398: The State of Your Baby
01 Oct 2020Desks, cables, game discs, app stores, and first impressions of Apple Watch Family Setup.
Episode Description:
- Thank you for all your donations to St. Jude! 💙
- Pre-show: Desk Reconstruction Day
- Uplift Desk V2 C-frame with magnetic cable channel and mountable surge strip
- Follow-up:
- John’s Headphone Update
- Sony’s digital vs. plastic-disc profits
- Apple now allows returning only Watch bands
- Google’s Carbon-Free Plans
- Unity’s IPO filing shows the threat of app stores
- Apple blocks Facebook update that tells users about Apple’s 30% cut
- Apple Watch Family Setup
#askatp- What’s the right way for someone who knows filesystems (🛎) to back up a Mac? (via Mike Lee Williams)
- What’s the best baby monitor experience? (via Migirdich Karnigyan)
- Infant Optics DXR-8
Note: Modern models do not use USB power input on the receiver, as was stated on the show
- Infant Optics DXR-8
- Is Marco watching Tesla competition? (via John Metcalf)
- Post-show: How does USB-C even work?
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- ExpressVPN: The fastest and most reliable VPN. Get an extra three months free with a 1-year package.
- Customer.io
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Chapters
- Desks, cables, and book clubs
- EDT 1770D, not 1770
- Thanks for St. Jude donations
- Digital vs. disc game profits
- Oh, fluffers!
- Sponsor: Customer.io
- Watch-band returns
- Google’s carbon-free plans
- Unity’s IPO filing
- News sites want more money
- Apple disallows “irrelevant” info 🖼️
- Shareholder obligation
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- Apple Watch Family Setup 🖼️
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Snapshots as backup
- #askatp: Baby monitors
- #askatp: Tesla competition
- Ending theme
- Post-show
Desks, cables, and book clubs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything is a mess in my world right now. Well, not a mess, different. Just your world? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron is having an outdoor, socially distant book club meeting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now, so there’s a very slim chance I might need to run away during the recording. But more pertinently…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To go, like, give your thoughts on the book?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly right. No, in case one of the kids wakes up, which is extremely rare for them, but you never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, could happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think was the theme of the book?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t even remember what book it was she was reading. But nevertheless— I don’t remember what themes mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More pertinently, as Marco, better than anyone, knows, I have had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very sporadic problems with my genuinely beloved USB Pre2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And every great once in a while, it will—I can’t figure out a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more descriptive technical term than glitch out, which is neither descriptive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nor technical. But every great once in a while, it’ll glitch out to the point that the only way to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to work properly is to unplug it and then plug it back in, like take out the USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connector and plug it back in. Which in and of itself, from my perspective, is not a big deal because it takes all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a moment for everything to write itself and everything’s good to go. But from Marco’s perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is a very, very different discussion because everything becomes two to three to four to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five times harder. And so we’ve been talking about this, Marco and I, on and off over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God knows how long. And somebody, I don’t think it was Marco, but somebody had said, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I had this, somebody says, I had a bunch of XLR cables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the USB cable kind of all intertwined with each other. And perhaps some sort of interference has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey caused that issue, or caused a similar issue. And I don’t think that’s actually the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not the problem. But in an effort to make Marco’s life ever so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slightly easier, those handful of times each year that this happens, I have taken my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey microphone and shifted it from the right side of the desk to the left, which is like sleeping on the wrong side of the bed. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is backwards now. I don’t know what to do with it. And the reason I did that is because on the USB Pre-2, the USB comes in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the right-hand side, the XLR cables come in the left-hand side. And And so my thought was I will move all the XLR stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the left-hand side of the desk, it had previously been on the right, leave the USB stuff on the right-hand side of the desk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is to say it’s like a three-foot USB-C to USB whatever cable, and never the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shall meet. And I don’t know if it’s gonna make a darn bit of difference, Smart Money says it won’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m gonna guess no on that. Same here. Which is funny, I actually, today was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desk reconstruction day for me. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, so both of us then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mine was for a different reason. I’m at the beach, had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get a desk, and I got like, basically I made the wrong choice on a certain type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of frame, and it was the kind of frame that like, it frames the desk on the front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end back underneath with metal framing, so that way your leg hits the front.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knee hits the metal framing, because it isn’t only like in the midsection or back the way they usually do it with like the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco U-shaped legs. Because my thinking was, I don’t like how most desks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have the T or offset T or C shaped legs, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap the front lip of the desk, the whole thing kind of rocks a little bit. And your screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might even vibrate or shake with every tap that you make. And I thought, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not ideal. I had some inexpensive Ikea desk before that did this. So I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me get a four-legged desk that should ideally solve this problem, instead of just having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two C-shaped or T-shaped ones, if you just have four legs, then it should make it much more stable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turns out it did. It worked in that sense, that it was indeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more stable, and it was basically like a rock. You could tap it, and your screen wouldn’t shake at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Downside was that it had that fully rectangular frame that my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legs would hit constantly, and literally every single time I approached and tucked under the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desk, every single time I hit my knee on that thing. Observant listeners might say, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t you just raise the desk? Good question. In fact, it was a standing desk, so I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raise it to whatever height I wanted. The problem is, if you raise the desk like an extra two inches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboard’s too tall, and it’s bad for ergonomics. Because ideally what you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a zero thickness desk. Like I know it’s not realistic, but you want the thinnest possible desk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way you can have enough space under it for your legs and maybe a bent knee or two, but you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want the keyboard to be higher than it needs to be. You basically wanna be, like you want the desk to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as thin as possible so that you can achieve that ergonomic and comfort ideal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Keyboard tray, Lisa needs braces.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Keyboard tray. Keyboard tray.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How does a keyboard tray not make this problem mostly worse?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it gives you a specific plane just for your keyboard that is lower than your desk. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get the desk up out of the way and still have the keyboard at maximum, like, lowness
⏹️ ▶️ John to your legs, essentially, without you hitting whatever. I don’t, I’m trying to visualize what
⏹️ ▶️ John the structure of your desk looks like, but if it’s just like a bar that sticks out from the bottom of your desk a couple of inches,
⏹️ ▶️ John this would get it out of your way, because you would raise the desk so that the bar is clearing but the
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard tray is, you know, is like two or three inches down. And lots of keyboard trays are adjustable in height so that it can be
⏹️ ▶️ John any number of inches away from the bottom surface of your desk. And then you’d sort of arrange those two
⏹️ ▶️ John things independently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I guess I guess I see what you mean I
⏹️ ▶️ John but the key feature of the keyboard tray is it clears it me gives you a big spot in your desk to put stuff And that is the
⏹️ ▶️ John main reason I mean obviously I do it for ergonomics because I bought my desk before Standing desks were really popular and
⏹️ ▶️ John my desk does not adjust at all, right? But I would never be able to give up having just
⏹️ ▶️ John empty desk space in front of me where I can put things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well how deep of a desk do you run because like There’s basically you know There’s like you know that the 24 inch class and a 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch class that of depth that tend to be widely available
⏹️ ▶️ John available. Maybe I’m at 36. I can’t even reach the back of my desk. Deep. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very deep. Oh my God. Yeah. Like I, I tried the 24s like in, in previous,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, beach arrangements, I’ll get something small cause it’s just vacation. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I was never happy with 24s even like in previous apartments, like where I didn’t have a lot of space, I would occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a 24 inch desk. It was never enough depth for me. And so I’ve, I’ve been 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while now and I have no regrets. But, uh, but yeah, Anyway, so I didn’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of keyboard tray. I still don’t think that’s my style. I do like a very clean, basic look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimalist kind of arrangement here. So anyway, I had to switch from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the four-legged desk, which is now being repurposed as a workbench in a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco location. And now I have a two-legged desk once again, and the wobbliness is back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is less severe than the inexpensive Ikea desk. And anyway, I had to redo everything. And so to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get back to how I brought this up, in a very random way, sorry Casey. I too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during my desk rearrangement, I had an issue with my audio interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was getting electrical noise in my recordings. And I did all sorts of stuff. I plugged in different things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried different cables, tried different arrangements, different settings. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even eventually tried a whole different interface to the microphone. And I was still getting this electrical noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my recordings. And I eventually traced it back. It took me almost a whole day to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out the problem. I eventually traced it to one of the cables I was using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was running, it had some excess, and I had coiled up the excess, so there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small bundle of XLR cable, and I had tucked it in a spot on the underside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the desk that ran next to a network cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently, it was getting interference from the network cable running past a bundle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of XLR cable. Because when you bundle it up, it basically passes the same cable five or six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times at least. So any interference potential is probably amplified. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XLR cables are inherently balanced. And they actually do a really good job of rejecting lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of noise, but apparently not the kind of noise that running a perpendicular network cable past it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generates. And literally, this whole day I was spending trying to get my interface to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have noise on it. And I literally had to just move this bundle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cable like four inches away from where it was, and the problem disappeared completely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Analog electronics suck. Indeed, it had to be learned. That’s the reason we invented digital.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just tell me if it’s a 1 or a 0. Lots of leeway there. Analog is a good little
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that changes my signal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and it was going to the box that does that, But it has to be analog at some point. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you want to be, I feel like, in the computer world, at least in my computer world,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the analog stuff to be as short as possible. Stay digital
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you can. Stay gold, pony boy. Stay digital, signal. And then, yes, inevitably, at some
⏹️ ▶️ John point, it needs to become analog for human brains to hear it and for human mouths to influence it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then get right back into digital as fast as you can. You had analog stuff just swirling in circles underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John your desk, underneath the network cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that was a big mistake, turns out. But I have rectified the issue, and with my new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desk setup, I not only have my knee not hitting the frame, because it’s the right kind of frame now, again, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also did a total organizational change where, I actually am very happy with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new desk, the one that’s not four-legged. I will pimp the company, it’s an Uplift desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very happy with their cable management stuff that’s under the desk. I got a surge strip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that mounts under the desk, and it mounts so that the plugs don’t face down, they face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, so they don’t intrude in the foot space. Because I’m also like, I’m a subwoofer foot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want a lot of stuff hanging down from the desk, because then when I lean back and put my feet on the subwoofer, my feet will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit the cords and possibly pull them out. Is that because your feet don’t reach the ground? So anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just an adorable image I have in my head of your little swinging your feeties while you program.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, part of the reason that I have a standing desk is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily because I frequently raise and lower it. It’s because I can set a standing desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a lower height than most fixed leg desks. Almost all fixed leg desks are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either they are like some of the Ikea adjustable ones, which again, I’ve been using those for years, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted something a little more sturdy, a little more heavy duty, but almost everything that’s not Ikea is a fixed height and it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the desk roughly 29 inches tall. and that is too tall for me. My preferred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting on the uplift desk is 27.4. It’s like an inch and a half lower than almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all regular desks have as their fixed height. And that, because what I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for my feet to be resting on the ground at regular sitting height. So like, you could just jack the chair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, be at full height and have your feet dangling at the bottom, or you can get a desk that you can set at the right height
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so your feet can be on the floor, and you can lower the desk to meet you. So that’s the biggest reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a standard desk, is to have easy, precise control over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual desktop height. And occasionally to raise it to stand it up. And it’s also really nice if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going under it to like wire something, it’s really nice to lift it up first and go under it while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in the high position. So much easier to do stuff under there. Anyway, I’ve been very impressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Uplift and this desk and all the cable management stuff. I did something similar to Casey where I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, analog stuff is now on one side of the desk. And on the other side of the desk, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had previously had another issue with analog interference with one of those big like mid cable power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply things where you have like the three prong cable to the blob and blob to a DC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable to the device that those big bricks or even or you know, the wall warts that go directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the outlets. Those are frequently the source of interference if you run analog cables near them because they’re usually pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of crap. And they have lots of interference components in them. And so what I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is the like the left side of the underside of my desk has a giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a giant mounted surge strip on the underside of the desk. There’s a big like cable management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like rectangle blob thing that can hold up a bunch of stuff. So I put all the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapters for everything in there and that’s all on the left side. And then all the audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables all the analog stuff is on the right side of the desk. And they have these cool magnetic channel things that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick to the legs and run the cables down them. It’s so great. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a big fan of the Uplift desk, so and in particular, their cable management stuff. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the nicest stand desk I’ve ever used, like with the control panel and everything. It’s I haven’t used that many.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve used, I think, four now, but it’s a very nice one. So I can hardly recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uplift. They are not a sponsor. I’m just recommending them. And yeah, anyway, but but don’t get the four legged one. The four legged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is not at all the right idea for leg comfort.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sturdy as it was, not the right idea for leg comfort. Get the C-Leg. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a four-legged standing desk, that’s what I’m looking at. It has a glass top too, so maybe Casey would like it. Or is it a glass top, or is that
⏹️ ▶️ John just showing me a transparent top where you can pick your material?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a frame-only option, but don’t get the four-leg one if you care about the knee comfort thing like I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was incredibly strong, but I’m going to be, yeah, that’s being repurposed as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a standing workstation, like in the garage area, where we can use it as a workbench.
