402: Flat-Side Promoter
29 Oct 2020iPhone 12 Pro: the official ATP review.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- Peter Pan: Arms akimbo
- 5G upload speeds
- Verizon’s 5G lead
- Photos-related updates
- Apple Photos file management options
- Image Capture can import HEIC files if you change a setting on your phone:
Settings→Photos→Transfer to Mac or PC→Keep originals
- Google Photos
- Marco is aware of the Sonos Move
- HomePod tip: disable “Hey Siri” on all other devices
- Marco’s laptop repair covered by credit-card warranty
- Peak Design combines MagSafe & mechanical fasteners (via Michael Luís Brown)
- Studio Neat’s Material Dock
- Thoughts on Apple’s battery specs from Justin Scholz
- iPhone 12 Pro Reviews
- MagSafe at 15W speeds
- …requires Apple’s 20W adapter
- Alvin Lim’s video
- USB Power Delivery specs
- Apple’s Adapters
- 20W: 5V@3A (15W), [email protected] (20W)
- 18W: 5V@3A (15W), 9V@2A (18W)
- 87W: [email protected] (12W), 9V@3A (27W), [email protected] (87W)
- 96W: 5.2V@3A (16W), 9V@3A (27W), 15V@3A (45W), [email protected] (96W)
- Lightning Digital AV Adapter Surprise
- iFixIt MagSafe Teardown
- Post-show: Marco’s iPhone 12 Thoughts
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Chapters
- Vote!
- ATP Store, Nov. 1–14
- Peter Pan follow-up (really)
- 5G follow-up
- Photos follow-up
- Smart-speaker follow-up
- HomePod vs. “Hey Siri”
- Laptop repair update
- Peak Design Mobile
- Battery mAh vs. Wh
- Sponsor: Flatfile
- Our iPhone Pro reviews
- John’s Migration Headaches 🖼️
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- Casey’s Carrier Complaints
- MagSafe 15W charging
- Ending theme
- Marco’s brief hands-on time
Vote!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to start tonight with a thing about our election that’s about to happen. And for our non-US
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners, I apologize, but this is important. And I feel like this is important enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if we didn’t say anything that we would be abdicating our duty as Americans. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am urging all eligible US citizens to vote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I want to talk to everyone here of every political persuasion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You all know out there that we are pretty liberal, but I also want to talk to the conservatives right now as well, because I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have conservatives in our audience, you’re listening too, and while we probably disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some particular policy positions, there’s also a lot that we can agree on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Americans. And you know, one of the fundamental things is that we can agree that our country
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a democracy. And the fundamental nature of a democracy is that people vote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to elect their representatives and their leaders. And to me, everything else is secondary. All other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco policy decisions are a lower priority when the democracy itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is under attack. And it would be wonderful to have the luxury for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conservatives and liberals to debate policies and laws, laws, but that’s only possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the foundations of our democracy are solid and trustworthy. And right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are not. The Republican Party at state and federal levels has consistently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and systematically orchestrated massive voter suppression efforts for decades,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve been alarmingly accelerating in recent years. And this is not a politically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biased statement or argument. This is a fact supported by tons of reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evidence from nonpartisan sources and lawsuits and court decisions going back many years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is specifically a Republican effort done to tilt elections in their favor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look for evidence of voter suppression by Democrats, you won’t find anything substantial. Again, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a partisan slant. These are just the facts with tons of evidence behind them. As far as I’m concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone who tries to win by making people’s votes not count
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is anti-American at the highest level, because that’s a fundamental attack on our country.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of many fundamental attacks on our country that this administration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the recent Republican Senate have carried out. And this is only getting worse. They are doing everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can to shamelessly destroy fundamentals of the American democracy for their own gains.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we no longer have conservative and liberal parties. You know, a lot of you out there identify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as conservative politically. You have no party right now. And many of us on the liberal side have felt that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way as well. You know, the Democrats are mostly centrists that by most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first world countries, political definitions would actually be somewhat conservative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Republicans are basically destroying our democracy while making almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no effort to actually govern. And those are the only two choices we have right now. This is the general election.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not the time for third party protest votes. That time is the primaries and we’re past that now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you don’t like either candidate, well, you know, this is politics. Welcome to politics. This is not new. That’s not an excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to throw away a vote. Your job is to look at the two options we actually have and pick the one that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think will be the better leader. And for those of you out there who are planning to vote Republican,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d like you to really consider why. Consider whether the positions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or issues that make you vote that way are more important than the foundation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our democracy that they are actually attacking. You know, because conservatives, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I might not see eye to eye on policy issues, but I hope that you can agree that the integrity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our elections and therefore the validity of our entire democracy is more important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than any other issue. And everyone, no matter how you vote, please, please
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vote. If you are on the side that you want to get Trump out of office,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you absolutely must vote because the table’s tilted. If we just win by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit, we still will lose. They’ll steal it, I assure you. They have and they will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They absolutely will steal it. So we can’t just win by a little. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that we can win and have any chance of election integrity and a peaceful transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of power is to win by a lot. It can’t just be a little. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to win by a lot for it to count. So please, everyone out there, please do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your civic duty. Help defend the foundation of our democracy and vote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m going to go a small step further. Many of you out there have voted by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mail and that’s great, but we can do better. Check with your state.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In many states, mail and voters are also allowed to vote in person. They won’t double count and they will prioritize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the in-person vote if they receive both from the same voter. For lots of horrible reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mail-in votes are at a very high risk of not being counted. So if you are able to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s a big if, I know, vote in person. This is a difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position to try to convince people during a pandemic, I know, and it’s a risk, and I’m not going to minimize this risk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not everyone can or should take that risk. And if you can’t or won’t or shouldn’t, I completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand. But if you are willing and able to vote in person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please go vote in person. You might have to wait in a long line, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the problem, but that’s also part of the fight. Our grandparents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fought in wars to defend our country. They put their lives on the line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they watched people around them die in horrible ways. War is horrible. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t served in the military, as most people in our generation haven’t, you are extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fortunate to not know what it’s like to have to put your life on the line for your country.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The least we can do is for the physically able among us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wait in line for a few hours to vote in an election where that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under attack and that really matters. So please, everyone, vote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re able, vote in person. But regardless, you gotta vote. Every vote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco counts this time. We need all of you. And I hope that we still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a functional country when we record next week, because the election is before the next episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is literally at risk. We desperately need everyone out there to vote.
⏹️ ▶️ John A little follow up on Marco’s thing here for the people who are going to say, we’re in a democracy, we’re in a republic.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what he meant. Let that one slide.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Of course, nerds. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know the people are going to say it, so I’m just prompting. For the mail-in versus in-person voting, at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point, due to the way the current administration has hosed the mail, the US mail service,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably too late for you to put your mailing, your ballot in the mail if you live in a state that demands
⏹️ ▶️ John that it arrive before election day. But there’s still a medium between voting in person and voting
⏹️ ▶️ John by mail. You can take your mail-in ballot in some states and bring it to a drop box, which is not a mailbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a place that says, put your sealed mail-in ballot in this box and you’re done. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have to go through the mail service. So check with your state whether you can do that. That’s what I did. The fact that we have to give all these
⏹️ ▶️ John explanations of how you can successfully vote demonstrates how screwed up voting is in our country.
⏹️ ▶️ John What should be a simple thing that anybody could do very easily is this super duper challenge.
⏹️ ▶️ John because of COVID, but mostly because of massive voter suppression efforts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And in many states, if you have voted by mail, in many states, you’re able to go check the status of your vote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some kind of website that the Board of Elections has in your state. Do that. And if your status
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t showing by the time Election Day happens, go in person and vote somewhere. Again, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John And because our country is incredibly stupid, really, it matters
⏹️ ▶️ John the most if the people in a few particular swing states as we call them. God, if you don’t know anything about our voting
⏹️ ▶️ John system and you’re in another country, if you want to be horrified sometime, look up all this stuff. But anyway, people in America mostly know
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re in a swing state, it’s super duper important you vote, right? Like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in California, like I don’t know how many are listeners in California. California is probably going to go blue. You should totally vote 100%. There’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John on the ballot than just the president. You should totally vote, but you should super duper totally vote. If you’re in a swing state,
⏹️ ▶️ John please only only we can save us. And this, the odds are stacked
⏹️ ▶️ John against us. Please vote please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We I don’t I don’t want to have to do another holiday party next week. Can we please not can we or can we do a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy holiday party instead of an unhappy one? That’d be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love nothing more than to not have to devote ten minutes of next week’s episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to politics like and the only there’s only one way that can happen like that’s that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t want to hear more politics, a tp vote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s it. Vote. Please vote. And seriously, I dropped mine off in a drop box.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tracked it online. Again, every state is different. Look up what you need to. Look at your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey board of elections or whatever. But I didn’t stand in any lines. I verified that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the vote got there. Not to say that Marco’s wrong. I mean, going in person the day of is the best possible thing from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a getting your vote counted perspective. But there are ways to do this in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost every state that wherein you can do it feeling safe and you can do it without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having to trust your vote to the U.S. Postal Service, which in and of itself I have no problems with, but lately has been,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been having a little bit of trouble. So please, please go vote.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will vote.com. We keep saying, oh, check your state, check this, check that. Government websites are usually terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will vote.com. That’s all you need to know. You live in the United States, start on that website. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can also go to like vote.org. But anyway, that’s a URL you can go to to find out how you can do the voting thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not hard, I swear. If you’ve never wrote it before, you will do it. It will work.
ATP Store, Nov. 1–14
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then after you vote and you’re just riding high, feeling great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about voting for all of the good people like Biden and Harris and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else, after you do that, what should you do? You know what you should do? You should check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out atp.fm. Starting on the 1st of November, if all goes according to plan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ATP store will be live. It will be at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t open up the Google Doc because I’m a terrible podcaster with all the different things that we’re going to offer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe we’ll just leave it as a surprise, actually. You should go check it out for yourself. But we will have some new stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a fair bit of old stuff. So check it out starting on November 1, if all goes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to plan, atp.fm slash store. If for some reason things are not going according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to plan, I will commit to putting something on that URL on that page to say, oh, we’ve been delayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, oh, it’s not going to happen. But in theory, everything will be live on November
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1st, probably during the day East Coast time. So if you’re waking up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Asia or something like that on November 1st and it’s not up yet, that’s fine. Just give it a little time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey atp.fm slash store on November 1st. And it will last for two weeks. So first through the 14th. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the time that we thought was as late as we could reasonably do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while still pretty much guaranteeing Americans holiday delivery and at least a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prayer for the Europeans and everyone else to have holiday delivery. No guarantees, no guarantees, but there’s at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least a chance, we hope. We will be using the same vendor, Cotton Bureau, for all our stuff, so your experience before will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably be your experience now. But anyways, atp.fm. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll talk more about the new merchandise next week when we know what it actually is, but there is some new stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Indeed. I should maybe get a new pen. I have to, um, uh, I had a backpack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it turns out, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have thoroughly ruined my, my peak design everyday backpack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How did you do that if you’re never traveling?
⏹️ ▶️ John But before we go into the story, we forgot one more thing too. I got to put everything in the notes or otherwise we don’t get to it. This
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is a lesson I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John learning today. It’s got to be in the notes. What’s the one, what’s the important thing that we forgot to tell people about the store?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll do it and then you’ll know. Oh God, I completely forgot. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John are an ATP member, this is the time for you to shine. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP member will get a discount code for, what is it, 15% off? I believe so. Yeah, 15%
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey off everything in the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John store. So if you want to get 15% off everything in the ATP store
⏹️ ▶️ John and you plan to pay enough money that 15% makes up for your membership, do it. Sign up for a month, get the 15% off,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, get a coupon code, use it, and then unsubscribe.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s free real estate. You can’t, don’t pass it up. And if you’re already an ATP member, thank you. If you just
⏹️ ▶️ John go to your member page, once the sale starts, you will see a coupon code that you can copy and paste in
⏹️ ▶️ John the promo code thing during checkout. Don’t forget the code, because that’ll be annoying to try to do it retroactively through customer
⏹️ ▶️ John support, although they probably will do that for you, to get 50% off anything. And order
⏹️ ▶️ John before the election, so you don’t have, so depending on how it turns out, you may be too depressed to buy merchandise,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you may need to retail therapy. But either way, if you order before the election, you don’t have to worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, thank you, John. I completely forgot to mention that. Yeah, so like John said, wait until the store’s up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then go to your member page and you can see your coupon code.
