401: Sandwich-Closing Force
22 Oct 2020We thoroughly broke the format of the show with HomePods, Sonos, MagSafe, a generous peppering of follow-up, and a giant stack of iPhone 12 waffles.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Dreaming in code
- Grand refactorings
- HomePod, HomePod Mini, and Sonos One (oh my!)
- Follow-up:
- Apple’s Magnetic Connectors Patent
- Accessory Design Guidelines for Apple Devices (PDF) (via Michael Bettiol)
- Periscope lenses don’t have moving elements (via Timo Grün)
- iPhone 12 Pricing
- T-Mobile joins the $30 off club
- Chargers & earphones & old phones
- Official battery specs for Apple products (via Roland Månsson)
- Settling an old bet from episode 291 at 1:55:14 (via Tim Chaten)
- Marco’s Time Machine woes
- Determining how many photos you’ve taken with each iPhone 11 Pro lens
- Jason’s write-up on using Photos’ Smart Albums
- Alex Chan’s post about using
exiftool - Casey (summarized results) (raw results)
- Ultra wide: 7%
- Wide: 83%
- Telephoto: 10%
- Marco
- Ultra wide: 9%
- Wide: 75%
- Telephoto: 16%
- Buying decisions
#askatp- Have we tried watchOS sleep tracking? (via Eduardo Berner)
- What is taking up so much space on our phones‽ (via Jayanth Visweswaran)
- Is John going to get an OLED TV? (via Tobo Granyte)
- Post-show:
- Ridiculousness in AT&T’s coverage maps
- An attempted intervention regarding Casey’s 🍌 photo management setup
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Chapters
- Pre-show
- Magnetic-connector patents
- MagSafe strength
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- Follow-up: Periscope cameras
- Follow-up: iPhone pricing
- iPhone 12 battery sizes
- Marco lost a bet
- Time Machine update
- iPhone 2x-camera usage
- Sponsor: HEY.com
- iPhone decisions
- Sponsor: Linode
- #askatp: Sleep tracking
- Follow-up: Solo Loop
- #askatp: iPhone space usage
- #askatp: John buying OLED TV
- Ending theme
- Post-show
Pre-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You ever been in a position where you haven’t messed with a portion of your own code for a while and you think that something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be there that just straight up isn’t there and you’re like, hmm, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird. Because I’m diving into peak view which I’ve been looking at for a while and I’m looking for something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not finding it and it’s freaking me out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you added it in a dream. I’ve had that happen a couple times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How is the code that you’ve written in your dream? Does it make sense?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think it’s pretty good like the best case you added in your dream and you remember how
⏹️ ▶️ John you did it So you guys do it again, but worst case it’s like I had it in a dream And I was so happy to have that thorny problem solved, but I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John how I did it and then it’s just like well in a dream you can kind of gloss over the details because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it just Whatever dream logic and then in real life you actually have to have the code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a cage I don’t think I’ve ever actually coded in my sleep. I have however however,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed bugs right before falling asleep many times. You know, as my brain is clearing itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out for the night right before I fall asleep, I will occasionally realize, oh, either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will discover a bug in my, like right before I go to sleep, where I will realize, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my god, wait a minute, in this case, then this case happens, and I didn’t account for that, or that’s gonna be wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It happens so often that Tiff can tell when I am being kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awake by this, and she will just say, just go fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, just go. And I’ll be like, all right, I’ll get up, I’ll get out of bed, go to my computer, like write down whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to write down or do what I have to do. It’s a thing, totally a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, but important question though, do you have your lights on while you’re doing this or are you doing this in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The crazy way that you podcast in your dark cave of sleepiness, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how you do it and stay awake during the show. Because we do this at night, I don’t know. I’ve been doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of, so Casey, you started the conversation about how you’ve been looking at very old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code that you wrote forever ago and being surprised by it. Over the last couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, for reasons that aren’t very interesting, I have been basically tearing apart some of the foundations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Overcast’s UI code and sync code and stuff like that. And it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like the point in the project where you’ve had just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts all over your floor for days and the thing, I couldn’t even build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for like a week. What I was doing was, for again, uninteresting reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was taking my five-year-old Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app delegate and I was bringing it into the modern environment of scene-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs and Swift at the same time. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I rewrote my giant app delegate from Objective-C into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three or four different Swift classes that are now using the modern API and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much cleaner. And I had to do a lot more Swift to make this happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just today, a few hours ago, just got to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now builds and runs. And it seems so far to work. I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done a lot of testing yet. but I have finally gotten the thing back together again. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a glorious feeling when you’ve been literally just, it was the kind of change where like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, the first thing I do is rename my app delegate and pull it from the build. So then you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hundreds of things that break. And then you wait for the ability to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, well, I fixed that error. At best, I can search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and replace for this constant that no longer exists, but otherwise I just gotta hit build and just see what happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, oh, here’s five more errors and fix those and hit build again. Oh, here’s something I have to write in Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and here’s something I have to figure out a new way to do it because it won’t work this way in Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And I think I have it back together. But this has actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a really interesting exercise in modernization of my code for one thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which itself is a fun thing to do, but also learning more about Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting more into the Swift mindset of How do you do this weird? Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ha ha ha. Nice, nice. That was from my watch. How did, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my God, what? I don’t know, learning about Swift? That doesn’t sound like. I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even pushing the button. Sound like the activation word. God, Siri’s the worst. Who’s looking forward to the new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not bought a HomePod yet, to this day. Not one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, I am very curious to hear the HomePod mini. I think I will be ordering one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same. can just because I am so curious about it. But I because honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, as I as I mentioned last week, I love the first HomePod for certain aspects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. But yeah, Siri, unfortunately, is not one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the sound is great. And if the, you know, if the little one actually does sound at all reasonable for 400
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks, then it’ll it could be could be quite useful. But we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see. I think we forgot to mention this last time. But you you can pair the little
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod minis to each other in a stereo pair, but you can’t pair a big one and a little one. So you’ve got to have
⏹️ ▶️ John the same kind for pairing, for stereo pairing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean in all fairness you can get three and a half of the little ones for the price of one
⏹️ ▶️ John You can play the same music simultaneously across them each as mono, essentially, speakers. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like if you have a house with it with some big ones, some small ones, you can still play on all them at once, but you can’t stereo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, that’s true. But yeah, I actually I’ve I’ve been away from my HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a few months, and last time I visited them, I realized how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much I love their sound. Like, so I’ve been using, I guess that’s still the pre-show, sorry for topic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco structural reasons, but that’s not. Are you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John though? Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been using the, I think I mentioned recently, I’ve been using the Sonos One, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s basically, Sonos is a little 200-ish dollar smart speaker, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has Alexa built in, and you can pair a pair of those together to make a stereo pair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s what I’ve been using in my main like kitchen area to get sound. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sonos One is an okay product. What’s great about it is that it has the Alexa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voice assistant, which I think is generally the best voice assistant. And it also has AirPlay 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For whatever reason, Amazon doesn’t wanna work with Apple directly to build in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay 2 support into the actual Amazon Echo family of products. I don’t know why. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, I can guess it’s corporate BS reasons, but I wish they would. As far as I know, the Sonos ecosystem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only way to get something that has the Alexa voice assistant and AirPlay 2. But because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not an actual Amazon Echo, it’s like a built-with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Echo, supports Echo, whatever, you know, Alexa built-in, it’s kind of a second-class citizen with the Alexa functionality, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of it is in ways I don’t care about. But there’s been two things that have been kind of irritating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me about the Sonos One system. Even though they are about the size of a HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even though you can stereo pair them, they don’t sound anywhere near as good as HomePods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Sonos One is a really okay sounding speaker. That’s the best thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say about it. It sounds okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I thought Sonos, like, I was gonna say made all its money, but that’s not fair, but like became popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was like the fancy person speaker because it sounds so good and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey auto tunes, well not auto tune, but you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not quite it. I mean, the reason Sonos got really big early on was first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all that they had this cataloging app. So you could basically have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a music server somewhere in your house. And they’ve always been very big in custom integrators,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like people who you hire to build yourself like a whole house audio system or a custom home theater,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a business I don’t actually know anything about because I’ve never used it or seen it, but I know it’s a big business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part two, which was probably the biggest part, is they mastered multi-room audio before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much anybody else did. And they have a large range of products they’ve sold throughout the years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of which are very expensive for what they are, but it was kind of like what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offers, of like, you’ll pay a little more for this thing, but you’ll have this integration of this ecosystem. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re really in the ecosystem, it’s great, for those purposes. These days, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like multi-room synced audio is kind of table stakes for a lot of these platforms. Many things offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and it doesn’t seem like Sonos is any better than anyone else’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways anybody would notice. Their speakers, you know, some of them sound good. Some of them are okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them, like the Sonos One is their lowest end speaker. It is their simplest, lowest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end thing. It’s their cheapest thing, and it shows. You know, it seems like a product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is made by a company that doesn’t want to be making it, which might be what the HomePod Mini ends up being.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see, we’ll see when we can hear one. Anyway, problem number one I have with the Sonos One is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it only sounds okay. And I think these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not good enough. Like the market has heated up, they have way more competition for $200 price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point for a smart speaker. It should sound better than it does. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then problem number two, I mentioned the Alexa thing being kind of second class.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a little bit buggy. Sometimes home voice assistant bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are ways that I can tolerate. Like, you know, if occasionally gives me a stupid answer to a question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or occasionally, you know, thinks it’s been hailed when it hasn’t been, I’ll forgive that as inherent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the technology. But this week, our Sonos One started losing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timers. When you tell your voice assistant to tell you in nine minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the eggs are done so that you can not over boil your hard boiled eggs, and then about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 12 minutes later you’re like, did I set the timer? And you ask it, hey, timer status, and it says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are no timers set. And you’re like, oh no. At first you might blame yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because dear listener, we are not perfect. Sometimes we forget to tell Alexa to set the egg timer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. But fortunately, this thing is useful slash creepy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough that if you go into the app you can see a history of what you have said to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and conveniently what it has said back back to you. And so you’re able to see and you can check and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco verify that yes, indeed, 12 minutes ago, you did say, hey Alexa, set a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timer for nine minutes. And then it said back to you, nine minute timer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set. So you’re able to verify, oh it got the timer. It just didn’t keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the timer. So that happened and I thought, well that’s weird. Let me try it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like a few hours later, I was in the kitchen, I’m like, let me just see, I’ll try it again. set a timer on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, raise my watch, set a timer on my watch too, to remind me, otherwise I totally forget that I even did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure enough, lost it again. And eventually I’m like, this is weird. So I unplugged them, both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonos Ones, plugged them back in. As soon as they booted up, three alarms went off in a row.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey time risk. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they occasionally have other weird bugginess, like you’ll tell it to stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing audio, and it’ll interpret stop as play the next track.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’ll say stop and it’ll stop, but then it’ll start playing something else. And then you’ll say stop again, and it’ll start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing something else. And it just gets, it’s just buggy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough in annoying ways on a regular basis, but then losing a timer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, that’s like a catastrophic failure. That is like, the one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am here in this ecosystem for is kitchen timers. That is like the biggest thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the biggest thing that the Echo is usually extremely good and consistent at. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve decided like we’re going to fire the Sonos ones and I’m going to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two of my HomePods here and replace that pair with those. And since we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a family of split opinions on Kitchen and Voice Assistants, we have ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the new Echo Balls and that will be our kitchen timer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash Tiff’s music device in the kitchen and I will use the HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that will be that. A good question from Riffalo in the chat, why not HomePod Minis?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a great question. The main answer is I already have like four HomePods I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Holy smokes. Also it’s where they’re going, it’s kind of a large space, it’s like a big open space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I don’t think the Minis would sound very good there. I’m going to pre-order one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod Mini to see how it is. I need a AirPlay 2 test device in my office,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that seems like a good one to use because it’s small and it’ll give me a chance to see how it sounds. And my office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty small room here, so we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of want a HomePod, and a lot of the time, like I definitely don’t want a $350 or whatever the normal price
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is HomePod. And I think it’s best buy had, or perhaps does, on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasion put them on steep discount. And anytime that happens, I’m like, do I want one? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for better or worse, and yes, I understand all the implications of it, but we have an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey original tall Echo in our kitchen area and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then we have Dots in the master bed, in the office and in Declan’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room and they’ve been working pretty well for us and they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sufficient for the needs that we have and we’ll occasionally play music on them and it sounds god
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awful, like I’ll be the first to tell you it doesn’t sound great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna say, please just tell me you don’t play music on the Dots, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, occasionally. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco sounds like utter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey garbage. But it doesn’t happen that often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Played out of your phone speaker, it sounds better than a dot. Oh, it’s not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, it really
⏹️ ▶️ John More importantly, the thing you just glossed over is that he’s got one of these things in his bedroom. That’s true. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cross. I mean, to be honest, it probably doesn’t need to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t do it, but I understand why people who are super into the ecosystem do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just went through on how it has a recording of everything you said. And some of them also keep audio recordings of everything
⏹️ ▶️ John you said. And yes, you can purge that and so on and so forth. but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s definitely a little bit gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, as with everything else, there are trade-offs and I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be lectured about how bad this is, everyone, mostly talking to the people that are not listening to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two of you right now. But anyways, I haven’t had a problem with the echo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices in my house. Like occasionally they’ll think that we have hailed them when we haven’t, but that’s actually pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rare. And we don’t use it for music that often. And so I feel like in so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many ways, I, even though I want really good speakers from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home pod, like I want that in my life, but I don’t want to rely on, on Apple’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, person in the tube and because I know that it stinks, like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it on my phone. I used on my watch and it’s extremely frustrating. I don’t want to add more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Apple’s person in a tube into my life. I want less of it in my life. And so even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really would love these very fancy speakers, I bet they sound phenomenal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no way that I would want to rely on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as my only shout into the air device. And I guess I could, you know, Hey dingus on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone or my watch or whatever. But again, I don’t want more of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Apple’s person in my life. I want less. And so on the one hand, I was going to make fun of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for having two different setups in the kitchen and how ridiculous it sounds to me. but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could totally understand how you’d end there. You know, it does make sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because like, it’s sad, but like this is, you know, kind of what we mentioned last week. Like the HomePods really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kick butt in the sound department. It’s not even close. They’re way better than the Echos and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better than the Sonos. It, again, not even close. It goes back to what made the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod so such a relative market flop in the first place. One of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty good sounding. Two of them are great sounding, but two of them at their original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list price is $700. And that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey pretty tough sell. Right, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at their frequent sale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becomes significantly better. Like, that set up for 200 for one or 400 for two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a really good price for what you’re getting. Like, it’s great for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think the official price is now 300, but you can still find them fairly regularly for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around 200 or 250. And for that, I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple wants to keep making like high-end HomePods if they keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making Siri better. Like at this point, I would just take, even if Siri is as dumb as it always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, but if it just, it’s just faster, like how about just make it faster? That alone would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so dramatically improve how useful it is. Because it’s, when you compare it to the Alexa ecosystem, it really is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the difference between like, When you say like, hey Dingus, pause, or hey Dingus, play,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just even those simple commands that you would think would be able to be processed 100% locally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple things like play and pause, basic media stuff, it has like a two or three second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delay to respond to those compared to every other voice system is so much faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it responds just with so much more responsiveness. And so I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, please make Siri better because I love everything else about this product line, just make Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And if you can’t make it smarter, at least make it way faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so easy for me to say, I feel like we’ve made the speech to each other a hundred times. It’s so easy for me to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re the biggest company in the world, throw some frigging money at the problem and fix it. Like, I understand that that’s easy for me to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With all that said, you’re the biggest company in the world, fricking fix it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how is this still a thing all these years later? Like, I just don’t get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And the thing, and the other thing is, I was talking to somebody about this the other day. I can’t remember who it was, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, you can use the crutch slash excuse. Well, while you see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple does much better with privacy and that makes it much more difficult for them to do things in the cloud. Well, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. That’s true. I’m sure to some extent, but like, if you really care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about privacy so much, then when you say, Hey dingus, pause my music, don’t send that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the cloud. It’s exactly what you were talking about a minute ago, Marco, like then move some of that on device. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these processors, the A14, we’re getting benchmarks now, and they’re phenomenally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast. Like why are we needing to send all this to the cloud? The good news is we can send it to the cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super fast on Verizon 5G. I couldn’t get it out of the straight face. I was trying so hard. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’ll be the only time. I promise that’ll be the only time this episode. Oh, it was too good to pass up. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what I’m saying? Like I do recognize that I am deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ignorant in so many ways, but particularly when it comes to this, because it is a far harder problem than I’m giving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it credit for. You know, it is an extremely difficult problem, especially to do it with the privacy that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple wants, but at some point, like I don’t understand how this isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better yet in the same way, like a few years ago and sometimes even today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll complain about why Apple software is as unreliable as it can occasionally be. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point, how do you not just look around and say, this has to change and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to fix this. And I get it’s a big company, I get things move slowly, But gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t understand.