⏹️ ▶️ John My one complaint about the now traditional standing desks is over
⏹️ ▶️ John the past few years, my work back when we went into the office, everything was converted to these standing desks that look a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John like these. I guess they all kind of look the same, but similar design. It’s the stupid control panel that
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of is on an angle on the right or left side. And it sticks down a little bit, which
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t that big a deal. And it makes sense, like, well, where else would you put it? But in an office environment
⏹️ ▶️ John where very often, it’s kind of like having cubicles but no cubicles.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ve described this scenario before. When you had a cubicle, at least you had walls that defined your tiny little veal
⏹️ ▶️ John pen that you spend your day in. An open office plan, you don’t have the walls. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want any space for yourself, you have to claim it somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of that is if you have any kind of furniture,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a rolling two drawer filing cabinet where you can put stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to fit that within your little claimed area. And one way to do that is to take some
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of furniture and slide it under one side of your desk. And like you said, Marco, like being able to
⏹️ ▶️ John lower the desk down is important, especially if you don’t have a keyboard tray. But if you do that, then that little, that one
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid little control panel makes it so you can’t slide the filing cabinet underneath it, or you
⏹️ ▶️ John can slide it, but now it’s trapped and one of the drawers hits it. And I just wish those controls were flush or something or
⏹️ ▶️ John movable or whatever. They just, it always annoyed me that no matter what style of standing desk we got,
⏹️ ▶️ John the controls were always like that and always on the wrong side that you wanted them on. Like, oh, I wanted my filing cabinet left. Well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where the controls are. So tough luck, you gotta put it on the right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, this one, you have to assemble the desk. And when you assemble it, you can pick either side to put the
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to be in the union to assemble the desk in the working world. Sorry, you can’t assemble the desk yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I would go in there in off hours with, I’d bring my power drill and stuff and just
⏹️ ▶️ John like when no one’s in the office, I’d just be under there. You know, I mounted my own keyboard tray on a succession of desks
⏹️ ▶️ John by drilling the holes myself when nobody was in the office. I just thought about that the other day. I wonder what my desk is
⏹️ ▶️ John like. I think I left a pair of my headphones. I think I left the pair of headphones that you gave me as a present at one point. I think those are still
⏹️ ▶️ John in the office. You should go back and claim them.
EDT 1770D, not 1770
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of, what headphones are you using tonight?
⏹️ ▶️ John Still the old ones. I have, I got, uh, I did place some orders for new pads. One of the
⏹️ ▶️ John orders came, not the one, not the real one that I eventually got the right one that Marco recommended.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I messed this up. This is my fault. So when I, when I was speaking in the episode, I gave the part number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the good pads as EDT 1770. It’s actually EDT 1770D. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gave the right one in the show notes. I caught this error, like as I was running, as I was checking the show notes and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corrected in the show notes but the audio so like the number i said out loud was wrong so sorry anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who ordered the wrong one uh hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah john was one of those people so yeah i owe john like 36 euros yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John well anyway i ordered the right one and who knows what’s going to come because it’s out of stock but i also ordered like a knockoff uh
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like fake leather plus memory foam and they’re not really the right size for the 1770s but they
⏹️ ▶️ John fit because you know these things are loosey-goosey you know so i put them on today uh i’m not sure if i’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna switch over over to them. I’m still wearing the old ones for now, but they’re ready to go. Maybe I’ll try them out next episode we’ll
Thanks for St. Jude donations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should start with a final check on what the status is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the St. Jude fundraiser and if you recall we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about this all month because September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. As we record it is still, strictly speaking, September
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for another couple hours. So hey, if you wanted to just eke in right at the nick of time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel free to go to stjude.org slash ATP. But I wanted to genuinely thank everyone for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having sent so much money to St. Jude. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really incredible how much money they and we raised.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the original goal was $315,000, which is not something to shake your stick at. That’s a serious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of money. And as of 918 in the evening tonight, which is Wednesday, the 30th of September,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $445,975.03, which is ridiculous. I am extremely proud of the ATP and Relay communities. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to anyone who has donated. It is worth noting that, do we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still have the new leader on the leaderboard as far as I’m aware?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The very large leader?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. So someone who wrote their name as 4Evelyn, I am not kidding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as of the time we are recording anyway, we believe this to be valid, donated $50,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is absurd and incredible and oh my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you happen to be that person and want to send me a receipt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will send you stickers and something else. I don’t even know what, but I’ll find something and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, we don’t actually know if this was an ATP listener or a relay listener. Yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t use an asterisk, which from this point forward will be the way that people indicate they are an ATP listener.
⏹️ ▶️ John No asterisk in the name makes us assume that maybe it’s just a very generous person who came in through the main
⏹️ ▶️ John Relay fund drive. But if by chance you are an ATP listener and you want some stickers, $50,000 will do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the low, low cost of a handful of ATP stickers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think maybe that might buy two handfuls?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, yeah. Actually, we can probably arrange that. But really, thank you to everyone who donated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We all, all three of us in the broader Relay community, all really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really appreciate it. and it is very kind of you. And we will stop badgering you about this until
⏹️ ▶️ John See you next year, 500K next year. We’re going to do it.
Digital vs. disc game profits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Anonymous writes in on some thoughts with regard to Sony’s digital versus plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disc profits. John, take it away.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is in regards to the discussion the past couple of weeks about digital versus
⏹️ ▶️ John optical disc games and the different profits that the game makers
⏹️ ▶️ John and Sony may or may not make, depending on what the retailer cut and the different prices of the consoles and all that good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, you know, this is an anonymous source who presumably would know. source says,
⏹️ ▶️ John when developers press optical discs, Sony makes them use its own factories and pay for shipping, paper printing,
⏹️ ▶️ John etc. So all the overhead gets passed on to the developers. After that, digital or disc, Sony still gets 30%. This
⏹️ ▶️ John reminds me of the old cartridge days when Nintendo would always make you pay for Nintendo to manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ John the cartridge for you. So they got some profit margin on the manufacturing of the game, then they sold the game, and then they got
⏹️ ▶️ John some margin on that because you have to pay Nintendo’s percentage of your game sales. So what this is saying is that Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John makes you use Sony factories to make the optical discs. And of course Sony gets
⏹️ ▶️ John a profit on that. They don’t do it for you at cost. Which potentially makes the disc
⏹️ ▶️ John games more profitable than digital. And this person is also saying that whether it’s digital or not,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony still takes 30%. And so I guess it’s just the developer and the retailer fighting
⏹️ ▶️ John it out for the remaining 70%. So it’s not so it’s not entirely clear,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least in the case of Sony, who presumably has large factories that make optical discs, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not digital is actually more profitable for Sony than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also sounds a lot like the record business, like back in like the awful peak of it in the 90s, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they just, I don’t know if they still do this, I assume they do, but it’s just less relevant now. But like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the things they would charge the bands for, like producing the CDs and everything, they really would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco destroy, like just screw the bands over at every possible angle. This sounds a lot like that, where like, you know, just Sony
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just… and I don’t think this is exclusive to Sony, like I think this kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has always been commonplace in the game industry, like in the game console industry. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just seems like they just screwed the developer at every possible opportunity.
⏹️ ▶️ John The difference is in this case that Sony legitimately has a reason to own
⏹️ ▶️ John optical disc factories. I’m sorry, in Microsoft’s case, they would say, oh, well, Microsoft has
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay someone to make optical discs, and then they pass that cost on to the developer. But in this case, Sony already
⏹️ ▶️ John has factories making optical discs for its other businesses. And so it’s like, look, we already own the factory.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re gonna make our profit the way we, I think the person who sent this tip
⏹️ ▶️ John described it as Sony getting its customers to pay to keep the lights on in its factories, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone isn’t manufacturing optical discs, then those factories are not making any money, and
⏹️ ▶️ John optical discs become much less popular. The one place they’re still kind of hanging on, like they’re pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John out of favor in music, but in video games, it’s kind of their last stronghold, although obviously that’s slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John shifting to digital.
Oh, fluffers!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving along, Google’s carbon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John free plan. No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to skip back on. I was, I figured you’d look back, but you didn’t. What? You skipped on Shorty, right
⏹️ ▶️ John above the Dave Mays thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, fluffers, I’m sorry. Fluffers. Oh, sorry. That’s a, that’s a lissism. It,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I couldn’t, I can’t see.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get some fluffers in your sleepy shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I guess I did. So the, the, the, let’s see, here we go. The etymology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that the word I’m looking for? The history of this is that I can’t swear like a sailor in front of my children, even though that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my natural state of being. And so, Aaron and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I both, I don’t know which one of us came out with this first, but we started saying, Fluffernutters, which I think is actually a sandwich if I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mistaken. It sounds vaguely like, it has that nice satisfying F
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the beginning. And so we would say, oh, Fluffernutters, and that would be kid friendly. And then that got shortened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, oh, Fluffers. And so that
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is not as kid friendly, but the kids don’t know that. apparently neither to you and Aaron.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, what am I? What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John am I walking
⏹️ ▶️ John into right now? Don’t worry about it. Oh God. So, uh, and other possible alternatives that I think are more widely
⏹️ ▶️ John popular than fluffers would be a frack from a Battlestar Galactica,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think, you know, right? Um, or a Fuddruckers, the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, fun fact, uh, Marco, I don’t know if you recall, but that a barbecue place we took you to with that huge ass fan in the ceiling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that actually used to be a Fuddruckers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s called a big-ass fan, Casey. That’s a brand name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Is there a hyphen or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there isn’t a hyphen, and I think there should be. Is it all one word? No, it’s big-space-ass-space-fans.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they just don’t understand grammar, which doesn’t surprise me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, Fluffer, right. Oh, right, right. I saw the Wikipedia link,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when it was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pluralized, I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the error in my ways. Right. Well, here we are.
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Watch-band returns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we talked last week, maybe the week before, about how Apple had the very curious policy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you needing to return the entire watch and band combination if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a poorly fitting solo loop. And after quite a bit of outcry, which was to be expected,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, guess what? They changed their minds on that. And so now you can actually return just the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey band and not the entire watch band combination. I haven’t seen anything personally about the mechanisms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by which this happens, particularly via mail, but supposedly it is a thing that you can do now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is good. I’m very glad they fixed this. It is kind of weird that it ever was, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ever happened in the first place. Like I think this was the kind of thing where some part of the process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of fell down it like because it’s common sense that when you sell a fixed length band
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as part of a, you know, non-separately returnable bundle with the watch, like, of course, there’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a bunch of returns, especially in a year where it’s really hard for a lot of people to go to stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was kind of an unforced error, I think. They should have fixed this issue in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operations chain before they launched on afterwards. But I’m very glad they fixed it. I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy it is to swap the bands. And a topic that we will get to in a little bit maybe is like — so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my son’s Apple Watch came, the SE that we decided to try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DIGGLE Oh, yeah. and I will talk about that in a little bit, but basically, of course the band was one size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too big. And it turns out, like, you know, he actually likes wearing it loose, so we’re wearing it that way anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I ordered the smaller band to compare, but like, I think the way that sizing tool was initially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guiding us to use it, I think a lot of people ordered bands that were one or two sizes too big. They must
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been getting a ton of returns to deal with, And so it’s good that they’ve made this process
Google’s carbon-free plans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Google has announced their carbon-free plans, and they say, as of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, which was a couple of days ago, we have eliminated Google’s entire carbon legacy, covering all our operational
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emissions before we became carbon neutral in 2007, through the purchase of high-quality carbon offsets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This means that Google’s lifetime net carbon footprint is now zero. We are pleased to be the first major company to get this done today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since 2017, we’ve been matching all of our annual electricity consumption with 100% renewable energy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now we’re going even further. By 2030, Google is aiming to run our business carbon-free and on carbon-free energy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everywhere at all times. That’s pretty good stuff. That is actually not evil. Who knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they still do not evil things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nice to see companies competing to be the more, you know, the more green, the more
⏹️ ▶️ John environmentally friendly this, I thought Google had an interesting angle because they’re such a young company, relatively speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can essentially afford to do this, which is erasing their, their past debt. Like before they were concerned about
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Let’s let’s erase all of that. Let’s estimate how much carbon we used for the entire life of the company before
⏹️ ▶️ John we started caring about this, and let’s get offsets for all those too. For Apple it would be harder
⏹️ ▶️ John because they started in the 70s, and even just calculating what their carbon usage was would be difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple’s still going farther because they’re trying to weave it through their whole supply chain, although Google itself has less of a supply
⏹️ ▶️ John chain than Apple because they don’t manufacture quite as much hardware as Apple does through third parties
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but yeah. I like this good stuff. I like to see it. And, uh, you know, dueling
⏹️ ▶️ John press releases and dueling multi-decade strategies to be more environmentally
⏹️ ▶️ John environmentally friendly. It’s a thumbs up for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I’m, uh, I’m pretty happy about this. This is good. Good times.