Peter Pan follow-up (really)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Hopefully turn this round upside down. I was trying terribly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terribly last week to figure out how to describe the way in which Peter Pan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stood in many places, but in Hook. By the way, there are some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people in my life that have been making fun of me for liking
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t do it, Casey. You could just leave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it there. I can’t, I can’t. Okay, all right. I’m just saying, I’m not gonna name these names, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re people that we all know. They’re very mean about Hook, very, very mean. It’s not nice at all. But nonetheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, the way Peter Pan stands and Hook and many other excellent films, just like Hook,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, that can be described as arms akimbo, which is something I had heard but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had no idea what it meant. And several people wrote in to tell us that correction. So thank you to all of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Arms akimbo, A-K-I-M-B-O.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know what the heading on this follow-up item is a reference to, either one of you? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the audience, it says, we always stand in a Peter Pan stance. That’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John for the olds. You know, the people who don’t like hook. Is this destiny or? No, it is not. Moving on.
5G follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5G upload speeds. So I’ve seen a smattering of anecdata that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has said that people who have functional 5G phones, I’m gonna rant about this later,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who have functioning 5G phones are getting actually slower speeds in some cases or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just not terribly impressive speeds on 5G as compared to LTE.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Ian wrote in to tell us that 5G in currently deployed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flavors is a downlink only technology. All the upload is done via LTE, as is the voice and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the control plane. Carriers will be deploying 5G standalone from 2021 on. I presume that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey US-centric, but nevertheless, apparently, especially when it comes to uploads, but even to some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree, perhaps with downloads, it is not gonna be as fast as you might have thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was an explanation of the terrible upload speeds that Gruber had in his review. It’s not using 5G when it uploads,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although I still can’t believe how good those download speeds were on ultra wide or whatever it’s called,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s still, you know, two weeks later is blowing my mind. All right, can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of you tell me about Verizon’s 5G lead, if you don’t mind?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, last show I was talking about how we had heard some people say, well, the reason Apple was promoting
⏹️ ▶️ John Verizon so heavily is because they’re the only company in the US that supports ultra wideband, and all Apple’s phones
⏹️ ▶️ John come with ultra wideband, so why are you gonna sell a phone with an antenna that you can’t even use? Nevermind that that antenna
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t even on a bunch of the non-US models. But anyway, they said, oh, well, other companies will have
⏹️ ▶️ John the millimeter wave stuff coming out. But Verizon got there first. So here is
⏹️ ▶️ John some more info on that. Verizon did beat the other carriers to market by about a year with millimeter wave. Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John used pre-standard hardware using a different technology, which they claimed they were replaced with standards-based equipment.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like how people used to deal with Wi-Fi routers, remember, like before the new Wi-Fi standard would come out? Oh yeah, pre-N.
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment that it’s like, well, the standard’s not finalized. But once it is, there’ll be a firmware update and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll still work. And that is a time-tested strategy for getting to market before your competitors and
Photos follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then we have some photos feedback. Of course we do. Some useful stuff, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple of people wrote in to point out that there is a mechanism by which you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can have photos leave your files alone, kind of. So there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a checkbox in the Mac Photos app. It’s labeled as importing copy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey items to the photos library. And that’s either checked or unchecked, which in and of itself sounds great, because if I could just leave the files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they were, perfect. I mean, leaving the whole thing that Photos doesn’t understand with a network share is believing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that aside. Like, so far, so good. But then you see the subtitle to that line, or the perhaps caption, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will. Only items copied to the library will be uploaded to iCloud Photos. So, ah!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yep, sad trombone indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a pretty big asterisk on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that is a huge asterisk.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, what’s the point? Like, why even support that? It’s so cruel. Speaking of the photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library, I forget if we linked to this last week, but a lot of people hey, Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t change my file names. Like, yeah, it imports them into the library, but it leaves the file names alone. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it used to do that. No longer. I think in Catalina and later, they
⏹️ ▶️ John changed the library format. And that’s why I was saying in the last show, like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco will not preserve your
⏹️ ▶️ John file names, give up. Like, it changes them into an entirely scrambled nonsense file. Now, it still knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what the file names were. And there was actually a bug with this back in the day where it would know what they were, but case insensitively.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you had file names of different only in case or you know You’d import a file name that was lowercase and when you
⏹️ ▶️ John told the photos to export it with the original name It would export it in all caps, but they fixed that bug But anyway photos
⏹️ ▶️ John knows probably and it’s one of its SQLite databases what the file name was But it changes the file name on disk
⏹️ ▶️ John to giant UUID looking scrambled stuff So yeah They’re the options
⏹️ ▶️ John for not mangling your files and photos are not great unless you don’t even want iCloud photos
⏹️ ▶️ John in which why you? Anyway, yeah, it’s it’s a shame but these options change
⏹️ ▶️ John and like when they change to scramble your file names in Catalina There wasn’t a big announcement about it people just kind of discovered
⏹️ ▶️ John it on their own all of which gets back to what I was saying, which is like You will not be able to hold
⏹️ ▶️ John on to just assume your file names are dead to you And then you’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John become at peace with that then move on but don’t assume that you’re going to find some sneaky way to
⏹️ ▶️ John Sim link your way into putting them on a network share and getting photos not to mess with it photo photos once to own them?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pete Autery was the first person that we saw to write in with regard to image capture. I had said in the last show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my workflow is once a month I will create a brand new photos library that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just temporary, and I’ll use that to suck in all of the pictures on either Aaron’s phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or my phone, and then I will delete the library thereafter. And the reason I did that was because that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only way I knew how to get HEIC, HEIF, whatever they are, image files, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey original image files onto my Mac. As it turns out, if you change a setting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your phone, you can actually have it work with image capture. So I’d said in the last show that image
⏹️ ▶️ Casey capture was only taking in JPEGs, which is not what I wanted. So Pete had pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out to us that if you go to settings, this is on your phone, settings, photos, transfer to Mac or PC, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is way at the bottom, and then you can select keep originals. And if you do that, it’ll actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transfer heaps to image capture and presumably in other cases as well, which is news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. And a side benefit of that is it’ll actually speed up image capture because it’s not doing all this transformation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and transcoding, if you will, on the fly as image capture is downloading them all, which was cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know that. And then a quick piece of follow-up. A lot of people have asked understandably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, I use Google Photos, what do you mean it screwed everything up? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know unequivocally that Google Photos was the crux of my issues, but let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me be a little more explicit about what I’m talking about from last show. I still do use Google Photos, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t suck in or import any of my big camera photos. I only have it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take things off the camera roll automatically from my phone. So that means I’m also missing all of Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures as well, come to think of it. But the part about Google Photos that fell apart for me was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Google Photos uploader. Like two-ish years ago, maybe more than that, It went from,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, and my memory’s real hazy here, it went from a specific Google Photos uploader to being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like some generic Google uploader or something like that, or maybe they just redid the whole thing. I don’t remember, maybe John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one way or another-
⏹️ ▶️ John called Google Backup and Sync or something now, whereas before it was called like Photo Uploader.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. So that transition, like it didn’t work for crap when it came to network shares,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like everything just fell apart with it. In addition to, I think it was Google, it may have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been something else, but I think it was Google, started making like duplicate folders all over the place. So it would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, Casey’s birthday and then Casey’s birthday, one, I don’t know, maybe like what was the new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DNS responder? And what was it? DiscoveryD? Maybe Google photos use DiscoveryD too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s like, I don’t know. I’m joking. I’m joking. I know, right? But one way or another, it was a combination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the uploader becoming straight trash and maybe it’s better now. I have no idea, but at the time it was straight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trash and I’m finding all these duplicates everywhere. So I just said, you know what? I’m out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t use any of the uploaders or anything like that. If you haven’t noticed these problems, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep on keeping on with Google Photos. I do love Google Photos. And honestly, if their uploader had never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changed, I don’t think I would even be batting an eye about iCloud Photo Library or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else because Google Photos was working really, really well. It’s just when their uploader changed, it really screwed me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty bad. So that was the back story there.
Smart-speaker follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, tell me, what is the Sonos Move?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is, we heard from a number of people who wanted to point out the existence of the Sonos Move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after I was talking about my smart speaker changing last week. I was saying how I had Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ones in a stereo pair and because they had Alexa built in and AirPlay 2 support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was complaining they didn’t sound very good and many people wrote in to tell me about the Sonos Move, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically a like, optionally battery-powered, pick-up-and-go portable speaker from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonos that is kind of like a Sonos One with AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Alexa, but with a battery, like giant battery butt. And in fact, I am ashamed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say that I did indeed already spend $400 on a Sonos Move. We already own one. I bought it earlier this year. And it’s, it’s not very good, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does sound a little bit different from the Sonos One, but not that different. I would suspect, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t researched this right this second, but I would suspect they probably have a lot in common actually. And it’s certainly, I don’t think it’s worth $400.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not, it’s not very good, honestly. Also, a few more little tidbits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this topic. I had said last week that I thought Sonos was the only way to get the combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an Alexa-powered speaker with AirPlay 2. It turns out Bose also makes smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers, which was news to me. And the Bose smart speakers integrate AirPlay 2 and Alexa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together. So that’s another option. I don’t know anything about them. I looked at them and frankly, I wasn’t impressed by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their industrial design. I think Bose needs to hire some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco younger people to do some of their industrial design. And finally, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick little follow-up. I did indeed go back and get my HomePods since last show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I set them up and they sound almost as good as I remember. They sound a little bit better in my mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re close. They’re a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade. I think the high ceilings in your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco place, probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just thinking that that’s really gonna show the speaker’s weakness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re moving to a more open, large environment than they were back in the other place, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to compare really fairly, but they do still sound way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the Sonos Ones. In particular, I noticed for podcasts, The Sonos Ones tend to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have very boomy voice, whereas the HomePods have much more natural, intelligible voice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without so much boominess, which is actually the opposite of what I would’ve expected. But regardless, they sound much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John better. Someone
⏹️ ▶️ John from inside Sonos wants you to know that it’s kind of unfair that you’re comparing a $350 HomePod sound
⏹️ ▶️ John quality to the sound quality of the less expensive Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ John One or whatever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s totally fair, so I’ll compare it to the Sonos Move, which is $400 and sounds like garbage compared to the HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway. That was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery-powered though, you said, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s like a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, well, if what you want is a pick-up-and-go battery-powered smart speaker,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing I did for years is you can just get battery bases made by third parties
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Amazon Echos. And they usually stick on the bottom in some way, and they’re just little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB batteries, basically, that are made to power the Echo, specifically. And so you can have your Echo sitting in your kitchen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has power pass-through, and these things are like 30 bucks. Power pass-through, you plug it in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time you leave it there, but then whenever you want to pick up your Echo and go somewhere, you just unplug the power cord, pick it up and go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that works just fine for years. And the combination of that is like $130 and is just as beneficial,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just as versatile and sounds almost as good, honestly. So if you want something in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonos Move category, I would recommend just an echo with a battery base. anyway.
