think they would succeed. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, first of all, their heart is just not in gaming. All of Apple’s success in gaming on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been inadvertent. It has kind of happened to them, not as a result of anything they did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, even with Apple Arcade, I don’t think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV needs to be a gaming device, and I don’t think it ever will succeed at being one, even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple were to really try and do things like put a controller in every box. Ultimately, their heart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not in it, their expertise is not there, and Apple already has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming in the casual way locked up pretty well with the iPhone and iPad, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s where they will continue to do well. I just, I don’t see the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever succeeding as a game platform. I think they’re better off, I mean, heck, even, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did everything ideally for them. When TVOS first came out, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went and I went and bought the Steelcase Nimbus controller, and I eventually bought the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hori Ultimate, because everyone said it was better. So here I am sitting there with two MFI-compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controllers, each of which was extraordinarily expensive, you know, for a lark that I was taking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I downloaded a whole bunch of Apple TV games back before people knew that it was gonna be worthless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make them. So like there was actually some good effort put into them. And I had a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun with like one or two games and then that was it. The types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of games that succeed in iOS, and iOS-like platforms like TVOS, these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of games that succeed are, you know, casual games. they’re usually much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in scope, much simpler than what you get on a console from like a major publisher.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s great for the phone in your pocket when you’re standing on line at the bank or when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just trying to kill some time with your phone or your iPad, that’s one thing. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna like have a home console-like experience you’re gonna sit on the couch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a controller that you had to pay 60 bucks for separately that you have to then like, you know, get the games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed on your TV with this clunky interface, and you’re going to sit down and play a game on your big TV on your couch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standards are pretty high for the quality and depth of those games,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the console world is so mature and has so many amazing games, that if you’re expecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of experience, you’re not going to find it in the iOS game world. Even if you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get past all the hardware requirements, the controller being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there or not being there. Apple’s ecosystem of software and of games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not contain a lot of those like super high quality games with lots of depth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They contain a lot of really simple games you can play with your finger on your phone when you’re waiting in line. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge market, don’t get me wrong. But most of those people aren’t wanting to then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play this on the big screen on their TV with a controller on their couch. they’re happy to keep playing those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games on their phone while someone else watches TV with whatever built-in smart crap is in their TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t see the Apple TV as a gaming device. And I think that’s probably because I just never use it as a gaming device. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be tons, dozens of people even, that use it as a gaming device. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally do not know of anyone that plays games on it. Now we’re gonna get all the email about the people who play games on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But- Well, it’s even worse because like, even Apple seems to have significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backed away from the Apple TV as an app platform when they introduced the TV app for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV and made that the default home screen. So now, if you want to do anything on an Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides watch TV in the TV app on TV on Apple TV TV, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fight you at every turn. Like, it’s like, and now it’s extra button presses, or you gotta go back a level, and then every time you hit home,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes back to that, and you have to go change that setting if you really want to, which no one probably does. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is backed away significantly from the app model, and any chances of it being a game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform, I think they have also probably backed away from, even though, yes, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much aware that Apple Arcade games are required to, I think, also work on the Apple TV. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, first of all, I don’t think Apple Arcade’s that successful, honestly, but also, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that matters. I don’t think enough people are doing it on Apple TV for that to be a thing or to notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, ultimately, I hope that Apple gives Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it actually needs, which is make the process of watching video content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better, which would be things like some software tweaks, MIUI tweaks, and the new remote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make it more appealing to the market by dropping the price. That’s what Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really needs. Better TV experience and lower price. And if they have to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut its abilities as a game platform to get there, that’s what they should do, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things are more important to that product’s actual future than a gaming ideal that they will never