Unity’s IPO filing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so tell me, John, what’s going on with Unity’s IPO filing, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a series of follow-up items that have been in the notes for a while. They’re mostly,
⏹️ ▶️ John the theme of all these is related to the Apple Epic struggle, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like secondary and tertiary effects, setting aside Apple fighting with Epic and doing all their things, which continues to
⏹️ ▶️ John rumble on. What’s going on in the rest of the industry related to this? This first
⏹️ ▶️ John one is from many weeks ago. It’s about Unity. Unity is a competing 3D engine. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John Unreal Engine, but from a different company. It’s cross-platform. Many games on iOS and many
⏹️ ▶️ John other platforms are built based on Unity. And the company that makes it is filing for
⏹️ ▶️ John an IPO. And I don’t know the details of this, but I’ve seen enough IPOs. One of the things you do,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just in IPOs, but I think in general, is you have to write up
⏹️ ▶️ John a document that describes to potential investors what are the things that threaten your business.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it seems to me that in this strange twist of the normal stuff in business where you
⏹️ ▶️ John just constantly try to make your company seem awesome to investors, to get people to invest in everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever the laws are around this require you to be honest, and it’s like an insurance type thing, not literally,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you never want someone later to say, hey, I invested in your company,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you didn’t tell me that this bad thing could happen, therefore I’m suing you or whatever. So companies are
⏹️ ▶️ John painfully honest in these documents because they wanna list everything bad that can happen. A volcano
⏹️ ▶️ John could erupt. aliens could invade, like just so that shareholders can’t come back and say, you never told
⏹️ ▶️ John us this could happen. Look at the document. Here it is aliens. We told you it was a potential threat you invested anyway. So tough
⏹️ ▶️ John luck, right? And it seems like the entire investor community in worlds has accepted. Yeah, whenever anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John files for an IP or, you know, files this document. Of course, if you look at the threats, it’s going to look like this company is doomed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at all these bad things that can happen to the company. And you know, they’re they’re so vulnerable. And it’s just like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve all agreed like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. We know that you’re going to list all this stuff. We know you’re going to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t scare me away. I’m still going to invest, but just this weird twist because every other part of business is all about
⏹️ ▶️ John making yourself seem awesome and adjusting your earnings and being optimistic or whatever. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, an interesting twist on, uh, on the usual threats that they put in there from
⏹️ ▶️ John competitors and so on and so forth is, and this is listed in unity’s IPO and I imagine listed and maybe soon listed
⏹️ ▶️ John in lots of the companies, the IPOs, which is basically a warning that a lot of unity’s business relies
⏹️ ▶️ John on people using their product to sell applications through app stores. And in the typical sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John cold-blooded language of these documents, I thought it was a great encapsulation
⏹️ ▶️ John of the threats posed by app stores to other companies. I’ll read some portions of it here. Operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John platform providers or application stores may change terms of service policies or technical requirements which could
⏹️ ▶️ John adversely impact our business. Yep, totally. If our customers were to violate,
⏹️ ▶️ John or an operating system platform or application store or believes that where our customers have violated its terms or policies,
⏹️ ▶️ John that operating system platform provider or application store could limit or discontinue our customers’ access to its platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John In some cases, these requirements may not be clear, or our interpretation of these requirements may not align with the interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ John of the operating system platform provider application store, which could lead to inconsistent enforcement of these terms of service
⏹️ ▶️ John and policies against us or our customers, and could also result in the operating system platform provider or application store limiting
⏹️ ▶️ John or discontinuing access to its platform store. There’s lots of long sort of multi-word phrases
⏹️ ▶️ John there to say App Store, but like, yep, you pretty much nailed it. Like that’s the environment
⏹️ ▶️ John into which everyone is trying to sell their applications. Like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically the app stores control the platforms. And if you are going to try to ride that bear in any possible way,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, the bear is going to try to potentially buck you off and it can bite you. And it might even not, might not even notice you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you might just get, you know, I’m, I’m straining this analogy. This is from the Steve Ballmer’s ride the bear analogy
⏹️ ▶️ John from Microsoft and IBM way back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I can’t imagine any company filing for an IPO these days having anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with App Store not having a section like this in their risk section. I think this would be a great
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to bring out in some case in the future about like, or trying to persuade
⏹️ ▶️ John Congress to apply regulation to App Stores or whatever to say, here’s a demonstration of how much power App
⏹️ ▶️ John Stores have. Now, when companies try to go public, all of them list the threat
⏹️ ▶️ John of app stores as a thing that could just be business ending for them because of the power that these app stores wield or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that can’t be good, like overall for, you know, humanity, business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, economies like that, to have like more massive risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factors like that can’t be a good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, like I said, these documents always list like everything and they always make it seem dire, but I just thought it was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you tighten up the verbiage surrounding the
⏹️ ▶️ John platform providers or application stores, if you squish that down to app stores or if you just squish it
⏹️ ▶️ John further down to Apple or Google, it’s a very straightforward, lorally explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John of the reality that we all face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think this is just like a blip in computing history? Do you think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, obviously, whatever you can call a 12-year period blip, but do you think, say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 10 years from now, that the dominant computing platforms will have these locked down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single gatekeeper app store kind of situations? Or do you think this will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco partially torn down or completely torn down by then?
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like in most industries, what you see is a sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John Cambrian explosion of activity and then consolidation. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you could have a re-explosion if there’s technological change, but it’s tricky. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John the one I always think of, and the one you always see charts about, is the auto industry. There used to be tons of car companies. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then there were not tons of car
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco companies because most of them went out of business
⏹️ ▶️ John and got bought or consolidated. And now, sort of with the change in tech, you’re like, well, electric cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John is there going to be like an explosion of new car companies? Not really. I mean, it just like, seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John one new car company like Tesla I was like, wow, I can’t believe that happened. But so I think the same thing with computer companies
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be way more computer companies and way more platforms and there was consolidation. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John how you get the next explosion in that specific type of
⏹️ ▶️ John business, right? You can have an explosion in tech companies. I think we’ve seen an explosion in tech companies, but platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t really exploded. Even mobile, I guess you had a brief period where there was like webOS and BlackBerry
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but then again, consolidation. So, and with app stores,
⏹️ ▶️ John they sort of got it, they were pre-consolidated, because you need a platform to have an app store already,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they piggybacked on existing platforms. So, I think it’s one of those things where
⏹️ ▶️ John regulation could help with this, but the only, I think we’ll eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John see a diversification, but not a diversification of things that look exactly like the app store. Diversification
⏹️ ▶️ John in how products are sold and distributed, digital products are sold and distributed, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John But specifically app stores, specifically for mobile devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not gonna be like a third one. And I don’t think either one of the two parties are gonna give up much control without
⏹️ ▶️ John a government regulation. So I think it’ll just be like, well, I remember when we used to all buy music from iTunes and now we
⏹️ ▶️ John all use streaming services, right? It’ll be like, well, remember when we used to all buy apps from the app store and now we use insert
⏹️ ▶️ John thing X that I don’t know what it is, like, you know, some future unforeseen thing. I think it has to be a new,
⏹️ ▶️ John a slightly new type of thing. In the same way that, you know, streaming services are not, it’s just digital
⏹️ ▶️ John music, right? But it’s different enough that the players changed around a little bit and there was a little, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more openness there and competing streaming services versus everybody buying from iTunes, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, having Amazon and so on and so forth come in late in the game. So.
News sites want more money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of gatekeeping and things of that nature, news publishers, including the Wall Street
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Journal, are joining the attack on the App Store and ask for Apple’s cut to be halved. Surprise, surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is another older story, but it was like when the, another side effect of Apple versus Epic,
⏹️ ▶️ John other companies smell blood in the water. Like when Apple is weakened slash distracted, now
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re part of Apple News+, hey, we don’t like our deal either. We’d like to get more money and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have less money, Apple, right? Sure, why not? pile on. I mean I don’t know if it’ll work out for everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John but as soon as there’s any perceived weakness it’s time to perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John try to renegotiate with Apple. Again this was this is about a month ago more than a
⏹️ ▶️ John month ago at this point so I don’t know how it turned out, probably not well, but people are gonna try.