HomePod vs. “Hey Siri”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, going back to the HomePods, one other tip that I came up with, when I first set them up here, I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole, you know, restore, start over thing, and they were working terribly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the hearing me and responding department. You know, I would say something, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little Siri blob on top would light up, and then immediately turn off halfway through, and before even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to me. And it took me about a few days to realize that what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was happening was other devices had Hey Siri enabled and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to turn like the recipe for HomePod happiness if you’re going to be a HomePod family. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recipe for happiness is to disable Hey Siri on all of your other devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything that is not the HomePod disable it. And for me, that was easy because I never intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that. Like on the phone, I always have it off. I accidentally had left it on on my iPad and on my watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the watch I’ve been doing the raise to speak thing. And that works great on the Series 6, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked pretty well in the Series 5 as well. So that’s like, you know, raised to speak is fine. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disable the Hey Siri response, but you can keep raised to speak on, and of course you can always use the button on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch. And so if you disable Hey Siri support on every other Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device in your house, HomePods work amazingly. Still slow to respond,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s just Siri, but the rate at which they recognize you is way better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s a much better experience with all the other Hey Siri disabled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you leave any of them on that are frequently around it, especially with your same voice attached
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them, like your own personal phone or watch, the HomePods work so badly that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost seems defective. It wouldn’t surprise me if they saw a big return rate because people thought they were broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they kept cutting off their commands and not responding. That’s how bad it is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t do this. This is not a ringing endorsement of the feature that Apple promotes, which is that your devices
⏹️ ▶️ John will negotiate with each other to determine which one
⏹️ ▶️ John to answer your Hadingus query. See how nice I am, listeners, and I don’t say the word. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John actually have the opposite experience. I just have the one HomePod in my house. And very often
⏹️ ▶️ John I realize early on that the credit I’m giving the HomePod for successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John hearing me is misplaced because I have Hadingus on on all the devices. I don’t wear a watch, so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the watch is uniquely bad, which wouldn’t surprise me because it’s always, you know, historically has been slow and underpowered.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when I say, hey, Dingus lights out, like I’m almost always carrying my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone around with me, whether it’s in my hand or in my pocket as I, you know, especially if I’m going upstairs for the night
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m saying, hey, Dingus lights out. It’s a lot of the time, it’s my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s hearing me and doing it. Like it’s winning the race against the HomePod to hear the command
⏹️ ▶️ John and run it. Now, but I never noticed this because if I think I’m talking to the HomePod, If I look at
⏹️ ▶️ John it and project my voice in that direction, then the lights go out, I’m like, good job HomePod, but actually what happened was the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John said, no, no, phone, you take it. And my experience has been with the HeyDingus on all my devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t, I mean, like you said, maybe like, when
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s slow, I don’t think it’s because of this, but I don’t know, maybe I would have a better experience
⏹️ ▶️ John if I turned it off, but right now I think I’m having a good experience in that I can say it and if my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John is closer to me, it will do it, and if my phone is not closer to me, or sometimes the HomePod wins
⏹️ ▶️ John even when the phone is sitting on the end table next to me and I’m sitting on the couch and the phone is still closer to me. I don’t know how it decides, but
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody wins and somebody usually turns off the light, albeit with some kind of delay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is actually something that possibly the U1 integration of the mini and of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most devices going forward actually might make better because the U1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is able to calculate distance from other U1 things very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precisely. So I don’t know. Anyway, this is a thing to know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my endorsement of the HomePod is audio quality and the mediocrity of Siri has gotten you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to think about buying one. And yeah, but otherwise I’m very happy with having transitioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to being a mixed HomePod plus Alexa family. One thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of wish, this is one of those areas where like Apple’s way of doing things really gets in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way in a number of areas, but I wish that you could assign the HomePod a different name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what if you just said, hey HomePod, play this thing. And if that would then never trigger any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other device, and you could have it never respond to Siri, and you could just have it have its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own name, which you can do with the Alexa ecosystem. You can name different things among choices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like three or four different keywords, and none of them are very good. But the point is, I wish you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just name it something else, even if it only had one, even if it was just, hey, HomePod as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option, and there was no other option, that would still be probably significantly better for a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that always amazes me that they didn’t give an alternate. Now, granted, you could argue that the Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John device kind of had to because some households have children with that name, but hey, some households could
⏹️ ▶️ John have a child named Siri too. But either way, like, we’re not asking
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, an unlimited ways to address it, just a couple of options. like anything
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Apple way to do it, I would imagine is, oh, you can change it and when you change it, it changes everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, no, so
⏹️ ▶️ John close Apple, so close. I mean, I understand why you wanna do that but it’s like, look, I always wanna call it this and now I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John changed it my whole life, that’s good. But like, this is part of products maturing. Like Apple, when Apple comes out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the gate with a very simple, straightforward solution where they take care of everything for you, that’s great. But as
⏹️ ▶️ John the years roll on, it’s time to consider the features that are lower down in the list, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And one of those might be, hey, Maybe a couple of years into the home pod, let’s let you handle
⏹️ ▶️ John it with a different word, maybe two or three choices. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I don’t think we’re asking for incredible
⏹️ ▶️ John configurability and dip switches and, you know, P-list hacks and be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John write your own. We just, you know, simple, simple demands. That’s how you can tell whether, I feel like whether Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, how it feels about its products. Like maybe it just thinks they’re perfect, but like, I always
⏹️ ▶️ John think of like, they’re not spending a lot of time developing that because there are sort of, you know, obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John second and third tier features that yeah, you don’t have them in year one and maybe not in year two, but eventually you should get
⏹️ ▶️ John around to them. Tons of those on the phone. How many things on the phone that we’ve talked about for years and years,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually we got. Because Apple’s attention has never wavered from the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they worked their way down the list, right? We’ll get that watch face store eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I hope. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod could use a little bit more attention.
Laptop repair update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And finally, for my follow-up, I have laptop repair follow-up. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned a few weeks back that we had sent away Tiff’s laptop, that it had just totally died,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we got it repaired by Apple, out of warranty, for a lot of money. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to specially thank Joe Aithman, Patrick O’Sullivan, and Joe Shaw, who were the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first ones to point out to me, hey, did you buy that laptop with a credit card?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because many credit cards offer a free second year of warranty for electronics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you buy through them. And it turns out, my credit card that I bought it from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did indeed offer this. It was a 14 month old computer that had a $750 repair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I went to American Express, filled out a bunch of forms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and today they credited my account for the full repair price. So, Joe Aithman,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Patrick O’Sullivan, and Joe Shaw, you saved me $750. And so thank you very much. That was awesome. And so, yeah, anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there, if you have to do a warranty repair out of war and out of warranty repair on something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is between one and two years old and you bought it with a major credit card, check with them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see if they have like purchase protection or something, because you might not have to pay for that repair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s awesome. I’d forgotten that that was the thing as well. I don’t have an American Express card, but I’d been familiar with that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passing. That’s really great. And yeah, good job, the three of you for reminding us.
Peak Design Mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Michael Louis Brown wrote that Peak Design, which we spoke about earlier, has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new Kickstarter where they’re trying to combine MagSafe and mechanical fasteners.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is related to our discussion of how strong is MagSafe and can you use it for a car mount
⏹️ ▶️ John or a pop socket and a bunch of products that have been announced that were MagSafe pop sockets or
⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe car mounts and how is that all gonna work. And this is a Kickstarter by Peak Design.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you should just check it out to watch the movie to look at their idea for how to make something
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be suitable for things like car mounts or camera mounts or situations where
⏹️ ▶️ John you really needed to be secure, but also be mag safe. And what they’ve done is essentially a
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny, I don’t know what you’d call it, a tiny little raised plateau on the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of your phone that isn’t raised much, but it’s like kind of like a flat round rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John that sticks out a little bit. And that provides the mechanical fastening, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John mag safe in that magnets suck the little thing that goes into that. Actually, it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John raised plateau, it’s a sunken indent. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco watch the video, it’s hard to explain,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s magnets combined with a mechanical fastener, right? So there’s like a little peg and a little hole and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John both round wrecks and they’re very slim. So it doesn’t add much bulk to your case because
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing works with a case, right? But the magnets are still there too and it makes it satisfying and easy to
⏹️ ▶️ John get it in the first time. I think there’s also some magnetic kind of fastener things gripping it as well,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s not just the magnets holding it on there, but because it’s a physical connection, if you put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a car mount and you go over a bump, you don’t need the magnets to keep it on the car mount. If it’s shaking
⏹️ ▶️ John up and down, the mechanical connection is going to prevent it from going up and down. The only direction it can move is out.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the sandwich opening force in Marcos parlance. That’s the only degree
⏹️ ▶️ John of freedom it has when it’s in. And that degree, there is magnets holding it, but in general, cars don’t shake that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know how well this works. It’s a Kickstarter. I just looked at the video and I thought, this is a nice compromise. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John using magnets, because magnets make everything cooler, because when they align things for you and suck things in or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s also using a mechanical fastener, but it’s also not putting a giant thing on the back of your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. And their whole idea is that we’ll make this system and you can use it in a mount, in
⏹️ ▶️ John a dock, in a gimbal, and attach it to the front of your helmet and put it on your motorcycle, and the video’s
⏹️ ▶️ John full of stuff like that. But anyway, I thought this was a very clever design. They’ve, I think they’ve met their goal.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve raised $1.1 million. Who knows if it will ever ship, but kudos for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good idea. I mean, they do have a history of shipping their project. So I think it almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly will ship. They have a pretty strong history.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, speaking of MagSafe, a quick plug for our good friends at Studio Neat. They have a couple of new material docs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are specifically designed to work with MagSafe. And I have not tried it myself, but I have one of their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey original material docs, and it is excellent. So I can only assume that this will be great as well.
Battery mAh vs. Wh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, can you tell me about units and battery specs and things of that nature? A
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of people gave this feedback, but Justin Schultz was the first one, I think, in his opinion
⏹️ ▶️ John and the opinion of many others, and it totally makes sense. Watt hours is a better measurement than milliamp hours
⏹️ ▶️ John because watt hours is a unit of energy that you can convert to joules. Milliamp hours can be misleading because of the influence of voltage,
⏹️ ▶️ John whereas watt hours is the right unit to use if you’re not outright using joules, right? So the reason we’re always comparing
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone battery capacity to milliamp hours is that we’re the only number we had, right? And that’s why we were so stymied by
⏹️ ▶️ John watt hours, because to get from watt hours to milliamp hours, you had to divide by voltage, and we didn’t know what the voltage was, and so on
⏹️ ▶️ John and so forth. So ideally, we would have the watt hour rating for every single iPhone battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s how we would compare them. But I think it’s mostly because like iFixit would always show the little picture and the printing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the battery, and that would say milliamp hours. For all I know, it said watt hours too, and we’d just been missing it. But now we know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we’d like to compare energy capacity, watt hours is the preferable measure, if we
⏹️ ▶️ John can get it. And if not, we’ll go back to comparing milliamp hours.
Sponsor: Flatfile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Flatfile. This is a pretty cool tool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So imagine you’re building a web app. Many of you out there have probably done this. You’re building a web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and you need to have some kind of data import functionality. Now think of the last time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you imported a spreadsheet. Did it work correctly the first time? Probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. Nearly everyone has dealt with formatting weird CSV edge cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the complexity of Excel files so that the data can be imported correctly into an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re building. It’s a huge pain and engineers aren’t spared from this pain. We are typically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doomed to build data parsers from scratch and usually not even for the first time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it isn’t just as simple as CSV upload but it’s also header mapping, data validation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even a UI component which really adds to the sprint of all this. So as enticing as it is to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another custom importer compared to the fun core product features that you want to be working on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Flatfile has finally made a solution. Flatfile Portal is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco elegant import button. This offers an intuitive data import experience and Portal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrates with virtually any application and in a matter of minutes can intelligently ingest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco validate and transform incoming spreadsheet data exactly the way that your customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have already formatted it that it’s clean and ready to use in your back end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can see for yourself at flat file.io. And you can even go there if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interested in testing out flat file portal in a production environment or playing with it in a code sandbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do all of that at get dot flat file dot io slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, that’s get dot flat file dot io slash ATP. Thank you so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to flat file for sponsoring our show.
