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

397: We Can't Wait To See What You Do To It

We should all have the freedom to make our phones look like Hotdog Stand.

Episode Description:

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MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Podcast lighting
  2. Donate * St. Jude
  3. Follow-up: PS5 pricing
  4. Xbox Series X preorders
  5. Sponsor: Backblaze
  6. Solo Loop
  7. No more Edition AC adapters
  8. Boring Old Menu Bar
  9. OnyX deletes APFS snapshots
  10. Apple One w/multiple Apple IDs
  11. Sport band XL size 🖼️
  12. Watch/band separation
  13. Sponsor: HEY.com
  14. Epic’s Sign In With Apple
  15. How cars work
  16. Microsoft buying ZeniMax
  17. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
  18. Widgetsmith & customization
  19. Ending theme
  20. Ode to Hotdog Stand 🖼️

Podcast lighting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the most startling ring in the world. God

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bless. It’s nighttime. I don’t have the lights in the room on because that’s the way I like it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And all of a sudden, doot, doot, doot, at like a billion decibels. It’s not your fault.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re just doing what you need to do. But holy God, it makes me jump six feet every time. Paul Matzko,

⏹️ ▶️ John Jr. I have the same problem, but in reverse because since we last spoke, I got the 250 ohm 770s.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, just and I was trying them out to see if

⏹️ ▶️ John my things can drive them and they can I can drive them loud enough To do a podcasting but you do have to crank up the volume. So

⏹️ ▶️ John if you forget that you did that And then unplug that stuff and your volumes

⏹️ ▶️ John close to max Everything is very startling. I’m not using them though today though because

⏹️ ▶️ John the pads that come with them are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, I don’t mind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. I mean do you do you if they don’t work for you? That’s fine, but I don’t think they’re so bad

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I feel mine feel so like I’m like have these been sitting in the box for a long time They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like snail like crackers.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, they’re just kind of like I don’t know and I feel like I Knew this going in but like

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re circular, right? nothing on the side of my head is the appropriate

⏹️ ▶️ John shape to go into a circle so this is the They apply pressure

⏹️ ▶️ John in some weird places. Anyway, I have the good pads coming So once they arrive, I will swap them out.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how I’m still using the Old Faithful for this podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fair. So I’m curious, Casey, you mentioned that you podcast in the dark.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In a manner of speaking, yes. The lights in the room are not on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I podcast in the brightest office I can possibly create because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we do this show at 9 p.m. And I am an old person and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to get up for school in the morning for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey kids’ school.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I am always battling being tired. And so I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure on podcast day, I try to get a nap sometime in the late afternoon if I can for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a half hour to help refresh me. I will delay my afternoon coffee until right after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that nap. So that way I’m like fresh, ready to go as much as possible. I will even avoid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eating a carbohydrate heavy dinner. Oh my word. Because that would make me more tired.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when it comes time for the podcast, I am in full lights,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and none of them can be particularly warmly colored. Like, none of this 2,700K BS. 2,700K lights are for like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, campfires and romance novels? Those, they’re so yellow,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, nobody should ever work under 2,700K lights. Give me like the 4,000K. That’s what I want here, 4,000K.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s hilarious listening to you say that, because I believe the Aaron approved light temperature or whatever the correct

⏹️ ▶️ Casey term is in our home is 2700K.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For many typical indoor lights, that is the right choice, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not when you wanna be like awake and working. It is the wrong color to be awake and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco working in. Now I’m not saying you should go with the 5000K quote daylight color,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the wrong choice for almost everything as well. That’s the problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like modern LED light choices is that almost all LED lights are available in just those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two choices. You have 2700K, which is quite yellow, and you have 5000K, which is quite blue for indoor lighting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the better choice is almost always between 3000K and 4000K. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get some LEDs in those color temperatures, but they’re not at all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a common case. In almost every case where people use 2700K bulbs, a 3000K bulb is actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a better choice. And in almost every case where people use 5,000, 4,000 is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an almost always better choice. For my office, I like 4,000, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is too blue for what most people would want in say a bedroom or a bathroom.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or even like a living room at night. You don’t want like your living room at night to be like super neutral to blue.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, but even then like a 3,000K is usually a better choice. And the 2,700K

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yellowish approximation that LEDs come in is actually, in my opinion, I think it’s actually more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco warm, it’s more yellow than incandescent bulbs typically were.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t know. It’s sad that we have these two extremes of LED bulbs, leaving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to almost always choose a bad choice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I mean, I believe I presented a couple of different options to Erin way back when we started the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey transition to LED, which was probably years after you did, Marco, but it’s been a few years for us

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. And she just wanted something that fairly closely to her eye mimicked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey incandescent bulbs. And that’s how we landed on 2,700, which isn’t to say anything you’ve said is wrong. All I’m trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say is that’s what Aaron preferred, so that’s what we stuck with. If you’ll permit me a tangent, though, a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey week or two ago, I guess it was early last week, I recorded an episode of a podcast with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my friend Tyler Stalman where we talked about the Apple event. And he wanted to do it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with video, which was mildly horrifying because I do not have an attractive space for video,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you guys have accidentally seen from time to time when I accidentally start Skype with video on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I- Paul Matzko, Jr. Although we haven’t seen much of it because you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey have any lights on. So all I see is Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in his sleepy shirt,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey illuminated by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco his computer screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Steve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John McLaughlin That’s correct. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John right. Paul Matzko, Jr. Very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Blair Witch 5 you’ve got going there. Steve McLaughlin So I needed to add a bunch of light for my face

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I’m trying to record this. And my situation in the office here is that I have a ceiling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fan with a very, very physically small and not terribly bright light bulb in it. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a desk lamp that is some sort of fluorescent, if I’m not mistaken, and it gets kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of bright, but in the nighttime, you know, it’s not really bright enough. And so what I did was I took the—our

⏹️ ▶️ Casey office doubles as a guest room—and so I took the bedside lamp and I put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on my desk and I put one of our LEDs in it. It was interesting because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a particular bedside lamp, this was very popular in, I don’t know, like the mid-90s or something like that, or relatively popular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the mid-90s. It’s actually one of those spinny electric meters that every house used to have, at least

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in America anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ted Galen Colby Oh, those are awesome. We had one of those in my house growing up, like in the 80s and 90s. Jared Polin, Ph.D. in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Environmental Science and Engineering Exactly. And so it’s one of those where the base, it’s a wooden base

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then like an electric meter and then just a single bulb on top. And if I remember, I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a picture the shutouts, I’ll probably forget. But nevertheless, I put in the LED

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bulb and I turned the lamp on and I’ll give you one guess what wasn’t working. The electric meter. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it pulls too little power. The bulb pulled too little power and so it just didn’t even cause the meter to spin at all. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, holy crap, this thing finally died. Wait, I wonder. And so I put the incandescent back in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and by comparison, that little bastard was whipping at a thousand miles an hour. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah, it turns out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey LED is efficient. Who knew?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny. Uh, so anyways, um, like I said, I’ll try to dig up a picture and put it in the show notes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah, it’s, it’s been, it’s been impressive seeing, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that I see it on my like power bill, but there’s just, I don’t know, seeing things like that remind me how little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey power your average led sips. I’m sure that like, uh, what is it? A corn

⏹️ ▶️ Casey light that I keep talking about in my garage, you know, picking up the one. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That one probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey does that one probably does drink some serious power because that one is bright. But your average

⏹️ ▶️ Casey LED.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like 20 watts. They’re still under any

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey incandescent bulb. That’s true. That’s a good

⏹️ ▶️ John point. I have a bunch of those things in my house. And they’re big and scary. But then you look at the actual power rating, and it’s ridiculously

⏹️ ▶️ John low.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. You end up spending approximately, say, like 12-ish watts.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, 35. There it is. 35 watt. It’s like 12 to 15 watts of LED equals

⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly 100 watts of incandescent for most LEDs. So you’ve got this 35 watt corn bulb that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even take as much power as like the low power 40

⏹️ ▶️ John watt dim incandescent

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bulbs. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have like a little like desk lamp, the little like tiny desk lamps. Those are like 40 watt bulbs usually.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have that amount of power to illuminate your entire garage. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is wild. And I think both our cars, I think, have LED lights,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey headlights. I believe that’s right. I might be lying to you though. Oh, we got a lot of neutral we got to cover at some point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. There’s been things happening, but we should probably save that for later. Also, we might

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to do it next week because I have a very important after show we need to take care of.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jared Ranere I am intrigued. As I sit here in my incredibly bright

⏹️ ▶️ Marco office, I am very intrigued. Aaron

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Powell Oh yeah, I never really explained why I’m in the dark. So I generally speak, well, I am old, period.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And generally speaking, I like to go to bed. Usually Aaron and I are getting into bed around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10ish, give or take some, and we’re passing out around 11ish, give or take some.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re up at 7 on the nose because that’s when our school routine starts.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I try to optimize my working setup for ATP anyway for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately going to bed and immediately going to sleep. As I think we’ve discussed in the past,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I really don’t feel like getting into now, which means of course we’re going to get into it for two hours, I prefer to shower at night. I’ve already

⏹️ ▶️ Casey showered. I already have my pajamas on or as we covered last week, although I I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might have clipped that from the release show, but as the bootleg people may

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have heard, I had let it slip that I occasionally call it my sleepy shirt and of course pants.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m already in my pajamas, the lights are out. So this way, the theory is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as soon as I walk away from this computer, I climb into bed and I pass right out. Now especially over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last few months in the after times, I have found that it’s always taken me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least half an hour to pass out. And sometimes I’ve been just rolling and tossing and turning until one, trying to fall asleep.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess just because I miss you guys so darn much. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or the other, this strategy is not working as well as I’d like. And it’s probably terrible for me to stare

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a bright screen. And I understand that. And that’s why I don’t typically do that. But that is the theory.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the hypothesis for me being in the dark. I’m sure there’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey many different kinds of science that say it doesn’t work right.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I missed the logical leap from those two things. I understand going straight to bed remind me again how

⏹️ ▶️ John the darkness

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fits into that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because it’s all, it’s nighttime. Like my brain is switched into nighttime mode. You know, I have my computer in dark mode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course, nothing I’m looking at is in fact embracing dark mode, but nevertheless, you know, my computer brightness

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not cranked all the way up. Like I’m not trying to say any of this makes, is scientifically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accurate. It’s probably all malarkey. But my theory is, is that I’ve, I’ve put my brain

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into sleepy time, night time mode. And so, as soon as we hang up, I can go to sleep. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in reality, it never happens. Mad

⏹️ ▶️ John Fientist One follow-up question. When you knocked your water glass onto your computer, was

⏹️ ▶️ John it dark in the room at that time?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris That is a very good question. I don’t think so. Now, I might be lying to you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s not on purpose. I believe that was during the time that I used to leave all the lights on, but I’m not 100% sure. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve gone through several different stages. Like early podcasting, like during the neutral days, I would stand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was recording. Um, and then eventually I got tired of that when our show started becoming three hours long.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I started sitting and I don’t remember exactly when it was that I decided to turn all the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lights out, but it’s been at least a couple of years now. Um, but yeah, that is a very fair question. I I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure the answer, but I think the lights were on, which Which makes it arguably even worse.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We, before we continue, should mention probably for the final time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we are continuing to try to help Relay raise money for St. Jude

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Children’s Research Hospital. If you haven’t tuned in to the podcast-a-thon that was this past

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friday as we record, it was excellent. I made an appearance, John made an appearance, which was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unexpected and freaking delightful, and we might be talking about that later, we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, if you can, even though Relay has already reached their goal. And thank

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, anyone who has donated, thank you. Was it $315,000? Is that right? $315,000, I believe, was the goal. And as I sit here tonight, they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have reached $346,295. You know, it is September 23rd as we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey record this. There is a week of September

⏹️ ▶️ Casey left. Let’s at least get them to $350,000, please. Pretty please? So if you can,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have any money to scrape together, please, stjude.org slash ATP,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey s-t-j-u-d-e.org slash ATP, throw him a few bucks. Declan donated $1. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I ever mentioned that on this show, but Declan decided to donate $1 after I explained what you were we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were raising money for. And so he literally went and found 10 dimes and handed them to me. And then I did a $1 donation, which I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought was very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco kind of him. That’s adorable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did he pay the credit card fee?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. And I actually, truth be told, I felt guilty doing a $1 charge because I knew they were probably getting eaten up in credit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey card fees, but I wanted him to see it happen and I wanted to do the right thing. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John figured… Did he write

⏹️ ▶️ John Declan Starr a list? This is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the nation’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey name. No, no, no, he did not because he’s not a moron. Thankfully he takes after his

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco mother. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey monsters. Yeah, thankfully he takes after his mother, not his father. But anyways, yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is St. Jude? Just a quick recap. If you, God forbid, had a child who was afflicted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with some form of childhood cancer, then St. Jude is quite possibly going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to help your child get better. Even if they don’t do it directly, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the research that they’ve done that they’ve released to the world, they’re probably helping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey indirectly. If you do get treated directly by St. Jude, you don’t pay a dime, and that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have to raise money. I cannot fathom what it would feel like to have my kid

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be afflicted with something so terrible and to know that at the very least you wouldn’t have to pay for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, pay for the help that you’re getting, that’s a pretty incredible feeling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you live in a barbarous country like ours where you have to worry about these sorts of things. So again,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stjude.org, please can we get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them to 350k before the end of the month? That’d be great. And finally, we have a new champion.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We do?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, I’m sorry, it’s not a new champion. We still have the same champion, but we have follow-up about the new champion. You’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got to read the notes before the showcase.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was my fault. I got overexcited. So we still have Doug reigning at $7,100, and Doug

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote in and confirmed that… Can you re-explain this, John? Because this was way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey before my era. What was the relevance or the significance of the $7,100, please?

⏹️ ▶️ John When I was talking about the amount that he donated last week, I weighed what I thought was a joke,

⏹️ ▶️ John that he had donated the amount that matched the model number of his favorite Power Mac in the first

⏹️ ▶️ John line of PowerPC Macintoshes. It turns out that Doug tells us that’s actually true.

⏹️ ▶️ John He says, I’m so happy you guys are nerdy enough to get the 7100 reference. Yep,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Doug has already had his stickers dispatched, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until the last moment of September 30, if you want to unseat Doug and get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a not otherwise for sale ATP sticker, all it takes is $7,101 if you please. You could be Casey’s favorite listener

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for

⏹️ ▶️ John basically an entire year. That’s true. Just. That’s true. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Bump dug off the top of that leaderboard, get us over 350. You have about a week and a half left

⏹️ ▶️ John to do it. Yeah. Now’s the time.