Magnetic-connector patents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You want to start some follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ John Normally marker gets like one or two of those but he managed to wedge in three topics this time Going for a personal
⏹️ ▶️ John record and in case you did it you did a good job of stretching it out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what we’re here for. It was that a hat trick for Marco. Is that how that works? Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start out with Apparently, there’s some patent that flew by sometime this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month about magnetic connectors for future devices this is for future iDevices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Macs and accessories. I glanced at this and reading the headline,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I assumed that meant something along the lines of the MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 2020, but with data somehow flowing through it. And then looking at the pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shown in this link, which of course will be in the show notes, it looks more like MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the aughts, but with other connectors or something. So John, can you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe shed light on this and help me understand?
⏹️ ▶️ John So usual disclaimer about patents, companies patent anything and everything they can possibly patent because
⏹️ ▶️ John our patent system is dumb and it incentivizes them to do that. So this doesn’t mean this is ever going to actually be in a
⏹️ ▶️ John product, but this is just one more example of using the magic of magnets to make
⏹️ ▶️ John connectors less fussy, I guess, right? So we had MagSafe with power
⏹️ ▶️ John on laptops a long time ago. Now we’ve got the big MagSafe ring on the back of our phones, Also with power,
⏹️ ▶️ John but with a contact type of thing, like, I don’t know what you would call it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We call it wireless charging, but there’s really a big wire attached to a big puck and the puck sticks to your thing, right? So it’s mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John a giant MagSafe connector, but I guess without direct conductive connections
⏹️ ▶️ John between two, you know, two conductors do not touch each other. That doesn’t have the same ring to it as wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John charging, so it’s called wireless charging. Anyway, this thing looks like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Casey was saying, a magnetic connector where conductors do touch each other,
⏹️ ▶️ John but possibly not limited to just power. It looks like the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing that if you would imagine that Apple was going to say, replace lightning with something that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C, but still have something that people could squint their eyes at and say, it looks like a connector.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could say maybe something like this. The fact that we’re seeing this patent now and there’s no product
⏹️ ▶️ John along with it probably means this is never going to be a product, but it’s interesting that Apple continues to investigate
⏹️ ▶️ John approaches like this, using magnets to make connectors less fussy. So you don’t have to align them up
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly. So they don’t have these little tiny delicate pins, I suppose, like they just sort of snap into place
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can yank them out and all the benefits that we like from MagSafe. And this mostly got
⏹️ ▶️ John me thinking about, like, you know, our computers have fewer and fewer ports on them and fewer and
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer kinds of ports as compared to, if you look at a PC from the 80s or 90s, you just count the different number,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like the different sizes and shapes of ports, right? There used to be a lot, especially on a Mac, used to be like ADB ports
⏹️ ▶️ John for the keyboard and mouse, serial ports, which were exactly the same shape but different pins for a
⏹️ ▶️ John printer. Then you had SCSI ports of different varieties. Sometimes you had a dedicated floppy
⏹️ ▶️ John drive port, depending on your computer. Like there’s all sorts of, you know, PCs and Macs had all sorts of differently
⏹️ ▶️ John shaped ports. And fast forward to today, and it’s just, especially on Apple’s computers, it’s just on the laptops, a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C shaped holes. right? But they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John like plugs, right? And, you know, a mag safe was good for power.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now, you know, it’s good for power again on our phones, I suppose. Magnetically connecting,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, connector designs are have advantages, disadvantages to become dislodged
⏹️ ▶️ John easily and so on and so forth. But it makes me wonder, like, if the eventual future of
⏹️ ▶️ John all kinds of wired connectors, even just plain old wired connectors that touch two conductors together,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, traditional connectors, might eventually all be have magnets incorporated
⏹️ ▶️ John into them in some way. Obviously, it’s more expensive to make them that way. And it’s, you know, it’s probably more difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John and like this, a whole bunch of reasons keeping us away from it. But the line of connectors, you know, the sort of trend
⏹️ ▶️ John line has been, I think, to be willing to spend a little bit more,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for like a USB C style or even like Thunderbolt or whatever, where there’s a little chip in the connector,
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to spend a little bit more for a benefit in miniaturization, ease of use, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can put the USB-C port in either way and it still works, that costs extra money to do that as opposed to having
⏹️ ▶️ John it just fit one way. So all this is to say is that I hope someday Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John revisits the idea of essentially a data connector that incorporates magnets
⏹️ ▶️ John just to make it nicer and easier to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I completely agree. I just still miss MagSafe. And there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a week or two ago a time when I think I had tripped over the USB-C charging cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my computer, which was sat perilously, more perilously than it should have been.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took a spill. I know, right? And it almost took a spill onto the floor. No, not that kind of spill.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, yeah, I miss MagSafe. Like, I understand why it’s not here anymore, but I do miss it. the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old MagSafe. but we’ll see what happens in the future.
MagSafe strength
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michael Bettiol wrote, accessory design guidelines for Apple devices exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a PDF where it describes all the stuff about MagSafe, which is super cool. And I had no idea existed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is I mean, I went to looking into this because it was a response to my question, like, how strong
⏹️ ▶️ John can the magnets be? Like, what are the requirements for MagSafe? Could you have a pop socket or a car mount that
⏹️ ▶️ John is stronger than apparently Apple’s cases are, you know, in terms of how well it attaches to the back of the thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John This document tells you if you want to to be a MagSafe connector. Here’s the maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John and minimum force and magnetic interference requirements and how to test whether you’re compliant and all that
⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff. But I can’t eyeball the numbers and say, oh yeah, I can tell what that
⏹️ ▶️ John is. I don’t even know what the units are. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John curious or if you’re just trying to design a MagSafe device, the PDF link will be in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can read all about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I tried also to read this document and realized very quickly that I was in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way over my head and realized, okay, I’ll just wait until the reviews come out. And fortunately, many reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have come out already for MagSafe stuff and the first batch of iPhone 12 and 12 Pro Embargo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews are out. And the answer about how strong it is, basically everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to agree that it’s kinda strong, but not super strong. Basically, it’s strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to help hold some stuff on, but not strong enough to hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things firmly. So, you know, like not strong enough that if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it solely as a car mount and you hit a bump on the road, your phone will probably fall off of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can’t swing your phone around like a rodeo rope from the end of the cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll fly off of that as well. So it’s strong enough for convenience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not strong enough for really holding it strongly in place.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it does give a range in the document. So you could say, well, maybe the cases are currently at the low end of the
⏹️ ▶️ John range, but the range is only 800 to 1100 of this unit that I don’t understand. So clearly the range
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny because I am not a pop socket person. I don’t really understand it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which means I’m destined to have one in like a year, but nevertheless, I feel like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be such a cool thing if you could, you know, attach a pop socket simply with magnets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And based on the reviews and not having one in hand yet, it sounds like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlikely to work out very well. I saw, I’m not going to be able to find it for the show notes, but I saw a tweet where somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was recording themselves putting a iPhone 12 or 12 pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the wallet attachment into their jeans. And I guess they had relatively tight jeans on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the wallet just kind of like slid right off as the phone was going into the jeans. And again, I haven’t had this in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hand. Maybe I’m making a mountain out of nothing, but it certainly seemed like, as you said, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was, I guess, sufficient, adequately strong, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super strong. And I feel like it would be neat if it was possible for the other side of the magnet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be crazy strong. That’s probably also not how magnets work, but whatever. I just think it would be neat to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do like a car mount with only a magnet, a pop socket with only a magnet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, I think the problem is that magnets hold pretty strongly in one direction, but pretty weakly in the other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the force of the magnets clinging together, like the force of the, like the sandwich closing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco force between the, like the wallet and the phone, if you think about them as pieces of bread like the sandwich pushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together force is strong but the like slidey force when you try to slide them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like laterally from each other is very weak.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re killing killing the physicist in the audience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes sorry I don’t know the term for this but basically like you know it’s if you tried to pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wallet straight off the back it would take much more force than if you slide it off the back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think that’s gonna that’s gonna impact like what kinds of accessories make sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what kind of strength you actually get in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you can overcome some of this because like so this document with the requirements, people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to follow these requirements. I’m sure people can ship whatever they want. So if you want to make a pop socket with
⏹️ ▶️ John those super strong rare earth magnets inside it and see if you can find a way to get that
⏹️ ▶️ John to successfully attached to a magsafe iPhone without destroying the phone, that
⏹️ ▶️ John will be harder to pull off and could work with a pop socket and will totally probably not be compliant with this document
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, but if it can be made, people will make it and try it. And one of the pop socket
⏹️ ▶️ John brands said they were making some kind of MagSafe pop socket. It wasn’t clear to me whether they were
⏹️ ▶️ John saying they were going to make a pop socket that can attach with MagSafe or they were going to make a MagSafe enabled
⏹️ ▶️ John case that had a pop socket, you know, mechanically part of the case, which is another thing you can buy. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see. You know, there’s magnets in the inside the phone. What is outside
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone is up to whatever people can manufacture that will still function.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I’m gonna recommend that if you wanna use any kind of magnetic pop socket, I’m gonna recommend you also get AppleCare.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’ll come with the pop socket. Things with the wallet attachment, a lot of people have done
⏹️ ▶️ John that in their reviews of trying to stick it in their pocket and showing how the wallet just slides off. It doesn’t look like it’s particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John firmly attached. I think maybe even Gruber mentioned this, that you could actually use that little wallet just as a wallet
⏹️ ▶️ John by itself without attaching it to your phone and just have it attached to your phone sometime if it’s in a loose pocket. but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit like the infomercials on, not infomercials, like the As Seen on TV
⏹️ ▶️ John product advertising said, does this ever happen to you? And you’re trying to scramble eggs and you catch your house on fire, right? Yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it wrong. Maybe that actually happens to Casey. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were actually had that wallet attachment and you wanted to put it in your pocket, you just turn the wallet part to face your leg
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of facing out and then slide it in your pocket. And it would probably be more successful, let’s say, like I can’t imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, think about the protrusion of the phone that would result from having it wallet side in.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying that the wallet attachment is perfectly fine in your pocket. It’s clearly, it’s like you said, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the force in that direction is enough to dislodge it no matter what. Even if you turned it
⏹️ ▶️ John around the face of your leg and slid it in, it still could dislodge the wallet. It’s just that they would both be in your pocket at the end. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a good design. This is not a good accessory. But I feel like the people making the videos put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the worst possible light to show how it pops off because it, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all I can say is if you plan on putting your phone in a pants pocket, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John bother getting the wallet thing because you’ll forget and put it the other way or it’ll slide off and you won’t notice and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably not great. In a jacket pocket, I think it would fit fine, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or even just like, you know, loose pants or a purse. Like if you have like, you know, cargo shorts, like those are super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loose, you could, you could.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know about a purse. Purse is a hostile environment with lots of stuff sloshing around in there and they could get dislodged from each other. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I personally, I don’t actually understand the idea of putting credit cards attached to your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s like people have such a minimal wallet that they don’t carry anything except for like one or two cards and a little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t even understand what that means.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impossible for your brain to understand the idea of a minimal wallet.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like so this thing is on the wallet again. It holds three cards. That’s what it holds. Three
⏹️ ▶️ John credit cards. It doesn’t hold four. You can do two or one. Right. How
⏹️ ▶️ John minimal does your life have to be that you only have three cards? Okay, driver’s license,
⏹️ ▶️ John two credit cards. That’s pretty minimal. That is, it is a very demanding
⏹️ ▶️ John minimum. I don’t know how many people can pull that off routinely. Maybe you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need any credit cards because you pay for everything at Apple Pay. That’s fine too. And maybe you normally take your big wallet but sometimes you don’t. But I just feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s so minimal. Like for something from Apple, they’re usually trying to find, to
⏹️ ▶️ John aim it like the mass market. I feel like that wallet accessory is not aimed at the mass market. It’s aimed at like a minimal
⏹️ ▶️ John wallet people or people who love to just move their driver’s license or their ID or whatever to and from,
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe people don’t take their IDs with them. I don’t know. I don’t know how regular people live with their wallets. It just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so minimal and so fixed. You can have two credit cards and how many bills
⏹️ ▶️ John can you fit in there? If people still carry cash, no coins, obviously. How about like a
⏹️ ▶️ John transit card, one credit card in your ID? It’s just, but no cash
⏹️ ▶️ John then? Because there’s no more room for cash? I don’t… Health
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insurance card? Like that’s, like does anybody, like, I don’t know. I am a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly minimal wallet person, but I even, I can’t get down to just three cards
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Follow-up: Periscope cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, why don’t you tell us about periscope camera lenses, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is from Timo Gruen, who says that the phone cameras in Android phones that are that are periscope
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses, which is not like a submarine periscope where like, you know, periscope comes out of submarine. Think of
⏹️ ▶️ John that. That would be a lot cooler. Yeah. Yeah. Think of that. But the entire periscope is inside the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just the little part that pokes out is parking out of a hole in the phone. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John He tells me that there is no moving lens elements in those. It’s just a way to get more
⏹️ ▶️ John focal length, right? So they are inside the phone and there’s this long tunnel where the lens is away from it, but they don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John move relative to each other. So it’s a way to get a big zoom, but it’s still fixed zoom.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if there’s some Android phone out there that actually has moving lens elements, but according
⏹️ ▶️ John to Timo, no such luck. So that makes a little bit more sense. And it still is
⏹️ ▶️ John like the only way to get a reasonable focal distance without actually have something sticking out of your phone but
Follow-up: iPhone pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m not trying to be snarky or funny or anything. I feel like I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people that we know and trust, different people, say the iPhones have absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey become cheaper this year. And then I’ve heard other people say the iPhones have absolutely become more expensive this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can one of you shed light on this? Like, what is the real deal here?
⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on what you care about. Like, you know, some of the price comparisons are confused by the $30
⏹️ ▶️ John like discount that you get for these special deals with everybody, which by the way has been extended to T-Mobile as
⏹️ ▶️ John well. So now in the US at least it’s fairly uniform that they all do this $30 off for some special offer or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But also because of the mini. And if you’re trying to compare like
⏹️ ▶️ John what the cheapest new iPhone was that’s not a continuing model from last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you say, but wait a second, it’s not the same because last year I could get an 11, a non-pro 11,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s so much bigger than the mini. So how can you tell me the mini is the new version as the replacement for the 11, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so much smaller. So isn’t that a worse phone? Unless you like the Mini better, and then it’s a better phone. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then what about the storage size comparisons? It’s a little bit confusing. I think net-net, I
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, the new iPhones this year are slightly more expensive towards the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John of the range because of the OLED screens. But it’s confused by the fact that they’re different sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John and the storage changes and the partner deals and so on and so forth. When it was LCD
⏹️ ▶️ John on the lower end, you probably got more or less more phone for your money.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the grand scheme of things, I would just call it a wash because the differences we’re talking about here are 10, 20, 30 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe more if you start subtracting out, which we’ll get to in a second, the power adapter that you
⏹️ ▶️ John might have to buy and stuff like that. So I could understand someone making the argument
⏹️ ▶️ John and being successful in the numbers that they are slightly more expensive this year, especially on the low end, but it’s not the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of difference that I think is either lasting or particularly significant because I think the OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John screen prices next year will go down and things will basically even out. And related
⏹️ ▶️ John to that, we talked about this with the new iPhones and how they don’t include headphones or
⏹️ ▶️ John a power adapter, but it’s like, but we don’t know how much the new iPhones cost. Again, with
⏹️ ▶️ John the OLED screen, like maybe the new iPhones just cost more. So the fact that they didn’t really adjust the prices as compared,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not clear to us that we’re saving any money by not having those accessories in the box. In fact, the prices look more or less the
⏹️ ▶️ John same as they were last year in the ballpark. So it feels like we’re getting cheated out of that money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what I said in the last show is like, if for example, they take an existing phone that comes with headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John and a power adapter and removes those from that existing product and keeps the price the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you know Apple’s just taking that as extra profit. Well, that’s exactly what they did. The XR11 and SE,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same phones as they were last year. If you buy them now, you get them without
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones and a power adapter. And did Apple adjust the prices? No, they did not.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least now they’re being consistent. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, it’s just, you know, a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John extra profit margin on some old phones and you know, who knows, but if the margins are exactly the same on the
⏹️ ▶️ John new phones, because the OLED prices have gone down since the iPhone 10, but
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs are still more expensive than LCD. So I feel like the reason the prices are up a little bit on the low end phones
⏹️ ▶️ John is mostly due to that OLED screen, which, if the parts reports of past phones are to be believed,
⏹️ ▶️ John were the most expensive part in the iPhone line with the introduction of the X.
⏹️ ▶️ John More expensive than the system-mounted chip, more expensive than the battery, the biggest single expense was more expensive than
⏹️ ▶️ John the case, single expenses the screen.
iPhone 12 battery sizes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another thing that’s probably expensive within these phones is batteries. John, where could I find the official battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specs for every Apple product ever?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently it’s in some weird, you know, in some legal compliance document where
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to list all this stuff. So we’ll put links in the show notes. It’s a little bit of a trick. You have to start off at like apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ John slash legal slash more resources slash gtc.html. And from there it links to another page. And from there
⏹️ ▶️ John it links to a PDF and there you can find specs on all the batteries for all the products,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just the new phones. The problem is, from my perspective, because I don’t know what this means, is it gives the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery ratings in watt hours. And watt hours is the same as milliamp
⏹️ ▶️ John hours divided by volts, but I don’t know what voltage to divide by to convert watt hours
⏹️ ▶️ John into milliamp hours. Because we’re always used to comparing the iPhone battery sizes by
⏹️ ▶️ John milliamp hours, right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because aren’t they usually around 3.7 volts for lithium? But I don’t know, there’s slight variation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some years, I think, that makes it hard to calculate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, anyway, so Roland who sent this
⏹️ ▶️ John in did some calculations, and I guess we can’t really put these in the show notes, but you can look them up in the document
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want. So the iPhone 12 mini has an 8.57 watt hour battery, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing to compare that to, so we don’t know if it’s bigger or smaller. The iPhone 12 has a 10.78 watt hour battery, which is down 9.5% from
⏹️ ▶️ John So smaller battery in the 12. 12 Pro is also down, or has the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size battery, and that’s down 7.6% versus the 11 non-Pro from last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that was, I suppose, a smaller battery? Oh yeah, it’s a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John battery in the Pro, because the 11 was the beefier phone last year. And the iPhone 12
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Max has a 14.13 watt-hour battery, which is down 6.1% versus the old Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John So all the batteries on the phones that have roughly comparable phones last year got smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes kind of sense, like we know the phones, the new pro phones are like 0.7 millimeters thinner. So
⏹️ ▶️ John where is that gonna come from? You gotta have a smaller battery in there. That makes sense. Also the
⏹️ ▶️ John old iPhone 11, there is no phone that size anymore. Now it’s kind of shrunken down. The 12
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro has the similar size screen, but in a smaller case, right? So these batteries are all smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John The battery ratings, according to Apple’s battery lifetime look like they’re in the same ballpark,
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose the five nanometer system on a chip is where the savings come from. How can we get away with having
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere from a six to almost 10% smaller battery and still have similar battery life? Hey, five nanometer, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’ll do it. So once we get these phones, we’ll see what the battery life is like. But in case you’re wondering, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John if watt hours are any kind of reasonable comparison of battery capacity, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John the voltage is the same across generations, them these are slightly smaller batteries in these phones.
Marco lost a bet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have a old, old bet to settle from two years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the 13th of September, 2018, John said, in the next five years, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will sell a new phone that is smaller than the 10. And Marco said something along the lines of, I’ll take that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bet. And then there was a back and forth, and it was concluded that if that happens, Marco will own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John a dollar. So Marco, if you wouldn’t mind Apple Pay cashing John $1 as we’re sitting here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can do it on the show. I’ll allow it, John. then if you could please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settle that bet, I would appreciate it.
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that right now. I’d forgotten all about this bet. So had I. It was said within the next
⏹️ ▶️ John five years, and we’re like two years and change into that, so I got it right in the middle of the range there. Yeah, Marco was
⏹️ ▶️ John adamant that they wouldn’t make a new, smaller phone, not like some existing phones they were still selling, but a new,
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller phone than the X, and I was pretty sure they would, and they did. How about them apples? Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to bet $5, but I talked him down to $1. How’s that for shrewd negotiation?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is from Tim Chatton, by the way. Oh, I heard that. I know that noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done. See how easy that is? You can do it while you record. And you didn’t even put an ampersand in,
⏹️ ▶️ John I heard the noise over on Marco’s side, but that finally came through over here. I was like, what is this lag? I
⏹️ ▶️ John just sent a dollar to somebody. Oh, it doesn’t auto, I think I have auto received now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, received just now. I did it. I got a dollar. Yay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I hate being in debt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Had to pay immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, hey, hey, hey. Mm-hmm
Time Machine update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I have some very quick follow-up before I forget on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken time machine drive with the 7.68 terabyte micron SSD. Right, what technology did you buy?
⏹️ ▶️ John have a new one with with Ryzen CPUs in them. With Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I said. So anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got a new enclosure. My first theory was well, I have these two giant SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this enclosure it was kind of seeming flaky maybe the enclosure is bad so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know before I do the hassle of you know trying to get some kind of warranty service from Micron
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I you know let me let me replace the enclosure because they’re really cheap and I ordered some enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came in and I learned very quickly that almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all 2.5 inch disk enclosures don’t support the a capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of seven terabytes, or 7.6 terabytes. They have capacity limits still. In this day and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco age, you can get a brand new USB-C, USB 3. whatever enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a SATA drive today, that if it’s made for 2.5 inch drives, which all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bus powered ones are, most of them have a capacity limit of four terabytes. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know why this hasn’t, well I guess I do know why, because hard drives,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 2.5 inch hard drives, I don’t think are available anything bigger than four gigs or four terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s one that maxes out at five. People used to sell fives, but it was actually two 2.5 inch drives,
⏹️ ▶️ John like combining to five, but I think there might be a single five terabyte mechanism. But anyway, it seems kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of borderline to have chipsets limited to four when that is even anywhere close
⏹️ ▶️ John to the actual maximum drive size. it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I would assume that the 2.5 inch interface chips would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the same chips as a 3.5 inch enclosure is that you know 3.5 inch drives are routinely above 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabytes now I know because
⏹️ ▶️ John the 3.5 ones aren’t going to be bus powered right so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the 2.5 ones
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire chip set has to be bus powered and that’s a whole other kettle of fish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah well anyway so anyone out there who for whatever reason wants to buy a an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost 8 terabyte SSD and you want to put it in a USB enclosure know that most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them don’t support the capacity. The one I bought the first time happened to support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I did eventually get another one that did. I will put a link to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the good one that supports it in the show notes. It’s by Cable Matters and otherwise it seems fine. Anyway, I replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the enclosure with instead of the one double enclosure, I now have two single enclosures and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they seem to work perfectly. I’ve been running it for almost a week now and I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no issues. So it does seem like it was simply a defective enclosure, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happily back to my non-synology lifestyle so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, fine. I should have made you a $1 bet about that, too. Yeah. Why don’t I just
⏹️ ▶️ John assume that I’m right from now on? It would save us a lot of time. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would certainly save us a lot of feedback email.
iPhone 2x-camera usage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Alex Chan had a very interesting blog post that went up over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last few days. And the question was asked on this show and other places as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, how much do I, whoever, really use the ultra wide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and telephoto lenses on my 11 Pro? And Jason Snell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had answered this question by way of, what is it, smart folders in photos? Smart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco albums. Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s called, smart albums, thank you, in photos. and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. But Alex,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming right after my own heart, decided to use ExifTool. And if you’re not familiar, ExifTool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a command line tool that lets you read or write Exif data, E-X-I-F, which contains a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bunch of metadata about pictures. And Alex wrote a one-liner that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will crawl a particular folder and spit out the results of how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many of your pictures have been taken with each of the different lenses. Now this gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very complicated very quickly because apparently in certain scenarios, you’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of unusual lens names, like dual camera, for example, which people thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be portrait mode photos, except maybe it’s not, and I could go on for hours. But suffice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to say, I looked at my personal results for 2019 and 2020, and I’ll put it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. But basically the summary for me anyway, was I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used the ultra wide for 7% of my photos, the wide for standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lens for 83% of my photos, and the telephoto lens for a full 10% of the photos I’ve taken with my 11 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is probably about on par with what I guessed, but it is nice to be able to see those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey numbers plain as day right in front of you. Oh, actually I should specify, this is both Aaron and me. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said me, but that’s not true. This was our joint, like merged photo library. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was actually the both of us. But nevertheless, the List family, 7% ultra-wide, 83% wide, 10% telephoto.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s just how we stacked up. And I presume neither of you did your homework and that’s okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally did my homework.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. That is a bet I would have lost. That is a bet I very much would have lost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Holy smokes, Marco, I am so proud of you. So where did you end up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in typical fashion, I did it like 15 minutes before the show, but still. Of course. That’s when I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the notes and saw this, I’m like, uh-oh, I better run these numbers. So I actually came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly where I expected to with a couple of exceptions. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the 2,400 or so photos I shot since having the iPhone 11 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have about 9% ultra wide, 75% 1X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and about 16% telephoto. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow, that’s fairly significant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is more frequent use of the telephoto lens than I would have guessed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is also still just, you know, 16%. If 16% of the time the photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a little bit worse because I had to use digital zoom to get them instead of using the actual optical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens, that’s not great. But if it comes with other substantial benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t have the option to have both those substantial benefits and the cool telephoto lens, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m gonna accept those benefits. And so, you know, the ultra wide,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I need the ultra wide, that can’t be simulated with the 1X. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need something wider than what you have, you can’t interpolate it. You have to just capture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So if I’m going to have only two lenses, I think I would pick the 0.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the 1X because I actually have ended up using the 0.5X lens more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have guessed. Like when they announced it last year, like this was the first year that had them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought I’m never gonna use that. I figured I would take like one or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shots for the novelty value and it was brand new and I would never use it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought too. But in fact, I have actually used it. And I looked through the pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, what are my ultra wide pictures? And it isn’t just all up front in the first few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks of having the phone. It’s spread pretty evenly throughout the year because I do actually end up using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more regularly than I would have guessed. And then I looked through the 2X pictures from the 2X lens that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m about to lose by going to the non-pro phone. I was surprised,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like seeing a lot of them, like oh yeah, I guess that is nice. But again, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I open these pictures up and I view them at full size, I see oh, they actually are noticeably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappier in quality compared to the 1X cameras. They are significantly noisier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of times the color isn’t as good, the contrast isn’t as good, because it isn’t as good of a camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m not talking about going from having a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2X ability to having no 2X ability. I’m going from having one compromised 2X ability to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a differently compromised 2X ability. And from that point of view, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing less than I would have thought. Now, one significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, this is, I guess, an important follow-up, one massive thing that people wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to point out that I just didn’t even think about is portrait mode. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never use it. Cause I really still hate it. If you are a frequent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user of portrait mode, yeah, you should probably keep the telephoto lens cause it plays a pretty important role there.