Apple disallows “irrelevant” info
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sort of kind of tangentially speaking of, Apple blocked a Facebook update that called out the 30% App
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Store quote unquote tax. Apple blocked Facebook from informing users that Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collect 30% of in-app purchases made through a planned new feature, Facebook tells Reuters. Apple said the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update violated an App Store rule that doesn’t let developers show quote irrelevant quote information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to users. And there’s a screenshot here in the show notes, which hopefully we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put as maybe the chapter art or something. But it says, there’s a button that says purchase access for $9.99.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in small text beneath, Apple takes 30% of this purchase. Learn more.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought this was interesting because I mean, on the one hand, you know, Facebook’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this to be a jerk, right? Cause they’re sore about the 30% and they’re, they’re offering
⏹️ ▶️ John a price and they want, they want the customer to know you don’t like this price. Well, guess what? Apple’s taking
⏹️ ▶️ John a 30% cut out of it. The implication being maybe it would be 30% lower if it wasn’t for Apple. Who knows if it would. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think the interesting part of it is like if you have a if you have a business
⏹️ ▶️ John model of a business model for your digital thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you don’t like that you don’t want the user to know about
⏹️ ▶️ John like that you’re kind of ashamed of like it’s like they’re calling it irrelevant. There’s no need for the customer.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s between you and me. Software developer. That’s between Apple and developer. The customer doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to know about this at all. But this relationship between Apple and developer does affect the customer in
⏹️ ▶️ John profound ways in in small ways in terms of what is the price Of this specific purchase and in big ways
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of what kind of applications will you ever see available on this platform? And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John saying Apple like literally having a rule or their interpretation of rule that says
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t tell users what’s actually going on Even if it’s the truth like it’s 100% truth you do in-app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John applicants 30% that is true true, Apple doesn’t want you saying that to the user. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure that’s a particularly defensive defensible position, even though,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, Facebook’s putting this text there to kind of be a jerk. And this is a battle of the Titans,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, between these two companies. It seems like if Apple thought it had
⏹️ ▶️ John a system that really was good, like, Hey, the App Store is great. Everybody loves it. Users, Apple and developers
⏹️ ▶️ John were all doing great putting the terms in while it may be quote unquote irrelevant
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe too much information or maybe people don’t care. They wouldn’t forbid it. It was like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to tell people what the deal is fine. Like the deal is the deal. What, what, what harm is there in users knowing this?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think as I think as any of us who have ever had an app in the app store, no customers, most
⏹️ ▶️ John people have no idea how the app store works, nor should they really care the same way. They don’t know what percentage of
⏹️ ▶️ John their purchase price of groceries is going to a vendor and how much people pay to be put in end caps. Like customers
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to know that. In some ways it is irrelevant, but like I said, in this specific instance of apps on the app
⏹️ ▶️ John store, it is actually much more relevant to customers than perhaps the fees the grocery
⏹️ ▶️ John store charges to get your item somewhere other than the bottom shelf or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, in this case, it’s complicated. First of all, like it could have been a much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated situation than what Facebook reported here. Facebook is a terrible company run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a bunch of terrible people who lie constantly. Facebook could be leaving out some really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important information here that makes it a little bit less clear cut. That being said, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is any kind of rule in Apple that does prohibit app developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from saying below the purchase button, Apple takes 30% of this purchase, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed a big problem. I agree with John, that is not something that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good look and however Apple chooses to coach the language,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around such a rule, of course it’s going to be an unwritten rule, but if they say it’s quote, irrelevant, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a meaningful term in app development. Apps are filled with irrelevant information. How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you define what that even means? That doesn’t mean anything. We shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argue about what is relevant or irrelevant to users. That’s what Apple wants us to do if they’re really doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the reality is Apple doesn’t want developers it’s apparently to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show users where the money goes. And again, there’s a huge if here, if this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story is true, and if this is the whole story, and if Facebook didn’t leave out massive information here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are big ifs. But I think this is a very likely thing, knowing Apple and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attitude towards this. And I think you could kind of see it both ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To use John’s store analogy, if you go to a store, the prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a store don’t say, we take 40% of the price of this milk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Verizon Farms or whatever gets 60% or whatever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The store doesn’t say that, and customers don’t necessarily need to care. But I think the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, and why customers are so in the dark about this, is that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are buying something in an app, it really seems like you are giving your money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the developer. it doesn’t seem like you’re giving your money to Apple and then they’re gonna give some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to the developer. So if you’re in a store, you know you’re shopping in the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know that there is such a thing as a markup in the store, and you know that when you buy that gallon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Verizon milk, you know that the store’s gonna take some part of that. It’s very clear to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how that system works. Whereas in an app on your phone, people don’t have that assumption. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that expectation. They expect that when they are buying this thing, that that purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price is going to the developer. Whatever that price is, it’s going to the developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they assume it all goes to Apple, and a lot of people still think that Apple makes every app in the App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but I think for the most part, I think that it is totally reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to expect that most people assume, on the whole, that when they perform an in-app purchase, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money goes to the developer, and whatever price they paid, that’s the price the developer gets. You know, the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has always been more complicated than that. Like, there’s always things like credit card fees, win any transaction, but I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, it’s the, the difference in magnitude matters here. If they lose a few percent, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three, three to 5% for like payment processing and you know, weird like tax things, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would even say it was up to 10% for like weird, you know, maybe like some kind of weird tax or,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, currency conversion issues in addition. Fine. But I don’t think people would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume if there’s an in-app purchase button and they want to give their money to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, somebody offering some cool thing in their app or you know I don’t think people assume that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking a third of it. That’s why I think this kind of this kind of language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if an app chooses to put this here should be allowed and if there is indeed a rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco written or not within Apple that says that you can’t do this that’s a terrible rule and they should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing that strikes me about this is and granted I’m only looking at the image of the picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the caption beneath. But this plays to me as though Facebook thinks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that somebody’s going to feel bad for Facebook that Apple’s taking 30% of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchase. Who is going to feel bad for Facebook in this? There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey must be. I would assume there are people that are Facebook super fans in the same way that you could argue the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three of us are super fans of Apple, but who are they? I don’t know. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even the people that enjoy the social interaction that Facebook can provide,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, friends and family who really enjoy that sort of thing. I wouldn’t say any of them are really overly enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Facebook themselves. So like, I, I sort of get the play here, like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, Apple’s screwing us. They’re taking 30% of this, but like your Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grow up. Like who cares if it was you Marco or me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or underscore John, like, okay, that’s different, but it’s freaking Facebook. Like they print money. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who cares? Y’all get a grip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re trying to turn, they’re trying to turn customer sentiment against Apple because that’s part of it seems, I mean, assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a thing that is, it is as described, it’s to Facebook’s advantage for people
⏹️ ▶️ John to be mad about the purchase price and to be mad at Apple, like to think that, oh, if Apple didn’t take that cut,
⏹️ ▶️ John this would be lower. And now Facebook is fomenting anti-Apple sentiment, which is why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a jerky thing to do and why you can imagine Apple not particularly liking it, but I still say,
⏹️ ▶️ John if the deal really is fair and would seem fair to anyone you described it to, you wouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John ashamed of explaining it. And it would be like, okay, well, you can, it’s kind of like if you, when you went to the grocery
⏹️ ▶️ John store they had a little sign next to the MasterCard thing that said MasterCard takes a 1% of this transaction,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Or something, every time you use a credit card, we have to pay X percent or X amount to MasterCard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s like Marco said, if they had that sign there in small prints underneath the little Mastercard
⏹️ ▶️ John symbol on the register, people might read it and go, huh. But because it’s a fraction of a percent or one or 2%
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it is, people would just say, oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that, but anyway, not a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John But 30% is a very different, and that would probably make people notice, especially if they didn’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John about that before. They’re like, really, 30%? Of course, on the other hand, if people knew just how much the retailer
⏹️ ▶️ John takes for certain products, they’d also be amazed because they would, I think most people think the majority of the purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John price of their thing goes towards Nabisco or the dairy farm that sells
⏹️ ▶️ John the milk, where very often that is not the case. And the majority of the money goes to the retailer. But who knows what people
⏹️ ▶️ John think about how the world works. I mean, it’s not something that people should need to know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just sometimes we’re just collateral damage in this war between titans. But I still feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had a deal that seems reasonable, like the credit card fee thing, people would be like, oh, well, I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s irrelevant to me, but it doesn’t seem crazy. Like if you told someone how credit card fees work, they might be
⏹️ ▶️ John surprised that retailers just have to eat that and it might make them feel bad for using a credit card instead of cash,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that ship has long since sailed and I think the entire economy has learned it’s worth it
⏹️ ▶️ John for the convenience. We will pay those fees because we know more people will shop at our store if we don’t insist that
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone pay with cash, because it’s more convenient. That’s why the credit card industry is, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the reasons the credit card industry is as big as it is, and so I think everyone’s willing to make
⏹️ ▶️ John that trade-off. It seems reasonable if you explain it. But so if we people know about the App Store deals,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is setting aside the stuff I said before, the big macro level stuff of like, and by the way, they also control the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of apps you’re ever going to see because they decide what is allowed on the store, more on that later possibly,
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think people wouldn’t just go, huh, they’d be like, wow, and maybe they would take a
⏹️ ▶️ John note of that. And maybe if and when this comes up in the legislature for just considering regulation, they would remember
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing that little sign about, you know, Apple taking a 30% cut, or maybe they wouldn’t care, who knows? We’re in such
⏹️ ▶️ John a developer-centric world, worldview here that I honestly don’t know how regular
⏹️ ▶️ John people would handicap these parties. But I think they’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, you mentioned Facebook super fans or whatever, but I think in general, outside of the tech sphere,
⏹️ ▶️ John people like Facebook because you don’t pay for Facebook, it’s free. And it’s a thing that has positive connotations
⏹️ ▶️ John to a lot of people, they use it all the time. If you took it away from them, they’d be sad. And then they don’t have to pay any money for it, so
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbs up. And I think people in general like Apple, but I think people in general either don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John about developers, or if you were to describe what a developer was, wouldn’t like them, because they’d be saying, oh, these people are getting
⏹️ ▶️ John rich selling fart apps, right? Or whatever their notion is of what a developer is. Their view
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is probably not accurate. And unlike Apple and Facebook, there is no sort of friendly
⏹️ ▶️ John public face that says developer that makes people have good feelings about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, this reminds me of the times, And I can’t think of anywhere it has happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently, except maybe a gas station, when there’ll be, and you’ve alluded to this, a cash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey price and a credit card price. And the credit card price is like 5 tenths
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a cent per gallon more or something like that. I forget exactly what it was. But you do see that from time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to time. And yeah, I agree with what you said, that convenience definitely trumps pretty much everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. And so, God, I should really find a better turn of phrase for that. Convenience is more important to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than anything else. And so, yeah, I don’t know. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crummy. And I think, like you said, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so developer-centric because the three of us are developers and make at least some small portion of our living
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the App Store. And so we are very, very biased when it comes to this. But yeah, it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 10 plus years on, 30% might be a little bit preposterous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, and before we, to save us from a bit of follow-up here, if you want to run a store that accepts credit cards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the deal that you have to make with the credit card companies, I think almost always, this could be out of date information,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at least it used to be this way, almost always prevents you from requiring credit card minimums
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or charging a different price for credit cards than for other customers. Almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always, the merchants demand that from the terms. Now, that being said, many smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stores just ignore that, and they can usually get away with it, because I don’t think enforcement on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little mom and pop places is very strong. But that’s why the big chains, that’s why you can go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Starbucks and charge a $1.50 cup of terrible coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Starbucks knows the deal they make with Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or whatever, precludes them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from charging different prices to credit card customers. Maybe the big gas chains might negotiate things differently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because gas is such a weird thing with weird margins and everything. But for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most stores aren’t actually allowed to charge different rates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s worth knowing in that argument, in its analogy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say, once you know how this kind of stuff works, your behavior might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change. Once I learned how much worse it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, for the wait staff at restaurants to have credit card tips versus cash tips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And once you learn how much their income depends on tips as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started doing cash tips whenever I can. Like if I’m at a restaurant, if I have enough cash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay the tip in cash, I will try to do that. And I started carrying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cash to restaurants for that purpose if I have enough. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a small difference for me. Oh no, I’m not going to get the 1% reward on my card for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that portion of the bill. But it’s a huge difference for them. And so when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you learn that kind of thing, you might change your behavior. So I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unreasonable for an app like Facebook to attempt to tell people, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evil as Facebook is, to attempt to tell people Apple’s taking 30% of this purchase. That being said, there is another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of this. I know we’re going long on this, sorry. There was no side of this of like, what do you expect users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do when there is no other choice? You know, like, okay, Apple takes 30% of this purchase,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s not a button right below it that says purchase it through us, you know, so we don’t have this problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there can’t be, because Apple privates that. So like, when there’s no alternative,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when there’s no way for people to change their behavior, I can kind of see why Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say, well, it’s irrelevant then. That’s not a good
⏹️ ▶️ John But like I said, they’re trying to change sentiment. And it’s kind of the same example as you giving the cash
⏹️ ▶️ John tip. Like so you have an alternative, which is I can change my individual behavior in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that mitigates this somewhat, which is exactly what you just described. But there is another alternative.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the case of Apple, there is no individual thing that you can do. But there is a collective thing in both cases that
⏹️ ▶️ John can be done. The collective thing in your case would be to vote for people who are going to vote for a much higher
⏹️ ▶️ John untipped minimum wage, you know, or a no distinction between tip versus untipped minimum wage to
⏹️ ▶️ John get rid of or change the terrible system we have in the United States. We have terrible systems for a lot of things, by the way. Hi, people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are not in the US. One of them is tipped workers and that whole scam where you can pay them
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculously low wage and expect them to make it up in tips, which is, you know, anyway, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John collective action. All of us can vote for people who will make laws to change that
⏹️ ▶️ John such that these people don’t have to rely so heavily on tips such that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the individual option that you typically encash is good, but the collective action of us changing the law surrounding that is better.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so what I think Facebook is hoping for is, well, there’s no individual action you can do, but we want to move your sentiment
⏹️ ▶️ John so that the collective action that somehow we will all get behind is, oh, these app stores, they need to be
⏹️ ▶️ John regulated. Let’s make laws that change what they’re allowed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s fair. And I would say just in general, to wrap this up, it’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like dirty, scummy thing. I think anytime Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a rule about the App Store that precludes app developers from telling the user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s going on, like why things are the way they are, or why they can’t do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s one of the reasons why the rule about in-app purchases, I think, is so sinister. Like, the part that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t even tell people why they can’t sign up in your app, like, that to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is incredibly problematic and just a sleazy thing to do that is beneath
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ethics that a company like Apple purports to have in other areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything where they’re literally restricting what you can tell your users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about material things that matter in the context of an app, those kind of rules
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Any kind of rule that says you can’t say mean things about Apple, that seems kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of bad. Because you’re like, oh, really? I can’t say mean things about you? It’s like, well, OK. Well, not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean things. You can’t say facts about Apple. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John crazy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, well, I’m dividing into two things. I’m saying like, if they said you can’t say mean things about Apple, all right, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s their story and of all the things that you have to comply with, that’s fine. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John next level is, you can’t say the truth in a neutral way. You can’t literally explain what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on in many aspects you just mentioned. You can’t explain to people why they can’t sign up.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the truth. You could explain it like, what if I explained it dispassionately and without saying Apple is a meanie?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like, you could, but they’re like, no, You can’t tell people what’s going on. And anytime,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s bad enough when someone says you can’t criticize, but again, they’re not the government, so this is not a free speech issue, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes you feel bad about it. It makes you feel like, okay, well, they really got me under their thumb. I can’t say anything mean about
⏹️ ▶️ John them. But then saying, also, you can’t tell people the truth, even if you do it in a way that is entirely neutral,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you do it in a way that it’s glowing. It’s, we love Apple, we love giving them 30%. Nope, Apple says, just
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, please don’t tell people what’s going on. It’s irrelevant to them.