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you imagine what a first party Apple console controller would look like given what that remote looks like? Oh God.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like what would that be?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You thought the original NES controllers had bad ergonomics? Wait till you see this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I feel like they would, I feel like because they’ve been selling like those, you know, the Nimbus controller and they see what
⏹️ ▶️ John the other, I feel like they’d be sort of much more cowed by the established form of a
⏹️ ▶️ John console controller that they wouldn’t make something totally weird, But I also don’t think it would be a good controller
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. Because I feel like they would make something console controller shaped, but then in all the surface details,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would do some kind of thing that’s in the spirit of the current terrible remote and make it smooth and
⏹️ ▶️ John featureless so you can’t feel the edges of the buttons and just like this hairline cut out where they press in. Or something
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible like that, where when you’re trying to feel where the face buttons are with your thumb, you can’t feel them because they’re all flush. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just, yeah. I don’t have much faith in their ergonomic design, given.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like their keyboard, but their mouse I don’t like, their remote I hate with a fiery passion, and I just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t imagine what their console controller would be like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Mack Weldon, and Bring Back Bronco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join if you want to at atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. Thanks everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, check my cast so long
Neutral: John teaches driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, I would love to know what it’s like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey teach someone how to drive. Actually, more importantly, I would love for you to get your son
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the horn so I can ask him what it’s like to learn how to drive from you. But to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best you’re willing to share, what’s it like trying to teach a small-ish person how to drive?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I’m just an amazing teacher or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my son is an amazing student, but he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great. Here it is. He is doing fantastic. I’ve been taking him on
⏹️ ▶️ John driving pretty much every weekend, both days, for
⏹️ ▶️ John months now, ever since he got his permit. And we did the whole thing. Start off just in a parking
⏹️ ▶️ John lot, and then work our way up to back roads, and then we work our way up to driving back and forth through the
⏹️ ▶️ John parking lot. We’re doing a lot of stuff that’s like drills for the actual test. So we’re doing parallel parking drills
⏹️ ▶️ John and three-point turns. And apparently, in Massachusetts, you have to back along the curb for 50 feet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, never even heard of that one, but that’s another part of the test. So we do a lot of teaching to the test, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we also do plain old driving on the roads, do errands, like go around in the various
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult intersections in the neighborhood and practice. And this is all on a stick shift car, which I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John give him an option. I didn’t say anything about it. I just said, guess what? We’re gonna go learn how to drive. And he just accepted
⏹️ ▶️ John it as the reality and he’s doing great. We found a parking lot that has a
⏹️ ▶️ John hill in it. Like it’s one parking lot and there’s like a lower level. there’s another parking lot. And we use the hill
⏹️ ▶️ John to do hill starts. So we just go to the bottom of the hill and we just go up like a foot and then come to a complete
⏹️ ▶️ John stop, then go up another foot and come to a complete stop, then go up and the hill gets steeper as you go. So the, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the contest was how many, how many stops and starts can you get before getting up the hill, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you stall the engine, it’s, you disqualified. So we did that game for a while and he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great at hill starts now he can just basically do an infinite number of them all the way up the hill.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit tricky in the top part. And he’s annoyed that the hill hold on the Accord is a little bit unreliable. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s great, because it teaches us not to rely on the hill hold. The hill hold gives off after a fraction of a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will hold you, and then it’s like, well, you better be ready to go. We’ve been doing driving around the neighborhood
⏹️ ▶️ John through intersections. We recently got up to the point where he was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John since we’re doing real world driving, it’s like sometimes you need to get out onto the road a little bit quicker, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trying to get into a spot in some busy traffic. So he asked me, how do I get
⏹️ ▶️ John out onto the road a little bit quicker? I said, now we’re gonna learn how to do
⏹️ ▶️ John burnouts. And so we went to the parking lot and we learned how to actually give the thing some gas.
⏹️ ▶️ John First thing I tried to get him to do was like, you’re gonna find where the red line is and you’re gonna see what a rev limiter is. And-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, did you do that? Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you have him bounce off the rev limiter without the car in motion?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, with the car in motion.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s a stick shift car, it’s got a tack and he’s just been,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, tooling
⏹️ ▶️ John around, shifting it like 2,000, 3,000 RPM or whatever, because he’s going slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, when we started doing this, we went to this, it’s like a parking lot of like an office complex, and on the weekends