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry for leaving that out. Don’t the new phones do portrait mode without the telephoto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do, but it’s worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. I never use either, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that, and I might be completely wrong about this, but I thought that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LiDAR was also assisting, on the pros anyway, was assisting with portrait mode. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that’s true, something I’m curious to see, and I feel like I saw this on Panzerino’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey review on TechCrunch, but one of the things, I actually mostly like portrait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode, like for the purpose that it serves, I think it’s pretty good. But some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the faults of portrait mode, or the common faults of portrait mode, are glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like at the, at the border between a person’s hair and the background, things can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blurred either too much or too little, or just weirdly. But the number one thing that drives me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just baddie about portrait mode is when say you’re, you know, standing and you have your,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your hands on your hips, like Peter Pan style, you know what I mean? And so you have this like empty space, like a triangle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. The little window.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You have that like triangle of empty space in, in, between your torso and your arms. Right. Well, in portrait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode, almost always that triangle of space will be like perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in focus because the algorithm hasn’t realized it needs to blur that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area. And then everything else can look pretty good. But as soon as you look at, you know, the insides of your Peter Pan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arms, then you realize, oh God, oh, again. And this happens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me all the time when I try to use portrait mode. And I wonder, and I haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this written anywhere, but I really wonder if the LiDAR is the sensor, almost the camera, if the LiDAR sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is used for portrait mode, even in the daytime, will that help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix this problem? Because for me, I’m not saying for Marco, but for me, if that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey triangle was treated appropriately by portrait mode or equivalent scenarios that are similar to it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I would use portrait mode a lot because I can get over the weird merging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between a hairline and the background. that’s not that big a deal to me, but golly, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey triangles that peek through drive me bananas. And so I am hopeful that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe the 12 Pro will make that a lot better. But again, I could be speaking way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of turn and maybe that’s not even close to reality.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lidar dots are pretty far apart, right? So if you’re expecting it to make like a pixel perfect perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John depth map of your arm, no, it’s not gonna do that. Like you’ve seen all the things of like with an IR camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many Lidar dots there and how far, It will certainly know that there are gaps there, but then it will be up to
⏹️ ▶️ John coordination with the sort of ML thing to say, okay, LIDAR has detected that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a big hole here, but we don’t know where the edges of the hole are. We could roughly say they’re kind of maybe triangular
⏹️ ▶️ John shaped but in terms of finding the actual edges, then it would have to stick the ML on it and say, find the edge of the
⏹️ ▶️ John arm and the body. You know, in theory you could definitely improve things, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t like this whole feature, so I don’t really care
⏹️ ▶️ John it does. But you try that out. You try some Peter Pan arms when you get your phone I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely will. I definitely will.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is it? Why is it Peter Pan arms is Peter Pan known for hands on hips? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey guess I don’t know toes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I think of like hook the movie hook which I liked and I know nobody else did and that’s the one with Dustin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hoffman Yes in Robin Williams. I love that
⏹️ ▶️ John movie. Okay. Sure. Yep. No, not the animated Peter Pan, but that one. All right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah well consider I was like 10 when hook came out and so I was like in the right in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rough age group for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hook was like contemporary for us, like it was made for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, exactly right. So anyways, so yeah, I just keep thinking of like Robin Williams
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like floating through the silhouette he had cut in Captain Hook’s sail, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, with his hands, you know, fisted on his hips and he’s just got that triangle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, spoiler,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally. Actually, that is actually a pretty big spoiler for a 20 year old movie, but here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so the point is, I’m going to try that once my phones come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, which I’m really looking forward to. John, I hope you didn’t do your homework, but did you do your homework?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I was up getting the, I thought this was for Marco because he’s the one getting the camera without the lens, but I don’t have to check
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m getting the camera with all the lenses, So I don’t have to worry about that.
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iPhone decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did you buy? And I’d also like to know, did you buy a case and did you buy any sort of AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus? And we will start with you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got a Graphite 12 Pro 256. I got AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ John because I always do, which somehow prevents me from ever breaking my phone apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you do the lump sum AppleCare or did you do the month to month? Because I don’t remember this being an option in the past. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t an option in
⏹️ ▶️ John the past. It’s been an option for a while. I get the lump sum because I get a new phone every two years. So I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna end after two years no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what. So it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to have it to continue to go on. I did not get a case because I want the leather
⏹️ ▶️ John one provided the leather one has a cutout on the bottom like the clear one. If it turns out the leather
⏹️ ▶️ John one doesn’t have a cutout on the bottom like the clear case, I don’t know what the heck I’m gonna do. I mean, I might
⏹️ ▶️ John start looking at third party cases. I might try the clear one, although reportedly the buttons on the clear one are terrible and honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like the look of it, but I am very much anti-lip on the bottom. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna have to try to use this with AppleCare and without a case until the leather ones
⏹️ ▶️ John are available so I can make this determination.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Did you get any chargers, MagSafe chargers or anything like
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, and I got the MagSafe puck. I’ve already, that’s actually already arrived. So that’s upstairs now. I
⏹️ ▶️ John got the MagSafe puck. And the other thing that I was fretting about on Twitter before the day of ordering was
⏹️ ▶️ John the options they give you in the ordering process are more confusing to
⏹️ ▶️ John me than I remember them being in the past. In the past, I would order my new phone on my existing phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John and during the order process, it would say, hey, I noticed you’re ordering on an iPhone, because I’d be using like the Apple Store
⏹️ ▶️ John app. Do you want to buy a new phone to replace the phone that you’re buying it on now? And I’d say, yes, that’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John fact exactly what I wanna do, and then I would just go through. Now, that option wasn’t presented to me. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got two options, neither of which made any sense to me because I don’t understand the weird world of phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I asked on Twitter, hey, which of these two options should I choose? And pretty much half the people said
⏹️ ▶️ John the first option, and the other half of the people said the second option. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was very sure that they were correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Helpful. That is absolutely, I saw a lot of this go by because I chimed in with the actually correct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everyone was utterly convinced that they were correct either way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the thing is they had the same reasons. They’re like, you should pick the first choice because if you pick the first choice, you don’t have to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John Verizon an activation fee. And people would say, you should pick the second choice because you pick the second choice, you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John pay Verizon an activation fee. And some people said, no matter what choice you pick, you have to pay an activation
⏹️ ▶️ John fee. And it was just all over the map. Like every possible permutations, I was like, okay, well, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody knows. Because people had stories about what they did. I did this with this carrier and this
⏹️ ▶️ John time and this phone, this is what happened to me. But always like two or three variables would be different. Well, that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John this year, it was last year. Well, you’re on T-Mobile and I’m on Verizon. Well, you live in a different country. And so, you know, it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John so there was, I thought it would be, I thought it was clear cut and I just didn’t know, but apparently it’s very confusing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, the upshot is that I’m pretty sure I could have picked either option, it would have been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think no matter what I did, I would end up with an unlocked phone. I think I could have bought a phone without a SIM and taken
⏹️ ▶️ John my SIM out of my existing XS and put it in there. But although I wasn’t sure which option would let me do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think I can order one with a new SIM and just have it transfer a service to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The final, in the final analysis, in the mad rush to try to get the phone, you know, the morning
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I don’t even remember which one I picked. I’m pretty sure I picked the top one,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John means they’re going to send me a phone with a brand new SIM in it, and when I turn it on, I’ll activate it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’ll be a surprise. Wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ay yi yi. Marco, you have not ordered anything, is that correct? Or well, you might have for Tiff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I admit I was tempted. And when the time came, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awake, I was like, you know, already up working, and I’d just gotten back from school drop-off, and I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what, let me check the app. And I opened up the app, and there it is, and I could order, I still had day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one delivery for whatever combo I would get for the regular Pro. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, I was very tempted, but I let it go by. I didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, you know, as much as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m gonna miss that telephoto lens, when I look at the iPhone 12 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to the F11 Pro, it doesn’t excite me. It’s not, you know, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think 5G is gonna be a meaningful deal for me during this year. I don’t even think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it covers where I am right now. I’m pretty sure there’s no AT&T coverage where I am for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5G, and I’m not gonna switch to Verizon for lots of other good reasons. It doesn’t, basically it doesn’t cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of places I need to be. So, like my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you looked at the 5G map? Because a lot of…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, I’m not talking about Verizon’s 5G versus LTE. I’m saying Verizon period does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not cover my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. No, I’m sorry. I’m back on AT&T because there is a whole lot of 5G everywhere that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would possibly be on a regular basis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll check. Maybe I could have read the map wrong. Anyway, I’m not super excited about 5G yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you’re getting 5G no matter what phone you get. So why are you talking about this? That’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As an upgrade to the 11. If I look at like my 11 Pro today, yes, I know for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody out there, I know it’s ridiculous to upgrade every year, but you know, this is what we do. So compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the 11 Pro, I don’t see a major reason to upgrade if what I’m going to be getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is mostly the same as what I have. And when you look at 11 Pro to 12 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t care super strongly about 5G, well what else is there? The 1X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera got a little bit better, the A14 is a little bit faster, and you got straight sides. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get HDR video, but you also get the A14 with the Mini, and you also get HDR video with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mini, just not as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Right, and you also get the better 1X camera with the Mini. In order to have a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big upgrade from the 11 Pro to the 12 Pro, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to go max. I think that’s, if you if you want it to feel like a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year on year thing, I mean, the sensible thing to do is don’t upgrade if you have an 11 anything because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not better enough. But if you’re gonna be an idiot and upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year and pick a new phone because you’re fortunate enough to be able to do that, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get excited by going from the 11 Pro to the 12 Pro. I think if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a max person, like what Tiff is, Tiff’s a max person, she’s getting a massive camera upgrade by going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the 12 Pro Max. So that’s gonna be great, and that makes total sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s a good reason to be excited. As this shopping day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blew by, I realized I don’t want the 12 Pro, I don’t think. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, somebody’s gonna play this back to me in a month when I’ve gotten the Mini, hated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, returned it, and gotten the Pro instead. But as we stand right now, I’m not super excited. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, I saw all the reviews that came out over the last couple days, And I really don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the massive fingerprint magnetness of the steel polished edges on the Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t like that they kept the very slippery matte finish glass back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Pro. So what they’ve made, and I’m happy to see that all the reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically say that if you’ve been using an 11 Pro or a XS or a X, it is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that same size. Even though it is officially very slightly larger, it feels the same. That’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m happy to hear that but I’m not that happy with this size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s fine I I deal with it But it’s a little bit bigger a little bit heavier than I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so that’s why when I look at this lineup The mini excites me because this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a massive year for like huge gotta have it harder upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unless you unless you’re a max person, then you get that awesome camera. But otherwise like it’s not a massive year for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Again, 5G notwithstanding, because I just don’t care that much about 5G yet. And so if it’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a massive year for that, I feel like I have to make a bigger change if I want this to be worth doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. And I have thought about just skipping this year for the first time ever because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. But there is one massive change that I really want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s the form factor. I really want that smaller phone. And I think even though I’ll be giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the 2X camera and I won’t be getting like the full Dolby Vision 60 frames a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I won’t be getting the new ProRAW format, I don’t think I would use either of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, as I mentioned earlier, I think the 2X camera is complicated to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’ll be missing it as much as I might think. But again, we will see. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m super excited about holding that little phone. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a feeling it’s gonna feel awesome. Like, I have a feeling going back to that size and having such a tiny,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light phone it’s easy to maneuver in your hand and everything. And going without a case, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll get the low-end glass, which will be more grippy. I’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the low-end aluminum sides, which won’t show fingerprints. I will be able to go without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a case because of its size and grippiness, which means the buttons will feel better, it’ll feel better in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand, it’ll look nicer. So I think it’ll be a substantial upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go to the mini in terms of just handling and feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’ll feel great. You can get a cool color too. Well, asterisk. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get a cool color if you like blue or potashio green,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m a red person mostly in colors and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a good, it’s not a good red. Well, it’s not a good red for me, it’s not what I want. It’s definitely like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a coral or salmon kind of color, it’s pretty far
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the blue, what’s wrong with the blue? Let me look at the blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a little flat for me, honestly, but I’m not much of a blue person. Like blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not one of my favorite colors. It’s fine, I get some things that are blue, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love it enough to make it my phone for a year. Whereas the red, I would if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like a more deep red. But unfortunately it’s not, so what I think, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one thing I’m not excited about is the color. I think I’m gonna go either white or black.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m leaning towards white and I’m not gonna get a chance to see them in person I don’t think anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John the black looks really black too. Have you seen a black one in a review yet? Or I guess no one has
⏹️ ▶️ John because the mini isn’t out yet. But have you seen a 12 in black?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, I’ve tried to find every video I can where people actually have them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and are unboxing them and showing them off. This is not very many videos yet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’ve seen a black one yet. That’s actually, that’s in one of the YouTube reviewers or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but regardless, I’m leaning towards white. But again, regardless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t ordered, to answer your question in the longest possible way, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I haven’t ordered anything yet. It’s a long way