Follow-up: PS5 pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up to quote Merlin Do you need me for this one? Cuz I might just you know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bugger off for a little while

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you want to know about a PlayStation 5 digital edition pricing?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh sure. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John Thing that we talk we’ve talked about so many times in the past But because we mentioned it on the last episode

⏹️ ▶️ John in the context of like pre-orders and stuff I think or maybe maybe miss anyway, we’ve just

⏹️ ▶️ John briefly mentioned it but then lots of people wrote in with feedback that was was telling us

⏹️ ▶️ John about stuff that we had covered elsewhere. So I just want to go back over the digital edition stuff, because I think it is interesting,

⏹️ ▶️ John and we have an Xbox story after this, related to the pricing of these things. So the digital edition, to

⏹️ ▶️ John recap, doesn’t come with an optical drive, but it’s $100 cheaper than the big PS5. But other than that, it’s exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John the same. It’s got all the same guts. It just doesn’t have the drive. And obviously, the

⏹️ ▶️ John profit margins have to be lower on that one, because there’s no way that drive costs $100. Lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of discussion online as people are trying to order PS5s. Which one do they want to get?

⏹️ ▶️ John Are the digital ones available? How many digital ones versus non digital ones were put out there?

⏹️ ▶️ John And then part of that is also how does Sony feel about the digital one? Do

⏹️ ▶️ John they want to sell more of the disc ones because the margins are bigger? Or like how

⏹️ ▶️ John how is Sony okay with cutting $100 off for just removing that one little part? of the

⏹️ ▶️ John explanations to that, again we’ve talked about in the past but we’ll try to summarize here. If you buy

⏹️ ▶️ John the digital edition that means all the games you’re going to be buying you’re going to be buying digitally

⏹️ ▶️ John and you can only buy them from Sony digitally because they run the online store much like Apple runs the app

⏹️ ▶️ John store and when you buy it from Sony, Sony doesn’t have to pay 30,

⏹️ ▶️ John 40, 50, 60 percent of the sale price to the retailer. When you buy a disc in Best Buy, Best Buy

⏹️ ▶️ John takes a big amount of the price that you just paid for that game. So although Sony is

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not losing money, but not making as much money when they sell you the PlayStation five digital edition,

⏹️ ▶️ John they know that from that point on, every single game you buy will have way bigger margins

⏹️ ▶️ John for them than if you bought it elsewhere. Now, part of that is also OK. Well, does that mean digital games

⏹️ ▶️ John always cost the same amount as physical games? No. And lots of people send feedback about this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some people said, I like to have the physical drive because you can find physical discs real

⏹️ ▶️ John cheap when they have too many of the game or they’re in the bargain bin or whatever. Some people said

⏹️ ▶️ John I like to not have the physical drive because you can find digital games really cheap when they have sales.

⏹️ ▶️ John Of course you can buy digital games on the one with the disc drive too so it doesn’t really hold but the point is both of those things have

⏹️ ▶️ John sales at different times for different reasons. You can find bargains in both of them so I feel like that’s mostly a wash.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you buy it on a plastic disc you can sell it somebody else. You can sell it back to a physical retailer

⏹️ ▶️ John for peanuts. You could sell it to your friend with a little bit more. You know, it’s a thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John you own that you can sell to somebody and that disk acts as sort of like DRM for the thing, like it has to be in the drive for

⏹️ ▶️ John most games. You know, even though it’s not running anything off the disk, the fact that you physically

⏹️ ▶️ John have the disk means you have the game. So if you get tired of a game and you want to sell it, you can and Riku has covered your costs, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Another thing is if you have the physical copy of the game this varies from game to game and

⏹️ ▶️ John system to system across Sony and PlayStation and Microsoft and Xbox and all different things

⏹️ ▶️ John but the rules about can I play this same game on multiple PlayStations in

⏹️ ▶️ John the same house at different times vary. If you have a disc usually just eject the disc from

⏹️ ▶️ John one PlayStation go up to a bedroom stick it into another PlayStation and play it there and it’s perfectly fine with it. If you have

⏹️ ▶️ John the digital one you can often do that by installing the game in both locations but only playing it in one location

⏹️ ▶️ John but the rules vary so So that whole sort of the

⏹️ ▶️ John known quantity that is physical disks and the way Sony has dealt with them makes a lot of people just go back to

⏹️ ▶️ John that and say, well, I know how physical disks work. I don’t have to worry about these weird rules. And I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John just go with the drive, right? Also a lot of people don’t have the internet bandwidth

⏹️ ▶️ John to download a 50 gig, 100 gig, whatever size these games are going to be. So there are definitely

⏹️ ▶️ John reasons to buy the physical one. There’s also reasons why Sony would want you to

⏹️ ▶️ John buy a digital one. From everything I heard about the launch, I think it’s like a 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 ratio

⏹️ ▶️ John of disc versions to digital versions. There’s a surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ John small number of PlayStation 5 digital editions out there. I don’t know if that’s because they

⏹️ ▶️ John just wanted the bigger margin on the launch. I don’t know if that’s because they don’t have as much confidence in making it up

⏹️ ▶️ John with the margins they’re going to get on the games in the future. I really have no idea. A whether that’s true

⏹️ ▶️ John and be what they’re thinking was but from everything I’ve heard it’s been harder to find the digital editions

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, last week when we were podcasting that was me missing all of the pre-orders like No,

⏹️ ▶️ John I said that thing about GameStop and it was like, oh, yeah GameStop put up their stuff early But it must have been a mistake cuz like their site

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t you know stop working and never mind, right? And then we did a whole podcast and then after the podcast

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m about to go to bed like let me look at my phone and all I see is everybody going PlayStation 5 orders are up

⏹️ ▶️ John there. They’re the best buy. They’re up at Target. They’re up at Walmart, you know

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re all sold out. So I missed all of that which is kind of a shame

⏹️ ▶️ John I did manage to get a PlayStation 5 pre-order. Thanks to I’m assuming

⏹️ ▶️ John an ATP listener Who I thanked on Twitter if you want to find out who it was and thank

⏹️ ▶️ John them yourself, maybe maybe donate to st Jude in their name They had a spot in line at the Sony pre-order

⏹️ ▶️ John that they didn’t need anymore and they gave

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that to me I had

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of other friends offer me spots like oh, you know I ordered five of them if you want one and I only need

⏹️ ▶️ John one if you want one of those five I can give it to you and Like three different people offered me that like

⏹️ ▶️ John people actually know in real life All of them had ordered discs versions

⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know. I’m either weird one for winding the digital one because I Pre-order the digital one.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want the disc a I don’t want to pay the extra dollars and be I’ve literally I literally never put an optical drive in either

⏹️ ▶️ John of my PlayStation 4s. So why would I buy the disc one? But everybody I know apparently is getting the disc one. So

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, my PS5 in theory is coming on launch day and I’m super excited even though the first

⏹️ ▶️ John and probably only thing I’m going to do with it for a while is just play Destiny 2. Of course.

Xbox Series X preorders

⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of pre-orders Xbox Xbox Series X pre-orders

⏹️ ▶️ John Went up yesterday ish It went a little bit smoother than the PlayStation launch because at least people waited for the correct

⏹️ ▶️ John date and time to do the pre-orders, but it was still a little bit of a you know website melting

⏹️ ▶️ John thing and Stock is scarce and so on and so forth the one story about the Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ John Series X launch. I thought it was fun was That sales of the Xbox one X

⏹️ ▶️ John are up up 747% on Amazon’s sales chart. I love this so much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ John just to refresh your memory, Xbox One X is not the new

⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox that’s launching. Xbox One X is the previous generation, top of

⏹️ ▶️ John the line Xbox, but boy, that name looks a lot like the new one. So I think there’s going to be a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of disappointed people and a lot of returns coming out of those. And to be fair, like going up 700%

⏹️ ▶️ John on the sales chart probably didn’t take that much because I don’t think lots of people buying Xbox one X’s

⏹️ ▶️ John right now at the launch of another console. But the fact that there was such a big bump means a lot of people made a

⏹️ ▶️ John made a mistake. They’re going to feel very bad about shortly. This is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why

⏹️ ▶️ John naming matters.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Mm hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, same thing could happen with PS4 versus PS5, but boy, the chances are a lot lower. You just got to remember one

⏹️ ▶️ John number five. It’s the bigger number than four. Get that one, please.

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Solo Loop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, do you want to tell me, maybe Marco, about the solo loop inversion trick?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was talking last week about how one little caveat for if you were considering getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new solo loop, which is that’s the one piece fixed length band that is the rubbery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, not the braided one. That most closely mimics the Apple sport

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bands. And I actually have one now it’s the wrong size because I use the tool wrong

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the sizing tool so I’m waiting for the correctly sized one to come in the mail.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One little trick that I had mentioned that it would be kind of a pain to have if you’re if you’re accustomed to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standard two-piece style of watch band if you if you don’t usually use a one-piece

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like circular one that you have to charge it differently that normally like I just have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco charger like resting flat on my nightstand just the bare cable no fancy dock or anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the bare cable just facing up and I can just take off my two-piece sport band and just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick the watch flat so it lays flat across that charger and that’s probably I think a pretty common use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but with a fixed band like the sport loop or the solo loop excuse me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t do that because you know the same same thing with any of the bands that like you kind of can’t separate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into two pieces easily the watch can’t lay flat and so our friend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John Gruber at daringfireball.net suggested that there’s actually a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trick you can do. You can basically turn the whole band inside out, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is looping on top of the watch instead of behind the watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that gives you a flat surface underneath the watch so that you can stick the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down on a flat-facing charger. So it’s kind of an odd thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I wouldn’t have thought to do, but it does indeed work. way you can have slightly more convenient

⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging while still using these fixed length always round bands.

⏹️ ▶️ John I do worry about the wear and tear of sort of torquing it in that way, you know, sort of doing the doing the dishrag thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John just wringing it out and just flipping it over. I don’t haven’t seen one in person, I don’t know exactly how floppy they are. But that is

⏹️ ▶️ John that is a motion that a watch band would not normally expect to undergo. On the other hand,

⏹️ ▶️ John shimmying your hand through that solo loop also probably puts it under some stress. And speaking of that, I know you got one size too big.

⏹️ ▶️ John What size did you get? And how did did you find the shoving it over your hand process?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got a seven. It turns out, I believe I’m actually a six. I have a six on order, but it isn’t here yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I, and actually, and Gruber posted an article this evening that kind of maps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these sizes onto like what hole you are on the sport band, which would have been much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better if Apple would have done that, because I would have gotten it right. Gruber’s sizing is correct. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it shows me exactly as a six, basically. But, yeah, Apple’s tool,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had followed the initial directions to what I thought was a correct tightness level, but it turns out it was not tight enough.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you have to basically make it, even though they said not to, you basically have to wrap it pretty tightly around your wrist.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, so I’m actually a six. But anyway, so I have the 7 right here. It is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way floppier than the Sportband, if you haven’t seen one yet or played with one yet. It is significantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more flexible. And I found the stretching over your hand process to be roughly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I expected, which is a little bit annoying, but doable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, while I did order a second one of these, and therefore I’m spending $100 on something I’m about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tell you that I don’t really want, I’m gonna give it another shot once I have a properly fitting one, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one is like, you know, loose, but I was able to do it. Like, it still worked,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I could wear it. I wore it for a whole afternoon this way. It was just like a little bit looser than for my comfort.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I was able to at least see what it was like. And frankly, I didn’t notice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge improvement in either comfort or in niceness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the regular rubber sport band. So I think if you already have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a rubber sport band that you are happy with, I don’t think it’s particularly necessary to make the jump

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to one of these. It isn’t necessarily an upgrade. It’s more of a side grade. You’re trading

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off certain things for certain other things. I still do find putting on and off a regular two-piece

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sport band to be better. I also like the fact that a regular two-piece sport band can, at any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, be adjusted to whatever size I want it to be. So, like, if I’m doing a workout where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want, like, super tight heart rate monitoring, I might tighten it one hole. If I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having, like, a really hot day, and maybe I’m on the edge of one of the sizes normally, then I might loosen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it one hole. It’s nice to be able to do that whenever you want to with a different brand. When you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that is fixed, it’s always the same size and cannot be adjusted slightly bigger or smaller, it’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less comfortable much of the time for me and for I think a lot of other people as your wrist changes size throughout

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day. So my overall review of the sport of the Solo Loop so far, having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again only worn one actually for an afternoon because I got the wrong size so far, is it seems fine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is not better enough than a regular two-piece sport band to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth its downsides.

⏹️ ▶️ John Unless you’re really worried about Apollo Robbins taking your watch off, because that might be way harder to do with that solo

⏹️ ▶️ John loop, because he’s got to slide it over your whole hand and you’re probably going to notice that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, but even like, you know, the regular sport band, because it tucks under the, like the, because the tail,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the excess tail tucks under using the buckle, you do have to like really get in there in a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco precise way to be able to pop it out. He’s got very nimble fingers. Yeah, like I’m sure somebody with practice,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically with Apple Watch sport band stealing, I’m sure they could get good at it, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. But you’re right, yeah, certainly this would be more securely attached to you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And maybe if you’re doing- If

⏹️ ▶️ John you constantly find yourself on stage at TED Talks or at large corporate events and Paul Robbins is there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a solo loop. Right, or maybe if you are in some kind of context where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your watch might get accidentally pulled off of you, like if you’re working, maybe if you’re in like Brush or something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re afraid a twig might stick right in just the right spot and pop your watch off, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that might be better for you. But for most people in most conditions, I think it’s kind of a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco toss up between whether it’s actually better in the two-piece sport band or not.

No more Edition AC adapters

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also got word from a person that would know that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently Apple is no longer shipping the 5 watt adapters for the fancy boy, fancy girl, fancy whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions, the Hermes and edition series 6 watches. So up until

⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, the 23rd, you would still get that little 5 watt brick with the Hermes and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey edition watches, but you would not get it with all the regular ones. Well, supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you order today, then you will not get the five watt

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brick even if you buy the fancy pants versions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now what do you think is more offensive the loss of the power brick or your pronunciation of Hermes?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, whatever. Probably probably my pronunciation but I cannot be bothered.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s French. Okay, moving on. BOOP!