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nobody there, so it’s great for learning to drive. There’s a whole bunch of office buildings and a whole bunch of parking lots, and we’ve been sort of touring
⏹️ ▶️ John them all. But at some point, maybe like two or three weeks into this, other
⏹️ ▶️ John people learning to drive started to show up. So now the parking lot is filled with people like stopping and starting and
⏹️ ▶️ John parallel parking, and just, you know, we’re widely separated, It’s big parking lots, but when I was trying to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John to have him bounce off the rev limiter, he was embarrassed to do it because he’s like other people who are learning
⏹️ ▶️ John to drive. We’re going to think that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. All right. So, yeah. So we learned how to start quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John We learned how to start quickly without spinning the wheels. We learned how to start quickly with spinning the wheels. We
⏹️ ▶️ John learned what it feels like to hit the red line. We learned to do, you know, fast shifting instead of, you know, first,
⏹️ ▶️ John second, third, but do for a second third and get up to maybe 5000 RPM between shifts. Right. at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. You know, we’re not doing performance driving here, but we did enough to know, like, here’s how you can squirt into traffic. And the reason I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to do burnouts is to show him this is what you don’t want to do, because this will not get you into traffic quickly. This is if you
⏹️ ▶️ John mishandle the clutch and the gas, you will just sit there spinning your wheels and instead of getting into traffic quickly, you will
⏹️ ▶️ John just be making smoke and ruining my expensive tires. So don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We did emergency stopping.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Emergency stopping so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can feel the ABS pulsing the brake pedal, right? All sorts of drills like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought you were doing this in Tina’s car, no?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh-huh. I see how it is. Yeah, we got a, here’s some accessories we got. We got a set of cones,
⏹️ ▶️ John collapsible cones, so I could set up like parallel parking. So we’re not parallel parking with an actual car, we’re parallel parking with a phantom
⏹️ ▶️ John car made up of cones. Which is actually trickier because the cones are low to the ground and you can’t really see. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and since they don’t want you to look at the backup camera during various maneuvers, I block the backup camera
⏹️ ▶️ John with a towel so we can’t look at that during the maneuvers. I got some student
⏹️ ▶️ John driver magnets that I slap on the back of the car whenever we go out to prevent
⏹️ ▶️ John who are behind us from honking. It works about 50% of the time. Because before I had them, people would honk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you’re behind a new driver and they’re like, why aren’t they going? Or the light changed, or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever new drivers do, people are gonna honk at you. And with the student driver stickers on, it takes about half
⏹️ ▶️ John the honks out. But I like the honking because as I’ve been telling him, the part about being a new driver
⏹️ ▶️ John is that people are gonna honk at you because you’re gonna do stupid stuff. And the worst thing you can do as a new driver is get freaked
⏹️ ▶️ John out by the honking and do something stupid. Just accept that they’re honking, receive their honking,
⏹️ ▶️ John take it within you and say, yes, I am learning to drive. I have done the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps deserves to be honked at but you honking is not going to make me suddenly squirt out into traffic and get hit by
⏹️ ▶️ John a cement truck because I don’t feel like it’s safe for me to go right now. So feel free to honk,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I will still not get so nervous that I stall the car and not do something stupid. And so it’s great experience
⏹️ ▶️ John being in the car and having people honk at you and just learning to accept the honking and
⏹️ ▶️ John not do something, because honestly he deserves to be honked at, because, you know, but he’s just learning, right? But anyway, I’ve been amazed.
⏹️ ▶️ John He picked up the clutch brakes, you know, gas stuff so quickly. He
⏹️ ▶️ John just pretty much never stalls anymore unless he’s super duper nervous. Maybe we’re doing like one
⏹️ ▶️ John stall and two hours of real world driving. If that, I think this, you know, we just had a trip
⏹️ ▶️ John today, I had him drive us to the high school to drop off a book that he had to drop off. He did that driving
⏹️ ▶️ John there and back, no problem. This weekend, I think he had one stall maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John during several hours of driving. So, overall I think he’s doing great. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John said, I credit to my, and I’d be the only person teaching him because I feel like my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little bit too nervous about her dying, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit maybe applies more pressure to him. I try to remain calm despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that I feel like my life is in my hands sometimes. And I feel like that calming influence is helping him
⏹️ ▶️ John understand. And I did, by the way, start the teaching procedure with a classroom
⏹️ ▶️ John portion before we got in the car. Of course you did. The classroom portion was me drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible, like pencil drawings of conceptually the you know the engine
⏹️ ▶️ John uh the clutch the transmission the drivetrain the gear shift to and and
⏹️ ▶️ John to explain like how it all works behind the scenes i wish i could have found a good youtube video but drawing it was fine to just say like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what happens when you press the clutch and when you don’t press it this is what the gear shift does this is
⏹️ ▶️ John what it means when you’re in neutral this is what the engine is doing this is how an engine works i’m not sure my daughter will
⏹️ ▶️ John tolerate to deliver a detail i went to but But I think it really helps just to conceptually understand what’s going on, because then it becomes less
⏹️ ▶️ John abstract of like, which pedal do I push when you understand what they’re doing and you understand like what the engine
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing and the whole nine yards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a question then. Is your son going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a man or is he going to drive like a New Yorker?