Shareholder obligation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think a way to perhaps understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and other companies, and this was written to us with regard to Apple and Epic, but I think it’s true of pretty much every company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I try to remind myself of this regularly, particularly when it comes to Apple, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often forget it. And Paul Rippey wrote in and had what I thought was a really clear distillation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of motivations of businesses. And so Paul wrote, both companies are doing what they owe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to their shareholders to do, trying to maximize profits. Apple has me, says Paul,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personally locked in, even though my handcuffs chafe sometimes. But Epic is the same sort of sticky,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just as good at extracting money. At least in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some middle schools, kids who play the free version of Fortnite without buying costumes are teased and called defaults.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ew, gross, Tommy’s a default! Like they’re wearing the wrong kind of shoes or something. Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Epic aren’t bad any more than a line who gills an antelope is bad. They’re just doing what their nature has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them do. which is obvious for sure, but I think it’s something that I at least could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use a reminder of from time to time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry, Paul, I hate this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing. Oh, I love it. Get out of
⏹️ ▶️ John here. So I’ll explain why. Well first, the epic
⏹️ ▶️ John and the defaults or whatever. Listen, kids since time immemorial have been making fun of other kids for
⏹️ ▶️ John not having the things that the rich kids have, whether it’s Reebok shoes or skins in Fortnite.
⏹️ ▶️ John That will never end. That’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that we should accept as a status quo, as I hope we haven’t accepted many things that were normal for us as kids
⏹️ ▶️ John as a status quo. In the same way, sort of abdicating responsibility by saying
⏹️ ▶️ John corporations owe it to their shareholders to do this, therefore they must, that’s not true.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a thing that you can choose to accept as a form of fatalism, but companies
⏹️ ▶️ John are just made up of people. And there is no privilege that shareholders have to get profit in a specific
⏹️ ▶️ John way, first of all. And second of all, I don’t even accept the premise that doing things that seem
⏹️ ▶️ John bad or mean or greedy are actually the way to increase shareholder value. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple itself has made this argument many times. They’ve made it in words and they made it in deeds. How do
⏹️ ▶️ John you become Apple? Do you do it by doing the most greedy thing possible all the time? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how Apple found its success. So it’s a small-minded view
⏹️ ▶️ John to think, oh, well, they’re doing this thing that seems mean, but well, they are shareholders. I don’t think,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you’re assuming that this thing that they’re doing that you don’t like actually does benefit shareholders more
⏹️ ▶️ John than doing something that would be nicer. I don’t think that’s true. And second of all, even if it was true,
⏹️ ▶️ John companies are not this abstract entity that acts without thinking. They are not a law of
⏹️ ▶️ John the universe. They are not a scorpion on top of a frog. They are groups of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is nothing stopping them from choosing to do something that is the right thing to do because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the right thing to do. as embodied by Apple in many instances, if not necessarily the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re talking about. So I reject this whole thing. I hate it when people say, oh, companies
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do it, they have to make profit, they have to extract value, they have to enslave us in these work camps, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just what companies have to do. Oh, I guess you’re right. They do have to do that. You can’t blame them for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it, they’re just companies. Nope, nope, I absolutely can blame them. That’s not what they have to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also on top of all that, it’s probably not even what they should do if they want to make the most money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand what you’re saying, but I mean, at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the buck always has to stop somewhere. And what you’re saying to me is that the buck does not stop with the shareholder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think any companies operate that way, any reasonably large companies operate that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just, I mean, I don’t want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, what you’re offering is a criticism of unbridled capitalism,
⏹️ ▶️ John that if left to their own devices, these companies will destroy the earth and
⏹️ ▶️ John externalize all losses and internalize all gains to benefit a tiny minority if not constrained by
⏹️ ▶️ John the laws that we collectively as a people impose upon them. And that is probably true, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not something that I accept an excuse and say, yeah, sure, totally. That’s how the way the world has to work. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, it’s not the way the world has to work. And it’s not the way the world should work. And I don’t and like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I don’t think it’s a Pollyanna issue or something because I think you can make more money by doing the right
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and making good products and not being super greedy. And I think Apple has actually shown that in many instances
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it to the point where it is because it has done many things that seem from a bean counter micro
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective to be the wrong move. And at every stage that it has done that, it has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John more successful, not less.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if that were the case, then, then Elon, the savior of all mankind should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be doing so much more to give Tesla technology to other companies, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because if he is really as benevolent as everyone seems to think he is, then he would be giving all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this information away and he’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it’s not saying that you have to just be entirely selfless and give away everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is obviously not the greatest strategy. We’re just choosing between the greediest possible thing you can do and
⏹️ ▶️ John something that is slightly more magnanimous. And people are arguing such a cynical argument to say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could do the ever so slightly more magnanimous thing, but they owe it to their shareholders to be assholes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they don’t. There’s nothing making that so. They are choosing to do it, and we can
⏹️ ▶️ John rightly call them assholes for choosing to do it, but there is no force of nature demanding
⏹️ ▶️ John that they do it. It’s such a cynical view to think that’s just, you know, they’re just going to do what they’re going to do, and there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John we can do about it, and we should accept it as the way things are. No, that’s the reason we make laws regulating
⏹️ ▶️ John companies, so that the worst, you know, the worst angels, the devils, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst aspects of humanity are not allowed to have free reign
⏹️ ▶️ John over our entire society. That’s why we make these laws. And in the best cases, in the most successful
⏹️ ▶️ John companies, they are able to sort of restrain themselves from doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst possible thing that has the most short-term gain for them specifically. In
⏹️ ▶️ John general, we demonize companies that do that, at least over the long arc of
⏹️ ▶️ John history, that say, well, this company did the sleaziest things possible and filled the water with mercury,
⏹️ ▶️ John and made all this money briefly so one big fat cat rich white guy could retire a gazillion there
⏹️ ▶️ John and then die, but they poisoned an entire town. In general we frowned upon that, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though in the short term, well, they had to do that to maximize profits, there was no law against putting mercury in that stream.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope. Don’t accept it.
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Apple Watch Family Setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, one of the new things from the Apple Watch event from a couple weeks back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Apple announced family setup. And the idea here is that until now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every Apple Watch was required to be paired with an iPhone. Not an iPad, an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now, you can set up an Apple Watch for someone else in your family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who does not have their own iPhone. and it has to be cellular. And once you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, it gets its own phone number, similar to the other cellular Apple Watches with the whole number sync system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. But it’s its own phone number, you can call it directly. It doesn’t ring with yours, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of its own independent cellular device, but without having a phone. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can use it as any other family device. So you can see the person’s location,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they share it with you, you can enforce screen time limits. There’s a new feature called school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time that basically locks down all the distracting features of the watch during the hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you set if they want to wear it to school. We’ve actually been kind of on the edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of wanting to get our son some kind of cellular device so that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could see where he is because in our current situation he’s doing a lot of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to the playground by himself and stuff like that. or maybe go into a friend’s house after school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we wanted to give him some kind of way that we could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see his location if we need to, and that he could call us or we could call him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something in an emergency or to see what was going on. And he’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little small and a little young, we thought, for a phone. We didn’t really want to get him a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of the kids in his class actually already have phones, but we didn’t wanna go there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know or care what everyone else’s thoughts are about what’s too young for phones. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, sorry, for everyone who has different opinions. This is just our needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and our thoughts here. Anyway, so this seemed like a perfect arrangement where an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch that is an inexpensive model, hence the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new SE, or even like an old used one, the old ones if we had it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately we didn’t have any aluminum ones that had cellular. So we went with an SE,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the nice base model SE1, but with cellular. And funnily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough, now my son wears the same size watch as I do, the 40 millimeter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Got him a size two of the new rubber strap thing, although size one is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably gonna be the more appropriate size. I’m waiting for that to arrive in a few weeks. But two is loose, but it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He wore it, today was the first day of wearing it fully, like for the whole day, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to school with it. Then after school, sure enough, we were able to send him off to the playground
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by himself, and he was able to come back. And for anybody who thinks that we’re monsters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a different situation where we live. It’s fine. Everyone here does this. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the overall experience of it was surprisingly good. You would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like this from Apple that’s like a brand new feature that involves like coordinating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, multiple services, multiple devices, different iCloud accounts, the carrier accounts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would expect a lot of rough edges and a lot of things that are broken or don’t work well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And largely it’s been it was great. So first of all, two things have gone very well for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me this year with this upgrade cycle. Number one, I was able to successfully transfer when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got my new Series 6, I was able to transfer through the regular process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my cellular service from my old watch to my new watch. That has literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never worked before. This year for some reason it worked I’m very happy about that that saved me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from you know dealing with AT&T’s weird like chat assistants so that was that was wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then when it came time to set up Adams family setup watch with the exception of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one unlabeled button I took a screenshot I’m gonna get the chapter art there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like a family setup screen and there’s like an unlabeled like localized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco string missing thing where it has a little like privacy the people shaking hands icon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and under, in all caps, it says button underscore title underscore wifi. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, besides that one missing localized string, everything else about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually worked very smoothly. I was shocked, again, I hit very few rough edges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only little snags where I had trouble figuring out, like, how do I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his contacts, or how do I add myself to his contacts and everything, and then how do I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get his location to show up in our Find My app as the watch’s location.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turned out I had to go adjust settings, because he’d already had an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with his own iCloud account, he’s in our family account, and we had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen time restrictions set up for him, including not only hours of use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but things like privacy settings. Everything that used to be personal controls is now under screen time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we had to actually go into the screen time settings like on our devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like managing his settings to enable location services at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then to enable him to share his location. And then we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could see him in our family group. But before he had the permission to share his location,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that didn’t work. And that was a weird thing to have to find, but I eventually found it. but besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, it has worked very well. My only concern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remains battery life. Oh, there’s another funny feature. So the school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time feature is interesting. Let me go into that for a second here. I actually forgotten about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they have this feature called school time where you can set during certain hours. It basically locks out the watch from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing anything that might distract the kids in school for the most part. So it fixes it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain face and I haven’t looked to see if I can edit that face at all, but it’s like, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain face that seems only accessible for school time. It has, it’s a yellow circular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, hourly index face with analog hands, and it shows digital time below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, like, you know, spoke of the hands, and it shows the day and date above.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I guess, great, it teaches kids how to read analog time, maybe, but also, you know, has the digital time there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has, you know, day and date. I was a little disappointed that it seems force this face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of letting him use other faces that he might want. It disables complications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and apps and it puts the watch in do not disturb mode and only the approved contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are able to get through. So it’s actually a very good thing for school. I was amused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that when he came home I was I was looking through the settings and I spotted in school time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it tells me every single time he woke up the watch to look at it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how long he looked at it. So I was able to say, hey Adam, hey you know what? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked at the watch 71 times during school. We have to lessen that.
⏹️ ▶️ John He just got it. It’s a new thing. Of course he’s going to be looking at it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. Right. And we had the whole conversation about this is not a thing to brag about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not a thing to show off. That’s not a good thing. If people ask, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say that your parents got it for you so they can see where you are, and so you can call them. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the official story to tell kids in school. And, you know, I know he wanted to show it off. Of course he wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show it off, he’s a kid. I knew this was gonna happen. The reason I bring this up, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the battery life was not great at the end of the day. So after school, it was down to 33%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As we were going home from the playground in the evening, I went to go pick him up. We were going home from the playground in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the evening and it was about to go into like power save mode because it was down to like 5% or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the way it was used today, the battery life seems pretty bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think because it was new and because he probably was looking at it and showing it to a lot of people all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly, you know, it was probably depressed somewhat. I explained to him about things like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the workout mode, which he of course has already tried. He has explored so much of the watch already.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He was like, within 20 minutes of having it, he was like doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco individual handwritten character to respond to me in a text message.