Boring Old Menu Bar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Boring old menu bar. John, tell us about this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, this boring old menu bar, if you take the first letter of each word, it spells B-O-M-B, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is probably not something you wanna use as the abbreviation of your app, but this person does, but anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Boring old menu

⏹️ ▶️ John bar. We talked a while ago about Big Sur and its menu bar and exactly how transparent

⏹️ ▶️ John it is and how much it shows through the color of your desktop background and how that can make it hard to read and

⏹️ ▶️ John various ways we could try to fix that. I myself tried to get a window behind the menu bar, but the menu bar in Big

⏹️ ▶️ John Sur does not care. We were talking about one app that put a window in front of the menu bar and then

⏹️ ▶️ John redrew its own menu bar on top of where the real menu bar was. The developer of Boring Old

⏹️ ▶️ John Menu Bar, a link in the show notes, has figured out a way to deal with this. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I had mentioned this approach, but I thought it was kind of terrible and I didn’t think it would actually work, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is if you just take the desktop background, whatever picture you have, and just draw a white stripe on top of it, then what

⏹️ ▶️ John will be underneath the menu bar will be white. but the sort of algorithm that the Big Sur menu

⏹️ ▶️ John bar uses to show color through is very sensitive to any little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John of color being underneath it, right? Like it smears it, but apparently if you

⏹️ ▶️ John make sure that every single pixel underneath the menu bar is pure white and there’s no stragglers and you

⏹️ ▶️ John get the margins right and everything, it will change the menu bar to be actually white. So what boring old menu

⏹️ ▶️ John bar does is it copies your desktop image, It makes a new image with

⏹️ ▶️ John the top part of the image replaced with a big white stripe, and then it sets your desktop image to that new

⏹️ ▶️ John one. The bummer about that is you can’t use dynamic desktops because that doesn’t, right

⏹️ ▶️ John now it doesn’t support it, right, so you know, if you take a screenshot of the image and replace it with a static one, it’s not gonna change anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? You could, in theory, make your own dynamic desktop that’s a copy

⏹️ ▶️ John of the current dynamic desktop with all of the images with white stripes added to the top. Like, that’s a thing you can do because we understand

⏹️ ▶️ John the format well enough, but I don’t think Boring Old Menu Bar does that yet. So anyway, if you want to fix your menu

⏹️ ▶️ John bar and you don’t wanna bother taking your desktop image and making sure you’ve got it scaled

⏹️ ▶️ John correctly in a graphics program and putting in a white stripe and realizing you made the white stripe too big

⏹️ ▶️ John or too small and going through all that, try Boring Old Menu Bar because it will give you what the

⏹️ ▶️ John name says.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool, that’s useful. I actually made a while back, I wanna talk about this on the show, I made

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those dynamic wallpapers which was two different shots of the kids and Cape Charles.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just so happened to really underexpose one of them. So it made it look like it was much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey darker outside than I intended. But put together with the correct

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exposure ones, it almost worked kind of well as a day-night wallpaper.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I actually did, I think there was some sort of command line tool that I used to generate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I forget. And it’s probably somewhere in the ATP show notes from forever ago. But anyways, there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a means. Like you said, John, we understand the format well enough to do it. And it’s just like a little bit of JSON and a couple images put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into a HEIC file, a HEEC file, or something like that. Anyways, the point is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is kind of cool if you have images that work that way, in the sense of two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey images that are complementary to each other. It is cool to do this and watch it change when you go into dark mode or whatever. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would hope that this would be added to bomb at some point.

OnyX deletes APFS snapshots

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, while we’re at it, why don’t you tell me about how you can delete local APFS snapshots, if you please.

⏹️ ▶️ John I found a suggestion for a GUI app that in a fairly straightforward way lets you delete them. I mean, you can tell when you

⏹️ ▶️ John run the GUI app that all it’s doing is running the command line tool, but that’s exactly what you want it to do. Don’t make me type the command line where I might screw

⏹️ ▶️ John something up. Just let a program do it. If you use the program called Onyx,

⏹️ ▶️ John O-N-Y, capital X, one of the many, many things that it will do for you is

⏹️ ▶️ John delete local snapshots from Time Machine. So if

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John looking for a GUI to do that and you’re afraid of the tmutil command line, check out Onyx.

Apple One w/multiple Apple IDs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now this next one, I don’t think I properly understand what the concern was, nor the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix. So I’m guessing this was John that put it in here. Can you explain to me what’s going on with Apple One, please?

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple One isn’t available yet. I forget what did they say it would launch? Is it like fall or something? Fall, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think so. Yeah. All right. So we’re still waiting for that. But when it was announced, a lot of people on Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ John had questions about like, okay, but like I use multiple Apple IDs and like I use use one

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID for like my iTunes ID, but then my iCloud thing is a different one. And

⏹️ ▶️ John they were concerned about how does Apple One deal with that? If you do individual services, you can kind of manage that. This

⏹️ ▶️ John specific question, I don’t quite understand, but apparently everybody involved understood

⏹️ ▶️ John it and was satisfied with the answer. So I figured we would convey this information because it comes from someone who works at Apple who tweeted

⏹️ ▶️ John this publicly. Apparently Apple One will play nicely with different iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple Music logins. Some people were worried that if they had a different login for Apple Music and iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ John services, that that would be a problem. But apparently that case is handled according to an actual Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John person who tweeted this. So, and there’s an iMore story that we’ll link in the show notes so you can read more about it. So if

⏹️ ▶️ John you have a different Apple ID for your iCloud stuff than you do for your Apple Music, I think they’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to say like iTunes. If you use like one Apple ID to buy stuff from the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey essentially, and a different Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John ID to be like your iCloud photos and everything, that Apple One will handle that case.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Somehow. We don’t know how,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not out yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And apparently this was Chris Espinosa that tweeted the answer. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Started working at Apple when he was 17 years old, I think. Still working there. That is bananas. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John and he was 17 years old in like the 70s. Just for clarity.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey He’s like employee seven or eight or something like that, eight I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John think.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. All right. Well, that’s it for this episode.

Sport band XL size

Chapter Sport band XL size image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then can you explain to me what this next one is about? I’m also confused by this. These blurbs are not working for me tonight.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I should turn the lights on and wake myself up.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you should. This was Marco saying that like, in terms of cutting down waste

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Apple Watch, they still send you, if you buy, get a regular band, they still send you the two different

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sizes with the holes in them

⏹️ ▶️ John for short and long. Well, apparently, according to Ryan Fung, when you order an Apple Watch at sea,

⏹️ ▶️ John you need to pick the strap size. So they’ll only send you with one of the things with holes in it instead of both of them. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John really? That’s what Ryan says. And would Ryan lie to us? No.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not seeing that choice when I go to the configurator online. It does say band size

⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular. Let me do some quick research here. So this says 130 to 200. Hold on. I’m trying to confirm it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Trying to confirm it too. Hang on. I can’t even get to the point where it’ll let me add to the bag.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, while we’re doing this, can I go on a small rant? I have not yet ordered,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron nor myself, an Apple Watch. And that’s fine. Whatever. Who cares? But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, maybe it’s just me, I find the Apple watch ordering process to be so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply frustrating. This is the first worldiest problem, but it is so frustrating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because like, I love that you’re allowed to now, because it didn’t used to be the case, pick out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like whatever, whatever, um, case with whatever size band and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever band you want, and you can mix and match and so on and so forth. But like to get to that point, you have to scroll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like all the way down or when you You go into the buy page, then you have to find where you can go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the gallery, and then you create your style or whatever it’s called. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like you build up a list of styles, and then you have to go into the styles to add them to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bag, and then you get to add it to the bag. And then when you get it in the bag, you can realize, oh, the cactus size

⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t available anymore, so now you have to start the whole frigging process over. I hate this so much. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s part of the reason why I have an ordered watch, which nobody cares. It doesn’t matter. But it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey frustrating. and if I wasn’t allergic to the inside right now, I would love to just go to the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey store and just do it and just figure it out. And A, I’m not even sure if my Apple store is open

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now, but B, even if it is, I’m allergic to the inside. But it’s so frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We, I figured this out, thanks to a tip from Veg in the chat room, who I’m guessing is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a vegetable enthusiast. This is not related to the Apple Watch SE. The sport band, I didn’t know this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sport band, if you get the black sport band, either even by itself or with any of the watches,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has an extra large option that you can take for the strap. It looks like only the black,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe other colors as well, but only some of the sport bands, possibly only the black, are available in this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco XL size. So if you have an extra large wrist that the regular sport band, even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco its larger piece, if that’s not big enough for your wrist, you can get the extra large black

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sport band that goes up another 35 millimeters in length. And so when you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick a watch with the black sport band, you get that option even if it is the SE to go regular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or XL. But if you pick a different color sport band, you don’t get that option,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you still get the same two-piece regular SM and ML set for the sport bands.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is not related to whether the watch is an SE or not, it’s related to whether you picked a black sport band around.

Watch/band separation

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m with Casey this ordering process is terrible

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco having just read you go

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey through it

⏹️ ▶️ John It is way harder than it used to and I remember in the beginning like it when the first couple of watches

⏹️ ▶️ John They had that cool animation. They still have all those animations in there But just the process I should be able to sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ John like we go on this show for whatever reason we frequently go through car configurators on their websites Which

⏹️ ▶️ John have way more options than watches like you can do a million things to cars and somehow

⏹️ ▶️ John these companies that are terrible at tech with these mostly terrible websites we never have any

⏹️ ▶️ John problem configuring the car the way we want it we can and the websites are able to communicate oh if you get stupid option package

⏹️ ▶️ John it turns off this and turns on that like there’s lots of weird rules with cars and somehow we can do it but these watches a there’s no reason

⏹️ ▶️ John for there to be stupid rules oh you want an aluminum case well you can’t get an aluminum case with that kind of strap

⏹️ ▶️ John why why can’t we well we just don’t think that’s right

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just especially since they box them separately it’s it’s kind of a mess And speaking of boxing them separately, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is another sort of blow up. That’s not entirely Apple’s fault, but it is Apple’s problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you buy a Apple watch with a solo loop and you misestimate your size because,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the paper thing doesn’t work for you and you just couldn’t tell, you have to return the whole thing. You can’t just return

⏹️ ▶️ John the strap and get a different size strap, even though they’re boxed separately. It still counts as one product and you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John return half a product. All right. So it all makes sense from a normal point of view, except that

⏹️ ▶️ John in non In COVID times, this wouldn’t happen because you’d go to an Apple store and you’d try on the bands and you’d find

⏹️ ▶️ John the one that you like and the chances of you deciding a day later that you picked the wrong size are much lower when you’ve actually

⏹️ ▶️ John had it on your wrist than when you’re at home printing out a thing and wrapping it around your wrist and just guessing,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So this is this is kind of a pain and I think I mean what Apple should do is just,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, let people return the straps. I know it’s a pain logistically and they didn’t expect to have to do it. But guess what? They do

⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s the world we’re in. And I continue to think these straps cost way less money than

⏹️ ▶️ John the price would indicate. So I think Apple can handle, just let people keep the strap and send

⏹️ ▶️ John them a different one. Like I don’t know how much these straps cost. Maybe again, maybe I’m shocked and they are, you know, incredibly expensive to

⏹️ ▶️ John manufacture or something, but especially for the sport bands and the solo loops that are just made out of

⏹️ ▶️ John that plastic stuff, just let people exchange them. It’s not the end of the world because everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to be sad if they get their big fancy watch and then they just have to send the whole thing away just to get a different size. And the worst

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is you get the one back, it’s like, finally my watch is back after, you know, three days or a week or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that size doesn’t fit me either. And it turns out I just don’t like the solo loop.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I have to return the whole watch again.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right? It’s just, I mean, as I think, I think Gruber said, they should just sell the

⏹️ ▶️ John little watch body, little watch bodies. They just, you know, just, just the watch by itself.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then the strap separately with the understanding that if you just buy the little watch body, you have to also buy a strap,

⏹️ ▶️ John but people are fine with that. Just price them appropriately so that the combination of a strap and the watch body

⏹️ ▶️ John is the same price as they sell the unit, making two different SKUs, problem solved, Apple. Maybe try that next

⏹️ ▶️ John year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and even if they won’t let you buy just the watch body, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should, you know, with some kind of discount, because like, I don’t need another

⏹️ ▶️ Marco white sport band. I have like five white sport bands, and like the previous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones from previous watches. By the way, I mean, this is another problem. Like when you, if you like resell an old Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch, once you’re done and when we know after you upgrade to a better one, resale value

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Apple watch is awful. Like they’re basically worth nothing. Even after one year,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one year old model is worth almost nothing on resale. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not true. Mine was worth like 180 bucks, which is granted a lot less than the 500 or whatever I paid, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, well, okay. Yeah. But like you, you lose, like it’s worth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 25% or 30% of it’s after one year. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s crazy how fast the Apple watch depreciates relative to other Apple devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that being said, usually when you, if you sell to one of those like resale services that like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, they send you a box and you send it through them, whether it’s Apple service or other similar ones,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they never want the strap. They only ever want the watch body. So you end up, if you’ve been in the Apple watch ecosystem for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, five or six years, you end up with a bunch of extra sport bands

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever comes with the one that you usually buy. So if they actually wanna make an environmental

⏹️ ▶️ Marco statement, they could sell just the watch body, and that way we can reuse the bands that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we already have if this is not our first Apple Watch. That would be a nice environmental statement, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco agree they should unbundle this because imagine, again, talking about not only the environment, but their economics

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, imagine all the waste. When they take a returned Apple Watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can’t just like wipe it off with a cloth and resell it. They can actually reuse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a surprisingly small amount of that Apple Watch. Like chances are that, you know, they go towards the refurbishment

⏹️ ▶️ Marco process. And if you look into like what they can reuse for a refurbished watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For most refurbished electronics, they can’t reuse much of the case or anything exterior

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and often not the battery either. And so like there’s a huge list of things that like they’re not supposed to reuse for refurbished products or that they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco choose not to. And you’d be surprised how little of something like an Apple Watch is left to be refurbished.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So taking a return of the entire watch for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a off by one or two size error on a fixed position strap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is incredibly wasteful in both of environmental costs and of money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if they really wanna make this better for the environment, like yeah, it’s great. They’re made out of recycled aluminum and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what would be even better is to make people have to return fewer watches.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the way to do that is to split this bundle apart and let people buy these things separately.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Hey.com. Email

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Epic’s Sign In With Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Epic and sign up with Apple. What’s going on there? This was a couple of weeks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old. Sign in with Apple, you mean?

⏹️ ▶️ John What

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey did I sign? Sign in with

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Apple. Sorry. Yes. It says sign

⏹️ ▶️ John up. I mean, I think sign in with Apple is the official name of the service, but sign up with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John is very similar in that you’re signing up for a service for using Apple. Anyway, when last we left this, which was a while ago

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Epic thing, Epic was saying that Apple was going to turn off Sign-in with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John for them because they don’t have a developer account or an app and all this other stuff. And what I was saying was that

⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that it makes perfect technical sense for Sign-in with Apple to stop working for an

⏹️ ▶️ John application that is pulled off the store that belongs to an account that has been terminated, Apple should

⏹️ ▶️ John do whatever it takes to make sure Sign-in with Apple continues to work anyway just to instill confidence

⏹️ ▶️ John in Sign-in with Apple that even if the worst happens, Sign-in with Apple will continue working.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this is a tweet from Fortnite status, which is an official epic thing from

⏹️ ▶️ John September 10th. They said that apparently signing with Apple will continue to work for

⏹️ ▶️ John them. So I mean, the epic is still recommending that all their customers switch from

⏹️ ▶️ John from sign with Apple to using an email address. But apparently Apple did whatever it takes to make sure

⏹️ ▶️ John sign with Apple keeps working. You know, it would have been better if they could avoid it, avoided the bad PR by preempting

⏹️ ▶️ John it. But at least they’re doing the right thing in the end. How are they doing that? Again, behind the scenes, it’s their own systems.