⏹️ ▶️ John to say I ordered nothing. Although you did, you ordered a phone for Tiff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I didn’t order a phone for Tiff. The Max and the Mini are the same day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s right, she has to wait too. Yeah, does she know what color she’s getting too?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Blue. Yeah, like as soon as the blue is shown on screen at the event, she’s like, all right, get me that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was like, all right, biggest one of that. That’s it, done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’d give us, you and me, Marco, if you were to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Blue Mini, which I know you’re not, but if you were to get a Blue Mini, I’d say there’s one chance in three that you and I will swap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones at some point this year. I’m laughing, but I’m not joking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I think I said this last week, you know, the meme with the guy holding the girlfriend’s hand and looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back at like the other girl. That is, I am holding the hand of the forthcoming iPhone 12 Pro, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking back at that Mini me thinking, Hmm, is that the phone I really want?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, again, I think if, if you’re the kind of idiot like us who upgrades every year, I think it’s hard to get excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about, about this one particular thing if you’re in the middle size, if you’re at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small, that’s awesome. It’s a new, a brand new size. It’s probably going to feel great. It’s going to have a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compromises. Maybe, you know, it’s going to take a little while to get used to the typing. I’m sure. But like, it’s going to feel great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re at the big end, you get that amazing new camera upgrade. If you’re in the middle, it’s, It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive sell as a year over year upgrade. Again, I know it’s ridiculous to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year over year upgrade discussions, but look, this is our show, this is what we talk about. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to be these kind of idiots, I feel like there’s going to be a lot of us tech podcasters and adjacent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fans and enthusiasts who end up going through more than one size this year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you have this weird trade off. and the middle size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty substantial compromise, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top size and the bottom size are both much more exciting for different reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s fair. I still stand by that I think this lineup of phones with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an asterisk here and a dagger there, I do think this is one of the most, if not the most compelling range of iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple has ever offered. But yeah, if you’re on the 11 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I am today, it is of questionable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey importance whether or not you need to upgrade like you were saying. But yeah, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought, Aaron and I each, a 12 Pro, both 256 gigs, she white, me blue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I’m very excited about. Blue is my favorite color. I am super excited about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blue. It’s funny, when I’d seen the photographs of the Mini Blue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I think they just call Blue, and the Pacific Blue of the Pro, I thought I actually preferred the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini’s shade of blue, but now having seen some more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video and pictures and whatnot of the Pro, I feel like I actually kind of prefer the more muted blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Pacific Blue, the Pro Blue. But we’ll see what happens. At some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure I will see a Mini and I might change my mind. But nevertheless, we each ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 12s. I got two years worth of AppleCare because I figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m probably going to run this case list. We saw how that went last time, so it’s probably wise for me to get AppleCare.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin, what I did for her, which was the first time she’s ever had AppleCares,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did month to month for her because we haven’t yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concluded what case she would like. And in the past, she’s run like the very light pink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey silicone, silicone, silicone, I always get it wrong, I’m sorry, the plasticky case. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this year they don’t really have a good pink option. And either way, those cases tend to fall apart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on her after like six to eight months anyway. So my thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process was, well, I’ll just do like a couple, like a month or maybe two months of AppleCare Plus for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her. So God forbid she pulls a Casey and drops the thing immediately, then we’ll be all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then once she gets herself a case that she likes, then I’ll just cancel the AppleCare on hers and we won’t have to worry about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore. But all in all, the buying process was pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent. It’s so much nicer doing it at eight in the morning rather than,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was it, three in the morning in the past? Is that right? Which was just awful. And it is funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me hearing the people in the left coast whining about their five in the morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I would argue that getting up at five in the morning to order a phone, that’s just inconvenient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Getting up at three in the morning is like destroying your sleep for the night. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so frustrating. We did it for years. But yeah, I used the Apple store app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it worked reasonably well. Californians or at least Apple never seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey punctual. So it wasn’t till like 8.05 or something like that that it finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went and allowed me to buy the phones but it was fairly straightforward. And theoretically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re coming this Friday. Aaron’s is still in China. Mine is somewhere between Anchorage and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my house. It left Anchorage a day or two ago, and yet still hasn’t moved.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s because they like, I forget where customs happens in this process. Every year, I remind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself as I’m watching these tracking numbers fly by, oh, yeah, that’s the time when they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally let it through customs, and it actually moves. And I should write notes on this so I can remember. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t actually gotten, in case you’re listening to this and you’re like, wait, wait, wait, how does he have a tracking number? I haven’t gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the official tracking number from Apple. But the trick that we’ve talked about that works for many years and I put a blog post up about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it that we’ll link to in the show notes, is if you go to UPS, if you’re an American, if you go to UPS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you do a track by reference and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use either the first several characters of your order number, I forget how many, but more importantly, if you use your phone number,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no hyphens, no parentheses, et cetera, then almost always that’ll come up with actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracking numbers for your phones, easily days before Apple has issued a tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number. And additionally, if you’re a UPS MyChoice person, it showed up on my calendar for today, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It showed up on my calendar, like delivery calendar, like two or three days ago. Obviously it was not delivered today, which is of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no great surprise, but that would have been a neat treat if it had worked out. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I plan as John to probably potentially get a leather case if I get one at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve always really liked the Apple leather cases, but given that I have AppleCare on it, I’ll probably just roll caseless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again and we’ll see what happens. But like I said, Marco, it would not surprise me, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean this, if you say to me at some point or I say to you at some point, so Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how are you liking that Mini? What are you thinking about maybe doing a little switcheroo
⏹️ ▶️ John while? Like Marco would ever wait to get your phone, he would just order himself a 12-pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I think I’m thinking about doing AppleCare myself because of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monthly option now. Because if I keep it for 12 months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the mini, it’s eight bucks a month, so it’s $96. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s actually not bad at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the leather case is gonna be like 60 or 50, right? Like that’s what they cost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figure maybe this will just be my case for the year. Because I do plan to go caseless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the mini. I would like a small amount of protection maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, for a hundred bucks for the year to literally then not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to worry about it at all, might be worth it. I don’t know. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might try that this year because the monthly option really changes things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I feel the same way in a lot of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting. M2 underscore Mike in the chat points out, Apple has never made a leather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case for the non-pro phones. Is that true?
⏹️ ▶️ John Get back into coach class plebe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The kids say pleb now. Are you familiar with this? I know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but now the little kids who hear these words on YouTube they say pleb.
⏹️ ▶️ John They also say sus. also say sus, I’m just ignoring them.
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#askatp: Sleep tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so 90 minutes into the show, should we leave follow up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As if we had any structure this week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t try to blame follow up on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this show. Should we just go into Ask ATP? I’m kind of not kidding. Let’s do it. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s start with some Ask ATP now that follow up’s done. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have any of us tried watchOS sleep tracking asks Eduardo Berner. I have not. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have used, oh shit, I can’t remember the name of the app, but I used an iPhone app years ago where basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would plug your phone, this was pre-Qi, you would plug your phone into your lightning cable and stick it under your sheet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under your fitted sheet if you can, or under your pillow or whatever. And I actually liked it, if I remember, I’ll put it in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, but it wasn’t stupendous. I haven’t tried the watchOS sleep tracking because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly, I don’t feel like I have real sleep problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally. I mean, obviously I have a night here and there where I can’t sleep for nothing, but generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sleep pretty well, so I’m not too worried about it. Let’s start with John. John, have you tried watch-aware sleep tracking?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t even really wear a watch, do you, right? Because you have like an ancient one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I do not wear a watch, so no, I haven’t tried this, and I do not have nights where
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t sleep. I have mornings where I can’t get up, which is all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have never done any kind of sleep tracking for any device of any kind, including the Apple Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I wanted to try sleep tracking, that’s what I would do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s never been a thing that I particularly cared about. I kind of know already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t have any massive sleep problems, except like most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should probably get a bit more of it. And I know that already. And having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a metric to be tracked, I don’t think is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to motivate me to change that any more than my own internal guilt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would otherwise motivate me. But I think it also helps that as I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco older and more boring, I actually am getting tired earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m kind of automatically developing healthier sleep habits over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s something that’s not really, I don’t see a need for it in my life right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John As you get older, also, you enter the times when your quality of sleep may go down. So I think one thing that the
⏹️ ▶️ John watch can help with potentially is not just telling you how long you slept, because if you don’t have sleep problems, like, well, I went to bed at
⏹️ ▶️ John this time and I woke up at this time. I can do the math, it’s not difficult. But as you get older, you
⏹️ ▶️ John may, various sleep problems may cause you to have restless sleep or sleep that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John as restful as the night of sleep that you know, despite the fact that as far as you’re concerned, you were asleep
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole time, are you really getting refreshed? So the watch would tell you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, maybe even tell you if you have, you know, breathing problems when you’re sleeping based on your part rate, who knows, but that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a sleep track. All I want to say is that sleep tracking is not just about, Hey, how long did I sleep or did I sleep? Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a little bit more to it than that. But I can’t even bear wearing a watch during the day though. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine wearing one while I try to sleep. I really don’t want things attached to my wrist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually don’t find it to be too bad, but I have no problem wearing a watch in general. So, you know, it’s, It’s not surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that you would say, on no uncertain terms, would I ever want this while I’m sleeping.
Follow-up: Solo Loop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, can I put some follow-up in here right now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, sure, why not? Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco totally break the format. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow-up that will not end. I’ve been meaning to do this follow-up for a while, and I kept forgetting. Back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I first got to try the new Apple Watch Sport, is it the Sport Loop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new fixed-length one? Oh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know what you’re thinking. I think that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Sport Circle. Solo Loop. That’s it, I knew I was wrong, but I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out. Okay, the new Apple Watch Sport Circle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The sports circle is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good too. Yes. Anyway, a few people wrote in to point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a benefit of that because like basically my conclusion, I’m still actually waiting for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correctly sized one to come in. I think it’s coming in in a few days, but my incorrectly sized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I basically judge it as like, it’s nice, but it didn’t seem worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the inconveniences compared to the regular sport band to be really worth it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most people. But a few people wrote in to point out something I hadn’t considered, which is if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal allergies, which many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metals irritate your skin in certain ways, usually, we heard from a number of people who said that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t wear the usual sport band because where the metal pin is, even that little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of metal touching their skin irritates them. And if you switch over to the sports circle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have any metal touching your skin. The only things that touch your skin are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rubbery whatever of the band, and the little bit of the ceramic circle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the bottom of the watch that forms the bottom crystal of the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about the whole aluminum or stainless steel case of the watch? None of that touches you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good question. I don’t know. I mean, you can get a ceramic watch, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’ll solve that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not anymore. Oh, you can? But if you’re super reactive, titanium tends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be fairly unreactive. So that actually, that’s still an option in the lineup. But if you look at the way the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch rests on your wrist, very little of the case really ever contact your skin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the big bulb on the bottom of the ceramic for all the lenses and stuff kind of pushes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch up above your skin. So that might not irritate people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much. And I think, I mean, I’m looking at the bottom of it now, because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bulb itself isn’t the only ceramic part. That whole bottom round rect, the whole bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plate of it is the ceramic material. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually might not be a problem for any of the metals, except for whatever bit of side touching. If you flex your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrist up, you’d rub against it a little bit. But for the most part, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll have to hear from people who have that kind of sensitivity on how much the case metal’s a problem. But it looks like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t be much of a problem for most people based on its design.
#askatp: iPhone space usage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Jayanth Visweswaran writes, I’m curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s taking up 128 gigs of space in your phones. I’ve been getting by just fine with a 64 gig device,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using only about 50 gigs, although I don’t take a lot of videos. But even if I did, I’m guessing it should all just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be backed up to iCloud anyway. Well, except for me. So I’m curious, what are the most data-heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps that you use? And as a side note, I’m somewhat annoyed that you can’t choose how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much local storage photos is allowed to take up. It only takes up 10 gigs with a library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iCloud of 100 gigs for this individual. But I wish I could limit it to take up just one gig.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fair. For me, I’ll put in the show notes an actual screenshot of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone usage, which I looked at and I haven’t touched, but this is how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to 121 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 gigs used on my iPhone 11 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basically, it’s a crud load of photos and a fair bit in the DJI Go app, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that I use for my gimbal. And those are all probably old and probably deletable, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re still there. That’s 11 gigs or 12 gigs in there. And then Overcast is using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe you mean you have chosen to download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey six gigs of podcasts in Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Touche, touche. This is because I’m deeply behind on pretty much every podcast I like to listen to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And although actually the most surprising to me of all these was Safari using three gigs. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no idea how that’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s counting browser caches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is, because it lets you drill down, and you can see website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey data. Oh, I didn’t even see that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at first, I thought website data was just whatever the persistent JavaScript crap that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advertisers use, like local databases and everything. And because my first one for that is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shopify.com, 80 megs. I’m like, what the hell? But then right down there, I see overcast.fm, 24 megs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and marco.org, 14 megs. And I thought, well, that’s weird. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what overcast and marco.org do. and they don’t do anything with local storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What, MarkoDrop doesn’t even set cookies. Like how does it use 14 megs? And so I think what it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have tabs open, it might be like serializing that memory to disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it can restore them and counting that, it has to store that somewhere, it has to be counted somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s my best guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s interesting, yeah, I’m trying to load it. Oh, there you go. YouTube is using 160 megs. Oh, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, before I leave Safari, sorry, offline reading list is accounted for separately as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. And for that, I have 400 megs. Oh wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, like medium, because medium is so great in so many ways, is 100 megs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey New York Times, 70 megs. There’s a lot of stuff here, some of which I would expect and some of which not. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently that website data adds up to 2.3 gigs once I drill into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, mine was not that different. So I will point out also for yours, first of all, I also had the DJI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that was storing a copy of all of the video that my drone ever shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like six gigs or something. But when I first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opened the screen, I had something like 130 gigs used. But with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of minutes of pruning, I have it down to 88.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I actually think I might do the 128 gig phone. Let’s save a hundred bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow, look at you. Like, I’m really talking myself down and price on a few things here.