Our iPhone Pro reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some of us, two-thirds of us, have new toys. And this is very exciting. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry Marco, this is what you get for getting a mini. So you guys, actually I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask, Marco, nobody in your household got a new phone, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so I guess it’s the John Casey show now, and since I seem to have the floor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will start. I wanted to tell a funny story, well maybe I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only only one who finds this funny will see, but a funny story about the delivery. So as with most years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly lately, my phone got delivered via UPS and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was due to come in between 11 and three, which is actually quite early for iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deliveries. Usually they’re not until like six-ish at the earliest. And typically, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t see our UPS driver, so I don’t know if it’s the same one every time or if it’s a rotating band of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey merry men and women, but one way or another. Typically, they just drop the thing off. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ll ring the doorbell, and then they’ll bounce. And this time, I was almost done with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing an exercise with Aaron, not like that, you gross people. We were lifting weights. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I hear this, like, I think the doorbell rang, and then I heard a very emphatic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knock on the door, which is extremely unusual. So I go to the door thinking, well, maybe this is the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s weird that they want me to sign for it, because they specifically said no contact delivery, but whatever, OK. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I go to the door and the UPS guy is down at the bottom of our little stoop, which was polite and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of him. And he said, I’m sorry, man, I just got to ask, like, what is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was like, hmm, it’s odd that you don’t know that, but I mean, hey, that’s fine. And I said, oh, it’s a new iPhone. Oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that time again. Yep. Oh, well, I’ve had like six or seven of those already and I was just wondering what it was. And of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course I’m thinking to myself, of the six or seven iPhones that you’ve delivered today, you choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, one third of the Accidental Tech Podcast to decide to strike up a conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, hey man, what’s in the box? I should have said a human head if I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quicker on my feet. That’s a reference, John. Anyways, so yeah, we had this like, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four or five minute conversation about iPhones and deliveries and how bad it is for him and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you like to guess whether or not I had the gumption to plug my podcast? I’ll start with Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course you did. What is that supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to mean? Am I wrong? I mean, the way you said it makes us think you didn’t, but Marco’s instinct that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would shamelessly do that is in character for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not only did I plug the podcast, which he wrote down on his little notepad. So if you’re listening,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very kind and enthusiastic UTS driver. Yeah, I say hi yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again. But not only did I plug the show, but I believe I was wearing the old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch Sport Edition ATP shirt at the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John On brand in so many ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I was extremely on brand. But I just thought it was hilarious that of all the houses that this guy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decides to like emphatically knock on the door and ask what is in there anyway? It happens to be mine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he’s at home telling a story about how I was doing his delivery. I just wanted to know something about this box and this guy starts
⏹️ ▶️ John promoting his stupid podcast to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he wouldn’t let me go. He just kept talking and talking and talking. Oh man, sorry, I just thought
⏹️ ▶️ John One more thing on delivery, is that weird COVID related delivery things. I mean, I’m glad that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John changing it, you know, doing contactless delivery and all that stuff like that, but it does make me wonder, like, what’s the deal with, you know, all the signature
⏹️ ▶️ John required stuff? Because Apple has been annoying slash cautious in the past where you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John order like a, you know, I was gonna say a $5 item, but they don’t sell anything less than 20 bucks. But you’d order
⏹️ ▶️ John like something really cheap and you have to sign for it. And it was such a hassle when we were going into the office, it’s like, oh, who’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be home to sign for this? And you miss a delivery. It’s like, it’s just an iPhone case. Just leave it on the porch, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when the iPhones and certainly big things like that, it’s like, oh yes, of course you have to sign in blood for those. But my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, no signature, this trucked it up my porch. And some other shipments I’ve had recently, I
⏹️ ▶️ John figure what they were, but like it was something that I was sure I would have to sign for. So I was all ready to leap to the door
⏹️ ▶️ John with a mask on and all that other stuff figuring I could, you know, sign and we’d be far apart, you know, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John get there and the package is on the stoop and the delivery person is walking away from the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he’s walking away to gain distance. This was early on in the pandemic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he’s like 20 feet away and he says, hey, do you want me to sign this for you?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, yeah, go for it. I mean, cause all they need you to do is like
⏹️ ▶️ John make a mark with their little, you know, like make an X or a line. Like it’s not like they compare your signature
⏹️ ▶️ John to anything. And so I don’t know if this is official policy Or if the delivery driver’s realized, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John this signature thing, all that matters is that some kind of mark is made with this electronic pencil thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and that constitutes
⏹️ ▶️ John a signature. So maybe people in these delivery services are just signing for all the packages themselves now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is to compare with the modern approach of the companies that are less mired in the
⏹️ ▶️ John past, let’s say, of Amazon does the creepy thing where they take a picture of it on your porch, right, and then mail that
⏹️ ▶️ John you, and say, we totally delivered your package, here it is on your porch, which is not reassuring because when you come
⏹️ ▶️ John home and it’s gone because someone stole it off your porch, but nevertheless Amazon can say, hey, we did what we’re supposed to do. We deliver it, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your porch right there. And then you can have long debates about that. Is that really my porch? Because how much of my house can you actually see?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, just to get ahead of the follow-up, in years past, you could go to your Apple like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey online order status page thing, and there was a official looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UPS or perhaps FedEx form that you could print out and sign and tape to your door that said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I understand that I am not signing in blood. Yes, I understand that means someone is surely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to take my phone off my porch, but please go ahead and leave it. And I don’t recall having seen that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this year, I think because everything was designed to be contactless.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that used to be an option on all things. You’d get a little tag on the door and say, we missed you, you weren’t here. And the options were,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can check this checkbox and stick it back on your door. And this checkbox says, you know, you are absolving
⏹️ ▶️ John us of responsibility and we’ll just leave it on your doorstep, right? or you can tell us to try again,
⏹️ ▶️ John or we’ll try again tomorrow, or you can go pick it up at the depot or whatever. And a couple of years ago, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John for all I know, because I’m older, a decade ago, that option disappeared from all the slips. There was no option that says
⏹️ ▶️ John just leave it. There was nothing you could do, nothing you could sign. Now, the Casey’s thing of like, oh, you go to the website and get
⏹️ ▶️ John the official form, maybe that’s what I was supposed to be doing. But I was just sad when I saw, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have that option anymore. I basically just have to be here, or I have to like go somewhere to try to pick it
⏹️ ▶️ John up myself. So maybe I’ll try the next time to go to the website. Although, what next
⏹️ ▶️ John time? Like we’re all home all the time now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see. To be clear though, I was saying preemptively, you go to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John order status page.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before the first delivery. Correct, I just wanna make sure we’re on the same page. Yep. All right, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got my fancy phone. I got the 256 gig Pacific Blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 12 Pro. One of the first things I noticed was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the box is a SIM removal tool. And I cannot remember the last time that’s happened. I didn’t go, you know, spelunking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into old boxes to see if that’s the case, but I remember like early on every iPhone or darn near every iPhone came with a SIM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey removal tool. And then I thought they stopped doing that, but this one did. So maybe I’m making news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of something that isn’t news, but that struck me because I don’t recall having seen a SIM removal tool in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years. It also may be because mine was bought without a SIM in it. so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe that makes a difference, but one way or another, I don’t recall having seen them for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while. And again, I could be lying to you about that. Aesthetically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing is frigging beautiful. I think this is probably aesthetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my favorite phone ever. I love the blue. I loved the midnight green,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe I shouldn’t say I loved, I really liked the midnight green a lot. I love this specific blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think it would be nice if there were louder and more vibrant colors on the Pro line as many, many, many people have said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I do appreciate the more subtle blue, even though in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same breath, I’ll tell you, I also kind of wish there was a louder one. But since I’m an ever older man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this fits my persona a little better. The sides, I think look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. They are aesthetically so much better looking to me than the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rounded edges of the phones of the last few years. Holding it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in hand, I’m less convinced. And I want to say it was on Upgrade,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, that Mike and Jason were talking about the same thing. And they said something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that occurred to me, I think, like the morning I listened to Upgrade. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct me if I’m wrong, but on the four and five era phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t they make a big hoopla about like chamfered edges at some point? And let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my own understanding is correct. was it the five? Okay. That what that meant was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use layman’s terms, they kind of like rounded off some of it, not round literally, but like they
⏹️ ▶️ John opposite of round, flat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, yes. And what I mean to say is they like, they like, you know, clipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off some of it to make it so that the edge was at like a 45 degree angle. Is that a fair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember, remember back when the old laptops, like the first generation of MacBook Pros and the aluminum ones before that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not the only ones. But anyway, the first generation of unibody MacBook Pros had a very sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Remember that? And I actually did a blog post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with macro photography years ago. Oh, I do remember that, yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Where I compared, because sometime mid-cycle of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that body style, they switched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a slightly sanded-off edge, and it made a huge difference in comfort.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it was always, they just increased the corner radius, right? It was always rounded, but in the macro
⏹️ ▶️ John photography, you could see the radius used to be so small that it was sharp, and they just cranked up the radius, so now
⏹️ ▶️ John it was rounded over more. And they’ve stuck with that more rounded over radius. If you look at any modern laptop, they’ve kind of dialed
⏹️ ▶️ John in how sharp they can make it to keep the aesthetics without it being like an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John danger or uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Although I would argue it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still a little bit uncomfortable, but it’s way better than it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I actually went into the attic and I didn’t spend any time with them until just now, but I found either mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Aaron’s old 4S. I found either mine or Aaron’s old 5S. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at the 4S, it does appear that you’re correct. It is not chamfered in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should note, I have actually turned on a light. So now I’m going to be up until three in the morning. Thank you, gentlemen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’ve turned on a light in order to look at this. To the best that I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the edges, as you guys said, are not chamfered on the 4, or the 4S, strictly speaking, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 5, it does look like they are. What’s interesting is my recollection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the 4S and 5 and 5S was that everything was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flush as it is on the 12 Pro. But looking at this in hand again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back and the sides are kind of one unit of aluminum. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the display kind of pokes out taller than the side aluminum does. So if you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it from the side, if you’re looking at say the volume switches,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can see the top of the aluminum And then a solid, like, I don’t know, millimeter or two above that is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of the screen. So does that make sense? So it’s not flush. You’re talking about the 4? This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 5S I’m looking at.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the 4 was an ice cream sandwich, which is even more prominent. Like it had the metal band
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ice cream. I’m sorry, yep, that’s correct. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the top and bottom chocolate cookie layers were
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fairly substantial.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not only did they sit proud of the aluminum, but they were inset from it as well, if my recollection, you have the phone in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of you. But I’m kind of surprised to hear that the five screen poked out too. Cause my recollection
⏹️ ▶️ John was that it was flat, but maybe that’s what passed for flat in those days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, I think that’s also part of it. All of this, this is many, many, many words to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, even though I don’t find the 12 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be extraordinarily comfortable in hand because of the flat sides, I love the aesthetics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much that I think I would still make that trade off either way. But I really wondered,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it’s all in my head, but I really wonder if they had chamfered the edges just a little bit, and I can’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m saying this non-ironically, but if they had chamfered those edges just a little bit, I wonder if just that teeny bit of, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not literally rounding, but figuratively speaking, rounding off, I wonder if that would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helped a little bit to make it a little more comfortable. In terms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of leaving aside the comfort, the size of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t notice and haven’t ever really noticed that it’s bigger than the 11 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have both in front of me. It’s definitely the 11 Pro is way more comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in hand. But in terms of size, I don’t feel like it’s any different. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand that it literally is bigger, but in terms of the way it feels in my hand, it does not feel any different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The screen does just feel bigger. I wouldn’t say that I feel like I have more real estate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just kind of feels bigger in a, just kind of gut way. but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say that I feel like all of a sudden I see more tweets or more emails or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things I was very interested in trying was the arms akimbo portrait mode, which is what started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this whole arms akimbo thing in the first place. And I don’t have any pictures that I’d like to share,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I did take a couple of quick shots of like Aaron or the kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with their arms leaving that triangle of empty space. And so far, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I probably took like five of these pictures. And I think roughly four of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were done appropriately, so that the empty space in between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the arm and the body was blurred, as one would expect. And I believe that the one time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that didn’t work was when the empty space was very, very small. Small enough that it wouldn’t surprise me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am filling in some blanks here that may be incorrect. But small enough that it wouldn’t surprise me that the LiDAR just didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detect that there was an empty space there. I might be wrong entirely. Maybe the LIDAR isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even used unless it’s in dark
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the LIDAR is only used in low light. Okay, that’s what I’m not sure about. Apple seemed to hint
⏹️ ▶️ John at that, but they didn’t say outright,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Exactly, so again, I might be filling you with baloney by accident, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it did seem like in situations where I felt like it was more likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the 11 Pro would fall down in portrait mode specifically, it did seem like it handled it better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is absolutely anecdota. I have not done like extensive testing or anything, but it does seem a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better at a glance, which I’m very, very excited about. Also the edge detection around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the top of heads and things like that is noticeably better. And it’s getting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point that for me, not for Marco and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not for John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, it is getting closer to, why do I have a big camera?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t think we’re there yet, but it is noticeably better than photos I’ve seen on my 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro between the Akimbo Dead Space and the edge detection. I haven’t tried anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with clear eyeglasses. I think the only time I took pictures of the kids was when we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside. And so they have the transition lenses that make them dark. You know, they make themselves dark automatically like sunglasses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we’re outside. So I can’t speak to whether or not glasses are doing better, but again, arms Akimbo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem better. And the threshold, the edges seemed a lot better as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have some other things to say, but John, do you have anything, Did you do anything with regard to the camera or portrait mode specifically?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna have my whole say in my section when we get down to me. The only thing I’ll add to your thing is I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the comparison tests on YouTube where someone was taking the new iPhone and the latest Pixel and some
⏹️ ▶️ John other, whatever that big phone is that has the 5X optical zoom in it. Anyway, they were doing comparisons and
⏹️ ▶️ John they were doing portrait mode tests. And as good as, you know, you’re saying the arms and Kimbo thing, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John phone is getting better in terms of finding where to artificially blur, the Pixel destroyed it. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like a picture of like a cactus with a bunch of little leafy things coming off the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom of the cactus and the iPhone erased the leaves entirely. And the Pixel like
⏹️ ▶️ John traced around every single leaf. I was impressed. I still don’t like portrait mode, even on the Pixel,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the gap in smart edge detection and finding what you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to blur around, I was shocked. I would have guessed that no phone could have detected these very thin, especially like from
⏹️ ▶️ John a side view, like a very thin leaf wrapping up around something. It was amazing what the pics did. I don’t even understand
⏹️ ▶️ John how they’re doing it. It’s gotta be some kind of ML thing that understands it’s a plant and is looking for those features. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, still a little bit of ways to go for figuring out what to blur. But I’m glad it’s handling big triangles of open space better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s been one area where like, in the same way that like, when the iPhone 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out last year, Apple came out with this night mode that basically embarrassed everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else’s night modes. Like it was so good. and I think remains like the best night mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as good as their night mode is, that’s as good as the Pixel’s portrait mode is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s not new. The Pixel has always been ahead of Apple in the portrait mode things, because you’re right, they do use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s entirely ML-based. I think it’s not optic at all. And they just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better results at edges of things. And that’s still, like, you know, I keep seeing these portrait pictures everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posting, oh, look how great the iPhone 12 portrait mode is. and I still see like people, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ears getting blurred off and hair getting blurred off and stuff and it’s still, it’s the same problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve always had. It is getting better, it seems over time, but it still looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really unnatural if you start looking at the edges of people’s heads.