⏹️ ▶️ John When you quote unquote terminate an account, I don’t think, you know, when you terminate anything in a big business, you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John actually delete the stuff for the most part, you just sort of soft delete it, which means market is deleted, but it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ John there. So I can imagine they could do what it takes to make signing with Apple still work for this basically

⏹️ ▶️ John non-existent developer account and app.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right.

How cars work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, this is actually some really good feedback from several episodes ago. John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were complaining about no good videos about how different car things work, and I think we were talking about transmissions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time, and I completely forgot. I have seen a couple of, or at least

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the videos that Nick Blethrow wrote in about. I’ve seen the one around the corner, how differential

⏹️ ▶️ Casey steering works. If I’m not mistaken, that’s about how actually a rear differential works,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is super cool. And apparently there’s a different one of the same spirit spinning levers how a transmission works

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and these are definitely worth watching if you’re interested

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve seen these videos before they’re good The problem with them is you know, they’re from the 30s So some of them are somewhat

⏹️ ▶️ John relevant like the differential thing is still relevant the transmission one It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of relevant but if you see what a modern transmission looks like all the same

⏹️ ▶️ John basic pieces are there but But they’re very different these days. But the main thing I was looking for was

⏹️ ▶️ John an abstract thing, where for a teacher, my kids that drive, they don’t need to know the intricacies

⏹️ ▶️ John of how does a synchro work to make sure the gears mesh together, right? Or what is the little

⏹️ ▶️ John lever doing when you shift in the thing? What I really wanted was the more abstract thing. It’s like, look, the engine is a thing that turns.

⏹️ ▶️ John It turns a thing. That thing is either connected to or not connected to the thing that turns the wheels.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just that type of very abstract sort of how does power get to the wheels and what things mediate it. without

⏹️ ▶️ John the nitty gritty details of what is in that box in the middle. It’s just a black box. That’s all you need to know, you know, but it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to know that in one end the engine is connected to the other end the wheels are connected. And there’s a thing in the middle that mediates

⏹️ ▶️ John where this, anyway, they’re cool videos. You should definitely check them out. I think Around the Corner is the better of the

⏹️ ▶️ John two. Is there more than two? I’ve only seen these two, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they’re not sure.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re really great. They remind me of PBS videos

⏹️ ▶️ John when I was a kid in that they’re very gentle and sort of, You would say boring,

⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re not trying to zazz it up. You know, they’re not trying to make anything cool and snappy. It’s just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to explain carefully and slowly and take you on incremental steps for your

⏹️ ▶️ John understanding of how this works. You can still get lost. Like if they do a step and they say something and you’re not on board with it

⏹️ ▶️ John yet, because you don’t know how levers work, you might get lost and it might all fall apart. But for the most

⏹️ ▶️ John part, I think most people can watch it one or two or three times and hold it all together in their head and go, oh, that makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s very clever because people are very clever and they make cool machines.

Microsoft buying ZeniMax

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me about why I should care about a company I’ve never heard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of called ZeniMax.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve never heard of it because it’s one of those companies that owns other companies. I guess we can start

⏹️ ▶️ John this with a story from January 2018. It’s a story in Polygon

⏹️ ▶️ John that was talking about the challenges that Microsoft faces in competing

⏹️ ▶️ John with Sony in the upcoming console generation because it was two years ago, right? We know that in this console generation, the PS4

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of stomped all over the Xbox One for a variety of reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ John But one of the reasons often cited is that Sony in this generation had a lot of exclusive titles

⏹️ ▶️ John that you couldn’t get anywhere else. You could only get on a PlayStation. Very popular, very high quality,

⏹️ ▶️ John very well reviewed titles. And the fact that people knew those titles were coming or knew

⏹️ ▶️ John those franchises were a platform exclusive motivated a lot of people to buy a PlayStation. Lots of other factors as well

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of Xbox trying to be a do-everything television box instead of just a game console, and the PlayStation 4

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware was really good, and the Kinect was a big diversion. Anyway, we’re not going to get into that, but platform exclusives

⏹️ ▶️ John were often cited as a strength that Sony had over Microsoft. To give an example, things

⏹️ ▶️ John like The Last of Us. Those are only on Sony consoles and not anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ John else. Not like they’ll be on Sony first and then someplace else later. They’re never,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’re only Sony, right? Because Sony pays for them. They pay for them to be made, they pay

⏹️ ▶️ John the studio, say we’ll give you extra money, just put your game on our platform. And platform exclusives also take

⏹️ ▶️ John advantage of the hardware because they don’t have to make sure they run well on other platforms, they can spend all

⏹️ ▶️ John their optimization effort looking, you know, playing really well and looking really good on the specific hardware, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So fast forward to this week-ish, and Microsoft has

⏹️ ▶️ John purchased Zenimax for $7.5 billion in cash. Who is ZeniMax?

⏹️ ▶️ John What is ZeniMax? They are a parent company of many other game companies.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve scooped up a bunch of game companies. You may, the only place you may have recognized the name is they bought

⏹️ ▶️ John id Software several years ago and there was a bit of a falling out between John Carmack,

⏹️ ▶️ John who I think at that point had recently left to work at Facebook or whatever, or Oculus, which then got bought by Facebook. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John they bought id Software. They own Bethesda, which you may know from Fallout and Elder Scrolls

⏹️ ▶️ John and Skyrim. They also own the company that does Dishonored, Wolfenstein, Prey, the upcoming

⏹️ ▶️ John Starfield space game. You may or may not have heard all these titles, but just trust me when I tell you that there are

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of popular franchises that are owned by

⏹️ ▶️ John companies that are in turn owned by ZeniMax. And so Microsoft bought them, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Now, ZeniMax and all of its subsidiary studios make games for all

⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of platforms. In fact, some of these game companies that are under ZeniMax

⏹️ ▶️ John have titles that are coming out as timed exclusives to the PlayStation 5. Timed exclusives

⏹️ ▶️ John in the gaming world is where a game is going to be available first on a particular platform, but not forever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’ll be on a particular platform for six months or a year or whatever. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John after that, it’s allowed to go on other platforms. It’s a way to pay slightly less money to get a game to be an exclusive, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because you have to pay people a lot of money to say you can never sell this game on any other platform. Like, well, I’m losing half the market.

⏹️ ▶️ John If I can’t, you know, if you tell me I can only sell on PlayStation and I can’t sell on Xbox and I can’t sell

⏹️ ▶️ John on PC and I can’t put it in the App Store for Android or iOS, that’s a lot of money I’m leaving on the table. So instead,

⏹️ ▶️ John what most companies do is a timed exclusive, which is you’re gonna be exclusive to PlayStation 5

⏹️ ▶️ John for one month, for three months, for five months, for a year, whatever it is. Enough time that impatient gamers,

⏹️ ▶️ John if they wanna play the game, will be motivated to get a PlayStation because otherwise they have to wait a year and all their friends have already

⏹️ ▶️ John played the game and it seems all tad or whatever. So anyway, some of these studios have games

⏹️ ▶️ John that are timed exclusives of PS5. Now Microsoft bought the company. And when Microsoft buys the company

⏹️ ▶️ John and all these different franchises, the question in everyone’s mind is, wait a second, they make a lot of games. They make games for PC,

⏹️ ▶️ John they make games for PlayStation, they make games for Xbox. Some of these games are on all the platforms. Does this mean going forward,

⏹️ ▶️ John now that Microsoft owns them, that the only platforms these games are gonna be on is Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ John and PC? That there’ll be no Android version, that there’ll be no iOS version, and that certainly there’ll be no PS5

⏹️ ▶️ John version, and there’ll be no Switch version? Like that’s what everyone’s worried about. So

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft essentially used money to solve their exclusive title problem and say, now we have

⏹️ ▶️ John a huge number of popular franchises. And at any time we could choose to say, guess what? The next

⏹️ ▶️ John fallout game only an Xbox and PC, but they haven’t said that yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John What they have said is we will honor the timed exclusives for PS5, which I,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know why they said that. They’re probably contracts. They mean that they have to, right? So they’re going to do that. Right

⏹️ ▶️ John But going forward Microsoft says it will be on a case-by-case basis. So

⏹️ ▶️ John If you were a fan of one of these franchises And are used to being able to play it on your

⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation or being able to play it probably years later in worse quality on your switch

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe in the future that will not be the case. I Fully expect that one or more

⏹️ ▶️ John of these very popular franchises like for example doom Which is actually having a resurgence because a bunch of new do game doom games

⏹️ ▶️ John look pretty good At some point in the future sometime in this console generation Expect the next

⏹️ ▶️ John version of one of these games is to only be available on Microsoft platforms And that’s kind of a

⏹️ ▶️ John bummer for gamers, but it’s kind of good for Microsoft because they have in one

⏹️ ▶️ John 7.5 billion dollar fell swoop have shored up a big weakness in their game business, which is lack of exclusive

⏹️ ▶️ John titles Especially since some of their exclusive titles are sort of losing their luster like

⏹️ ▶️ John Halo Microsoft still owns Halo. Bungie split off from Microsoft a while ago, but Microsoft retained

⏹️ ▶️ John Halo. But now they have other developers making Halo, and the upcoming Halo game has not

⏹️ ▶️ John been really setting the world on fire with its trailers. So, you know, Halo has always been an Xbox exclusive,

⏹️ ▶️ John right, or Xbox PC exclusive, despite the fact that Halo 1 was available on the Mac or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John So with its current exclusives fading, it’s great to get a giant bucket

⏹️ ▶️ John of really great franchises from which you can pick and choose. Um, the, the other aspect

⏹️ ▶️ John and the final aspect of Microsoft shoring up a strategy is, and we didn’t talk about this before, but I’ve heard it talked about another podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft subscription strategy. They have, we talked about it in the context of the cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John gaming things, but they also have a subscription service for regular gaming. You can pay them a monthly fee and in exchange,

⏹️ ▶️ John you get access to a bunch of games. And when you stop paying, you lose access to the games, right? These aren’t like streaming games

⏹️ ▶️ John that are running at a data center somewhere, these are games that will run on your local Xbox, right? You just pay

⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix style to get access to them on an ongoing basis. And in that

⏹️ ▶️ John subscription price, they also have a deal where you pay us X dollars a month. And for that price,

⏹️ ▶️ John you get a next generation Xbox, an Xbox Series X or an Xbox Series S, depending on how

⏹️ ▶️ John much you pay. And also that service that gives you access to all these games. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the games that are in that service, as you can imagine, third parties don’t want to put their games on the service because they won’t get as much money. They’d

⏹️ ▶️ John rather sell each individual person in the game for 60 bucks than to get a fraction of your $30 a month

⏹️ ▶️ John subscription fee spread over 20 games. But now that Microsoft owns all these game studios,

⏹️ ▶️ John all the games made by these studios can be put into that bundle, because hey, Microsoft owns them. And if they say you’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ John do it, you’re going to do it. So take your whole back catalog and put it into this Game Pass subscription. So instead of it being a $500 console,

⏹️ ▶️ John now you just have to convince your parents to pay $35 a month for the next two years.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you do the math, you end up paying like $800 for a $500 console,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re also getting access to a huge collection of games during that entire time, right, and

⏹️ ▶️ John they get you on the subscription bandwagon. Now it’s just like you just assume it’s a monthly fee that you pay, just like your cable

⏹️ ▶️ John bill, your cell phone bill or whatever, you also pay your Microsoft Game Pass thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? I don’t know how it’s gonna work out for them. Historically, the gamers have

⏹️ ▶️ John proven to be a very sort of stubborn and traditional lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of the reasons they went with the PlayStation 4 and last generation, because it was a thing that they knew. Gamers are not

⏹️ ▶️ John used to paying a subscription for their hardware and software. They’re more used to, I buy a console than I buy

⏹️ ▶️ John games. So we’ll see how this works out. But Microsoft in,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, at the very last stages of the race here, right before all these consoles launch,

⏹️ ▶️ John has made some bold moves and has some interesting strategies Should make this generation console

⏹️ ▶️ John race much more competitive than the last one which is Bad for Sony but good for

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft, I guess And Nintendo don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John Because they’re still selling a bajillion switches

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. I Wonder how many of them were sold specifically because of the limitations and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the game that everyone’s playing animal crossing? Is that what I’m thinking of where you apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can only have one island per thing or something? I’ve never played the game, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if anyone’s buying multiple switches But Nintendo did make an announcement recently now that Microsoft and Sony are killing each other Nintendo’s

⏹️ ▶️ John announcement was that they consider themselves to be about halfway through the generation life cycle that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey apparently

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re on their own generational timeline

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Everyone, you know, Sony

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft are like this is the generational turnover like, you know, six or seven years after the last generation It’s time for the new

⏹️ ▶️ John generation and Nintendo says we’re about 50% through

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean to be fair that seems about right like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the Nintendo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation. Yeah, that seems totally fair. Like the Switch is still selling like crazy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Switch, I think it did come out significantly after whatever the hell these current generation consoles

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are called, right? The PS7 and the Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John One

⏹️ ▶️ Marco X, One X, One X.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a generation number for them in Wikipedia, but I can’t remember

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, yeah, whatever it is, it, those stopped being relevant a while ago, I think. Um, so yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, and I would love to see like a Switch Plus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or, you know, Switch Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s, that’s do soon, but that in the same way that the PS4 Pro did not and

⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox One X did not mark a new generation. It’s about the mid generation is

⏹️ ▶️ John when you get the pro version. So there is a switch pro coming eventually in some form or another that will have more power

⏹️ ▶️ John and other features like that or

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ve already done the lower power switches where you can get the one where the Joy-Cons don’t come off, whatever that one’s called.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, the Switch Lite, I believe. You can’t buy those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere either. Like the Switch and the Switch Lite, they’re out of stock everywhere much of the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like for this this entire summer. And some of that was because of COVID, some of that was because of Animal Crossing. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very popular, good console that everyone still wants.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re making as many as they can, and they sell every single one that they make, and they just are ignored. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we joke because Nintendo’s weird and doing a weird thing off to the side, but Sony and Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John simply do not have a game system that is portable. You gotta plug them into the wall. So they’re competing, and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an entirely different market. Nintendo’s over here that they’re in between phone games and

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad games and console games. And in between you got the Switch thing which is a handheld but you hook it up to your TV but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John got all these awesome Nintendo games that are exclusive and until and unless someone buys a Nintendo, Mario’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not going anywhere else. Except for, you know, he did appear on iOS but not quite the same thing as the

⏹️ ▶️ John big name games.