⏹️ ▶️ John But- This is not going to happen. You’re gonna get the 256. Why are you even pretending?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, you are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, well, but one thing I’ll point out, like, you know, as the listener mentioned, Photos only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses a much smaller amount of space. Yeah, like for me, Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses, well, I don’t know how it’s accounting for this. It says Photos uses 117 gigs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yet I have not even close to that. I don’t know, oh, oh, now it refreshed, eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs. God, this screen is buggy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t understand the refreshing on this screen. I was looking at it for this question, I was looking at it otherwise, like what changes
⏹️ ▶️ John in the first minute and the second minute this screen is up to adjust these numbers in such huge ways, it’s very strange.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get emails all the time from people saying, because at Overcast I have a storage manager
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen in the app where you can see what are you using on the space and there’s actually a small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug in the current version where it’s not counting a second copy of your database. So whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see for data, double that. But the podcast things are accurate. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get emails from people all the time saying the storage manager screen says I’m using this many gigs, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone storage screen says I’m using 10 gigs more. What’s the problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have no idea. When I went into the DJI app earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this evening to delete all those drone videos, I had to reboot the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the iPhone storage usage screen actually refreshed to display that information.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know what is going on with the counting of the screen, but it’s probably at least approximate. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using 40 gigs for music, 22 of which is Phish alone. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course. I’m surprised you have that much other than Phish. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. But like that’s the biggest user. My photos is only 8.6 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Casey, your photos are 41 gigs because you don’t use iCloud photo library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason still. Well, it’s because I just haven’t gotten around to it. And because it’s kludgy, because I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the system of record for my photos to be the Synology. I can’t have a network drive as the system of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record for photos.app on my Mac. That’s the short of it. Now I know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways around it. I’m not arguing that I can’t fix it, but that’s what it boils down to, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I would have to duplicate my photo library onto like a attached drive or something like that, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to get photos.app happy, which is really frustrating. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m actually surprised I have 40 gigs of photos because my workflow, which is extremely complicated, but works for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that once a month, I pull the photos off of my phone. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I leave myself a month of photos. So I do this in the middle of the month. So just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a week ago, I took all of the photos off of my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and ingested them and stuffed them on Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, I shouldn’t say I took them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the phone. I imported them and then I put them all in the Synology, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave the most recent month. So I have on my phone basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos since mid-September because I did this mid-September and left a month before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then. I did it in mid-October and I leave the last month. And so I’m surprised that I somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to 40 gigs on what should only be a month’s worth of photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And certainly what I need to do is sometime tomorrow in preparation for when the phone gets here on Friday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to clean a lot of this stuff up because the more stuff that I have going into,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I almost said iTunes, into Finder, I guess, as an encrypted backup, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all gonna have to come back out on the new phone. And so if I can clean all that out for myself, then that’ll make my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup and restore considerably quicker when the new phone arrives. So I need to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then finally, Tobogranit writes, is John planning on ever buying an OLED TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or is he going to skip this technology and wait for the next, such as micro LED?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is Casey ever planning to ask me about the storage on my phone, or is he just gonna skip that and go right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to the next? Oh, sorry, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely forgot about you. Marco and I have flapped our gums so darn long, I completely forgot. I’m sorry, John, that’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rude of me. John, tell me about the storage on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m using, with the caveat that the screen is mysterious and adjust numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John by large amounts when seemingly nothing has happened on your phone, I’m using 120 gigs-ish of storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John My top apps, number one, what’s your guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna say number one, photos, number two, music, number three, messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say photos first. I don’t think you put that much music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your phone. I would actually say Overcast is in the top three and messages is another good idea. Yeah, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey is the closest. Number one, Overcast, because I’m a hoarder. 21 gigs. Oh my God. Goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John on Overcast I have some like whole shows that are no longer available, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For reference, my Overcast is three gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, yeah, now I got a lot of shows. I know I do. Now you know why I’m always asking for like filtering and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like search box on playlists and stuff. Now you know why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Search box on playlists? I never thought about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have, because I suggested it to you on the show. And you said, that’s a good idea, but then you didn’t write it down anymore. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So show you what. Number two, number two, Instapaper. It’s 16.5 gigabytes. Good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been a while since I’ve seen that code, but how, how?
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you saving in there? I mean, I guess it never gets rid of things. Like I Instapaper a lot, and I read them,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I archive them, but I guess they don’t, I don’t understand how it is managing its storage. I know I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a ton of stuff in Instapaper from years of using it, but I don’t, you know, whatever. Anyway, number two,
⏹️ ▶️ John Instapaper. Number three, music at 15 gigs. number four photos at a mere five gigs. Remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have the real photo library. And I also teletop to my storage, so
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And after that is Plex at three gigs, Books at two gigs, GarageBand,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I should just delete at 1.5 gigs and then it trails off from there. And to be clear, people who are like, why are those
⏹️ ▶️ John apps so big? This isn’t the apps, the apps are tiny. It’s the data that goes with the apps. That’s all the top contenders.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is all just attributable to data associated with the apps. Eventually, as you scroll down, you get to things where it’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John app, but all the top consumers are apps that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data. See, mine was actually, like part of the reason I got 30 gigs back earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tonight was there was just, I had some games installed that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody said, this is a really good game, so I went and downloaded it, and it was like 600 megs or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been sitting on my phone for three years, and I’ve never launched it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I deleted things like, I deleted iMovie, because I’m never gonna use iMovie. you
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t enable that feature that it always suggests, which is like, hey, well, we will uninstall and offload apps that you haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John launched in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It offers that to me, and it says it can save a little over 10 gigs by doing that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard bad stories about people who like, it offloads an app that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do need there. Like, I don’t like the idea of that being automatic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would be a better idea for me to just go through one day, go through the whole app library,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just delete any app that I can honestly say, like, I’m never gonna use this. Or rather, this has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been on my phone for three years and I have never used it, so odds are pretty good that I’m never gonna use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like, I’m never gonna actually get to this game. I’m never gonna watch the fancy movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Netflix. I’m never gonna play this game. I know that about myself. I’m just, I don’t play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long games on my phone. I play crappy little two-second games on my phone. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so all these fancy games that have all this great art that are 600 megs each, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete all of them and I won’t even notice. That kind of thing. I’m glad the screen was here, and I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had to look at it for this homework, because I get rid of a whole bunch of space from stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t even know I was losing space to.
#askatp: John buying OLED TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me. Tobergranate would like to know, are you ever planning on buying an OLED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV or are you just gonna skip this technology and wait for the next, such as micro LED?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this your attempt not to have the fact that you skipped over me in the last question included in the program
⏹️ ▶️ John by you trying to give a clean at a point? Because I feel like that’s not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking about it, but now it’s not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why do you do, why are you so mean? You are, what does Merlin call you? You are my worst friend.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why am I so mean? I mean, you could have just, you already read this question. What about the live listeners? They’re like, didn’t Casey just
⏹️ ▶️ John read this question?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but you know, we gotta give the bootleg people something to be excited about and proud of, that they get to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. So you are, as with Merlin, you are my, well, Merlin is not my worst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best friend. You are my worst best friend,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John Smith. He’s just so- It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not worst best friend,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re blowing it in typically your own fashion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever! You’re messing up our reference. Whatever, I don’t care. It’s you, it’s you. Why are you always bad cop? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I wanna know. All right, so answer the
⏹️ ▶️ John question, please. All right, I have been, and I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John still am, planning to buy an OLED TV, but every year it’s been like, oh, well this year there are some compromises
⏹️ ▶️ John with the OLED, but next year they’ll probably fix these issues. And the number of compromises has been steadily
⏹️ ▶️ John decreasing, but still every time I look at them I go, well, I’ll wait until the next year till they
⏹️ ▶️ John fix this thing. In particular this year, well, first of all, I’m annoyed that in the US we can’t get Panasonic
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs because for a variety of reasons, they’ve had the best picture quality
⏹️ ▶️ John in a bunch of years, including the current one, if that’s like what you care about, but they’re not even sold in the US and I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John buy some weird European one because there’s always weird differences and yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m mostly looking at the LGs and the LG C10 or C Roman numeral 10, CX,
⏹️ ▶️ John has some weird actual regressions from the C9. Not only did they not fix every single thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John was wrong with the C9, but it brought some of its own new limitations and it’s like, oh, maybe it’s because of
⏹️ ▶️ John COVID and maybe who knows what the upshot is. But like there hasn’t, and there hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John been much progress in panels because LG is the only one who makes panels. So every other TV that you buy is just an LG panel on there anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re not really making progress on these panels because everybody is trying to pick their next screen
⏹️ ▶️ John technology, right? That Samsung has one bet on a particular kind of panel technology
⏹️ ▶️ John and LG is betting on a slightly different one and it’s not clear when they’re gonna be ready. So it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is the tail end of OLED because if LG’s just gonna keep making
⏹️ ▶️ John this same panel while shifting its focus to the other kind of panels, like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. So I haven’t made the decision that I’m just not getting an
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED. I still want to, I just want there to be an OLED that mostly gets rid of, like that has all the
⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces that we want, that has all the HDMI 2.1 with all the features and the maximum bandwidth,
⏹️ ▶️ John that does really good black frame insertion instead of the weird one that has good near
⏹️ ▶️ John black handling, that has the auto low latency mode and the variable
⏹️ ▶️ John refresh rate and all the features and the best software that handles all the new interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John and works well with all the new game consoles, all the things. And we’re just not quite there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every year I was like, well, maybe next year. So this year is just like last year. I’m saying, oh, maybe next year,
⏹️ ▶️ John the TVs will, there’ll be a TV that has fewer compromises. The good news is the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John are going down. Like you can get like a C10, 55 inch C10 for like 1500 bucks now on sale. So they’re getting cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, the chips inside them for the user interface are getting
⏹️ ▶️ John faster and the apps that come with the TVs are getting better. And so while I wait, things are getting
⏹️ ▶️ John better. And in the meantime, you know, my current TV, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it still looks good to me. Like I know it’s not as good as an OLED. I know the blacks aren’t as good. It’s not even 4K,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the hurdle for me getting a new one It’s like I have to upgrade everything to support 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s a bigger task than just getting a new TV. So I’m just still waiting.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the answer is am I ever planning on buying one? Yes, ostensibly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, possibly. That’s funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, thank you to our sponsors this week, Linode, Hay.com and Mack Weldon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can do that yourself if you’d like to by going to atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thanks everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. John
⏹️ ▶️ John any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Harmon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ We’ve been back in the podcast
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ John This would be a perfect time for Marco to tell us about his various adventures of Swift if he hadn’t already told us half
⏹️ ▶️ John of them in the pre-pre-pre-pre-show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well first I’m gonna send this image in the chat, in the private chat, sorry, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s a it’s a earlier in the show when we were talking about 5G coverage and I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure doesn’t cover where I am right now. Casey sent these maps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our chat, in our little private chat channel, screenshots of AT&T’s coverage map showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that indeed it covers almost everywhere I would probably go. Now I have figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out where my actual house is on this map and I superimposed it here and sent it back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you Casey, and you can see that while it looks like my house might have 5G
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coverage, there’s a huge hole in coverage on half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my block and many of the surrounding blocks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And have you experienced that already? Because that looks like straight up little to no coverage from what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the funny thing is that we have an AT&T cell tower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a water tower that I have line of sight to from my house and that covers this entire area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well. So I don’t know why there is this hole in coverage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right here where it doesn’t have 5G, it just has the 4G LTE.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why there is that hole there, but it’s a few hundred feet from the tower.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it directly below the tower?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not directly below the tower, but it’s like three blocks over. It’s not far. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area that is blacked out from the 5G map can also see the tower with direct line of sight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a flat town with a water tower in the middle of it. There’s cell phone towers all over it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And somebody pointed out, we have to keep this in the show because this is kind of belated real time follow up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I guess just makes it regular follow up. Somebody pointed out in the chat, and I didn’t have a chance to say anything during the show, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if the 5G that’s listed on these maps is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actual 5G or is it the 5GE or whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it, is this all 5G or is this actual legitimate 5G? and knowing AT&T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how shysty they are, I bet you anything that none of this is honest to goodness 5G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s actually 5G.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you because walking around this town that is mostly covered apparently with their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5G official coverage, I’ve never seen the 5G thing on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone. Whereas I do see 5G in other places.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so that bodes well then, right? That would hopefully indicate that this is legitimate 5G. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m pretty sure this does indicate that there is 5G in some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my town that has an AT&T tower in line of sight.