⏹️ ▶️ John Trying to use depth mapping for that, which is what Apple’s doing, and depth mapping with multiple cameras, depth mapping
⏹️ ▶️ John with the LiDAR, like that approach has limits. Like I don’t think there ever
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be depth mapping hardware sufficient to catch the flyaway hair going off
⏹️ ▶️ John the top of your kid’s head. Because it’s a hair, it’s literally a hair, right? So good luck
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to pick that out with your death map. You know, you could have just military grade LIDAR
⏹️ ▶️ John from 20 angles and still have difficulty detecting a single hair. But if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John ML, and if that hair resolves at all as a series of pixels that stem from the head and are
⏹️ ▶️ John the same color as the rest of the hair, you’ve got a fighting chance. Of course you could just use a real camera and not have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I digress. I was using my real camera earlier today when the kids were carving pumpkins.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’ll catch the Harris, you know why? Because science.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because science, indeed. So there were, and to some degree remain,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a handful of issues with my phone that I think are all software. I don’t think any of this is hardware. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think this may all be traced back to iCloud maybe, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I did, So what I did was a backup to my laptop and then restored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it from my laptop to my phone. I found that SMS relay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so this is the feature where you can type text messages on your Mac or Macs or iPad for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that matter, and have them, you know, relayed to your phone and then off to your cell carrier. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been spotty for me. I think I’ve got it mostly resolved after signing out of iCloud on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phone and signing back in, but it’s definitely not been as consistent as it had been. It had worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flawlessly for me for like a decade plus and it’s definitely been a little bit wonky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lately. Additionally, I’ve noticed even on the phone itself, there have been some,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was actually strictly speaking MMS messages because they were group text messages,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I believe are all delivered over MMS, but basically non-iMessages in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey groups where Aaron would receive, when we’re on the same conversation, Aaron would receive one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it just would never show up on my phone, ever. and still hasn’t like days later. And I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experienced that before. If I have, it would be like one in a year or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it’s exceptionally rare that that’s happened for me. And it’s happened a couple of times already, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very, very odd. And then finally, I’ve had some real struggles getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch Unlock to work with my Macs. So I’ve gotten it working with my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro, which is funny because of the two Macs, I want it less on a MacBook Pro because it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Touch ID. but I still haven’t gotten it to work on my iMac Pro. And I’ve tried various different troubleshooting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things and I haven’t yet cracked the code as to how to fix it on both.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve rebooted things. I’ve tried, like I said, I tried signing out of iCloud and signing back in on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t tried that on my computers yet, but I’ve tried a bunch of stuff. Nothing’s really worked. And this is the first time that I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall in easily a decade that I’ve done a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone upgrade and had as many software, seemingly software related problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I have, which is a real bummer. And I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is where, you know, everyone says, oh, just restore your phone, or do you start fresh and blah, blah, blah. And I might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that. I don’t know. But it’s been a damper on what is otherwise a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice phone that aesthetically I frigging love. And I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say enough good things about. That’s basically it for me. I have some complaining to do about AT&T a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit, but let’s focus on the phones. John, you also have a new toy. Tell me, how’s your new toy?
⏹️ ▶️ John One more question about your watch thing. Did you do the thing where you delete all the invisible
⏹️ ▶️ John entries from keychain?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did try that. I think I did it on both machines and that did seem to fix the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. It did not seem to fix the iMac Pro, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. All right. Just wanted to check and to save you from that feedback. All right. So I got, as I said in the
⏹️ ▶️ John last show, a 256 iPhone 12 Pro graphite. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said in the other show, I didn’t order a case because the leather one isn’t out yet and I don’t even know if I’m going to get that
⏹️ ▶️ John one for reasons I’ll get into in a little bit. So I’m like, alright, well I’ll just use it without a case for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I did. I used it without a case. So first impressions, I agree with Casey that this thing looks
⏹️ ▶️ John really nice. It also feels really nice. It is very, it’s very elemental.
⏹️ ▶️ John Aesthetically, it is marred by the asymmetry of the camera bump, but that’s just the reality of smartphones, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It did make me consider for the first time looking at the back of it, whether Apple ever
⏹️ ▶️ John will or should center the camera bump as many other camera manufacturers do. Because like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to have the bump, yeah, it’s got to be a bump, fine. Does it have to be asymmetrical? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe there are advantages to being asymmetrical in terms of how you hold the camera in your hand or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of other phone manufacturers do it centered and there would be advantages to that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s why right there. Like I think a centered camera bump looks like a Samsung phone. And I think that’s why they
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not just Samsung. Lots of companies do it, but yeah. You know, it could be aesthetics. Either way, the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason I’m thinking about it is because the rest of the phone looks like a piece of jewelry. Like it is
⏹️ ▶️ John nice looking in terms of tolerances and finishes. The stainless steel edge, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I know some people prefer the matte edge for grip. And again, I’m not talking about ergonomics. and I’m just talking about aesthetics,
⏹️ ▶️ John I love how the stainless steel edge feels. I did not wish for chamfering because the stainless
⏹️ ▶️ John steel edge is slightly rounded over and a slightly rounded over stainless steel edge
⏹️ ▶️ John looks and feels great on this thing as an object. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is a fun object to turn over in your hand and look at and have, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And more so than any phone I can remember, The only one I can remember that
⏹️ ▶️ John was probably the equal or exceeded this is the 4 series because the 4 was so elemental,
⏹️ ▶️ John did not have a giant camera bump because those were earlier days, and so committed to its simple
⏹️ ▶️ John aesthetic of glass, metal, glass in the ice cream sandwich mode, which I still think is great. But this stainless steel
⏹️ ▶️ John is a new high for, I think, the look and feel of the edges of a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, ignoring it as a piece of sculpture art, what is it like as a phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I tried to use it without a case. The flat sides,
⏹️ ▶️ John they, you know, as I predicted on the previous show and as I described in the previous show,
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded edges to the phone are slimming. On the previous generation phone, I have a 10S, but it’s the same form
⏹️ ▶️ John factor as the 11 Pro and all that other stuff. They make the phone seem
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner. And we know from the measurements that the 12 Pro is actually thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John than my 10S and the 11, right? but it doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner. When you go to pick it up, it’s like, oh, this is the skinny phone. It’s not, it’s not skinnier,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I even did the measurement, well, I’ll get to that in a little bit, you know, just perception
⏹️ ▶️ John wise, this phone feels, doesn’t feel bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels chunkier. I would agree with that. It feels fatter. I think I would
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with that too. In my mind’s eye, when I pictured this phone, and keep in mind I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John using without a case at this point. In my mind’s eye, when I pictured this phone in my head, I was picturing a
⏹️ ▶️ John beautifully finished slab that was like taller in height
⏹️ ▶️ John than my iPhone XS with the case on it. Like my caseless 12 Pro in
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind’s eye was tall. It is not. If you put them on the table next to each other, you’re like, what are
⏹️ ▶️ John you talking about? It’s way lower. You know, I put my XS with the case and then I put my 12 Pro next to it and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can see the 12 Pro is way thinner than that phone with the case. What are you even thinking? It’s because the sides
⏹️ ▶️ John are flat. It feels chunkier. The width feels exactly the same. The height, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I can detect if you remind me that it exists. And of course, if you put them back to back, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see the height difference. So if you’re worried about the width, don’t worry about it. But it does
⏹️ ▶️ John feel chunkier. Now I used it without a case for several days,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was all I could stand, mostly because of me. I, my thing, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of reasons I always want cases on my phone. One is to be grippier so I don’t drop
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Two is because for whatever reason, if I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a case on the phone, I put it down gingerly on surfaces, because I mean, especially this
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, it looks so nice. I don’t want to, I don’t want to just chuck it onto the table and have it go clatter, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I know people treat their phones that way and that’s fine. Like, for whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to do that. Like I wanna keep my phone looking nice. Now it’s probably stupid because like a phone is there to be
⏹️ ▶️ John used and who cares if the back has scratches on it and sometimes phones look cool when they have scratches all over them or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for whatever reason, I find myself unconsciously, whatever, putting it down
⏹️ ▶️ John gingerly on surfaces and I don’t like that. But the final one, I think the most important reason that I want a
⏹️ ▶️ John case for this is because there’s a camera bump in the back and the cases
⏹️ ▶️ John that I like even out the camera bump. So when I put my phone down on a surface, It is dead flat
⏹️ ▶️ John because the case is thick enough to account for the camera bump. And that’s what I’m used to. A phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that lies dead flat on the surface. And I don’t realize how much that affects my usage
⏹️ ▶️ John until I got a phone that is not grippy and not even has a big camera bump
⏹️ ▶️ John and I put it on the arm of the sofa and it starts to skitter off and I’m like, nope, this cannot stand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t have this. So I lasted all of like two or three days before I ordered a case. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John my leather one isn’t available yet, so I ordered the Apple silicone case, knowing full well
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Apple silicone case wraps all the way around all of the edges,
⏹️ ▶️ John and including the bottom edge. Now, the previous cases on my iPhone XS, I have a leather case, the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John edge is exposed. The whole bottom edge of the phone is exposed, so you can see not only the lightning port, but you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John the metal with all the little holes in it for the speaker and microphone and all that other crap. That whole bottom edge is exposed.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s important to me on these current round of phones with Face ID because
⏹️ ▶️ John swiping up from the bottom edge of the phone, it’s great when that bottom edge is just naked, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially on the XS and 11 where the bottom edge was, all the edges were rounded. So I’d put
⏹️ ▶️ John my thumb on the bottom edge of the phone and just sweep up from like from the middle all the way up. Like it’s how I unlock my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not an uncommon action. Why swiping up on your phone happens every single time you pick it up to
⏹️ ▶️ John unlock it unless you have, you know, a phone with touch ID or something, right? on the 12 Pro with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple silicone case, the case goes around all the edges, which is beautiful and uniform,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it also means that if you try to sweep up from the bottom edge, you’re starting with your thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John touching the intentionally grippy silicone lip, and then going
⏹️ ▶️ John down onto the glass and then going. Now, you can train yourself to don’t start that far down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead, start on the glass, and it works fine. Like, you don’t have to actually start at the very, very edge. You can start with
⏹️ ▶️ John your thumb just on the glass, but old habits die hard and I don’t like having to think about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So what I want for this going forward is a case
⏹️ ▶️ John that is grippy, that levels out the phone, and that has a completely exposed bottom edge. Will that
⏹️ ▶️ John be Apple’s leather case? The photos seem to indicate that it will not have an exposed
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom edge. Instead, it will wrap entirely around just like the silicone case. We don’t know because Apple’s been shy with product shots,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you squint at the one that shows it from the back, you’re like, oh, that doesn’t look like one of the ones that has a cutout, it probably doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So for now I’m using the silicone case. Now, I mentioned height comparisons. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John with the silicone case, the silicone case wraps around the back, levels out the camera bump, and also the lip
⏹️ ▶️ John comes up higher than the screen just slightly. And so in my mind’s eye, I’m thinking, this was already
⏹️ ▶️ John a chunky slab-sided phone, and now it’s got a lip, it’s got, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got a case that makes the, you know, it goes farther down on the backside, and then it’s got a lip that sticks out on the front side. Surely
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like twice the height of my iPhone XS. Put them down on the table, they are exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same height. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco down to the millimeter.