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Widgetsmith & customization

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So over the last week, we’ve seen the release of iOS 14 and we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen everyone finally getting their hands on widgets. And holy smokes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has this blown up. So I often feel old

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I often feel like I’m losing touch with what kids

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and people who are younger than I think are important. I’ll catch an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey award show, like commercial or something like that, and you know, featuring this artist that Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t know, and that artist that Casey doesn’t know, and that other artist that Casey doesn’t know. And it’s very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey disheartening. Like, I’m not proud of this at all. It’s the normal march of life, but it’s sad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to realize that you are becoming that guy that just doesn’t know who anyone popular is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But… To be fair, I was always that guy at every age.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some of us just wait a little longer than others, I guess, or a little less long than others in certain cases. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dear friend of the show, underscore David Smith, has had a very, very interesting week and a half,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I cannot wait for the pending under the radar where I hope you either did

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or will discuss this. I’m happy to be chief summarizer and chief, but Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder if you would like to do the honors, especially if you’ve talked to David more than I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have recently.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So honestly we are we are saving almost all of this for the next episode of under

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the radar Which will come out in a little bit less than a week roughly Yeah, like next Wednesday

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ish And I am looking forward to that as much as you are the short

⏹️ ▶️ Marco version The short version of what we know so far is that underscores

⏹️ ▶️ Marco newest app called widget Smith Which is a thing that lets you like basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco output and generate and customize tons of different iOS 14 home screen widgets.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Based on the same engine that he made Watchsmith for a little while back, Watchsmith

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for making totally custom Apple Watch complications. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s even better now with WatchOS 7 because you can do multiple, issuing multiple complications

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the same size from the same app now. So Watchsmith was already a huge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of work sophistication from Underscore, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can customize your Apple Watch complications. But then he took a lot of those same concepts and many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the same possible complications and widget types and brought those now to iOS 14 home screen widgets,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which it turns out is a way bigger market. And so much bigger in fact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I haven’t checked in the last couple hours, but as of this morning, Widget Smith

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is number one in the App Store and has been number one in the App Store for, By now, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about four or five days at least, right? So we now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know the developer of the number one app in the App Store. It’s kind of fun. I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s going through quite a lot. He’s issued like four updates in that time. He’s issuing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an update every couple of days. It’s been pretty remarkable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco As far as I know, he’s holding up well. Everyone is happy and healthy, and we will hear much more about this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on next week’s episode of Under the Radar.

⏹️ ▶️ John And part of how this blew up, I don’t know the origin because we just hear things secondhand over here in the old paper world,

⏹️ ▶️ John but apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I saw at

⏹️ ▶️ John least one TikTok video of someone demonstrating, look what you can do. You get iOS 14

⏹️ ▶️ John and then you can get these things on your home screen called widgets and you can make them in different sizes and so on and so forth. And there’s this cool app

⏹️ ▶️ John called Widget Smith where you can kind of make up your own widgets. And the widgets, they’re straightforward.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not like you get to program them. It’s like, okay, well, there’s a widget for time and weather and all sorts of different things

⏹️ ▶️ John and photos and so on and so forth. But here’s the key to Widgetsmith. Like, let’s grab, those widgets are

⏹️ ▶️ John already on the phone. There’s already a weather widget, there’s already a calendar widget. What does this Widgetsmith app exist for?

⏹️ ▶️ John You can customize them. You can customize basically their appearance and layout. You can pick different

⏹️ ▶️ John fonts. You can pick different colors. You can pick different backgrounds. And if I was to describe

⏹️ ▶️ John Widgetsmith to you before iOS 14 launched, you’d be like, all right, well, what do

⏹️ ▶️ John I care about the color of the weather widget. Like, oh great, I can pick a different font. I can pick

⏹️ ▶️ John an ugly font. But so, I don’t understand why I would ever get this

⏹️ ▶️ John app because it just seems like, unless I have a need of some specific widget that Widgetsmith can

⏹️ ▶️ John do that no other app can do, why would I ever do this? And the answer of basically the entire

⏹️ ▶️ John world was because you can change the font and the color and the layout and the size.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it turns out that’s a thing that people really, really want to do. So a couple of people have popular

⏹️ ▶️ John videos on TikTok showing the customization you can do with this. And this combined with the ability to

⏹️ ▶️ John use shortcuts to make a custom icon for a thing that launches an app, basically make the world’s

⏹️ ▶️ John most trivial shortcut, which is when the shortcut is run, launch mail. But

⏹️ ▶️ John because you can give that shortcut a custom icon, now you have all the ingredients for what was

⏹️ ▶️ John being, you know, going viral on TikTok and all of, you know, spreading all over the world, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John I can make a home screen on my iPhone that has a custom wallpaper, which you could do for years and years,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Custom icons for every single quote unquote app, they’re all just shortcuts, but every single

⏹️ ▶️ John app and widgets of different sizes and layouts of different

⏹️ ▶️ John colors and different fonts and different styles. So now you can have a home screen that

⏹️ ▶️ John looks like no home screen you’ve ever seen. The combination of all those things can be color themed, can be

⏹️ ▶️ John laid out strangely, It’s just the options that you have are so much more than just a grid of

⏹️ ▶️ John icons that you can’t control the appearance of unless the individual app lets you change the icon, which some apps do. But if

⏹️ ▶️ John you decide you wanna have, for example, a complete pink and white theme with flowers in the background,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t turn every single app to be pink because maybe one or two of your favorite apps allow you to

⏹️ ▶️ John change the icon to a pink one, but they don’t match and they’re not the same color of pink. And it’s all just a grid of tiny little

⏹️ ▶️ John icons. But with widgets, you have all the different widget sizes and shapes. You can put whatever you want in them, including

⏹️ ▶️ John photos and yes, calendars and weathers and all sorts of things you can do, you can customize your phone

⏹️ ▶️ John to look very different from a stock phone. And that’s something people wanna do. If you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John ever seen people out in the world with their iPhones, most of them have cases on them. And if you look at their cases,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see a lot of personality in those cases. They’re not just black plastic cases.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll see sparkly ones, purple ones, silver ones, ones with mirrors in them, ones with unicorns in

⏹️ ▶️ John the back, ones that are fuzzy, like anything you can imagine, right? Now you can take

⏹️ ▶️ John that and do it to the screen of your phone. Now, another reason

⏹️ ▶️ John why if we had described this to a bunch of Apple nerds before iOS 14 launched, they would say,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s stupid, and maybe that’s not really the Apple way, because the whole point of the iPhone is that everything looks nice,

⏹️ ▶️ John and if you let people customize stuff, they’re just gonna make their phones uglier, and it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John not the Apple way to do that. In fact, Apple will probably disallow that ban it from the store because why would they let you make

⏹️ ▶️ John your phone ugly? That’s the whole point of, you know, everything looking just so. But

⏹️ ▶️ John people who say that have not been around Apple very long because there was a long

⏹️ ▶️ John stretch of time in the history of the Mac, for example, where customizing the appearance

⏹️ ▶️ John of your computer was a huge thing in the Mac community. Granted, the Mac community

⏹️ ▶️ John itself was tiny, but within the Mac community there were utilities let you change every aspect of what you saw on

⏹️ ▶️ John your screen. From the font in all the system font for all the menus and all the dialogues to the appearance

⏹️ ▶️ John of every single window on the screen and every possible aspect, all of the window widgets and of course the desktop background,

⏹️ ▶️ John the icons of every single one of your apps, the icons of all the folders and all of the little icons that appear

⏹️ ▶️ John in alerts. You could in classic Mac OS, you can customize everything. Using eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John using a framework that Apple itself designed to be threaded through the entire operating system. And there were huge

⏹️ ▶️ John communities around basically making your Mac screen look sleek and black with like, think rusted

⏹️ ▶️ John metal everywhere, or pink and sparkly, or like, you know, shiny silver. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I was in this community, I did this. I just thought about like, I should go up to my attic and dig this stuff out. There was

⏹️ ▶️ John various websites, one of which like, have contests like, submit your picture of your Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John looking as cool as it can, like with everything customized, right? Whatever your theme is, whatever design you come

⏹️ ▶️ John up with, some combination of your own artwork and custom icons you got from Icon Factory and Kaleidoscope Themes

⏹️ ▶️ John and custom fonts that you downloaded and show us that one screenshot that makes people think, wow,

⏹️ ▶️ John that Mac looks totally different than mine and it’s all a coherent theme. And that’s all people would do was

⏹️ ▶️ John change their Macs and take a nicely arranged screenshot and upload it and have contests of who has the coolest Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s no surprise to me that people wanna do this. And it’s also no surprise to me that people

⏹️ ▶️ John who are in the Apple community who sometimes people think, oh, they just want everything to be clean and simple and want

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to design everything? No, that’s what Apple has wanted for a long time, but users have always wanted to express

⏹️ ▶️ John themselves through their devices. They’ll do it in hardware if you let them with weird ass cases, and they’ll do

⏹️ ▶️ John it in software if you let them. And Underscores app, combined with the custom icons

⏹️ ▶️ John and shortcuts, finally opened the floodgates. And now everybody is customizing all the things. And yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re making things that you may think are ugly, the same way they did with Kaleidoscope themes and custom icons

⏹️ ▶️ John in classic Mac OS, right? but people wanna do what they wanna do. And it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s no stopping this, you know, like once the barn door is open, like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? The only way Apple had stopped it up till now was making it so hard to customize

⏹️ ▶️ John anything about what your phone looked like. In fact, it took years and years and years before they even let developers let you change the

⏹️ ▶️ John icons of apps. But now that users can change it, they’ll do it. And this is on top of the fact that if you make a shortcut

⏹️ ▶️ John with shortcuts and launches the app, it launches shortcuts first, and then it launches the app. It’s a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ John experience. You’re like, why would any, you can’t even use a phone like that. But that’s how much people wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John customize their stuff. They’re willing to put up with a home screen that every time you tap an icon,

⏹️ ▶️ John it goes through shortcuts and then launches the thing that you want. So I hope Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John takes notice of this and realizes this is the thing users wanna do.

⏹️ ▶️ John It makes them happy. It’s no skin off Apple’s back. Like, what do you care if Apple, you know, people make their

⏹️ ▶️ John phones ugly or whatever. Apple, change shortcuts or whatever, or make a way for

⏹️ ▶️ John you to launch an app without going through shortcuts. There is actually a way to do it. You can make this other kind of bookmarklet thing

⏹️ ▶️ John and slap it on your phone like the configurator app, but it’s too difficult for people to do. Make it easy to

⏹️ ▶️ John make a custom icon that launches your app. I know people are gonna say, oh, there’s security concerns. What if I make a malicious

⏹️ ▶️ John app that actually looks like a mail, but it’s not mail, right? Those are all the same complaints about changing the app icons, and that’s the reason why

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s that scary dialogue that says you have just changed the icon for whatever app, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know there are concerns, but look, people want it and they’re gonna find some way to do it anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, congratulations to underscore for being the catalyst

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s setting this off, but for having the forethought to think, I think people will want to do this. I mean, he was a little bit surprised

⏹️ ▶️ John by it too, but all the updates are like, you know what, even more color customization, even more fonts, right? Because now

⏹️ ▶️ John he knows where the demand is. First, he might have thought, Oh, people just want to have just the right information. But I think he quickly learned

⏹️ ▶️ John people want more shades of pink. People wanted to be able to set gradients, right? People wanted to be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to pick even more fonts, yes, including the quote unquote ugly ones, add all the things,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So couldn’t have happened to a nicer, harder working person. He deserves

⏹️ ▶️ John all the success that he is getting. Hopefully comes out from under what must be the incredible

⏹️ ▶️ John avalanche of support email that he’s getting. Because remember, it’s at the top of the charts. It’s a free app with in-app purchase,

⏹️ ▶️ John which means that everybody can download this and they will download it, and they will have a

⏹️ ▶️ John complaint, and they will email him, and he’s just one person. I’m sure you’ll talk about this under the radar,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the actual numbers involved in here are staggering. A lot of people are downloading this

⏹️ ▶️ John app, a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and first of all, I totally agree. This could not have happened to a better person. He’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a friend of all of ours. Maybe we’re a little bit biased, but he won’t tell you this, and he’ll be really embarrassed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when he hears this, but he’s the nicest guy in the world, first of all. The nicest guy in the

⏹️ ▶️ John world. He’s disgustingly nice. You will hate him, he’s so nice. Because it’s not just us, because we’re friends.

⏹️ ▶️ John There is no one who has ever met this man who has not said that he is nice. He’s so nice, it makes you angry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. So not only is he the nicest guy in the world, but he works

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so hard, and he has put out so many apps. And he’s had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some successes here and there, but nothing like this in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many downloads has gotten, you know, sitting at number one on the charts. Like, this is the kind of thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that iOS developers dream of happening once in their career. And for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of us, it never happens. And so to have this happen to, you know, somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who we know is noteworthy in itself, and to have it happen to, like, the nicest person that we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know is also especially cool. I will say, though, again, not to spoil anything for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our episode, but when I asked him how many emails he was getting a couple days ago, he expressed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to me in a number per second.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. Yeah, I had spoken to him when it was first starting to blow up, and I think it was a number

⏹️ ▶️ Casey per minute at that point. But this is earlier, I suspect, than you spoke to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco him. Yes. I think it also helps, too, what has helped Widget Smith take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off as much as it has. Not only is it giving people this customization

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they so badly have wanted, and there’s been all this pent-up demand for customizing your iPhone and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. But not only that, but also like if you show a screenshot of your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco home screen that has a Widgetsmith widget on it right below it, it says Widgetsmith!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s how, like the way widgets are designed, they say their app name right below them just like anything else on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Springboard. So it’s kind of like a self-promoting thing, which is great, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the app. And so everyone who sees one of these awesome customized home screens that says Widgetsmith

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or two times all over it like that that helps push the app even more which is even better but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know just going back to the customization thing like i just i am so i’m so delighted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when i see some of the things people have come up with it is delightful it is it is like first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all incredibly impressive skill going into a lot of these like the the amount of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco creativity and artistic skill and just work just like you know brute force work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going into some of these custom home screens is just incredible, it’s inspiring, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the downside of the way Apple usually does things, you know, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really runs a really tight ship when it comes to any kind of customization

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on any of their modern platforms. The Mac has had a decent amount of customization