⏹️ ▶️ John This doesn’t list the millimeter wave anywhere, though. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not even a legend. Does AT&T have millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wave deployed
⏹️ ▶️ John I look this up because we got a bunch of feedback that are like, oh, the reason why Verizon was in that thing is because Verizon is the only company
⏹️ ▶️ John in the United States that has millimeter wave, but that’s not true. I think they all have it coming out. I think Verizon’s first, maybe, but
⏹️ ▶️ John AT&T’s gonna have it. I think even T-Mobile. I did a little bit of research on it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I expect all the carriers to eventually have to support millimeter wave somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably not anywhere near Marco’s house, but in certain streets in New York City, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there will be millimeter wave 5G on all the major carriers, I imagine, this time next year. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably not relevant at all. I just comment that it’s not even on the legend, right? So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, no, we’re not even going to show you where that might be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you saw Gruber’s map on his review. He had, here’s the city that I live in, And these six
⏹️ ▶️ John streets have millimeter wave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and actually to that end, I would like to file a formal complaint about Gruber’s review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was extremely good, except I don’t think, for me anyway, that he had put enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emphasis on how incredibly fast the millimeter wave or whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called, 5G is. Because he mentioned it as kind of like almost an aside in the review, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall exactly what his speeds were, but it was something to the order of like two and a half gigabits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per second on a freaking phone. Like this is real world actual results
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he got on these, uh, on these review units. I know I’ve told the story a hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times on this show and I apologize, but it’s really is relevant. When we moved out of an apartment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moved into the home that I’m living in now, we were in a Comcast area and I hated Comcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because everyone hates Comcast. And then we were moving into a Verizon Fios area. And this was in 2008 when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey files was still pretty darn new. And I remember vividly being overjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a symmetric 15 megabit per second connection. 15.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My iPhone 11 pro easily gets two to three times that without even trying. And now, again, this is 2008.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now we’re in 2020, it’s 12 years later, but 15 megabit, I was overjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by. And then eventually I upgraded 75 megabit. And, and again, like that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. It was so fast. Now I have the best BIOS I can buy. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey symmetric gigabit service. In theory, not of course in reality, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in theory, there is no difference in me moving a big file from my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my Synology that’s three feet away, than there is from my desk to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dad’s house, who also has a different ISP, but also has gigabit, you know, 60 miles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away. I know that’s not literally the case, But on paper, it should be about the same speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is bananas how quick our internet connection is at home. And yet, and yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this little slab that’s standing in the middle of a street in Philadelphia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gruber got 2 and 1 1⁄2 gigabits down? That is bananas to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can’t believe that it was just like a one-liner off to the side. That blows my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, because there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many. It is amazing, technically, but there are so many asterisks on that. That’s fair, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s only in these very small coverage areas, like millimeter wave or mm wave,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how I’m supposed to be saying this. It only covers these very small areas and you basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to, it’s almost as if you have to put wifi routers everywhere. Like it’s that kind of scale
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s worse than wifi because it doesn’t penetrate as well as wifi even. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John line of sight. It’s not quite line of sight, but almost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and so like the example everyone keeps giving of like a sports stadium, that makes total sense. That’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in practice, this is gonna be a rare benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most people, if it’s ever a benefit to them. Like if they ever happen to be in an area that has this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also again, like burn through your data cap in two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of solving the wrong problem. And then of course, as a few people in the chat are pointing out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s also interesting that the tests right now are with empty 5G networks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once everyone has 5G phones, congestion will become a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, allegedly, 5G deals with congestion better than 4G, and that’s great, I look forward to that, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of thing that we actually need cell network advancements to solve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, peak speeds in ideal conditions on an empty network with unlimited plans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t throttle you, That’s a fantasy for most people. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually solving real world congestion in dense areas or in event
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spaces like stadiums and concerts and stuff, that’s a real problem to solve. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if 5G brings significant benefits to that, that is useful and that is great. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all just funnels into our continuing narrative of like, yeah, 5G will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good once it’s widespread, but I still think it’s being kind of oversold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its benefits. But, you know, we’ll see when we all have it and when in two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years it’s ubiquitous and all the phones have it and that everyone’s using. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then we can get back to complaining about how the coverage isn’t good enough and data plans are too slow or too small, rather. They won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too slow. They will be too small. And the coverage will still suck in half of our houses. Corey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bachman I tell you what, though, it’s interesting that you bringing up stadiums and this is not new, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, back in the before times, 15 years ago when we still went to UVA football games,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was tough to do anything on the internet in these football stadiums.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the football stadium is 65-ish thousand people, which is a lot of people in one small space for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure, but which, God, is terrifying to think about now. Oh my Lord. Even though it’s all outdoors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still terrifying. But nevertheless, if I wanted to do anything on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phone during the game, it was an exercise in incredible frustration. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, if wave does improve that as it claims to, that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely, extremely welcome because that is one place, you know, when you have this extraordinary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey congestion, that is one thing that I don’t feel like has gotten particularly better in the five or 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years that we’ve had season tickets. You know, it’s always a disaster if the stadium’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full and, you know, there are there are times when UVA can fill their own stadium and times when they can’t, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s mostly at capacity, it is impossible. And that’s outdoor. It’s the perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place to put a series of Wi-Fi routers. And actually, I believe the UVA football stadium has Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s for free. And even that gets overwhelmed, because that’s not really designed for 60,000 people. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reminds me of when we were at Moscone at WWDC. And I don’t remember if they’ve done this at a-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was just going to say, does the sports team stop playing and tell everyone to turn off their my fives?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, definitely not. But I remember being like Moscone and they would put up like a four pack of TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they would show like the Wi Fi and like where the coverage was being what was good and where it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad and what the throughput of the entire event was. And I was always fascinated by that because it’s so far out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my normal, you know, day to day, I don’t have to think about that sort of thing. But yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s here I am now shilling for this ridiculous Verizon thing that I made so much fun of last week. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am very fascinated to see the real world effects of not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only 5G, but most particularly this millimeter wave thing, if it does come to other carriers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think what was shocking to me about Gruber’s 5G millimeter wave numbers was not
⏹️ ▶️ John the download, but how much worse the upload is. I mean, I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John part of this is power limits on the phones because they don’t have power transmitters. Maybe it’s a choice about the
⏹️ ▶️ John network, but it was, you know, whatever it was, 1.8 gigabits down, 25 to 70 megabits up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s a very good point. That’s a very, very good point. Like that’s not, you know, that’s two orders of magnitude.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, yeah, I mean, it’s fine. Like your FaceTime will work. It’s not like you’re probably gonna be limited too much,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not even a hundred megabits. It’s not even like a hundred megabit ethernet, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we’ll see how this works out. Oh, and also more real-time follow-up from Gruber specifically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently there’s no 2X button on your Mini with only two cameras, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As far as I know, that is always the case. You only get those little quick jump buttons for the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware lenses that the phone has. So I will miss my 2X button, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can still pinch to zoom. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or a Gerber suggestion is to just take the photo at 1X and then crop it later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there is a slight difference in things like how the JPEG compression, I won’t have ProRAW.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I’ll have to deal with like, you know, like JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artifacting and detail at different crop levels. Like, digital zoom is slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically better at capture time than taking a picture and then cropping it later. But it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I’m surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hasn’t started promoting this because it’s, you know, Photoshop, Adobe had an announcement about their new version of
⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop and it’s filled with all sorts of machine learning algorithms for doing stuff to photos that look really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John and one of them that you see a lot of everywhere, both just in still photos and even like even video
⏹️ ▶️ John games. Now, NVIDIA has a bunch of tech that they have been advertising that will essentially allow you to
⏹️ ▶️ John zoom and add information that’s not there through the magic of machine learning, basically synthesizing pixels that
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t exist to let you essentially zoom in on a photo and
⏹️ ▶️ John not have it become pixelated or more blurry because they will just take information that doesn’t exist and say, but it might’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been something like this and just add it. and that would be amazing technology for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially 2X digital zoom that does not look as bad as, oh, we just blow up the pixels and
⏹️ ▶️ John smooth it over. Now, for all I know, Apple is doing some of that, but the latest tech in that
⏹️ ▶️ John realm, where it’s not just like we treat your image as a big grid of pixels and do the best we can, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John machine learning algorithms that try to figure out what it is they’re looking at in some fashion and be able to,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially the old movie joke of now enhance, being able to actually do that, albeit
⏹️ ▶️ John by making up data that doesn’t exist rather than revealing information that’s actually there. In video games, they do
⏹️ ▶️ John it to allow the game to render at lower res and then essentially upscale, but
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than just upscaling where it’s like, oh, I can tell you’re rendering this at, you know, 1080 and upscaling to 4K, the
⏹️ ▶️ John upscaling is so good that it’s becoming more difficult. If you don’t know what to look for, it’s becoming
⏹️ ▶️ John more difficult to tell whether something is running in native 4K versus something running at 1440 being
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligently upscaled to 4K. And so you can get huge frame rate
⏹️ ▶️ John increase for a marginal loss in quality, right? So if I told you you could double your frame rate by
⏹️ ▶️ John having it look a little bit worse, you would definitely take that. So that’s something Nvidia is doing. And I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple brings that with their next round of neural engine magic to say, hey, 2X digital zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ John but guess what? This new 2X zoom looks amazing. I mean, that’s kind of what Deep Fusion does, like a let me bring
⏹️ ▶️ John out detail that’s not really there, but it’s not as aggressive. So all
⏹️ ▶️ John this is saying is worst case, you take the picture at 1x, throw it into the latest version of Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John and let it work its machine learning magic to double the resolution and then zoom into 2x.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or like Casey, take all your photos and put them in a shoebox and then later, try to find one, dig it out, put it in Photoshop and
⏹️ ▶️ John this workflow that I still don’t understand the benefits that it’s providing because you keep
⏹️ ▶️ John telling us about the drawbacks, but it’s like, just give it a Dicloud photo library.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the benefit is that all of the data is, it’s like the maniacs who insist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on putting plain text on the file system, right? It’s the same basic premise. Like all of the raw,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not raw as in the file format, but all the raw files are just sitting on the file system. They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Now they’re organized by date. So if I need to find a photo, as long as I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approximately when it was taken, it’s incredibly quick.
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of benefit. You can find photos by date in iPhone photo library, I swear.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey OK, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s fair. But OK.
⏹️ ▶️ John granted, Apple’s photo does, Apple’s photos app does make it way harder than it used to be. I hate that
⏹️ ▶️ John app with such a passion. But it is possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, but here you go. If you hate the app with such passion, what am I missing then? What is good about it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I can do all my crops and edits or whatever, and they show up everywhere across the Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John that has this thing, right? and I can have some of the photos on devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can have all the photos on other devices, like they’re still just in the file system and they get backed up by all my backup programs.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t have a place where I have a bunch of files organized by date and name especially, but don’t you edit your photos?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I crop, rotate, and adjust any photo I care about. How do you do that with
⏹️ ▶️ John a box full of JPEGs? Do you make a second copy of the photo and crop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I would do it at the time, if I cared that much, which I don’t, I would do it at the time that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking them off the device and putting them on the Synology. I would do it all then.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you would discard the original then? Yeah. This is the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ John my God. Photoshop, Photoshop. Apple Photos saves the original always so I could always go back to
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but it also saves all of my edits and crops and keywords and tagging and
⏹️ ▶️ John face recognition and all the other things you need to get on this bandwagon eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is, I just, I really, After having been burned by EverPix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and PictureLife and Google Photos, I just do not trust anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the cloud as being the one true source of information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I just don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you wouldn’t. The one true source would be on your local disks and your local backups, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. It would also be in the cloud and also be in your cloud backups. The only difference is it wouldn’t be a file system
⏹️ ▶️ John of hand named, handmade folders and files that you made. It would just be the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. but I assure you in the Apple photo library, there are eventually a bunch of JPEGs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I mean, if I were to go to iCloud photo library, what I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do is I would still insist that the source of record
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my ridiculously named files because that works for me, I like it, it’s reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s repeatable. And again, like if photos would let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put this on a network share, I would have done this two years ago, easily if not more, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I, I, I have such a problem with having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to run like a fifth redundant backup of this, of all this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a physical drive connected to my iMac just because photos won’t let me use a network drive for my photo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey library. Like that’s so ridiculous. It, and especially for something,
⏹️ ▶️ John the network drive thing is a problem, but I think you should, you should let go of the carefully named files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear you. I will not be listening to you. Because again, I want the source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of record to be effectively like plain text files in folders. I know that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally what we’re talking about, but you know, for people who have this note taking system where they have this folder structure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where everything is just dot TXT and this bespoke folder structure,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s bananas personally. Like I’m all in on Apple Notes for that sort of thing, I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand why one would be like that. Uh, and so I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want something like that, something that I am 100% in control of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want that to be the source of record for my photographs because they’re too important to me to trust to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything else. I don’t want Apple’s file names. I don’t want Apple managing them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to manage where the files are, where they go, how they get there, et cetera. It’s the same reason like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are things that I’m very picky about, like pretty much every photo that winds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up in my photo library and has wound up in my photo library for the last three, four years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much everyone will have some amount of geotag information in it. You know, I might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approximate. It might not be the exact down to the meter latitude and longitude I was standing at, but it’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll at least get me to the city in which I took the picture of nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ll try my darndest to remember, Oh, I think I was standing about there. That is bananas. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the first to tell you it’s bananas, but it is not entirely unusual for me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to look up. A photo by the location in which I’ve taken it. And so, because of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of my iPhone photos come in with all that caked in and built in automatically. But for my big camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will go through with the app geotag, which is. Okay, but it gets the job done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I will mark where these photos were taken because that’s, And that is important to me in the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s important to me that these files are in the exact scenario layout that I want on the file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system, because there is nothing, this is not a challenge. There’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that anyone can do other than me to ruin what is sitting on the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I can ruin it by deleting stuff. I can ruin it by not backing it up appropriately as we went through like a year ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I almost went and had that happen, but my photos, especially, I have like literally four or five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copies. And so it would take a serious amount of oopsies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to happen in order for me to lose all my photos. And that’s the way I like it, because I got burned by EverPix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got burned by Picture Life. I got burned by Google Photos. I don’t trust any of these anymore. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just don’t. I mean, after how many times of me getting screwed by these things, why would, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the other thing, like, why would I go to Apple of all people? Like, if Google can’t get this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, why in God’s green earth would I trust Apple with this? this. And I, I eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will do it. I’m telling you I will eventually one day in an infinite time scale, I will do it. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I see a million reasons not to do this in very few reasons to do it other than
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s tons of reasons to do it. I mean, like it really depends on how much you want to do with your photos. Like, do you have a system of faving