⏹️ ▶️ John My 12 Pro in the silicone case and my XS in the Apple leather case, you put them side
⏹️ ▶️ John by side, flat on the table, they both lay dead flat. You compare the height of the edges, they’re exactly the same height. It is an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John like physical illusion that the XS is thinner. Because it’s got rounded edges
⏹️ ▶️ John and rounded edges are slimming. So it’s amazing. Like I feel like my phone has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John chunkier, but all actual measurements tell me that is just perception. It is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John not any bigger than it ever was. It’s just flat sided. Now, all that said, the flat
⏹️ ▶️ John sides, when it was a naked phone, I think did make it easier
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to grip it. It felt more secure than the absolute bars of soap that were like the six and the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, eventually the 10S as well. Like, because those ones have the matte
⏹️ ▶️ John glass on the back, which is very slippery, and they had rounded edges. This one has
⏹️ ▶️ John shiny stainless steel on the flat sides, and shiny stainless steel is surprisingly grippy, right? And so it
⏹️ ▶️ John felt more secure. Like, it didn’t feel secure enough for me to not get a case, and like I said, I’m mostly getting a
⏹️ ▶️ John case because I didn’t want to have to put it down gently on things, and because I wanted it to lay flat, right, and because I do want it to be slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John more grippy. But it got me thinking, well, what do you actually want? Do you want the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John with the rounded edges that feels thinner even though it isn’t?
⏹️ ▶️ John in a grippy case or something? Or do you want the flat sides? Like everyone was talking about, oh, I can’t wait till the flat sides
⏹️ ▶️ John come because they have fond memories of the four and the five, which were very different phones, very different size-wise than these
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And the flat sides certainly look cool. I enjoy the aesthetics, but they’re less important
⏹️ ▶️ John to me than the ergonomics. But where I came down on this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomically speaking, the flat sides give a benefit that I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is worth their chunkiness. When I think about when am I
⏹️ ▶️ John the least secure about my grip on my phone? When am I afraid that I’m going to drop my phone? And it is
⏹️ ▶️ John always for me personally, when I’m taking photos. Holding my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John sideways with two hands. Sometimes I’m using the volume button as the shutter button, but sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on the orientation and the situation, maybe I can’t do that. So then you got to do the thing, you see people do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I do it myself where you’re gripping the phone with some set of fingers, but then you’re using another finger to hit
⏹️ ▶️ John the shutter button, right? or to hold it down for burst mode or video or whatever. And again, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still, why don’t you just always use the volume button? It just sometimes doesn’t work out that way. In the moment, you’re trying to get a picture of your dog doing something
⏹️ ▶️ John cute or whatever. So when I’m holding my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John by the edges with a limited, with a small number of fingers, usually thumb on one side and
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of fingers on the other side, vertical or horizontal, that is when the rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John edge phones have always felt the least secure to me. I’ve always been afraid that if I squeeze a little bit too hard,
⏹️ ▶️ John with the force not being exactly opposed from the two edges, that it will start to rotate and slip right out of
⏹️ ▶️ John my hand. Flat sides make that way better, because you can press
⏹️ ▶️ John on two flat sides and be much more confident that if your force is slightly offset, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to cause the phone to rotate in your hands because the edges aren’t rounded. And that benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John of flat sides, it has nothing to do with me holding my phone or the aesthetics or whatever, merely the benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John of the flat sides making a more secure grip when I’m holding it away from me with one or two or three fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John to take photos makes me a flat side promoter. And even though
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels chunkier, I think the trade-off is worth it. And there’s also the fact that with actual flat sides, you can put it upright
⏹️ ▶️ John or on its side on a table and have it take video or photos that way. Although honestly, if you put it upright like the Monolith,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t take much to shake the table to knock it down. And that actually works better if you have a smooth table with a naked
⏹️ ▶️ John phone than with a case, the case adds a little bit of rounded and wobbliness to it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, that’s, you know, it’s only been a week or so, but that’s my take on the flat side so far. They make the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John they make me think the phone is thicker with two C’s if you like,
⏹️ ▶️ John than the other phone, even though it totally isn’t, but I will take that
⏹️ ▶️ John trade off for the increased security when taking photos, which is super duper
⏹️ ▶️ John important to me. And so I like that. For the cases I did this I was gonna do this on the show But
⏹️ ▶️ John I figured I better get a jump on it so on Twitter I I sent out the call you know I get trying to give my requirements
⏹️ ▶️ John as Concisely as I could by showing two photos my photo showed here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple clear case It has an exposed bottom on the phone like if you look at Apple’s clear case if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the photos of it you Can see the entire bottom of the phone except for the corners right here is Apple silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John case It does not have an exposed bottom it wraps all the way around and just has a cutout for the lighting port and then some
⏹️ ▶️ John little dotty holes for the speakers, right? What I want is a case
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not clear, that is more like the Apple silicone case, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John has the cutout that the clear one does to allow the bottom to be exposed. Preferably leather, but I didn’t specify that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I got tons of recommendations, you know, and me being super picky, it’s like, well, that looks
⏹️ ▶️ John good, but the leather’s a little bit too rough, or that one looks good, but the buttons are just leather bumps. Do you remember the leather bump buttons?
⏹️ ▶️ John Either one of you? I don’t know if you get the leather cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to all the time, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was until, geez, probably like the iPhone 10 or so?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was like the iPhone 7, 6 and 7 model year-ish form factor. Apple’s leather case,
⏹️ ▶️ John it had buttons for the volume and the power, but they were just like leather lumps. Like it was like the leather
⏹️ ▶️ John went around and when you came to the buttons, it was another lump of leather and it was less satisfying
⏹️ ▶️ John to click. And then they changed to basically having sort of a secondary exposed metal button
⏹️ ▶️ John that that metal button would press the real metal button underneath it, and that was way more satisfying because the buttons had
⏹️ ▶️ John sharp edges and they were cut out from the surroundings, and I like those much better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even Apple’s silicone case has, it has silicone buttons, but they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John just lumps that you press. It’s like there’s little cutouts and then the silicone buttons sit within the cutouts, or if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not cutouts, they’re really doing a good job of fooling me because they feel like they have little sharp edges, and that’s how I want them to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, I was looking for a case like that. I found two prospects. One has leather lumps
⏹️ ▶️ John and one does not. I will put them both in the show notes if you are also looking for something like this with
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom cutout. Lots of people ask me, why do you care about the bottom cutout? I thought it might be obvious, but apparently not. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, it’s the swipe up from the bottom is the big deal for me because swiping up from the bottom and hitting that little lip,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the end of the world. It works fine and you don’t have to hit the lift. Like I said, you can train yourself to just start higher,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I prefer not to have it that way. And the other way, the other thing that I realized about the
⏹️ ▶️ John cases that go all the way around is it makes your phone way more symmetrical than it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so many times I have picked up my iPhone 12 Pro upside down. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can, yeah, you can feel the volume buttons. That’s usually how you notice, you feel the volume buttons and you realize, or you, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, one finger swipes over the bottom edge and you feel the hole for the lightning port, or you just visually see the hole for the lightning, and you realize
⏹️ ▶️ John you have your phone upside down. But I have gotten far enough to the point where I’ve swiped onto a screen that
⏹️ ▶️ John was upside down, right? And it’s happened, you know, six or seven times in a handful of
⏹️ ▶️ John days. Would I eventually get used to it? Maybe, but I don’t want to have to. I never thought about this before with my other phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I was just doing it unconsciously when I see it somewhere and pick it up. You can tell which side is the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s got the exposed, you know, the bottom edge is exposed and you can see that from pretty much any
⏹️ ▶️ John angle. You can see it from the back because the cutout sort of exposes the little things sticking out and you can see it from the
⏹️ ▶️ John top because the perimeter doesn’t go around. So so anyway, yeah, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that is closest to my requirements This is from DecodedBags.com and it’s their new
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 12 cover and it is a leather cover with their own independent buttons that
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t leather lumps and the bottom cut out. I didn’t buy it because I’m still waiting to
⏹️ ▶️ John see the Apple case, you know, finally. Definitively
⏹️ ▶️ John say that the Apple case wraps around. Chances are very good it’s going to wrap around because all indications of
⏹️ ▶️ John all their other cases and all the photos that I’ve seen indicate that it does wrap around, but frustratingly the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t actually have a shot of the bottom of the iPhone case. And to add to that frustration,
⏹️ ▶️ John with all these recommendation of iPhone cases, people were throwing around on Twitter, you’d be amazed at how
⏹️ ▶️ John many websites, like the manufacturer’s website, the company that makes the iPhone case, you go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John product page for the case, and it has one or two photos of the case, and
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them are from the back. It’s like, I wanna see the top, bottom, and left and right edges.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I can’t tell what your buttons look like when I’m just looking at the back of your case. What, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, it’s like you had one job, make a product page for this iPhone case. Should we have photos? Yeah, people like to see what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John buying. Should we have photos from different angles now? Just one photo is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, come on, you have one job. How many edges are there? There’s only six edges, right? Just take
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Or they have a photo from the back and then a photo from the front. So you can see like
⏹️ ▶️ John the inside, like a design they have on the inside of the case that you’re never gonna see. It’s like, come on. You know, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to squint at it and say, from this angle, does it look like the bottom has a cut out? Like one case
⏹️ ▶️ John had like this moody sort of dim lighting, everything shrouded in shadows. And you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re zooming in and turning up the contrast in Photoshop. Like, is that a cutout or is that just a shadow? I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell. Come on case manufacturers, just show your products from all angles. You know, Amazon and other sites
⏹️ ▶️ John like that do a good job because users upload photos or YouTube, yay YouTube, because someone will take it and hold in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of a camera and rotate it and then you’ll be able to see all the edges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe they only have a flatbed scanner.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. Maybe, although it’s hard to tell. They look like they’re very nicely
⏹️ ▶️ John lit shots. Oh, and so I guess the final thing is, it was actually the first thing, phone setup.
⏹️ ▶️ John Before I could even do any of this experiencing of the phone I had to get it set up. I did get a SIM removal
⏹️ ▶️ John tool. The mystery of which option I chose when setting up the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the mystery remained because, so I’m, you know, I’ll start from the beginning. I’m setting up my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John I turn it on, and it’s like, oh, do you want to transfer stuff from your phone or do you want to do it from iCloud or whatever, I did
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone transfer. I think that’s what I did last year too, where you sit them next to each other and they transfer directly rather than
⏹️ ▶️ John going from iCloud. Prior to this, I had done all backups on the other phone and everything, so it’s all fresh, right? I did
⏹️ ▶️ John the transfer and I just sat them next to each other for a really long time, both of them plugged in and they did all the transfer and everything transferred
⏹️ ▶️ John over, right? Something that only comes up for developer nerdy
⏹️ ▶️ John people is that all of these transfer techniques, I believe all of them, both iCloud and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think maybe also restore from iTunes backup slash Finder backup, but I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure iCloud and phone transfer. They don’t give you back your beta apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that’s been your experience, but like, and I have a surprising number of beta apps including on my home
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, so when the thing is quote unquote done transferring, my home screens look different because they’re missing icons. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to go back into TestFlight and redownload the betas and put them back where they were. I think it actually remembers where they were because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think if you just tell TestFlight to install them it puts them back in the right place, which is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not only does it do that, but it’ll actually usually even restore their data. Because the app’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data does get synced over, it’s just the app itself is not synced over. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m assuming this is because of the weird way the test flight came up, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have the UDID for each phone, and I’m guessing the way test flight works behind the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scenes is still based on that. And Apple’s just automating it and raising the limits of things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that’s how it still worked. And so there’s probably no good way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to actually transfer over beta apps between any two devices in any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco method, unless they would like integrate these two very different parts of their backend, Which Apple’s not good at.
John’s Migration Headaches
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I didn’t expect it. It’s not a big deal. And most people don’t have beta apps or whatever, and it’s pretty easy to fix. But anyway, all I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to say is, you know, I get the two phones, they’re done. They look a little bit different. I say, oh yeah, test flight. I go download a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of test flight stuff, and they look the same. I’m like, great. I’m in business now. And it had a little one of those white
⏹️ ▶️ John dialog box that comes up that says, we’re trying to activate your phone. This may take a few minutes or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And then I make sure I go near a window or whatever because my house has terrible signal, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want activation to fail because signal. But of course, activation does fail. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, failed to activate. If this problem persists, go talk to your carrier. I’m like, oh, maybe I was just not in the
⏹️ ▶️ John right place at the right time. How do I make it activate again? Reboot the phone, whatever. Go, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can go to the second floor of the house, go near the window that has the strongest signal. We’re activating your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John dot, dot, dot. Activation failed. If this problem persists, please contact your carrier. So I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, this isn’t good. You know, ostensibly the setup, quote unquote setup
⏹️ ▶️ John process is done. I have all my apps, but I can’t get the phone to activate and be my
⏹️ ▶️ John actual phone. So then I was thinking back to those options. Which option did I pick when I ordered the thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like- Well, so hold on. Did your phone have a SIM in it or not?