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time simply because it’s older. iOS has really not. Shortcuts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco helped a lot, certainly, because you could do stuff like this, but as John I’m just saying the amount of customization possible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS has not been high. And it kind of shows like when, when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you rule something with an iron fist like that, you really stomp out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of potential creativity. And yeah, there is a lot of bad creativity out there. There’s, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, there’s a lot of stuff that people will do that is bad. And you could maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the argument, maybe you should let them because it’s their computer, it’s their phone, it’s their tablet. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you should let people use the devices the way they want to. And when Apple loosens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the grip just a little bit, in areas like this that have no real downside,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s no real downside to this. Like the security arguments are bogus. The whole thing about, what if I need to use your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone in an emergency? That’s also bogus. Like these arguments don’t hold water to even the least bit of scrutiny.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If somebody wants to make their phone look like whatever they want to, just let them and they’ll be happier and they’ll come up with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only something cool for them, but something so great that maybe Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will take inspiration from it for future OS versions or future designs. Like, there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of amazing creativity out there. There’s a lot of amazingly skilled artists and designers out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there who want to customize their stuff in a different way than what, than like the very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrow, safe way that Apple has to do things. If you let that creativity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, if you let people use their computing devices as computing devices, by the way, this also extends

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to software, But if you let people use their computers as computers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Apple Watch, you get this amazing creativity out of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is what these devices are capable of. Like we have amazing technology, we should be breaking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down walls as much as possible. We should be enabling people to do what they want as much as possible,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as we can make it safe. Even that’s an argument. There’s even a good argument to be made that even if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not safe, we should let people do it, as long as we warn them properly or provide control to get back or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I love seeing this. It almost seems kind of like the success in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming that Apple has had. It almost seemed like this happened to them accidentally, that they maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t intend for this amount of creativity to be unleashed inside of their platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m just so happy to see this. And I hope, even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco though I know this is kind of a tall order, but I hope Apple learns a lesson from this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that loosening the grip, even just a little bit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can really result in amazing things that their customers can now do with their computers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They should let this happen more often, and they should consider loosening the grip in other areas because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s only so much creativity and delight and spirit and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco joy that can come out of what is now a pretty uptight,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco conservatively run design company. Like many of Apple’s designs, I would not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco classify as delightful anymore. I would not classify as even particularly humane.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would classify many of them as uptight and safe. And to let people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just explode in their own creativity is a beautiful thing, and Apple should let that happen more often.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, back on the Mac, because the classic Mac that had no memory protection and people could do what they wanted, like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple couldn’t stop them. Like even before they added Appearance Manager, people hacking the interior

⏹️ ▶️ John of their computer. Apple actually provided a way for you to put custom icons on things and people took advantage of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then it was just, you know, you always have the ability to do everything. But of course on the iPhone and iPad, it was all locked

⏹️ ▶️ John down. And if you’re inside Apple, or if you had talked to someone in Apple, probably what they would have

⏹️ ▶️ John said and what you would have agreed with, I think what we all would have agreed with because it was true, is like, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ John but not a lot of people ask for custom icons. Like I know, I understand what you said and the iPhone is locked down, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ John Seriously, we don’t really actually get that many requests for being able to customize things like

⏹️ ▶️ John that, right? And eventually they would say like, oh, well, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John five years into the life of the iPhone, we actually will add a way for icons to be customized, but

⏹️ ▶️ John developers will do it. And we’ll have to see all the icons that they’re selecting, and there’ll be a big warning dialogue.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’d be like, we’re great here at Apple because we respond to customer requests and even stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John like asking for custom icons for apps. We don’t even hear that request that much, But you know what, we eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John got around to it and we did it, so you’re welcome.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You’d be like. And you’d be like.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the story we heard, just for the record, we heard some crazy story about like, Eddy Q basically demanding that feature for like some sports

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that wanted to do it, like the NBA or something like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I thought it was an

⏹️ ▶️ John MLB. Yeah, but the whole point is like, if you’re inside Apple during this time where the iPhone is massively successful,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you say, listen, of all the requests we get about the iPhone, please let me

⏹️ ▶️ John customize my app icons and the appearance of my home screen is really far down the list.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I bet that’s true. They didn’t get that request. And that’s the thing about allowing

⏹️ ▶️ John for, I mean, Apple always says this in their keynotes, we can’t wait to see what you do with it. But

⏹️ ▶️ John what we can do with it is limited by what

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you let us do with it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So even though, like the millions of people who want to customize their home screens,

⏹️ ▶️ John how many of them actually sent any kind of feedback to Apple that says it would be nice if I could change my

⏹️ ▶️ John home screen? Basically none of them, to a first approximation. such a tiny number. Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John true. If Apple’s not lying and saying, actually we were getting millions of requests, they were probably getting almost

⏹️ ▶️ John no requests for this. But that doesn’t mean that Apple is satisfying all their demands,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That like, if we don’t get requests for it, that means nobody wants it. Absolutely not true.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple itself says that sometimes people don’t know what they want or don’t know what to ask for, but if you give it to them, they realize they

⏹️ ▶️ John like it, right? And so you have to make an intellectual argument, which is like, look, Apple, I know you’re not getting requests

⏹️ ▶️ John for this, But trust me when I tell you that lots of people would love this. And they’d say, what do you mean lots of people? Like the

⏹️ ▶️ John only people who, like you can do this now with jailbreak, but how many people jailbreak? Like nobody, like we have proof. Look, nobody

⏹️ ▶️ John wants this. It’s not out there. Why are we gonna waste engineering time on doing this? And you’re like, but

⏹️ ▶️ John just trust me, people love this. And again, you make it up. Look what they do with their cases. See all the cases are weird and everything. It’s like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. People can buy third-party cases, but we want the iPhone, that’s our branding. It needs to look like us.

⏹️ ▶️ John We need to control that. And trust me, nobody wants this. And that argument can go around and

⏹️ ▶️ John around. And like Marco said with gaming, they kind of backed into this accidentally, but suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ John there is a critical mass of functionality to make this happen. I guarantee if you had told Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John before iOS 14 launches, guess what? Millions of people are gonna use shortcuts to customize

⏹️ ▶️ John their icons and pay the price of going through shortcuts before launching the app. They’d be like,

⏹️ ▶️ John nobody’s gonna do that. Like maybe you’ll do it once on a whim, but no one’s gonna actually do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you’d be like, no, really want to customize their home screen like you’re crazy. Well, here we are.

⏹️ ▶️ John Here we are. Again, listen to the end of the episode to find out exactly how many people

⏹️ ▶️ John were interested in doing this. Now, it’s true that it’s so awful now, having to go through shortcuts and having,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, even widgets themselves are fairly limited in what they can do within certain sizes, the functionality

⏹️ ▶️ John of which is very limited, which is a thing. Yeah, so Marco was getting out before like if you open up the world of software

⏹️ ▶️ John to allow widgets to be more interactive, maybe you could could have even more creative output from software

⏹️ ▶️ John developers. But like success hides problems and you

⏹️ ▶️ John will not, your users will not come and tell you the feature that you should add to,

⏹️ ▶️ John to, as Marco said, have an explosion of creativity in your platform. People it’s not that people don’t know that they

⏹️ ▶️ John want it. It’s just that’s not how the feedback loop works. People aren’t spending all their time and energy trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to convince you apple of what you should do. I mean, that’s what we do on this podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but trying to,

⏹️ ▶️ John we are small, we are few, trying to convince Apple what they should do to make the iPhone better. And sometimes people

⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t even know. But when you give it to them, they know it when they see it. And I really hope Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John takes this as a wake up call and just buckles down and says, you know, for iOS 15, customizing

⏹️ ▶️ John your app icons is easier than ever. And in fact, there’s a giant global switch to turn off all the custom icons in case

⏹️ ▶️ John you ever want to. And there’s an all new management interface for rearranging your home screens. Please, Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John I want this personally, but other people would like it too. Trust me. Yeah, so,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, live, hopefully Apple is living and learning from this. And I honestly, I do think because it is so

⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to do the icon customization that that’s not really gonna last, but widgets and you know, the wallpaper

⏹️ ▶️ John background which Apple eventually lets you change to, it’s all coming together, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple should pursue this rather than either resisting it or

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to ignore it because it’s real and it’s spectacular.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say too, I totally didn’t think that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco widgets and home screen customization would be as big of a thing as they are, so far at least,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Android has had this, you know, we’re going to hear from Android people, like the Opera did it first,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Simpsons did it first, like, yeah, we know. Android has had this kind of stuff for a while. Like people,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can customize certain things way more than iOS. They’ve had home screen widgets, I think, for a while. Windows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone even had home screen widgets. So the concept here is not new, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made the mistake of assuming that a similar feature that has already existed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Android once it came to iOS would have similar results.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we’ve seen, like, imagine if the iPhone didn’t have apps and Android did.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco People would probably make the argument that the iPhone doesn’t need apps because look at Android

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, they’re crap. Sorry Android people, you can write to Casey if you have a problem with any of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t hate me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you would probably say like, look, third party apps, it turns out people have no taste.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Third party apps are crap, iOS doesn’t need them. But then if you add them to iOS, you realize, oh no, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, Android’s third party apps are crap, but iOS, the iOS community makes good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco third party apps. And like, you would be proven wrong because these two communities are not the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See also any argument about custom Apple Watch faces. There have been other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart watches that have had custom faces, and they have largely been a cesspool

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of crappy designs and copyright infringement from, you know, or like, you know, trademark infringement from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco major watch brands. But that’s not a good reason for Apple not to offer it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because all that means is those communities and those user bases didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have good enough taste to do well with this feature. That doesn’t mean Apple’s users and Apple’s developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t have good enough taste to do something good with this. The Apple community is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only amazing in general, but it’s also huge. Plenty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people will be able to come up with good stuff to do with any little tiny bit of freedom Apple gives us.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They let us make apps. It wasn’t a very long time before they let us make apps. It was only one year,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that was a very good move to open up that door and to let other people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides Apple do something on their precious platform. And the more of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doors they can open up, the better their platforms do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This happens over and over again. I can’t think of anything that Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kept locked down and then later changed their mind and opened up where that became a really horrible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, except for like the clones in the 90s, right? Like that was like the one time. Were there any other times

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they loosened their grip just a little bit and it turned out badly for them?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, arguably the total lack of memory protection on the original Mac, but that wasn’t a loosening, that was just a

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that they had to do to get the technology to time. But it makes me think like, your examples of different communities.

⏹️ ▶️ John What I mentioned before, the sort of the theming community, the Mac theming community, Windows didn’t have memory

⏹️ ▶️ John protection in the early days either, right? So all the things that people were doing to the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John to customize it, whether it be custom appearances or things that make a puking

⏹️ ▶️ John sound when you eject your disk or Oscar the Grouch in the trash can. Every single one of those things was possible

⏹️ ▶️ John on Windows 1.0 or Windows 3.0 or whatever, with the same techniques

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, oh, well, I have free reign of the memory space and there’s no memory protection. I can inject whatever the hell code

⏹️ ▶️ John I want anywhere. Like, you can’t stop me from, you know, third-party developers can make a thing that customizes the appearance of window

⏹️ ▶️ John frames and that makes Oscar the Grouch come out of the trash can when you empty it, like, or the recycle bin

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the hell, like, or makes it, you know, well, I guess they couldn’t do a puke sound when you eject this, because they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have auto eject discs on most PCs. Ha ha. Anyway, or sound cards. Oh my gosh. Yeah, or sound

⏹️ ▶️ John cards, right? And so what was the difference? Why did all this stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John happen on the Mac? It was the community. People attracted to the Mac for the reasons that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the Mac had, the vibe it had, the aesthetic it had, the values expressed through the

⏹️ ▶️ John software that the Mac embodied, like the hardware and software embodied the values of the people

⏹️ ▶️ John who made it. And those values came through to the customers. So everybody who was into

⏹️ ▶️ John that type of thing, it was a combination of people, it’s, you know, liberal arts and technology, which Steve Jobs would say decades

⏹️ ▶️ John later, the people who are incredible, technically

⏹️ ▶️ John good coders who could figure out how to, on a machine with no memory protection, more or less safely

⏹️ ▶️ John inject their own code into all sorts of corners of an operating system didn’t create and they don’t have the source code for and large portions

⏹️ ▶️ John of which are written in assembly, people could figure that out. And people, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John very often the same person who had good taste and artistic ability and had a

⏹️ ▶️ John creative goal they wanted to pursue. Almost people were on the Mac. That’s why the Mac had

⏹️ ▶️ John this rich customization computing and the windows had hot dog stand, right? And that was first party.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, it’s, it’s not to say that, oh, all of the artists, creative people are, were on the Mac and not on and Windows,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just that the communities were different. There was more of that type of person on the Mac. There

⏹️ ▶️ John was more of that special type of person who combined, I mean, just for the creation of Mac, who combined deep technical

⏹️ ▶️ John skills with artistic knowledge and creativity. And that’s why my entire childhood was spent

⏹️ ▶️ John customizing my Mac to the point where it would crash all the time. And a computer with no memory

⏹️ ▶️ John protection, because that’s what I love to do too. That’s what attracted me to the Mac. And I love the fact that that community was

⏹️ ▶️ John there and thriving. Even in Mac OS X, there was unsanity, finding ways

⏹️ ▶️ John to inject code through the mock kernels, you know, code injection mechanisms. There was a

⏹️ ▶️ John shape shifter, which did teaming on Mac OS X. Eventually Apple locked down most of this stuff for mostly

⏹️ ▶️ John good security reasons. But I always said, I would complain in articles back, you know, at the dawn of Mac OS

⏹️ ▶️ John X, right? I would say, look, I understand the reasons why memory protection is good. In fact, I’ve been asking

⏹️ ▶️ John for it for years and years. Great, we want that. And I understand the reason why it’s not good to be able to inject code into arbitrary

⏹️ ▶️ John processes, right? We all understand security is a real thing. The solution to this though is not,

⏹️ ▶️ John you are never allowed to do this. The solution is, Apple, please provide what I always called

⏹️ ▶️ John clean hooks to do this type of thing. To give one example, in the early days

⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac OS X, there was, you know, you could put menus in the menu bar. If you look in the upper right hand corner of your screen

⏹️ ▶️ John now on your Mac, you can see a bunch of icons up there. At one point, there were two different APIs for

⏹️ ▶️ John putting things there. There was the one that Apple could use, which was the good API that lets you rearrange all

⏹️ ▶️ John the icons with the command drag and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey everything and let you have

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all these features.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there was the crap API that third party developers were allowed to have. And what would third party developers do?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, just use the private Apple API, because screw you. Like, why would I use the worst

⏹️ ▶️ John API in Apple? You know, this is before the App Store, right? But like, Apple didn’t like that. It’s like, look, the solution, Apple, is not to

⏹️ ▶️ John give everyone the toy version of things or to not give them the functionality at all. Provide, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, when I say clean hooks, supported good APIs for doing things like putting a menu in the menu

⏹️ ▶️ John bar that you’re hearing it rearrange. I still think it would be useful to provide a supported

⏹️ ▶️ John theming API for macOS. That seems ridiculous to everybody. That’s the thing that Apple did.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple made and shipped appearance manager, they went out at the last second and didn’t ship the themes.