⏹️ ▶️ John Neither. He’s a very, very calm, sedate driver. Like he’s, you know, he,
⏹️ ▶️ John he drives gently. He’s not in a hurry. he you know and right now mostly he’s he’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John test taking mode like i don’t know if you’ll find out but i feel like this generation of kids is very very attuned
⏹️ ▶️ John to test taking because there’s so many more standardized tests and so much more teaching to the test so this
⏹️ ▶️ John is just another like oh i know this mode this is i’m going to be tested on something and i have to learn it so it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s do three point turns let’s parallel park let’s back up along the curb why because it’s on the test and
⏹️ ▶️ John that type of stuff the same thing with like the the double stopping like there’s a There’s a bunch of stuff that they want you to do in Massachusetts
⏹️ ▶️ John like stop at the stop line, and they also want you to, after you stop at the stop line, when you creep up again so you can actually
⏹️ ▶️ John see, do a full stop again, don’t roll through that second part, do a full stop again,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then go because that’s something they want you to do for the test. It’s also good driving
⏹️ ▶️ John habits. But anyway, I feel like he’s going to be a fairly calm
⏹️ ▶️ John driver, at least until he gets way more confident, because he’s not nervous driving,
⏹️ ▶️ John but he drives carefully and sedately. Like he’s a new driver, so new drivers don’t know where to look.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s why they get hit by cement trucks and stuff. Right. But I’m in the car with him making sure that I’m at least
⏹️ ▶️ John being aware of everything else. I’ll let you know when he gets up to the hooligan level, but I feel like he’s generally
⏹️ ▶️ John a very calm and careful person who will most likely get into accidents due
⏹️ ▶️ John to inattention and not hooligan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see. I don’t know. I just, having spent the beginning of my driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey career in Connecticut, Relatively far away from Massachusetts border but not that far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember that the pecking order was connected drivers were fine new york drivers were jerks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but generally skilled jerks. New massachusetts drivers were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jerks but didn’t know what they were doing and then there was jersey which was just a whole new disaster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in every way shape and form so i mean i don’t even pump their own gas there like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t know how, you can’t trust them
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. Yeah, we did that too. Every time we’re in the car, I make them go get gas if we need gas, and I make them pump it
⏹️ ▶️ John to learn how to do that. That’s the part he likes the least. Like, why do I have to get gas? He feels like it’s beneath him, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of driving. I pay for it, he should be happy with it. I tap
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone on the gas meter thing, that’s the hard part. I still miss SpeedPass.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, SpeedPass isn’t the thing? Oh, you’re talking about the mobile thing or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John whatever it was. Yeah, they used to just be the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thingy on your key chain. Instead now I have to take my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone out and do face ID and it’s worse. Like an animal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like an animal. Well, I’m glad that you’re teaching him. I’m glad that he’s enthusiastic about it too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because your son is not the most overtly enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person I’ve ever met. And from what I understand, teens these days, the kids these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days, aren’t generally enthusiastic about driving anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am very impressed that he has been taking it so seriously and doing so well. That’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s a fun thing to do. And you know, when you’re first learning to drive, driving is fun. So you know, I think he’s, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think he has, he views it as a utilitarian thing as in once I can, like when I was viewing, it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I want to ride my bike to the mall and I want to buy a model at the model shop. Now I’ll be able to drive there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And because the mall was 20 miles away or whatever, 10 miles, fine, 20 miles round trip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I’ll be able to drive. has utility in my life, I don’t think he sees that angle because in this modern
⏹️ ▶️ John age, the car has no utility to him, especially since we live near public transport. If you really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to go somewhere, you could just take the T. But driving is fun, and so I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like a real life video game. In the good sense, again, he’s not being reckless or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, driving is complicated, and you don’t realize it until you’re trying to teach somebody new about all the different
⏹️ ▶️ John places you have to look and why and when and and how to judge the behavior of other cars, and what
⏹️ ▶️ John blinkers do and don’t mean. And Massachusetts with its totally invisible lane markings
⏹️ ▶️ John that rubbed off three winters ago, and its intersections that don’t line up, and its signals
⏹️ ▶️ John that are all hidden in the bushes. Massachusetts, setting aside the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John mass hole, New York driver, Connecticut driver, whatever, Massachusetts roads are a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John The pavement is a mess. The alignment is a mess. The signage is a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything conspires to make it difficult. It’s not like those driver ed videos where you’re in some
⏹️ ▶️ John beautiful place with wide open roads where the signals are suspended directly over your lane. All the
⏹️ ▶️ John lanes are clearly marked and there’s huge soldiers. None of that here. So I feel kind of bad for
⏹️ ▶️ John him in that respect. But that’s why we’re driving around on railroads and learning about where the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John intersections are and how to successfully navigate them and alternate escape routes if you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John manage to get through this intersection. You can make three rights instead of a left and it’s easier in this place.