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, that’s what I get to. That was the question I asked myself. Does my phone have a SIM? Now I went to the info page and you see the IMEID
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever all that stuff. I was like, that must mean I have a SIM in it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because all these numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know anything about phones. Like maybe you only think that’s what it means or maybe it’s an eSIM. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I went and got the SIM removal tool, which came with my phone. Because I felt so dumb, I’m like, I need
⏹️ ▶️ John to physically check whether this thing came with a SIM, because through the software, I can’t tell because I don’t trust
⏹️ ▶️ John my knowledge of how phones work. So I used the SIM removal tool, popped it out, sure enough, there was a SIM in the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well, that question is solved. So I pushed the little SIM tray back in, and now I’m like, well, now
⏹️ ▶️ John what do I do to activate this phone? I think I might’ve tried it one more time, and of course it fails, it failed pretty quickly. Then
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to do what the thing said, which is call my carrier, and that’s never, never a thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do, especially on iPhone day, because this is a day one order, whatever it was, October 23rd, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is the earliest ship date, right? So I called my carrier, Verizon,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I penetrated the labyrinth of their support maze.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was it faster because you were on Verizon’s 5G network?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, nice, I missed it, darn it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, obviously I can’t be on Verizon’s 5G network because my phone isn’t activated. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I get through the thing and that they’re going through like the wait times are, blah, blah, blah. And honestly, the wait times didn’t sound that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, okay, well, it could be worse. It’s not like they said it was a one hour wait time. And then they have this option of like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can call you back so you don’t have to sit on hold listening to this terribly over boosted, clipped,
⏹️ ▶️ John fuzzy, eight kilohertz Muzak. I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John what song it was. I think it was like a Muzak version of like, I don’t remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John some hit from like 10 years ago. It was very strange and mildly inappropriate.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, I’m like, yeah, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s do that thing where you call me back so I don’t have to sit on hold anymore, right? So I
⏹️ ▶️ John go through the process of doing that. First, they ask you, like, are you calling from the phone you want to be fixed?
⏹️ ▶️ John And what number do you want me? And type in the number. I was like, type in the number. It’s the number I called you from. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John use that one. But they’re only a phone company. They can’t tell what number I called them from. So anyway, I type in my phone number. This is my landline
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m calling them on because we still have one of those at home. Type in my phone number. I tell them to call me back. And then I hang
⏹️ ▶️ John up. And then you get an email and a text and it’s like, yep, we’ll totally call you back. We’ve got your spot in line,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m doing other things. The phone rings. I’m like, that must be Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John calling me back. I get up to go over, get the phone, but it doesn’t ring a second time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Verizon’s home phone thing has a feature where it will, this is their
⏹️ ▶️ John like spam caller feature. But rather than just sending the spam callers directly to voicemail
⏹️ ▶️ John or blocking them, it says, I don’t know why we thought this was a good idea, but the feature is that if it only
⏹️ ▶️ John rings once, it’s spam. Which is kind of nice, ring zero would be better,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you’re sitting on the couch watching TV and the phone rings but it doesn’t ring a second time, you’re like, oh, that was a spam call. So it’s good that I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t get up. It’s good that I didn’t even turn my head to look what the caller ID said to see if it’s someone I care about, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So Verizon calls you back, or I think Verizon calls you back. I get up to go get the phone, I look at the caller
⏹️ ▶️ John ID and it says Verizon, but the phone doesn’t ring a second time. So I quickly grab the receiver and pick it up and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, hello, dial tone. Because not only does it only ring once, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it just either sends them the voicemail or hangs up. So I have lost my spot in line.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no. And so I called Verizon back and they said, would you like us to call you back?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, no, because apparently Verizon, your own spam filtering software system
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks that when your support line calls me back, it’s a spam call. And if I don’t get there on the
⏹️ ▶️ John very first ring, I missed the call. So the wait times, as you can imagine, had changed
⏹️ ▶️ John in the intervening 30 minutes or whatever I’d been waiting for this call. And I stayed on hold for a
⏹️ ▶️ John very, very, very long time. Eventually got through to a very nice person who I
⏹️ ▶️ John gave a 10 rating in the obligatory, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know, call thing or whatever, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I explained the situation. So I got a new phone, it’s got a new SIM in it. Person on the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I can’t say whether this is actually true. I’m just telling you what the person on the phone said. But the person on the phone said,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s good that you got a new SIM in your phone because that’s what you need to do for 5G.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that actually true? It depends on the carrier, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it depends on the carrier, but I’d seen somebody talking maybe to you on Twitter saying the exact same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that doesn’t mean it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John true, but- People said everything to me on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Twitter, right? Well, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s definitely true if you had a super old phone with the wrong SIM form factor, like if you
⏹️ ▶️ John had a micro SIM instead of a nano SIM, that is definitely true. Although I have heard of people cutting down a micro SIM
⏹️ ▶️ John with actual scissors to be a nano SIM or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there’s like punch out tools you can get, but I think even that doesn’t work for 5G. And I believe there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually documented somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the reasons my intention was to choose the option that comes
⏹️ ▶️ John with the SIM in the phone was because I’m like, well, better safe than sorry. And if it comes with a SIM and it’s a 5G phone, I know for sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that that SIM is gonna work with 5G because duh, right? So sure enough, my phone did come with the SIM
⏹️ ▶️ John and they were like, and the guy on the phone said, it’s good that you got the phone with the new SIM. I’m like, great, we’re in business.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I had to read a series of very long numbers over the phone to this very
⏹️ ▶️ John patient person. The IME ID is like, is like whatever that one, that’s nothing, it’s the other one. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember the acronym, but the other one is like 27 digits long. Oh, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John killing me, right? And mine has a string of zeros in the middle of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, counting zeros
⏹️ ▶️ John is the worst. Cause I was trying to do it in groups of like three, but there was a run of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, more than three zeros and it wasn’t four, it was like seven or eight zeros. I was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John zero, like I’m counting them with my finger. I’m using my fingernail. I’m like, how many zeros are there? I get done with the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing. I’m like, I’m gonna count those zeros again. Stay with me here. Cause you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if you screw this up, you just wasted, like, you gotta go through the whole process again. Went through this whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like, okay, you know, turn off wifi on your phone. Like I was asking during the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole call, I always ask the poor people this, I feel so bad. I’m like, what could I have done to not be talking to you right
⏹️ ▶️ John now? Because there’s something I could have done on my end instead of calling my carrier. Like, because he was
⏹️ ▶️ John saying like, make sure your other phone is off. I’m like, was that it? Is that all I needed to do to activate my phone was get
⏹️ ▶️ John my previous phone off the network? And it’s like, yeah, you should probably get your previous phone on the network. But again, anything someone says on one of these calls is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, is that true? Or is that just something they tell people or does it make it easier? But next
⏹️ ▶️ John year, or two years from now, I will try this, which is turn off the other phone and get it off the
⏹️ ▶️ John network, the one that currently has my number before trying to activate the new phone with my number. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that would have helped here. But he was like, well, maybe, I don’t know, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so we turn off the
⏹️ ▶️ John other phone, do the thing, and he’s like, okay, well, now we’re activating your phone. Now try to give me a test call. Of course, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work. Turn off your phone again, reboot it, try different places in the house. So it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t work on the first, second, or even the third try. Why didn’t it work? What was he doing on
⏹️ ▶️ John his end? He was doing something. He put me on hold a lot. He was doing a lot of things, you know, and I was like, oh my God, did I read
⏹️ ▶️ John the numbers wrong? Eventually the phone activated. It activated
⏹️ ▶️ John after like the fifth time of doing literally the same thing. I was on my end, I was doing the same thing every time, following the
⏹️ ▶️ John instructions. And on his end, he was doing something. Eventually it worked. This person was
⏹️ ▶️ John very patient. I was happy to get my phone work. This is many hours into my phone setup process this morning.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, but I’m not done because I’m like, great, I’ve got my phone. It’s all set up now.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s set up with Verizon 5G. I quickly determined that no, there is no 5G in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John I get a one and a half bars of LTE is what I get. And I like it. And of course I don’t go anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John else. So I haven’t actually been on 5G. So I have no idea what the speeds are, right? But I’m like, well, at least my phone setup is done.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then I go through the thing of like, well, let me just launch all my apps and make sure I can log into all of them. And then like something
⏹️ ▶️ John must’ve happened in the past two years. Like, I mean, I have vague memories of this for two years ago, but if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a curve where you could graph how many things I use for two-factor authentication
⏹️ ▶️ John and how many two-factor authenticated app accounts I have, that curve has gone hockey stick
⏹️ ▶️ John in the last couple of years because I’m like, oh, well, let me just, you know, I use Google Authenticator
⏹️ ▶️ John as my main two-factor app. And through some mysterious
⏹️ ▶️ John process, when you get a new phone, Google Authenticator
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t empty on the new phone, but it’s not full.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I have a huge scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John list of Google Authenticator things on my good phone, right, on my actual phone. On the new phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had some entries in Google Authenticator and they weren’t just Google. Like there was
⏹️ ▶️ John other services that my two FA things were there for. I had a vague recollection that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, if you just let it sit there for a while, kind of iCloud style, it’ll sync all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think it ever would have because it was sitting like that for a long time. So I’m like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got to go re-add the two-factor stuff for everything in Google Authenticator. And then that’s when I realized how long the list
⏹️ ▶️ John is. And it’s so painful. Every website has a different way of doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you just add a new device? Do you have to disable two-factor? If you disable two-factor,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many hoops do you have to jump through to that? Often to disable two-factor, you have to still have two-factor. So it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ John important, and I knew this going in, that I keep my good phone with all the 2FA stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John still on it. I need that to get it onto my other phone. Like if I had just thrown this phone in
⏹️ ▶️ John the ocean and gotten a new phone, I’d be screwed out of a lot of these things. I’d have to go to the backup codes, right? Where they send
⏹️ ▶️ John you these one-time codes that they tell you to print out and everything. Every website is different. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John technique is different. Some of the websites were broken. Like Slack’s website was super broken. You would go
⏹️ ▶️ John to like add two factor and it would say, scan this QR code. And then it would have a broken image on the webpage.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, come on Slack. But then you’re like, aha, But there’s another way you can add it besides QR code. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just an encoding of a string or whatever. There was a little link that says, can’t scan the QR code?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, Slack, I can’t scan the QR code. Click this link here and it expands this little thing. It says, just
⏹️ ▶️ John enter this string into your two-factor app and it’s a bunch of letters and numbers. And I enter the bunch of letters
⏹️ ▶️ John and numbers into my two-factor app and it adds it and says, now, finally at the bottom of the page, test that your two-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John thing works by entering your six-digit code. Enter the six-digit code and it doesn’t work. I
⏹️ ▶️ John tried this so many times. Am I mistyping it? Do I have to type in the new code within the
⏹️ ▶️ John time window of the two-factor because it’s time-based thing for Slack, right? Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just contacted Slack, or I was complaining about it on Twitter and Slack’s corporate support thing
⏹️ ▶️ John contacted me and they said, oh, if you’re having problems, send some emails. So I sent them an email. Halfway through
⏹️ ▶️ John me writing the good, dutiful, detailed email of what the problem with their webpage was, including a screenshot showing a QR code
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t exist and telling them, yes, I see the part where I don’t need to use a QR code. No, that part doesn’t work either.