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s- Can you imagine if you got a device like this when you were that age, what you would have done with it? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think of what we- Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my God. Every nook and cranny that we explored of like our crappy personal computers
⏹️ ▶️ John that had such limited functionality. This one thing that’s on his wrist all day does so much
⏹️ ▶️ John more than us writing like basic programs. And we were, you know, so it does not surprise me. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all they’ve got is time, and they’re gonna find everything that they can do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, yeah. He and his friend in school have already asked, are there any games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it? And I’m like, I actually, I know there’s not on it now. I don’t actually know if there are any good watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games. Adam will tell you. Yeah, he’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John eventually know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t think that would be a great idea for the battery life reasons. But also on the battery front,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, one concern I’ve had with this that I’ve mentioned, I think David Sparks told me about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, is like when an Apple Watch with cellular is away from its phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all day long, it keeps the cellular active way more than the average
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch does. Like most people with cellular watches, they’re with their phone most of the day, but you just might go out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe for a jog and have it be on cellular, but like it’s not gonna be like an all day thing the way it is if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to school and you don’t have a phone. So the cellular is actually not really designed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be on that long, battery life wise. And so I think the battery life might just always be really crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this context, like the way it’s being used this way. Um, this is also the smaller watch, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bigger, the bigger watch would have had a bigger battery. It would have looked even more ridiculous on him. So we didn’t do that. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, that might be a concern for anybody thinking about this, that battery life is going to be an issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll, I, this is what I’m going to watch, like as the novelty wears off, and it just becomes like a thing that he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has on his wrist. You know, we’ll see how that changes things. I might also change the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen to tap to turn on rather than raise to wake. I think that might help. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this is the SE, it does not have the always on screen. In this case, I think that that’s a very good decision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the battery life is going to be so constrained. So anyway, we’ll see how that goes. Battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life is my primary concern. It at least will be just barely enough. Hopefully we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get better than that with maybe different settings and novelty wearing off, but overall so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems really good. And it was amazing that like, I mean, and part of this, you know, again, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kid, you know, he’s a nerd. He figured it out real fast because he’s made of us. But like, he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally has had this phone for a day and he calls me from the playground. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had messaged him like, hey, we’re going to dinner, you know, meet us there or we’ll come pick you up. And he calls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me from the playground in response to my text. Okay, daddy. Yeah. Okay. well, you know, I’ll see you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. I just got my first phone call from my son, and it’s from his wrist from a playground.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you could have lifted your wrist on the playground when you were eight and called your parents and talked to them. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just think of another ridiculous thing. We’ve talked about this before, about things that we did with our programmable calculators.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which were such pieces of garbage in terms of computing ability, and yet we’ll find every nook and cranny of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that we can do with them that’s cool. And he’s living in the Dick Tracy future. Like, it’s just, I’m very jealous
⏹️ ▶️ John of, uh, of the kids these days. They don’t know how good they have it. We had to play snake on a stupid calculator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You say all that. And I agree with you by and large, but also consider that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and Tiff will know where Adam is always. And I think we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about this last episode, maybe a couple episodes ago, but like I was a pretty straight shooter growing up. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really didn’t do anything. I don’t think that that was that particularly egregious, but nevertheless, part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of being. And granted, I’m talking about being a teenager, not talking about being a grade schooler, but part of being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a kid is doing crap that your parents don’t want you to do. And so even though I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you that having all this technology on his frigging wrist is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in putting myself in Marko and Tiff’s shoes, I would probably make the same choices. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s worth recognizing that in some ways we’re, I was going to say hindering,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s not fair. We’re changing the way that our kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are associating with us or treating us as compared to the way that we treated our parents,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is probably healthy and natural.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you worry about it. In like two weeks, you will know how to disable the location and put it in
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, teenagers absolutely will figure this out. But even young kids figure out how to get around screen time limits, how
⏹️ ▶️ John to not show their location when they don’t want to. At this point, Adam probably doesn’t want to hide his location from his parents. So when he does,
⏹️ ▶️ John rest assured, he will have no problem doing that. And then the other thing is, you probably haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John experienced this yet because you just use it for one day and you haven’t been that far away, but my kids have Apple Watches.
⏹️ ▶️ John Finding the location via Apple Watch, it’s hit or miss depending on cell coverage, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on battery life. Like sometimes you just go to find my and it just, it spins for a while
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just don’t get to see a location. And these are not in the cases where my kids are intentionally hiding it,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just like at school or at their practice, you know, sports practice or something, right? Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you just can’t get a signal from where they are. And sometimes you just don’t know. So it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, unreliability is a factor. Um, my one suggestion for Marco in terms of battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life is perhaps, uh, this is from, I have this experience with my dog’s thing, which is a similar,
⏹️ ▶️ John similar tracker. My dog doesn’t look at her tracker very often, but anyway, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John same deal. If it’s, if it’s, you know, it’s got GPS in it, but if it’s on like sort of the cellular network
⏹️ ▶️ John or the, you know, communicating to GPS satellites all the time, it really kills the battery. What you
⏹️ ▶️ John want is for it to be on Wi-Fi. So you register the dog tracker thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with Wi-Fi, with sort of known Wi-Fi networks, and if it can see one of those known Wi-Fi networks, it does
⏹️ ▶️ John all its communication over Wi-Fi, which I think just takes less battery than trying to do the GPS
⏹️ ▶️ John slash cellular stuff. So if your school has a Wi-Fi network, can you get the watch on that
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi so that when he shows up at school it switches cellular off or at least uses it less often
⏹️ ▶️ John and instead just speaks over Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me paint a picture for you. He’s in a new school this year. He just got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Apple Watch. He’s the only kid in his class with an Apple Watch. And this is a school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I barely know because it’s a brand new school. There is no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to ask him for the Wi-Fi password for his Apple Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John on the wall on a big piece of paper. You just need to go in there. And this is the thing that always goes on in my local
⏹️ ▶️ John schools. All my local schools have Wi-Fi, but they don’t tell the parents what the password is, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the schools are in a cell phone dead zone. So it’s like you show up there for some back
⏹️ ▶️ John to school night parent thing, and you’re bored out of your mind because you’ve had multiple kids to go through the school, and someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John asking some long question that’s more of a comment, and you can’t look at Twitter. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know there’s Wi-Fi, but you can’t get on the Wi-Fi because they won’t tell you the password. And the kids are on it through
⏹️ ▶️ John some like a certificate system that like only their phones can get on it. Like you can’t get on it unless you know the password
⏹️ ▶️ John to the guest network. Anyway, if your school has wifi, the password is on the wall on an eight and a half by 11
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of paper. So you should just go there, look around and the wifi password would be like the name of the school plus
⏹️ ▶️ John one, two, three, and then just, serendipity, you know, secretly just put the watch on wifi and see if that helps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, there are complicating factors. For instance, I’m not sure I’m allowed in the building.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well. All of this is a non-COVID times discussion as I discuss my kids
⏹️ ▶️ John being at school and stuff like that. So, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s amazing to me, John, how often you find yourself in a cell phone dead zone. Are the witches
⏹️ ▶️ John and- Rich people. The answer to your answer is rich people. I live, I am a rich person. I live among rich people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rich people do not like cell phone towers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but they like having the things that make them happy, like cell service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they don’t. It’s a very much NIMBY thing. It’s hard. Yes, it is. When you’re in the richest neighborhoods, there’s usually bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, guys, this is a problem I’ve never had.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m not in the richest of rich neighbors, but the richer neighborhoods you get, the more I go towards people’s houses
⏹️ ▶️ John who have actual mansions and actual backyards and land, the sell signal gets worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you take the Green Line through the T in Boston through certain
⏹️ ▶️ John sections, you’ll know when you’re driving through the richest of rich sections because the sell signal gets worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, I think the same thing. It’s like, well, wouldn’t you just want, isn’t that annoying to you? Wouldn’t you want to have good
⏹️ ▶️ John sell signal? Not as much as they don’t want to have cell towers, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m lucky that my neighborhoods have cell towers in them. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re easily able to see them even. It’s very obvious that we have great coverage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, if you drive a little while, go to a few towns over to the super rich one, and you get no signal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatsoever for anything. I mean, I hear you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so different than my lived experience, which isn’t to say you guys are lying or wrong or anything. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes sense. It’s just so different than my lived experience. It’s hard to wrap my
⏹️ ▶️ John around. I think it’s a different set of values depending on where you are. Because in my
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, in my small experience in the Midwest visiting my in-laws,
⏹️ ▶️ John the ritzier neighborhoods there tend to value things like having good television
⏹️ ▶️ John and internet and cell coverage more than they value not seeing cell towers. And just
⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever reason, maybe it’s old money versus new money, or maybe it’s just a different East Coast, West Coast
⏹️ ▶️ John attitude or just a technological bent versus not. The equations don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s population density, availability of land, whatever, for whatever reason I find it incredibly frustrating and
⏹️ ▶️ John in the specific area that I am up here in New England, the, you know, the old money,
⏹️ ▶️ John rich people houses don’t have cell tower. And maybe it’s because all the land is already all bought up and already all developed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s no like, there’s no available place to put the cell tower. That’s not it literally in someone’s backyard
⏹️ ▶️ John and no one wants it in their backyard. They would love it if it in someone’s backyard five blocks away, but then that person doesn’t want it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Also, like, hills are a huge problem. Like, so if you have any kind of terrain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that, like, you need a lot more cell towers than you would think, and it makes it even harder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I don’t think you ever get to this neck of the woods, but there was somewhere, I want to say it was maybe 684.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not confident I’m right about that, though. There was a couple of cell towers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they put like fake needles. Oh yeah, the cell trees? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, the cell trees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like whenever I’m on a long highway drive, you see those pretty frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, because I believe it was the stretch of 684 that I would take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away from my parents when they lived in Connecticut, and I would take it down toward the George Washington Bridge and all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I vividly remember there were a couple of, yeah, the cell trees. that there are these things that like if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you if you only glance the top of them looks like a very very thin like Charlie Brown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey style like you know needle based tree if you only glance at it but it’s like 800
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feet taller than every other thing around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, they’re way taller than actual trees.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever seen. Oh my gosh, it always made me laugh every time I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, it’s like the world’s worst toupee. It’s like you’re fooling nobody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back for a minute just before to close out the subject we got into the subject about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco location tracking ethics within a family because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is kind of interesting that like you know we can see our son’s location at all times as long as he’s wearing his Apple watch and the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good and the cell signal is good and everything the ethics we’ve established so far which is you know first established
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between Tiff and I is that location sharing is reciprocal so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I showed him the Find My app on his watch and said, here, you can see where we are too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Interesting note on that. I repeatedly show this to my kids because they’re constantly asking when we’re going to pick them
⏹️ ▶️ John up, where are you? I’m like, you always know where I am.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco We all share our location.