⏹️ ▶️ John your photos in any way? Like, so how do you, you have so many photos, how do you find the good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, a couple of ways. First of all, I don’t, it’s actually for all the time I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spending telling you how important it is to keep this, you know, by date hierarchy and so on. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that often that I go spelunking into my photo library to get an old photo. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, there are two ways I can find a photo that I care about. Number one is if it’s something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is good and even not even necessarily great, but good, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually put that in day one. And so I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John produce through day one. I don’t trust Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, but day one is a good place for your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey favorite photos. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually yes. I trust day one a lot more than I trust Apple photos. And I’m sure there’s gonna be somebody writing me saying, oh my God, I lost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all my photos on day one. Very well could be, who knows. But for me, day one has not yet burned me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess strictly speaking, Apple hasn’t. But everyone except day one has.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the answer to your question though, before like why in the world would I trust Apple? Well, lucky you, the rest of the world, including
⏹️ ▶️ John me and Marco, I’ve been testing this for you for years. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s not a complete no-no.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like this is their new kid on the block and they’re totally untried and untested. I’m not saying they’re perfect. People have lost up with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos, but I feel like it’s the same trade-offs. If you have a bazillion backups, like I do, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can have a bazillion backups of your Apple Photo Library. It’s the same as having a bazillion backups of your
⏹️ ▶️ John files and folders. The only difference is, like, if you have some fear that Apple is going to no longer support
⏹️ ▶️ John the library format and you’ll be stuck with this, you know, whatever it is,.photo library directory that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t make heads or tails of, A, the photos are still, up to this point, in there as
⏹️ ▶️ John randomly named, garbage named files, but they’re all there, but B, I think Apple has shown over the years,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do continue to support this as a major part of their suite of products, so
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t see them abandoning anytime soon and deciding, you know what, photos aren’t a really important part of the Apple experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re not gonna support this app anymore because you take photos on your phone and it has to go somewhere. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had the same library from iPhoto days, and I’ve never had to do anything other than continue to upgrade Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John operating systems and buy new Apple devices, and it has brought my library along. Even when they
⏹️ ▶️ John dropped the ratings, it made it easy enough for me to change the ratings into likes. You know, likes
⏹️ ▶️ John are now flops, timeline goes sideways, but you know, I haven’t lost any data, and I’ve been able to preserve my
⏹️ ▶️ John metadata. I feel like that’s the main thing, the benefit you would get is the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John do things to your photos, to put sort of work and labor into the organization of your photos
⏹️ ▶️ John in a richer way than just putting them into a directory or copying them into day one, right? And that includes things like geotagging,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I assure you can also do in Photos, right? Like all these things are,
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos does a super set of what you’re doing. It just totally scrambles your files and directories, which I know can be upsetting
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s one of the things that you’ve put a lot of labor into is the careful organization of your files and folders. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if and when you’re willing to let go of that, you will get benefits on the other side of it. And I don’t think you’ll lose
⏹️ ▶️ John anything in terms of reliability and data durability. you will just lose
⏹️ ▶️ John file naming and directory naming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and even then, if most of your organizational strategy is just by date, which I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always found to be the most useful photo organizational strategy, that’s just a shell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco script away. Because all the original files that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are in that Apple photo library thing, they all have EXIF data. And so you can use your precious EXIF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tool to actually very easily, automatically, rebuild a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco date-based directory structure from that Apple Photo Library file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ever really had to. And I’ve also, just something else to point out, I have tried in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many, you know, different organizational strategies, different programs, Aperture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lightroom, iPhoto, doing my own folder structure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I have lost more photos to my own incompetence trying to run my own systems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I have to Apple Photo Library by a mile. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you run the system yourself, you aren’t perfect either. And almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year, like around Christmas time, we’re trying to make our Christmas photo album
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the previous year to bring and show our parents, here’s what we did last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Christmas. And Tiff and I are scrambling to figure out where are the pictures from that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one camera, from this, from last year? I can’t find those like, cause they didn’t go through the system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They had their own system and we can’t find them and God knows where they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are. And occasionally we do find them, sometimes we don’t. And like, you know, your own system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is manual and just like manual backup plans, like there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential for error there. Whereas like the automatic built-in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, method the system has to keep these things in sync, Which again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, I’m as much of a skeptic of Apple Web Services half the time as you are, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one has proven itself to be really solid. And again, as John said, this is not a new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been really solid for, as far as I can tell, almost everybody, for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, even when it was new, it was pretty solid, and it’s gotten even more improved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since then. And so, ultimately, while I agree with John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Photos apps are pretty rough in a lot of ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like for editing anything, as an organizational tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have way more features than the Finder. That’s true. It’s like, you know, it’s, although I will say this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the task that Casey just described, finding things by date. Photos can do that, but unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John versions of iPhoto, which had like a one-click way for you to show, just show me photos from this date,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so many more clicks in Photos, whereas Casey can just go to the folder is named after that year and find
⏹️ ▶️ John it faster than photos. But that’s only because photos is so exorable, that they refuse to give you like a quick search
⏹️ ▶️ John box and let just let me type a date.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s the thing is that I, it is non-negotiable to me. It is non-negotiable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the system of record that all of my photos, iPhone, big camera, Aaron’s iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of them, the system of record is the Synology. I will not budge on that. You can think I’m crazy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will not budge on that. So I will never trust photos to just start ingesting things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, in, in, in may and assuming that it’ll work. I will still do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my process no matter what, even if I embrace iCloud photo library, the, it is non-negotiable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, I don’t care if the two of you or anyone listening thinks I’m nuts. That’s fine. I will not budge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this. And so what I’m saying, what I’m saying to you is I’m going to take an app that the both of you have spent several minutes describing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how crappy it is. I want to take that and I want to use it in an extraordinarily non-standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way where I’m telling it, okay, I would like you to use a, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to use this external file system, be it on a drive or be it via, you know, network share
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as where all the files are. I want you to keep it in that file system. I don’t want you to screw with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything else. I don’t want you to have your own copy. Keep it all. If you’re going to mess with it and mess with the
⏹️ ▶️ John original. No, you can’t. I don’t think you can even tell it to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I thought you could tell it to just leave the files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think so. See this again, I don’t understand why, what this is buying me. I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, what you need to do is revisit your bedrock assumption of like system of record. The Synology can
⏹️ ▶️ John be the system of record for your photos. It’s just that you would have a second copy of it on your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and a third copy of it in iCloud and a fourth copy of it in Backblaze, right? It’s just, it’s just a way of looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at things, right? All the data you’ll have, I have a complete copy of my photos on my Synology, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, I have two complete copies of my photos on my Synology. But, and if I just
⏹️ ▶️ John declare that that is my system of record then success, I’ve maintained your status quo, right? Granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John on my Synology, they’re in iPhoto photo library bundles,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one of them from my Mac and one of them from my wife’s Mac. Nope, nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John nope, nope, nope, nope. But like, what is the system of record? How is that not the system of record?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the data is there, but it’s also, And not just like a sum of data, all
⏹️ ▶️ John data, every single one of my photos is on my Mac, on my wife’s Mac, and then on the Synology twice
⏹️ ▶️ John in the form of Time Machine backups, and also into SuperDuper backups.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I hear you, but I just, I don’t, all I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then if I am embracing photos is adding more steps to my process because my process
⏹️ ▶️ John No, fewer, all you do is you just take pictures with your phone and you’re done. That’s one process. And the second thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures, I take pictures of my big camera and I import them into my photo library and I’m done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but I just told you, I’m not negotiating that the system of record is the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they will go, they will travel from the thing where you imported them to the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no. The file’s named the way I want in the directory structure I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not gonna be able to keep the files named the way you want. That’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get on. Then it’s a non-starter. I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John again- You’ll gain so much more, like the ability to-
⏹️ ▶️ John your ability to organize photos into albums and fave them and be able to set things
⏹️ ▶️ John aside and do searches based on geography and do searches based on people’s faces and find the picture of somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ John was in the kitchen on this particular date and make calendars because you have set aside all the pictures you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John in the calendar for the relatives because you had previously gone through and cropped them and adjust them and put faves on them so now they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all ready to go when you make the calendar at the end of the year. Nobody does this except you. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is solving problems that I
⏹️ ▶️ John Who takes thousands of pictures and then just allows them to be a sea of thousands of pictures. You have to do something with them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Otherwise, like, why are you even taking the pictures? Like, why not just take the pictures and throw them in the garbage if you’re never going to look at them again?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do look at them. I just don’t look at them the way you look
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey take thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of pictures. 10 of them are good. And those are the 10 you put in the calendar. Like, it’s not rocket science.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want a f***ing calendar, John. This is not something that I want
⏹️ ▶️ John in my life. But you put pictures in frames. Like you take all the pictures. You have to find the ones that are good, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Otherwise, why are you taking the pictures?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And I can do that with my system in ways that you will not approve of, but I can do
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, they’re on day one, yes, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s not the only way. The other way is I shoot the big photos, the big camera photos in RAW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in JPEG. I shoot everything in RAW in JPEG, and I only keep the RAWs that are of decent photos. So I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just look for all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John RAWs. You throw
⏹️ ▶️ John out the other ones, it’s madness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I told you you’re not gonna like it, but it works. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying, I think you’re doing a lot of extra work for no features
⏹️ ▶️ John that you wouldn’t get with iPhoto library. And there are features in iPhoto that you don’t get with your current system. Now there
⏹️ ▶️ John are attributes that you don’t get with iPhoto library, which you say are deal breakers, but they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John features. They’re not like a thing you can do in one case and you can’t do in the other. They’re just attributes as in, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have folders and files that are named. You’re right, that attribute will go away, right? But then what does that attribute give you? No actual
⏹️ ▶️ John features, no actual benefits. Like, well, now I can search by date, but you can do that in photos too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the other thing is that I have all of my iPhone photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to Google photos still to this day, and I don’t trust Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos anymore with my big camera photos, but all of my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and actually it wouldn’t get Aaron’s either, but it will get my phones. Google photos to this day gets my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone and it has up until a year or two ago when I abandoned the piece of garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google photos uploader, it had everything. It had my photos, her photos, big camera photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had everything up until a year or two ago. And so if I wanted to search for a person or search for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey geography or something like that, I would turn to Google Photos and I would do it there. And that would almost, almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly it would get me there. The only case, the only way it wouldn’t is if it was something that happened in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last year or two and the only way I documented it was the big camera, which I can’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a time that I didn’t snap at least one photo with my iPhone at an event where I was using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the big camera predominantly. So even if you’re insistent that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having some sort of photo management app is the panacea that will solve all the problems that I don’t actually think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have, then I have Google Photos, leave me alone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like a photo app is another way for you to organize your photos. Your current way you organize your photos
⏹️ ▶️ John is you put your good ones in day one and you put the rest in date-oriented files and folders. And those are
⏹️ ▶️ John two ways to organize, but there are many more ways to organize. And your approach to edits, where if you
⏹️ ▶️ John make edits, you’ll do it on import and then throw away the original is also maddening because the idea that you
⏹️ ▶️ John will never change your mind about edits or want to later edit another picture, like whatever, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a weird system. But anyway, like if you ever want to do anything with your photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John having them in an app lets you slice and dice those photos much more easily than dealing
⏹️ ▶️ John with like the Finder. The Finder is a worse photos app than the Photos app. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we can safely say that. For all
⏹️ ▶️ John annoyances of the Photos app, it is a better photos app for organizing, for finding,
⏹️ ▶️ John for editing, you name it. So those are the benefits I think you’d be getting by using the photo library. It’s not so much
⏹️ ▶️ John the iCloud photo library part, it’s the fact that now you have a giant bucket where you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do work to organize your photos in different ways and
⏹️ ▶️ John have that work preserved across everything, all your devices, all your Apple things, you know, the whole nine yards
⏹️ ▶️ John across the cloud, everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the only way that I feel like I’m missing out something that photos would provide is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that when I was all in on Google photos, which again, screwed me like everything else has,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was all in on Google photos, I did create albums for bigger events like vacations and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was nice to be able to just hop over to an album and be able to show pictures, you know, or, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least narrow down pictures from a particular vacation. I, I absolutely, 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confess that I do miss out on that to some degree. But with that said, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey date this event happened, I can jump right to the photos. Now, granted, admittedly, I will be jumping to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much larger pile of photos than I would probably want for the, for, you know, this hypothetical where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sharing a photo with somebody, but, or even just like an abridged version of our vacation with somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, but I could still do it. And alternatively, especially in the last couple of years, I’ve gotten really devout about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day one and I would just look for the tag in day one. That is, you know, Declan Smith’s birthday, Disney world trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then that’s the best photos that we took from that trip. You don’t have to like it, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are many different, there are many of them. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I butchered my own quote.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, this is, this is the system that’s, that works for me. And I, it’s not often that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think to myself, ah, crap. I really wish I had a photo album that, that I could just show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, John of this vacation that we took. I just, you’re, you’re fixing problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I really don’t feel like I have. And who knows? Maybe tomorrow I’ll set up iCloud Photo Library and say, holy crap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were right. I can’t believe I waited this long. But for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve solved all of the problems that I have had by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either writing a bespoke Swift app to name and place these files, which I’ve done. I’ve solved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it by finding an app that works on Mac OS to add geotags, which I found and maybe one day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll write my own, but at least for now I’ve found something that’ll do it for me, or assist me in doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I mean, I have reminders that fire once a month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at different stages of the month to remind me to pull pictures off of Aaron’s phone and then pull pictures off of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone. I mean, I’m not saying that it is a completely foolproof system. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying that it can’t be improved, but I’m saying that all of the things that really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were pain points for me, I feel like I fixed. It doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it can’t get better, but anything that was actively painful, I fixed. And why would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I screw with something that seems to be working?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, on this very show, I think you described it as Byzantine and complicated or something to that effect. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John what the benefit I was hoping to get for you is you can simplify your life by not having to worry about all that stuff you just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey having doing what
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone else does, but just take pictures with your phone and then there is no step two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed. But that’s if I’m willing to give up the one thing I’m telling you is table stakes, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want these files where, where and how I want them. I will not give that up.
⏹️ ▶️ John you should work on giving that up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will take it under advisement. I will take it under advisement, but it’s not going to happen. Because I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been burned too many times.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should try and experiment. Leave your photos where they are and start a new empty iPhoto library
⏹️ ▶️ John and try it for a month or something. Because if you don’t like it, then you can just export all those photos and then run your
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift thing on them and then shove them into the Synology, right? You
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but again… Not this year. Next year. We’re going to work on this for maybe next year. next year. Steve McLaughlin Okay, Marko to swim in the ocean,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get you to try briefly the iCloud Photo Library lifestyle.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you can report back on the show and say how much you hated it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark O’Loughlin I know, I think I use photos now. Part of my process was to use image capture to pull these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off my phone or Aaron’s phone. And actually, since Heek and Heath and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HEVC and whatever they’re all called, became a thing, image capture will cause the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to convert to JPEG. And if you use photos, you can export the originals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can export the HE, HE by Cs, whatever they are, HEVCs, I don’t care. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late and I’m tired. I should have the lights on. It would wake me up, wake me up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right, Marko? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways. So what I do every, well, twice a month is I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find the place where I put my temporary photos library, delete it, and then I will start photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’ll say, holy crap, there is no photos library. Where would you want me to make this? and I’ll put it in basically the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same spot. And it’ll be called KC mid-October, whatever. And I’ll do an import from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phone. I will then immediately export it all to a folder on my desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I will run my little Swift app to move them all to the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I delete the photos library I just created an hour earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the system is flawless. I take it all back. Yep, I told you. Ha ha!