⏹️ ▶️ John But at one point, Apple actually dedicated significant engineering resources to putting in clean

⏹️ ▶️ John hooks to theme the entire operating system, and they made a bunch of cool themes for it. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that may seem like why would they ever do that? Like, that’s, I know we’re begging to get custom app icons on iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re far from that, right? But on the Mac, there are many opportunities, custom window minimization

⏹️ ▶️ John hooks, custom sort of window management hooks, like places where third party code can cleanly and safely

⏹️ ▶️ John hook into the operating system, using supported secure APIs, to simply

⏹️ ▶️ John provide people with the option to change the functionality. Why can’t I have Oscar the the garage come out of my trash can

⏹️ ▶️ John on my Mac. There is no reason you can’t provide a secure API to do that. Obviously, that’s not high priority.

⏹️ ▶️ John Who’s asking for that? Probably literally nobody. Apparently not. But but if

⏹️ ▶️ John you did it, I guarantee someone will make it off to the garage come out of their garbage again. And and it would someone

⏹️ ▶️ John make a YouTube video of it or put it on TikTok and a million people on their Mac laptops as they sit

⏹️ ▶️ John in zoom school meetings and COVID times would have also the garage coming out of their trash can again, because you know why?

⏹️ ▶️ John People like fun.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s basically it. Well, and we’ve had so little of that. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing industry, like many industries, goes through cycles and fashions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that, and trends, certainly. And in the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably 10 years or so, maybe even more, there’s been this incredible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reverence for designers to a fault, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think I’ve made that clear on a number of occasions. That like, we put so much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco faith into designers as this like high class of gods who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just dictate how things should be and they’re always right. And they know better than you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Designers will, you know, come up with, here’s how the thing is, period. Our designers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have I’ve declared this to be the thing, period. You know, ignoring for the fact that whatever the thing is changes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every three years, but we’re gonna put that aside for now. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you end up having a very small group of people dictating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how things look for everybody. As we have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty small number of computing platforms that matter anymore, that have big audiences and big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco user bases, you have a very, very small number people in the world deciding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how everything will look and work. And as the modern platforms that have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco increasing usage, like iOS, Android, these have way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less customization than Windows and Macs have in the past, and they’re much more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco locked down software-wise than the platforms that we’ve used in the past. The more we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go into this world of designer dictated norms from the top that are, by the getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco increasingly conservative and broad market as these platforms have gotten so big and spread around the world.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Combine that with the decreased freedom we have on the software side because this new generation of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco operating systems is just so locked down that we have just a severe lack

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that customization and software hacking and freedom and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco home brew type stuff. So much of the stuff we just don’t have much of these days.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s either impossible or it’s out of favor. But mostly on these new platforms, it’s mostly just impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel like that kind of hurts computing and it hurts people learning computing. It hurts people having fun with their computers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It hurts their computers’ ability to feel like delightful, fun things that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can just tinker with and play with. And to some degree we are past a lot of that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the era of computing, in the same way that you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tinker with and play with a lot of cars anymore, because cars are much more integrated into and sophisticated and everything. You can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a lot of those same arguments about computers. But I think there’s still a lot of room

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for computers to be fun for people. Like you were just saying, Sean, computers have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not been fun for a lot of people for a while. They become cold, utilitarian,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring, or almost like dictators of how you need to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. And they don’t need to be that way. Computers, when we were growing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, were fun. And you could tinker with way more than you can tinker with now. You could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco write your own code on every computer that you had. Chances are you might not have done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but you could have. You could run any app from anywhere that you wanted to run. You could customize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of things. You could break stuff. You could customize, you know, like I used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a regedit hack to customize my start button in Windows 95 to say Marco instead of start.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why? Because I could, and I was a teenager, and it was fun. fun. I was a stupid teenager.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had phone my computer. That’s it. That’s the reason that that’s all the reason I need it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days, you don’t have a lot of opportunities for that. Anything we can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do to just break open a few more of those doors. It’s better for everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s better for the platforms because you make your customers happier.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if your platform can be customized the way people want to customize it, then they’ll stick with your platform.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If somebody makes a really awesome iPhone home screen that you can’t get to look quite right on Android,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, this is somebody you follow on TikTok or something, like, then maybe your next phone will be an iPhone, so you can make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your home screen look like that. Like this helps them sell more phones, it helps people stick with the platform, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes the customers happy who are already there. Computing needs more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that fun. It really, we’ve had so much fun stripped away in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent decades, like, anything we can add back in there, I think is worth it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is worth considering.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of weird how all the stuff that exists on the Mac that you can do that, it’s mostly

⏹️ ▶️ John just holdovers from classic Mac OS. Like I was thinking about this as I look at my screen, like

⏹️ ▶️ John customizing icons. That was, you could do that on the Mac for all time. It became easier

⏹️ ▶️ John once they enabled you to copy and paste icons in some version of classic Mac OS, maybe it was like

⏹️ ▶️ John seven, five or eight or something. And copying and pasting icons onto

⏹️ ▶️ John folders and applications and volumes, that exists in Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John OS X and current Mac OS because it existed in Classic. And it was just an expected feature. How many people

⏹️ ▶️ John even know that feature exists? I mean, Casey’s over there not even renaming his hard drive, but let alone pasting

⏹️ ▶️ John a custom icon. On Classic Mac OS, every single one of my top level folders

⏹️ ▶️ John had a custom icon that did not look like a folder. my favorite characters from Star

⏹️ ▶️ John Wars or anime or whatever, like everything had a custom icon. My folders had custom icons,

⏹️ ▶️ John my apps had custom icons. I didn’t give most files custom icons, but I had files with custom

⏹️ ▶️ John icons because it was a very special notes document that I used all the time or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s not like Apple decided to do that on the Mac. They just said, oh, well, it’s a feature

⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re gonna bring over because we’re gonna bring the Finder over and make it a carbon app. and this is just the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that’s gonna support and it supports resource forks or whatever. And to Apple’s credit, they didn’t expunge all

⏹️ ▶️ John of that as time marched on. So you can still do some things like that, but they haven’t been adding features like

⏹️ ▶️ John that. And think it was, you know, the app Candy Bar, which was used to, used to be developed by Icon Factory

⏹️ ▶️ John and or Panic. I forget who made it first and who adopted it. But anyway, one of the things that it could do

⏹️ ▶️ John was it would let you theme with icons. So you can copy and paste custom icons onto

⏹️ ▶️ John most things on the Mac, although they’re making it more and more difficult with weird permissions and stuff these days to customize

⏹️ ▶️ John the applications folder or certain volumes. But anyway, you can do that. But what if you want to change

⏹️ ▶️ John the default folder icon? What if you want to change the folder icons for documents,

⏹️ ▶️ John movies, pictures, they all have those little embossed ones. What if you want to change all those icons? What if you want to change

⏹️ ▶️ John the icon that appears in alerts for a warning alert or an error alert, like the little face

⏹️ ▶️ John with the red badge or whatever? All those are resources that exist in the OS. And back

⏹️ ▶️ John in the day, even on, like I said, even on Mac OS X, Candy Bar would let you change that stuff. Change what

⏹️ ▶️ John the trash icon looks like in your dock, right? Or put the dock on your desktop like DragThing used to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of those features used to be possible through somewhat sneaky code injection

⏹️ ▶️ John type things. But, you know, in the modern era, they were sort of non-destructive where it would just do it in memory.

⏹️ ▶️ John But really, if you just, you know, reboot it in safe mode or into a different account, it didn’t actually alter

⏹️ ▶️ John your icons. But slowly but surely, locking down the Mac has made those hacks less and less

⏹️ ▶️ John viable. Apple didn’t care if they broke them from OS to OS, and Apple didn’t care if they stopped

⏹️ ▶️ John working entirely. And it became eventually too annoying to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s a threshold, like you could always, not always, but for a long time, you could make custom icons that would

⏹️ ▶️ John launch apps on your phone. There’s various ways to do that. But all of them are way too hard and annoying

⏹️ ▶️ John for people to get over that hump. Same thing with jailbreaking. You can do lots of customization with jailbreaking, but jailbreaking is quite

⏹️ ▶️ John a hump for people to get over. It’s weird and complicated and scary. Not a lot of people are doing it. As

⏹️ ▶️ John soon as the barrier was low enough for the masses to clear it, even if it was still a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ John barrier, like going through shortcuts, if you can do it just by tapping your finger, people were on board and they started doing

⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? So I really hope, I’m thinking again about the Mac specifically, but I really hope

⏹️ ▶️ John the things that are leftover from classic macOS that give us a little bit of customization functionality,

⏹️ ▶️ John stay in Mac OS. Like I think it’s a terrible regression. Like when I, when I can’t paste the new

⏹️ ▶️ John icon onto my, onto one of my mounted volumes because of weird permission errors or some APFS volume merging

⏹️ ▶️ John type thing, right? Like that shouldn’t happen. And I wish apps like

⏹️ ▶️ John candy bar had clean hooks. If people want to customize every icon

⏹️ ▶️ John on their system and icon factory who wants to make an icon for every kind of custom folder and every little icon and

⏹️ ▶️ John every system preference icon and every icon in the menu bar, like all those icons, if someone wants to make

⏹️ ▶️ John all those, which people did, they made complete icon sets for a complete transformation of your entire thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Provide an API for that. Provide modern appearance manager, provide hooks for, you know, the sound effects

⏹️ ▶️ John when you turn on like interface sounds of like the crumble sound with the trash and everything and Apple made a new set of sounds and

⏹️ ▶️ John we were all excited about that, remember that? What if third parties could plug in any sounds

⏹️ ▶️ John for any event? And you have the Kaboom, you know, control panel all over again. This is not super high

⏹️ ▶️ John technology. Making a clean API for providing custom sounds for events,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that complicated. And it’s the thing that people would like. And people would make it so their computer farts when they

⏹️ ▶️ John empty the trash and they would make some kid laugh. And is that so bad, really?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, listening to you guys talk about this, it reminds me that for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much every stage of my computing life, I have had at least a brief

⏹️ ▶️ Casey window of time when I’ve wanted to customize stuff. And I’ve told this story before,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when I was, I don’t know, not too much older than Declan,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when modern computers were like, I think, 386s or 46s, modern PCs were 386s or 46s at the time, my dad had found

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an old, I don’t remember the model, but like the original era IBM PC.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think he had retrofitted it such that it had a 10 megabyte hard drive,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was just so voluminous, I cannot even begin to describe to you how much space that thing had.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey infinite. But he had put this in my room and it wasn’t connected to the internet because there was no internet. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t connected to anything. But, you know, I had a stack of floppies and I could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey play games and do stuff on it. And I remember spending oodles of time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think I’ve spoken about this before, making like a menuing system that was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey either one huge section of like autoexec.bat or a series of batch files

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was kicked off with autoexec.bat. And I very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey strongly remember at least one version of this menuing system had a red background with yellow text because at like eight years

⏹️ ▶️ Casey old or whatever it was, I thought that looked fricking cool. And I spent hours doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, absolute hours doing this. And one could argue it was not useful,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but when I’m screwing around writing a bash script, like it’s really spiritually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that different. And then as time went on, I eventually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to, I don’t know, like 10, 15 years old, something like that, and Windows 95 came

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. And oh man, was I excited

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when a friend of mine came upon probably a copy of a Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus exclamation point disk. Marco, do you remember this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the one that came with the Buddy Holly video, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s right. Yeah. I thought it was part of Windows 95 until you said that, but yeah, no, I think you’re right. And it had like a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pinball game on it, but among other things, it also had a theme system sort of thing where you could theme

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows 95. And I spent so much time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey messing about with this. It was so much fun and it was making my computer mine. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point or another, I don’t remember when this was, but it might have been during the Windows 95 era, I skinned it such that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I found a skin I should say, that made it look like a Mac because it looked cool and I kind of wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what it was like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to be like. I have a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac maybe. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But that’s not the point. And then, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey after my Windows days, but before I got a Mac, this is the early, early to mid aughts, I had a brief window

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time when I was running Ubuntu full time and that had a million and seven problems.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But one of the cool things about it was you could tweak all sorts of stuff. And I remember, um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was like a virtual desktop switcher that was like a cube spinning,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know? So, instead of just sliding a virtual screen in like it works in macOS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, it was an entire cube spinning around. And I forget there were other like really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancy 3D effects. I can’t remember for life what they were, but I remember spending hours on that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey partially because it was all in buried config files and it was always breaking because I looked at it crossways,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s the Unix way or the Linux way anyway. But I spent a lot of time doing that. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then early-ish in my iPhone career, I remember, so to speak,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was jailbreaking from time to time because I wanted to get the, I don’t remember what it was, was it SB settings?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing where you swipe down from the top and you would get like a series of widgets or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to like turn off Wi-Fi and change the brightness, the volume and stuff like that. This is basically control

⏹️ ▶️ Casey center before there was control center. And just a week or two back, because I found

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in the show notes and because I think it as Jason Snell keeps talking about it, I started playing with Bitbar, which is a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really neat thing that we’ll talk about another time that lets you basically run a little shell script and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stick the output into your menu bar. So amongst other things, that means

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have in my menu bar either a lock emoji or a blue car emoji to tell me whether

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not my garage door is open. Do I need that? Absolutely not. I don’t need it at all, but it’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like it. Like, why not? It’s neat to see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco How many things in your life tell you whether your garage door is open?