⏹️ ▶️ John Find me. And no matter how many times I remind them, I guess it’s too much of a hassle for them to open up
⏹️ ▶️ John the Find My app. Like they can’t, it’s not that they don’t know at this point. I’ve resorted
⏹️ ▶️ John to taking a photo from my perspective in the car of where I am, hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can see how I’m by this part of the baseball diamond and you need to just walk across and come to me because this is where
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m parked. And it’s like, or you can use find my like our location share. I thought this was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know if we set it up so long ago, but I just assumed this is the way family sharing works by default
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time is that everyone shares the location already. But yeah, we totally do that even though it only ever seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to work one way where we’re constantly trying to find the kids and they don’t care where we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the other rule that we follow is, so, you know, the sharing is reciprocal. So if I can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, you can see me. And also that we don’t make a habit of idly checking it. That we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only check it if we need to know for a good reason. And it doesn’t need to be like emergencies only. It can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, hey, I wonder if Tiff is on her way home from the thing she was at. So I know it is like start cooking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dinner. You know, it could be something like that, but like, it isn’t the thing that we like idly just check for no reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, because that feels like a little too invasive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and it is very convenient for the record like it is a really neat feature if you’re if you’re trying to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like that like get dinner on or whatever the case may be But yeah, it definitely comes across as a little stalker. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sure Goodness, so so Adam seems to definitely like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. How do the two adults feel about it Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Mean so far so good. It’s only been one day So maybe I’ll do I’ll do some follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this like in the future after it’s been a little while so we can kind of see how it works in more practice, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I gotta say, I am deeply concerned about battery life on that device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I’ve mentioned numerous times, the battery life on my small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch Series 5 has never been stellar and is getting considerably worse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that it’s about a year old. I still haven’t ordered a replacement because I just can’t be bothered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the god awful website. I’m still allergic to the inside and I don’t want to go to the Apple store. So I might never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order one, who knows. But nevertheless, um, I am, I am really concerned about what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be like to run my watch on cellular all day long. And perhaps there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of, you know, uh, some sort of low power version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the SC uses, you know, or some sort of hardware that’s maybe different on the SC, I don’t know, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I would presume and assume that it’s going to the real rough battle and Adam’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna have to top that thing up at least once Brilliant.
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#askatp: Snapshots as backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so let’s return to Ask ATP for the first time in a couple of weeks. Mike Lee Williams
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, I want snapshots of my Mac. I have a network attached storage that supports BTRFS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that butter? How do you, what is the correct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John colloquial? Some
⏹️ ▶️ John people say butter FS. I always just say BTRFS. Who knows how you’re supposed to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Should I use Time Machine or should I just clone using something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then take a BTRFS snapshot? I ask because a network time machine backup seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has the half-life of like three months max. John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know a lot of people have problems with network time machine backup, and maybe I’m just a network time machine
⏹️ ▶️ John unicorn, but I don’t. This is a major complaint for people who
⏹️ ▶️ John have, especially if it’s a third-party time machine network backup. They’re like, oh, it works
⏹️ ▶️ John fine, but then so frequently it says, your backup could not be verified, it must be recreated.
⏹️ ▶️ John And some people say that happens every week, Some people say it happens every month. I’ve had that happen to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like two times in seven years. So it’s a whole different scale. And so as far as I’m concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John network time machine backups are just problem-free and that’s what I would totally recommend. Now, what Mike is
⏹️ ▶️ John describing is like, oh, I’m gonna do something clever or I’m just gonna do a clone, but then I’m gonna use file system features
⏹️ ▶️ John to snapshot that clone. I think that would probably work, assuming,
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming, BTRFS either has all the features you need to preserve the metadata that you care
⏹️ ▶️ John about, or assuming you’re using a sparse bundle disk image or something else that is built on top of the file system and what you’re actually doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is snapshotting the disk image, snapshotting the sparse bundle directory for the disk image, like that can be
⏹️ ▶️ John made to work, but in general, my recommendation is and remains, use Time Machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that is Apple’s most supported snapshots of a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John over time system. You can recover from it, you can pick a point in time to recover. In theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be the best support. I know people don’t have a lot of luck with it, but I don’t think there’s anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John my experience tells me that it’s not impossible to have a good experience with it. So I’d say try
⏹️ ▶️ John Time Machine. If it’s constantly corrupting itself and there’s nothing you can do to fix it, maybe try
⏹️ ▶️ John rolling your own system with BTRFS and sparse bundles or whatever you’re gonna do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s gonna be much harder to deal with. And when you need to recover, because your whole disk dies
⏹️ ▶️ John and you boot it up, it’s much nicer to be able to say, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John connect to your time machine thing and pull the snapshot you want and go, you can do it the other way, it will eventually work if you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re doing, but it’s trickier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also add, I’ve had really good luck with my Synology network backup over time. Like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing where time machine, like, you know, basically fails and makes you clear it out and rebuild the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, usually because it thinks it’s out of space when it isn’t, or, you know, whatever, that happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me all the time with almost every previous time machine setup I had ever used until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did the Synology’s hosted network time machine thing. And that works perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. And one thing that might make a difference here is that the way I set that up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is with disk quotas per user using it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s, whatever the time machine client is on Macs, it will read disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quota information for network shares and will obey it. And for whatever reason, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked way better And I never had this kind of failure happen. Whereas, yeah, with previous time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backups, I had that happen, yeah, about every three months. That’s about
⏹️ ▶️ John right. I’m also using Synology, but I never went the extra step to do the per
⏹️ ▶️ John user quota. I have multiple users just sharing a volume with no quotas on it, and still no
⏹️ ▶️ John so, I mean, other than, like I said, I think it has corrupted itself maybe three times in seven years.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s, it’s so beneath my radar that I just tend not to think about it. So it could just be a credit to
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology’s implementation of the time machine hosting. It could just be dumb luck, But it’s not impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John is what I’m saying.
#askatp: Baby monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Migirdek Karnigian writes, as a soon-to-be father, I’d like your opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what the best baby monitor experience is. I say experience instead of device or product because whether it’s a camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and app or standalone device I care about the overall experience. Now you have to consider that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the youngest child of the three of us is just shy of three years old now, so this information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a bit out of date. I think I might have heard it from Marco and Tiff, but I heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from somewhere that you you really, really, really, really do not want an app-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adam Grant Yep, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was us. Steven Connelly Okay. And as soon as you guys described why, which I will give you a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do in just a moment, it made perfect sense. Now, again, this is information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, you know, in the case of the Armins is what, eight? How old did you say Adam was? Eight, nine? Adam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Grant Yeah, eight. Steven Connelly Eight. Okay. So, it’s eight years out of date, and for me, it’s three years out of date.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I am looking at my, at right now in my my hands is our Infant Optics Monitor. I think that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll put a link in the show notes. It is a device that you carry around with you and it shows video and audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or it shows video and plays audio of your kid or kids rooms. I really love this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one in particular because the model that I have has a standard USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug to power the handheld receiver thing. I don’t know if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still the case today though. So double check my work on that. But when I bought it, it was one of those, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things you would use for like headphones and like a Kindle, whatever that size is, I don’t care what it’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s one of those standard ones, which is great because you can plug it into a computer, you can plug it into a wall wart, you can plug it into darn near anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll put a link in the show notes. Marco, can you tell me why it is you don’t want a wifi slash app based thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so this is a common trap that nerds like us fall into when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have to buy a baby monitor for the first time, is one of two things. either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A, let me get the coolest technological one that is almost always some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like service-based one where it’s IP-based and so there’s like some kind of cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple-looking camera and then you can either use their monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it just uses your phone and you can check it from the cloud and you can even have it so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can check it when you’re at your friend’s house or whatever, down the street, who knows, you can, for some reason, if it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for baby at home and it isn’t something that requires you to go to jail, then great, you can check it from there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, or pitfall B is you see how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive baby monitors are, and you’re like, these are just cameras. I can get a cheap IP camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for X dollars instead. I’ll just use an IP camera. It’ll be better and cheaper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ll view it from all these different IP camera-based viewing apps on my phone. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with the former, the fancy camera, is that whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are sending something out to the internet and back, you will introduce significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latency and unreliability. And there will be a strong incentive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the service that you are using to compress the crap out of the video to save on bandwidth costs and to make it more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsive. And so you end up basically with a latent, unreliable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy video stream. The problem with the IP camera is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, it’s just more crap to set up at a time in your life when that’s the last thing you need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The last thing you need is to have technical burdens to deal with and to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech support for them when they break and anything that’s fragile or complicated at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t need that right now. The other problem with IP camera stuff is that you’re still using some kind of phone to view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. You’re limited by the network, you’re limited by any kind of, whatever the Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coverage in the various relevant rooms might be or whatever your connectivity setup is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IP camera viewing apps tend to be terrible as well. I never found a good one when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefly had some IP cameras. So it’s not a good world to get into.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not as nice as you think it is if you haven’t tried it, and it’s not great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last thing you want out of a baby monitor is latency or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unreliability, because that literally ruins the entire point. Not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you need to trust, you know, if you’re using a monitor, you’re using it for a reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You wanna see the state of your baby, or hear the state of your baby, which they will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually make clear to you. If it freezes, or the video is delayed, or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it dramatically reduces the utility of this device, and it calls into question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why you’re using one at all, if you’re gonna have one that has significant delays, or is unreliable at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my experience, eight years ago, was that the IP-based solutions, including the fancy cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, were unreliable and full of latency, and had dropouts, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the picture would just freeze for like 30 seconds, or a minute, or more, and it’s like, okay, well then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re telling me this is the state of my baby, but it’s actually out of date, and I have no way to tell that. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last thing you want out of that kind of device. It’s also just really annoying when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not live, when there’s any latency at all. You’re gonna hear the cry and scream, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quieter version from, you know, the next floor up when you’re downstairs, and then three seconds later, you hear the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco echo, you hear the louder version out of the monitor, and that latency is really annoying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and can create some interesting feedback loops. And so the last thing you want is for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your baby’s cry to be made more grating on your ears and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoying. This is not the time of your life when you need that kind of thing. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time in your life and you need very simple solutions that work every time that ask very little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you. The regular old style where you just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a camera microphone thing on one end, you have a portable monitor of some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind on the other end, and they talk over RF directly in your house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no networking involved, that is the best kind. Because it is instant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no latency, It’s reliable, way more reliable than anything IP-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or network or internet-based. Usually it’s also cheaper. Even, because like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like all these solutions that like use your phone as a monitor, that might have made some sense in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a world where screens are expensive, but screens haven’t been expensive for a long time now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The regular old setup where you just have a camera and a screen with a battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind it that you can plug into USB or whatever, like that’s a great setup And none of those components
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are expensive. Like those are all very cheap things these days. So the actual cost savings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anything else would be minimal, I think, maybe even negative. So just get the old kind that just has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a camera and a dedicated little handheld monitor thing. And you don’t need to involve your phone. You don’t need to involve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the internet. You don’t need to involve any kind of weird like cloud service or local networking weirdness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or latency or anything like that. This is one of the things where the old way is actually better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a classic story in my mom’s side of the family, and I don’t know if it’s true or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but apparently when my mom was growing up, their family was really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really close with the family across the street or maybe around the corner or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My mom is like 65 years old now, so this was the mid to late 50s, early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 60s. The story that I’ve been told numerous times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that what they would do is they would call from the house that housed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the baby to the house where the parents were hanging out and leave the phone off the hook in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey baby’s room. And then they would leave the phone off the hook at the house where they were partying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where hopefully they would hear if the baby was screaming and then one of them would run back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mom’s house and help her or one of her younger brothers if necessary. I don’t know if that story is real,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it always made me laugh that that was how they handled it, you know, in the 60s was, oh, we’ll just call each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other because local calls are free even back then. And so that was what they did. John, before I move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, any thoughts from you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if you don’t mind everyone telling you that you’re a terrible parent and you’re going to kill your children, there’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John the option of attachment parenting and co-sleeping and other situations where you don’t actually need remote monitoring for
⏹️ ▶️ John your kids because they’re sleeping with you all the time, but, or some of the time anyway. My kids are so old that I
⏹️ ▶️ John just had the audio only monitors. So that was a different world. In today’s world,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously this is speculative, I don’t know what things are, but I do now have cameras in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John In my opinion, the cameras I have, I have just a bunch of Nest cameras, like the current models.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reliability of them is fantastic, and the latency I find perfectly acceptable for monitoring children. I’m not using
⏹️ ▶️ John it to monitor children, I’m just using it to monitor my house and occasionally my dog, but it’s very similar. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re dead simple, reliable, and I think the convenience of being able to just look at it on your phone is super convenient. That said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a baby, I don’t know what it’s like, I don’t know what I would choose all I can think of is what I’m used to, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John pure analog RF audio only monitors, which we got for our first child
⏹️ ▶️ John and we just kept using for our second. I still have a little bit of PTSD hearing the sort of static-y,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, amplified cries.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, just anything associated with, with, you know, raising infants into
⏹️ ▶️ John toddlerhood is going to probably, depending on your kid, be somewhat traumatic for you
⏹️ ▶️ John as a parent. So choose wisely. that’s a reason not to use your phone because now you might start associating
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone with this, you know, anyway, there’s, raising kids is hard. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what the best solution is, but I think if the experience you want is the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John look, to view and hear your child at any time in the most convenient way, based on my experience
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Nest indoor home cameras, that would have, if that had existed
⏹️ ▶️ John when my kids were infants, I think that would have fulfilled my needs perfectly and
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t have minded all the things Marco talked about in terms of latency and so on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have Nest cameras. They’re not good for this. It’s too, there’s too much latency.