⏹️ ▶️ John It is an Apple watch widget and this is what the widget would do. It would constantly vibrate, but if it ever stops vibrating,

⏹️ ▶️ John the garage door is open. It’s perfect. It’s flawless.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t know. I have a zillion things notify me and I don’t need them, but it’s just, I just like that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s this bridge between the physical world and my computing world. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s all these different ways of customized my computers and I would argue that some of them, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey early on, are some of the reason that I got comfortable with a computer in the first place.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what made me interested in doing this sort of thing. And you could argue that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very first programming I ever did was that menuing system in DOS. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, in so many ways, I cannot agree with you guys more that, you know, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at some of these iPhones that some people have shared screenshots of their home screens.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in my personal opinion, from any objective measure, they’re hideous.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not all of them, but some of them. But objectively, you look at this and you’re like, oh, God, those fonts are terrible. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey colors are wrong. It all clashes with each other. It’s like looking at the back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a device that Mike Hurley owns, where there’s nothing but sticker vomit everywhere. But you know what?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike likes that. And I’ve done that from time to time on my devices. I liked it. And if you want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your home screen to look like, what was it, John Hot Dog or whatever the theme was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco from—

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand from Windows 3.1? Hot dog stand.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, like whatever, fine, it’s your phone. And something that worries me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply about, you know, what is going on in Cupertino and how do people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel about this? Obviously, they’re willing enough to let this out into the world and see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what happens, but I’m deeply worried that maybe there’s two different camps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Cupertino, one of which is looking at all of this widget action and saying,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh my God, you’ve ruined our phone. The other of which, which I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to think I agree with is, well, it isn’t our phone anymore, is it? It’s their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone now. I really hope that that’s the team, so to speak, that’s winning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. I don’t know. But there are a lot of implications for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey expanding this access. I actually think that there are some security implications

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this because I would I assume, and I believe, that a lot of the widget stuff specifically is done within Springboard. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t really know that much about how iOS is architected, but my limited understanding is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Springboard and Backboard basically run the show. Like that is almost everything. And so exposing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Springboard to arbitrary third-party code is potentially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hazardous. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John code, it’s data. That’s the magic of the SwiftUI system they’re using for their widgets. It’s not executable code, which is why

⏹️ ▶️ John they have limited functionality. But anyway, these are technical problems that are solvable. You want to provide clean hooks for something, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can do it, especially for the very limited use cases. Like we’re not saying we want the world, we need to be able to

⏹️ ▶️ John code everything. It’s just baby steps, like get there eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, and you make a good point that it isn’t really code, that’s a very good point. But I don’t know, I just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope that there’s more of this. And the only thing that I can really think about, or the only thing that comes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to mind that’s happened in macOS recently that allows this, is for the longest time, like Dropbox would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use some sort of hack in order to get like the green check mark or the blue like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey processing icon into Finder to show you whether something was being uploaded or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey downloaded or whether it was already synced with Dropbox. And it seemed to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, or if I recall correctly, there was eventually a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey proper API, a clean hook provided for that. Now, my understanding is that clean hook isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly work all the time, but nevertheless, the point is that they

⏹️ ▶️ John tried. It’s supported rather than you injecting code into the Finder, which becomes increasingly less

⏹️ ▶️ John possible as the OS gets locked down. And it should be locked down, but that’s a perfect example. I mean, that

⏹️ ▶️ John took a customer in the form of Dropbox that is a little bit bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John than a random user asking for, oh, it’d be great if I could badge icons. Yeah, go away. But if Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ John wants it, and if more importantly, to get into like the whole epic strategy here, if Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ John is doing it anyway, and if Apple really, really wants Dropbox stopped injecting code into

⏹️ ▶️ John the Finder. You could yell at Dropbox for them to stop and Apple tried that and it didn’t work.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or you could provide a clean hook for providing that functionality and it just turns out you’re gonna need that same functionality for your

⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud stuff anyway. So provide the API, then consult with Dropbox and say, if we provided

⏹️ ▶️ John this API, would you use it? And Dropbox is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hell yeah, we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna inject code anymore. As long as you make the API be able to do the things that we can do, we’ll use it. And I’m pretty sure the current

⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox actually uses that hook to make the little icons next to their files. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the success story that Apple should pursue with all this customization. It’s just that the threshold should be

⏹️ ▶️ John something smaller than a gigantic, important company like Dropbox wants it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox, it only came about because they were able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to kind of hack things on the system in a certain way and do something that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t anticipate them doing. And it took off because it turned out it was really great and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t fit into any like, you know, preconceived categories

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing that could run. It didn’t fit any of the pre-written APIs Apple had blessed us with.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox had to do some hacks to get it to work in the seamless way that it did back before it was a steaming pile

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of garbage like it is right now, but back then it was better. And Apple couldn’t foresee

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But because the platform was a little bit flexible, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing was able to exist and take off. And there was a great tweet,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we mentioned it a few weeks ago, that somebody said, like, if the web browser

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was written today, Apple would reject it, and it wouldn’t be possible to release it on iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I often think, like, when you have things so locked down as they are, on iOS especially,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even the way things are heading on the Mac, but, you know, especially on iOS, when you have things this locked down,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you run the risk of the next big potential thing just not happening,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either not being possible at all, or not happening on your platform because it can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it does something that Big Brother Apple either doesn’t permit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or has made impossible in some way. And that’s a shame for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone involved. Like if major technological advancements or major potentially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great applications or very useful applications can’t exist on your platform, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great for your platform or the industry or society that could benefit from these applications.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So ideally, you want things to be possible. You want to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a loose enough grip that greatness can happen on your platform, whatever it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t care how smart Apple is, they’re never going to be able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to predict every possible thing that they should enable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they should permit on their platforms. They’re never gonna know what the next big thing who’s gonna need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or what it’s gonna be. And so the more they can loosen their grip,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better. And Casey, what you said a minute ago, it really hit me. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a very prevalent attitude at Apple and many tech companies that the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things they put out there, whether it’s hardware, software, or services, are theirs, not their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers. And I think Apple probably very much, I bet many people in Apple look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the design of the OS or the widgets or the apps or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the technical limitations that they impose, or the policy limitations that the App

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store rules impose, and think, well, this is our platform. We can do whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we want. You bought a window into our platform. Many of the ways

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the platform itself treats the users make it seem like they view

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that way too. Like many of the upsell opportunities, many of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications for marketing purposes that Apple uses themselves, things like this. It kind of seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple sees this as their platform and we’re along for the ride. That feeling is why I left Windows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever ago and came to Apple, because Windows was starting to feel like that. And I was tired of being taken

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a ride. I wanted a platform that felt like it was mine because I was buying these things, damn it, they’re my computers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple felt more like that for a while. They’re decreasingly feeling like that over time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think we need to really push for a return back to that time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where our computers were our computers and they would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let us use them how we want. And again, that goes from everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from customization to what software is allowed to run on them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is never going to have the best creativity in the world for everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s never going to enable everything everyone needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from their computers. People want to customize their stuff. People want to run their own software. People want to do their own stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their devices that they buy. Apple should be very thankful to be the vendor of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco such devices that people pay premium prices for, and that should be enough for them. If I buy a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple that is increasingly expensive to get good ones, my obligation to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple ends at that purchase. That’s it. I owe them nothing after that. I can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do whatever I want to this thing from that point forward, as far as I’m concerned. For some reason, we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of phones and tablets and watches working that way, but they should too, for all the same reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for Apple to keep things as locked down as they have been really restricts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco creativity and potentially great new applications and potentially great new uses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and great talent out there and enthusiasm that we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be having for these devices that we can’t have because they’re too locked down. Or because Apple didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that something should be designed the way each of us thinks. You know, that I can’t use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch in analog mode because I hate all the analog faces. I would make small tweaks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to literally all of them if it were up to me. Apple shouldn’t need to care about that. They should,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, this kind of thing should be possible. Either I should be able to tweak the ones that are there or I should be able to make my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own. Not because it’s a computer, and it can do that. Computers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do amazing things. I hope we can leave the era of the overbearing platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco owner dictating what we can and can’t do to the degree they do today, because it’s a very high

⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree, and it should be less. Because these things are capable of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more than what Apple will ever come up with on their own. And I’m tired of the attitude

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, we know better than you. because that is provably wrong

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people on the whole. There’s been this attitude, you mentioned it earlier, there’s been this attitude

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having to keep things a certain way for safety or security.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Technical security is one thing. We have much more advanced APIs these days, much more advanced separation,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing hardware features to prevent a lot of outright hacking and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problematic security problems with the customization. So we don’t actually need a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of these restrictions for security reasons anymore. Some of them we might need for battery life

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons, but not most of them. And so we now have the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical platform sophistication to offer lots of customization,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to offer arbitrary software to run, stuff like that, and to do that in a safe way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a lot of the reason why we don’t have that is a prevailing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco attitude of we know better than our users

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or our users shouldn’t be allowed to make bad choices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just think we’re past that. I think those are condescending, kind of like mansplaining,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overbearing IT manager kind of arguments. And I think we’re past that. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we went through the era of overbearing control. I’d like to see that era end.

⏹️ ▶️ John So before the Apple’s old line, we can’t wait to see what you do with it. Right. They they

⏹️ ▶️ John need to look at that saying from more angles than they have. Right. But both

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of we’ll be able to do much more with it if you let us. That’s one angle. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John other angle, which is the angle that I think that they’re the big blind spot is, is we can’t wait

⏹️ ▶️ John to see what you do to it. Apple never says that. Here’s the new iPhone, we can’t wait to see what

⏹️ ▶️ John you do to it. Because they see it, and this is definitely a valid view, and

⏹️ ▶️ John the predominant view is like, look, we’re giving you tools to express your creativity. Even though

⏹️ ▶️ John we all love just hacking on computers for computer’s sake, in the end, you’re trying to make a short film with

⏹️ ▶️ John a movie, or write a novel, or whatever. It is a tool to your creative end, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s an important aspect, and I think Apple’s concentrated so heavily on that, like making sure all the things they give

⏹️ ▶️ John you lets you do things with them. They are, you know, they’re products

⏹️ ▶️ John to pursue an end, right? But there is an important aspect. Everybody does this, whether it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, making a custom place to hang all your woodworking tools or just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John having a, you know, a cool looking handle on your favorite set of golf clubs or your

⏹️ ▶️ John lucky putter. People do like to do things to their tools and

⏹️ ▶️ John computers are so much more than just tools. They’re practically a place that we live. And of course, everyone knows they want to customize the place

⏹️ ▶️ John where they live. So yeah, I, I, I, Apple, you know, Apple is not a monolith.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure there are large factions inside Apple that are on the same page with all this. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John but for the past decade or two, it’s been swinging hard in the other direction.

⏹️ ▶️ John Part of it is as, as do a security, but part of it is just like, that’s the way the culture is going.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you could argue that it’s about, I’ve heard this argument about the Mac, like, well, all this customization

⏹️ ▶️ John about the Mac, like that was fine when the Mac was young, but it is a mature, stable platform now, and we can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have you running these hacks, and it’s not important enough to add clean hooks for all this stuff, so the basics

⏹️ ▶️ John are already there. You can put menu icons in the menu bar, you can customize your icons if you really want to, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all you need, it’s fine. And we added dark mode, isn’t that fun? And accent colors, oh, that’s great. So everything’s fine, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a mature platform, right? I see it the other way. I see that what

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS and iPadOS have reached now is true maturity because now we’re,

⏹️ ▶️ John we are like not just so overjoyed to have the ability to have a smartphone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now we’re saying this is a platform reaching maturity. Why shouldn’t I be able to customize the

⏹️ ▶️ John way it looks? Why shouldn’t I be able to do things to my phone, right? Because we’ve done the basics on the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone. And once you’ve done the basics, the next step is to say, let’s let people have fun.

⏹️ ▶️ John And day one, you can’t expect here’s the iPhone and you can customize everything and it has all the features. Didn’t even have copy and paste.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like we understand, right? But I feel like it is an important stage in the maturing of a platform

⏹️ ▶️ John for you to be able to customize it in more ways, including quote unquote frivolous ways

⏹️ ▶️ John like appearance. The arc of the Mac is we went through that, it matured, you could customize

⏹️ ▶️ John it a lot and then it kind of degraded. I don’t know if it was going into old age or whatever. And I feel like,

⏹️ ▶️ John to be fair, dark mode, accent colors is a swing in the other direction. So I feel like, as with

⏹️ ▶️ John most things in the Mac, If I have complaints about them, it’s mostly about current

⏹️ ▶️ John position and not direction, because for the most part, the direction is turning ever so slowly in almost

⏹️ ▶️ John all aspects in the direction that I like. So, you know, I’m positive on that. But

⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPhone and iPad and all these changes, I feel like this is a sign of a maturing platform. This explosion

⏹️ ▶️ John of creativity is reaching a new stage, maybe the teenage stage of iOS in

⏹️ ▶️ John terms of a platform that allows people not just to use them as tools, but also to express themselves through how

⏹️ ▶️ John they, you know, manage and, you know, what they do to their tools.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s important also to point out that most of this creativity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is coming from young people. That, you know, just because we are old and boring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we are fine not customizing our Mac icons and toolbars and

⏹️ ▶️ John everything. Speak for yourself, mine’s all customized. Fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, just because, like, you know, you out there, like, you know, just because you or we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to customize something and are fine just leaving it the way it is, we all just said how much we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to customize it when we were younger. And so just because we don’t want it doesn’t mean no one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does. And maybe as the people in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge of Apple got old and boring, maybe they decided it was fine to not have these kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco customizations. But there’s always a younger group of people who wants to be really enthusiastic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and wants to love their computing devices and let’s let them do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey As a final note, I am not good at this. But something I’m trying really hard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be better about is to not yuck other people’s yum, to not poop all over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that other people like. And I am really bad at this. You could probably find a million and seven examples of me not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing this. But I’m really trying to get better. And I thought that a friend of the show, Steven Hackett, had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really good post on this called On Widget Shaming that we’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s pretty short and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a pretty nice read where basically like if people want to make their stuff look ugly, let them make it look ugly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It may not be ugly to them, turns out. And I think that that’s a really good post.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re running a little long and if permitted, we might have a long after show, but I’d like to remind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you just one literally final time, stju.org.atp.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are now, as we are recording, $346,965, so close to $347,000.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would like to add that Declan Starr-Lis has apparently donated $400, which is very kind of him,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially since he’s sleeping and does not have a credit card, but that was very kind of him.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I also wanted to call out BMW Star, parenthesis, white parenthesis, who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey donated $5.40, which must be a reference to the 540, you know, the 540 Series BMW or the 5

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Series BMW. But the comment I really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey liked, and I’m not saying this sarcastically, the comment was, it’s not a lot, but I won’t be neutral

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the fight against cancer. So, well done. $5.40.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John —Capital N on the neutral.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good job. —And capital N on the neutral, yes. Well done, $5.40. It’s appreciated. So, please, one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last time, and you won’t have to hear this again until next September, stju.org.com.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you could.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco —Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Hey.com and Backblaze. And thank you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our members who support us directly. You You can join them at atp.fm slash join. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anti-Marco-Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ John to Accidental, Tech Podcasts So Long.

Ode to Hotdog Stand

Chapter Ode to Hotdog Stand image.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assert that the hot dog stand Windows theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was successful.

⏹️ ▶️ John What is your metric for success?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think whoever created that in that fateful day in the early 90s at Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was being serious about it. I think they did it to be funny. It was one of like 60

⏹️ ▶️ Marco preset color themes you could toggle on Windows and it looked hideous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they called it hot dog stand. And I think it was a bit of creative whimsy. They thought it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was funny. It was funny. And we’re all still, not only did, like when you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were playing with those things, like back in the day, or when you were showing someone else what your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer could do, you would always go to hot dog stand and be like, look at this, ah! You turn it on for like three

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds and you turn it to something else. It was successful in that it gave people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some joy when they were exploring this kind of, you know, frivolous, delightful little customization

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing could do with their computer. I don’t think it was intended to be serious, and it didn’t achieve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seriousness. It achieved joy, and it was one of many color themes to show off what you could do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with custom colors with Windows. And we are still talking about it like 30 years later. So I think it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was successful in what it probably was setting out to do.