⏹️ ▶️ John Too much latency for you. I have, like I have them in my house. They’re fine. Every time I, every time I look at my thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re right, there is lag, but it’s sufficient. Like it’s never 30 seconds or a minute. It’s like 1.5
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds. Even when I’m in different, in a different state, I can just look at the inside of my house
⏹️ ▶️ John in essentially real time. The image comes up quickly. It’s high resolution. It’s reliable of the internet. helps
⏹️ ▶️ John that I have a very fast network upload connection from my house, right? That’s, it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John for my needs. I don’t need it to be super duper real-time. But again, I didn’t use it with baby so I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how well it works in that scenario.
#askatp: Tesla competition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, John Metcalf wants to know, hey, is Marco watching the possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tesla competition like the Polestar for future lease shopping? The Polestar 2 is smaller than the S, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like it could be a proper competitor to the 3. Interested to see where the line goes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would agree with that wholeheartedly. I’d also like to call out, since this Ask ATP was asked 14 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, MKBHD has done another episode of, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, Autofocus? Is that the name of his car series? I believe that’s right. And he did an episode on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Porsche Taycan, Taycan? I don’t know how to pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ John it. He doesn’t know how to pronounce it either. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. And in fact, when he was tweeting about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the editing process or filming process, he tweeted, boy, am I glad I started this car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video series. This Porsche Taycan is actually a very different car than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any Tesla. And just a few lucky people have experienced both and get to articulate that. Should be a fun video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’ll at least put a link to the video in the show notes. Also try to dig up a video from Rory Reed, formerly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Top Gear, who did a test of the Model 3 versus the Polestar 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is worth watching. Both of these videos are like 10, maybe 15 minutes each. But to answer the question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, are you keeping your eye on anything? Are you Elon or nothing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am very, very happy with the Model S as a car. I’m less happy with Tesla as a company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Elon as a person, but I am very happy with the Model S as a car. it is an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. There’s no other car that I want right now, even with all these new options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the things I like so much about the Model S is I love that it’s a car-shaped car and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a absolutely massive cargo capacity because it is a large car-shaped car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a giant liftback trunk. That is something that I think only the Taycan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even come, Taycan, how do you say it, John, was the right
⏹️ ▶️ John way? I don’t know. I always forget. I’m pretty sure it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John tie in your shoe and con like con man. But I don’t remember. All I know is
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not any of the obvious five ways that occurred to you to say it. I’m pretty sure it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oh, god. I think it’s Ty Conn in the gear. Anyway. We talked about it on this very show. That’s why I asked you.
⏹️ ▶️ John When Portia officially told us how it was, but none of us remembered it. And now we just do whatever the first thing
⏹️ ▶️ John comes into our head is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think Portia should be used to Americans mispronouncing all their names. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I think, is what comes closest to what I’m looking for, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse at being a car-shaped car with a massive cargo capacity than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Model S is. Like, I know it’s better in other ways, according to some of the reviews, but it’s worse in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. And so I actually still am very into the Model S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what it is, the size and shape and cargo abilities that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has. Because of that, I’m not really shopping around still. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still have another couple of years before this lease runs out. So I’ll see what happens
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, we talked about many of the alternatives to this
⏹️ ▶️ John in an extended bootleg version of the thing, that some people
⏹️ ▶️ John are upset that they didn’t get to hear that. Oh, I have to become an ATB member to hear that. That is absolutely the type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have always cut from the show. You’ve always been
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco missing that. whether you knew it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John We always talk about crap that does not make it into the episode. Way after the real episode ends,
⏹️ ▶️ John right after the after show ends, you’ve always been missing that. But now, if you become an ATV member, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John the option to get a recording of the live stream. And you can actually go back and listen to that if
⏹️ ▶️ John you care about it. So you shouldn’t feel like there’s suddenly something behind a paywall. This wasn’t even behind
⏹️ ▶️ John a paywall before. It was invisible to you unless you were there at the live recording or you had someone who recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John the live stream. So anyway, hopefully, Casey, we can find that for the show notes. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to hear an extended discussion of what was it, the, I can’t even remember the name
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of it. What the
⏹️ ▶️ John hell is the name of that company? The Lucid Air? Yeah, the Lucid Air, if you want to hear a discussion of that and
⏹️ ▶️ John a long extended discussion of Marco saying how he still likes Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, no, I still like the Model S as a car. Very different from I like Tesla the company or Elon
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it was shorthand. We were talking about like all the advantages and disadvantages of the drivability
⏹️ ▶️ John and the charging network, and this promised car that is not yet shipping, and what it supposedly has. And
⏹️ ▶️ John since then, Tesla has had an event about their advances in battery technology that could change the equation again, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the Lucid Air was exceeding Tesla’s current stats. But then Tesla comes out with their new technology
⏹️ ▶️ John that they say is going to give their cars more range. Anyway, if you want to hear that, atp.fm slash join,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can go find the old bootleg and then find that segment and hear us talk about it
⏹️ ▶️ John way more than any person should ever want to hear us talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John is why it gets cut from the episode, and it has always been cut from the episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re welcome. Exactly. All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Customer.io, and ExpressVPN, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check, what, cast, so long.
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to understand how USB-C works, and I don’t mean like the ones and zeros way, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me try to explain. I have a USB-C to USB-C cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming out of the back of my iMac Pro, and it stays connected to my iMac Pro always.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And approximately half the time I plug in my iPad with like the Magic Keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you know, directly into the Magic Keyboard, or sometimes the iPad itself, about half the time the iPad will charge, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about half the time it just sits there. I have always left the one end of the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable plugged into the iMac Pro, always. And only about half the time will it actually charge the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but every single time, if I disconnect the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro side, so it’s already connected to the iPad, and I say, oh crap, it’s not charging again. I disconnect the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro side, connect it again, immediately the iPad starts charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know very little about this, but I know enough to know that there’s some amount of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey implied priority based on what’s getting plugged into what first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I can’t for the life of me understand why this only works sometimes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can one of you please, please explain to me how does USB-C work? Because apparently I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does anybody know how USB-C? Touché.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you need to know how quote unquote USB-C works here, but the main thing you have to know is
⏹️ ▶️ John that on both sides of this, but especially on the iOS slash iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ John side, there is software involved in the successful completion
⏹️ ▶️ John of the task that you’re expecting to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey happen, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John when you want to see it happen is you wanna see a little lighting bolt appear over your little battery icon and you wanna see charging begin.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not, strictly speaking, just a thing that is defined in the USB spec
⏹️ ▶️ John straight ahead. There is, you know, the software on both ends. Now we know how reliable the USB stack is on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John these days, right? And then on the flip side of that, Even on iOS devices, I very
⏹️ ▶️ John frequently get into situations where I’ll plug, say, my phone into a computer with a lightning cable in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’d be like, why is my phone not charging? And then eventually, 37 seconds later, oh, badoop,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now it’s charging. The software part of it is what I would blame for all of this. It’s a combination
⏹️ ▶️ John of the USB spec and power delivery, but also mediated by software control over charging, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iOS side, combined with the software bugs and the USB stack on the Mac. I think that totally explains
⏹️ ▶️ John this problem entirely. Like that because there’s software on both ends and because we know there’s weird bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John on both of those things, you know, you have that. The thing that annoys me, speaking of connecting iOS devices to Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the reasons I’m frequently connecting my phone or my iPad in rarer cases
⏹️ ▶️ John to my Macs is to get photos off of them because Apple doesn’t understand how families work and I have to do that whole
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library thing, right? And so what I want to happen is I want to plug in my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and you plug it in and I have the thing turned off where I never wanna plug in my device and have it automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John launch photos or music or whatever, because I hate that. So that’s all turned off. So I have photos already launched.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s in the foreground. I plug in my phone and Photos reacts and if I click on
⏹️ ▶️ John the device in the sidebar, it says, please unlock your iPhone or please unlock your whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the time I see that screen, most of the time my phone is already unlocked. And it will continue to say, please
⏹️ ▶️ John unlock your phone for like 67 seconds. It will just sit there and it will just say, please unlock your phone. It took
⏹️ ▶️ John me so long to figure out that I shouldn’t keep disconnecting and reconnecting my phone and unlocking and doing all that stuff. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should just sit there and wait. Because even though it says, I can’t do anything until you unlock your phone, please unlock your phone, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lying. It’s totally lying. You just let it sit there and eventually it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I guess your phone’s unlocked. Here are your photos. It takes forever because I have a ton
⏹️ ▶️ John of photos, but the UI absolutely lies to you. And if you take it seriously and try to
⏹️ ▶️ John solve the problem by unplugging various ends and putting it back in, trying to launch the Photos app on your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone before you unlock it, and just, it’s, forget it. It’s all filled with lies. And I think that’s the same type of
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, where it’s like, I made the hardware connection, why is the software thing not happening?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because on both ends, there’s some kind of software mediation of the hardware connection, and to
⏹️ ▶️ John get all the dots to connect and the stuff to flow takes a little while. I think Photos really
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t aware that my phone has been unlocked, because the phone hasn’t told it through whatever software mediated protocol
⏹️ ▶️ John that exists between photos itself specifically in my phone. So yeah, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can’t imagine how regular people deal with this because if they’re staring at a screen for a minute that says, please unlock your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and their phone is already unlocked, they’re gonna do the same thing I used to do, which is like, oh, I guess I’ll unplug it and try to replug it. And you will
⏹️ ▶️ John never make it that way. You have to just unlock, plug it in, unlock it and put it on your desk and walk away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then come back later and be like, oh, there’s my photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just frustrating. That being said, even though USB-C does have its problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Marco, you’ve been banging this drum for a while, I am very ready for the all USB-C lifestyle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bring on the iPhone 12 with USB-C, I’m ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that would be amazing. Honestly, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think so either. They’re just taking away all the cables.
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that the predominant rumor? That the iPhone will never go USB-C? It’ll go right from lightning to nothing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was one of the rumors. I haven’t heard about that recently, but I’ll tell you one thing, If that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the plan, I’m not excited about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that was the rumor for this year, but I think it was like, nope, that’s the future. It’s gonna be lightning, lightning, lightning, lightning iPhone 12,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then all of a sudden nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, you know, Apple changes their mind sometimes on things, and sometimes these rumors are wrong, and so who knows what will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think the most likely scenario of for this year’s iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are lightning. I don’t think they’re going to change that. I wish they would, I wish they would go USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I just don’t have high hopes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that the iPhone 12 case already leaked, didn’t it? I tried to save a link to it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I always like to save the link to those leaks just so when the phone does come out, I can look back at them, say, was this
⏹️ ▶️ John or not? But the cases have leaked for most of the iPhones for the past many years, like the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John literal part. And if you look at it, and then the phone comes out, and you look at that part’s leak, you’re like, yep, that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You look at the iFixit tear down, and you can tell the inside little flanges are all exactly the same. Totally leaked.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t recall in that leak, if that leaked case had had USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would have been a big to do, and there was no big to do. I think it was just like, yep, flat sides, here it is, iPhone 12. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am all in on the flat sides too,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John though. Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of dreading the flat sides. I know we haven’t talked about this too much, but I’ve been talking about it in the context of the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always have cases on my phones, and flat sides make for fatter cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? The slim,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I mean? Like, that’s why I mentioned on Twitter, like, I was thinking, like, what it would be like to have an iPhone 12
⏹️ ▶️ John bumper, right? Because flat sides, hey, you can put a bumper on a flat
⏹️ ▶️ John side thing and that, you know, gives you some protection with a little bit slimmer of a case, but it just, it
⏹️ ▶️ John does make it fat. I don’t know. I’m probably not gonna use, this is my year, by the way, which is why I care about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m getting the iPhone 12 or whatever when it comes out. Congratulations in advance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I don’t know how. And the thing is, I won’t be able to just go to a store
⏹️ ▶️ John and feel how they feel in the cases. just, I’m going to be buying this thing blind and crossing my fingers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. That’s what we all do. Usually we’re not patient. Not him. Not most of