⏹️ ▶️ John I eventually figured out the workaround, which is disable two-factor entirely. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t disable two-factor entirely because this particular Slack, and we are all on this Slack, and I’m not going to name and
⏹️ ▶️ John shame it, but the particular Slack does not allow you to disable two-factor. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I could change two-factor to be SMS briefly. So I change it to SMS, two-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John my way in to the thing, use that as two-factor to get the new two-factor thing on that, and then change it back to the,
⏹️ ▶️ John When you go to add it again, it doesn’t show you the broken page with the QR code. It sets
⏹️ ▶️ John it up as a new device because you had previously turned off, you know, you’d use two factor and SMS, which doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the QR code authenticator app thing. Anyway, I eventually got it to work. God, I have so many two
⏹️ ▶️ John factor things. I have, I think at my count, five different apps, each of which
⏹️ ▶️ John has multiple things in it. Why do I have five different apps? It’s not my choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Work alone has multiple two factor systems, right? And then I have two factor things for, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John things like Slack or related to podcasts or, you know, Discord things that I’m on and
⏹️ ▶️ John all like, and tons of Microsoft stuff, which has their own app. Just, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ John setting up this phone took so long. And it’s not, everyone kept saying like, what did you use? Did you use the Apple transfer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you use the iCloud? That’s not what took all the time. That was fine. That ran fine, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s two factor. Now everyone’s gonna tell me, you should use Author. You should use insert name of your favorite app here because
⏹️ ▶️ John it does cloud syncing. you should use 1Password because it’ll do all this stuff for you. Well, A, that’s not true because I can’t choose
⏹️ ▶️ John what apps I use for work and I can’t choose what apps are used by like these companies that I work with and all this other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, right? Sometimes you just don’t have a choice and you have to use the apps they tell you to do. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to talk to corporate IT to get the new thing on the thing and they won’t do it over mail and they have to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you just can’t avoid that. But B, for the things I can control, now I’m going to be the Casey of this episode
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, I find some vague comfort in the idea that my two-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John things are not cloud synced. That they’re literally only on the device and the only way to get them to another device is to copy
⏹️ ▶️ John them directly or go through a computer backup or whatever, right? Because I feel like for two-factor,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the convenience of it syncing is great, but that also means it’s probably in a cloud somewhere and that
⏹️ ▶️ John does not make me feel good because the whole point of two-factor is something you know and something you have, and what I have is my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and a bunch of backup code somewhere, right? But if it’s not something you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John if the information required to re-instantiate your two-factor stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is in a cloud account somewhere, because then if you crack that cloud account, you get all the two-factor stuff and you just download
⏹️ ▶️ John it to any phone you want and now you can get in as two-factor if you know my password and yada yada. So there is some
⏹️ ▶️ John comfort in that, but in like hour three of my two-factor setup, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I should use a cloud sync one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or maybe I should use one
⏹️ ▶️ John that lets me download it in the back. Because there’s a bunch of ones that will, they’ll save their stuff in the
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes backup. And yes, to answer your question, I did do a complete encrypted iTunes,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I keep saying iTunes backup, but you know what I mean. A complete encrypted backup to my Mac and a complete restore
⏹️ ▶️ John of that backup to my phone. Google, I don’t care. It’s the same deal. It comes back up, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, here’s some set of your two factor. It’s not all of them, not by a long shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did that work, by the way, for you without rebooting the computer? Did the backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and restore work without, yeah. Yeah, and you’re on Catalina, right? Because you’re on the iMac Pro, I assume?
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. I mean, it took forever, but yeah, and the progress was just like a tiny pie circle thing
⏹️ ▶️ John next to the device in the sidebar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve been doing that recently. I had to send out Adam’s iPad for repair, and so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backed it up to my computer because Minecraft data is not backed up to iCloud. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s basically like the primary application of this device. So that’s with my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco temporarily it restored it onto my iPad, which I had back to my computer first. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he used that for a week while I waited for his to get shipped out and come back and then did the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in reverse. So two more restores. And every time I had to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would plug in the iPad and look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John at Finder. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t show up at all. And at first I’m like, am I doing something wrong? Did I miss the permission dialogue somewhere?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And eventually I would search and I found this Apple support document that says, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t appear, reboot both devices. And sure enough, that did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time. Like, great, software quality, here
⏹️ ▶️ John we are. I did have that problem. I plugged in my new phone, and I’m like, is this the first time I’m doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Finder? Actually, I plugged in, I think it happened with both. Plugged in my phone to do, when I was doing the original
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes backup, I keep saying iTunes, Finder backup of my old phone. I plugged it in, I’m like, so
⏹️ ▶️ John this is supposed to be in the Finder, right? So I go in the Finder, and I’m like, oh, I guess I have to make a window with a
⏹️ ▶️ John sidebar. So I do, I’m like, it’s supposed to be in the sidebar, right? I look in the sidebar and it’s not there. And I plug in and unplug, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John plug in and unplug, nothing happens. But having done that giant saga of hardware debugging with my
⏹️ ▶️ John computer before, I just jump immediately, like I plugged and unplugged like two times till I immediately jumped to,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, plug it directly into the computer. That’s always a solution with USB. Do not pass
⏹️ ▶️ John go, do not use a hub, do not plug it into your monitor. So I went over to my actual computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John unplugged my podcast microphone USB that I’m talking through right now, and plug the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John with an Apple cable directly into the back of my computer. Wouldn’t you know it showed up in the sidebar. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John next time you have this problem, I suggest if you’re not already doing it, connect it directly to your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bad news, I was already doing it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John an Apple cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly to a USB-C port on the back of my iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, USB-C, maybe that was the problem, I did USB-A.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s why yours took forever, because that’s USB-2. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have, with the, I should have thought of that. I should know that I couldn’t have, because I didn’t have the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone yet. So I didn’t have the lightning to USB-C cable yet to do the backup of the original phone. When I went to restore
⏹️ ▶️ John onto my new phone, that’s when I should have done it, and that was a mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for anybody who doesn’t know, the USB-C cables that Apple supplies are USB 3. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-A lightning cables are USB 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and for anyone who doesn’t know, on their hojillion dollar Mac Pro, if it’s connected the way mine is, the ports
⏹️ ▶️ John in the back of the monitor are USB 2.0. I should know, wait, I have display screen compression now. They should
⏹️ ▶️ John be up to three speeds. I should test that one time. Let’s see many past episodes about this details,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird. But when I plugged in the new phone, I had to do the thing where like, make this phone trust this computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and even that was a little fidgety because it’s one of those things where if a prompt appears and you miss
⏹️ ▶️ John it or it doesn’t appear, like how do I make that prompt come back to let me do the thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But eventually I got it to work. All that is to say, restoring the iTunes slash finder
⏹️ ▶️ John restore of my encrypted backup did not improve my two factor situation. And many of the two factor
⏹️ ▶️ John things, like there are levels of orneriness. Sometimes it’s like, well, we want Cloud Sync, but if you do an encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John backup, you get the thing back. Sometimes like the Google one, we will give you some apparently random assortment of your
⏹️ ▶️ John two factor, but like not nearly like a fifth of them. Right? Some of them
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t give you anything or will, you know, or will seemingly give you everything. But when you
⏹️ ▶️ John try to use one, it’ll be like, well, you need to do this extra step or this extra authentication thing and send you back to the website.
⏹️ ▶️ John My worst one was like, it was a work thing. And it was like, yeah, we remember that you had this
⏹️ ▶️ John two-factor thing, but the actual message was your work has a policy set that you’re not allowed to set this
⏹️ ▶️ John up on a new device without actually talking to a human or whatever. So, you know, what do you want?
⏹️ ▶️ John Work bureaucracy. Eventually, it seemed like it took a full day. Full day from, hey, my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone is here, to now my phone actually has all the apps on it, including all my two-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, and they all actually work. And it was a fraught day, because if you’ve ever messed with two-factor stuff, you’re like, please don’t let me get locked
⏹️ ▶️ John out. involved and every time you disable and re-enable a two-factor by the way most
⏹️ ▶️ John websites give you an entirely new set of backup codes and I’m assuming they invalidate the old ones
⏹️ ▶️ John so I was printing out backup codes like crazy right it’s just and then trying to organize them and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John you print them out that’s what you’re supposed to do I don’t want they’re not I don’t store them on the computer the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ John is they’re not on the computer if you break into my computer I don’t want you to here’s a here’s a single key that can get you into all
⏹️ ▶️ John you know for each one of my accounts here’s the thing that you need a single factor that will get you in. Because that’s the point. The backup
⏹️ ▶️ John code is like, if you lose your phone and you don’t have the two factor, I don’t even cut them or copy them
⏹️ ▶️ John or paste them. It’s like print only. I print and then, because they usually
⏹️ ▶️ John give you a screen that says print this screen. I don’t even save it as a PDF. I just literally print it and it goes down on a piece of paper and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to organize the paper and it’s a whole physical organizing mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you tape the pieces of paper to the bottom of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John keyboard? Yeah, I stick them on my monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the pieces of paper are kept in a physical secure location, it will not be disclosed. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, so anyway, a whole day of setting up my phone, and then I got to experience all the stuff that I just
⏹️ ▶️ John described about the cases and everything. I tried out the phone, the camera a little bit. I don’t have enough experience
⏹️ ▶️ John with it to say anything other than it is way better than a XS camera, but you already knew that,
⏹️ ▶️ John no big surprises there.
Sponsor: Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Backblaze, unlimited cloud backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your Macs and PCs for just $6 a month. I love Backblaze. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, first of all, I love the idea of cloud backup. This eliminates so many risks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hazards that could happen to your data if it’s only in your house or your office. But Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cloud backup services in general save you from yourself and save you you from a whole bunch of possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threats, things like fires, floods, data loss, theft, all sorts of stuff that could happen to every copy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your data if it’s only in your your house or your building. And among all the cloud backups I’ve tried,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe me, backblaze is the best. It’s not even close. It is by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best. So here’s the thing, you can back up your entire Mac or PC for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six bucks a month, and any external drives that are connected to Unlimited space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlimited bandwidth, unlimited speed. It’s that simple. When you want to restore files,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just restore like one file. So for instance, if you’re like on vacation somewhere and you left a file on your home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, you can do like a one-file restore right in their app on your phone or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their website. Or if you have like a big data loss, you can do a restore. Of course, on their website,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make a giant zip file and they have a downloader to help you download it quickly. Or you can have them ship you a hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overnight UA hard drive with your data on it, and then after you’re done, you can return the drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ll refund the cost of the drive to you. So it’s a wonderful service. Backblaze recently saved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our butts. I talked about on this show how Tiff’s laptop basically totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco died at a time when I had no time machine backup for it. So we would have been totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosed, but Backblaze saved our butts. And as the CTO of the family,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Backblaze saved my butt, let’s be honest. It saved us because it had a copy of everything. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got the laptop fixed, we got it back from Apple, of course it’s wiped, and we were able to download everything
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re gonna need this, start today. Backblaze.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Backbleeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
Casey’s Carrier Complaints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A piece of real-time follow-up I was digging around on the Verizon coverage map.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And interestingly, their nationwide 5G seems to stop at the Connecticut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in like Marco’s neck of the woods. And then the rich people section of Connecticut, so like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Greenwich and Stanford in that area, you know, all the New Yorkers effectively. And then that’s about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It appears that it is nowhere even vaguely close to you, John. There is some, there is some ultra wide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey band relatively close to you. And I don’t want to disclose
⏹️ ▶️ John In the city. I think there’s an actual Boston proper. I think there’s a couple of streets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where’s Austin? Cause in North Brighton, those are areas that have a fair bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ultra wide band. Actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of surprising, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll take a while to roll out. Honestly, I just, I just don’t have better signal at my house. I don’t care what the speeds are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know, it’s funny you bring that up and you know, I’m looking at, uh, some of the, the Virginia coverage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Verizon’s coverage map, which I think I complained about this last week. Verizon’s coverage map
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is excellent in terms of functionality. Uh, AT&T is such an utter disaster. It drives me nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I will say that there is a large swath of semi no man’s land that is on the West
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Virginia, Virginia border. There’s like probably a couple hundred square mile area
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is just completely barren on Verizon. Like, Nope, sorry, no service. Not even just a teeny bit, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey none. Nope. you don’t need it. Which is somewhat enlightening because this is the moment in which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to start, oh I am jumping ahead, no I’m not jumping ahead, even if I am I don’t care. I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to complain about AT&T because unbeknownst to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my AT&T plan, which is, I don’t know, I think we jumped onto this plan like three or four years ago now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s one of the data rollover plans. We get something like 15 or 30 gigs a month of which we never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use that much and then the data data rolls over between months. So, you know, if I use, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I get, like, call it 30 gigs and if I use 10, then the next month I’ll have 50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs because I have the 30 from that month and the 20 from the month prior and it only goes, rolls over for a month. It’s actually a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice setup. I have, you know, hotspot tethering, whatever you want to call it, and it works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out pretty well and I’ve been pretty pleased with it actually. But I go to look around at AT&T’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey godawful coverage map to try to figure out if there’s there’s 5G anywhere near me and there’s really not. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was in a different section of Virginia where I thought there was 5G nearby. And so I start trying to look into this and then I come to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that as I’m looking in the settings in like setting cellular and then I think cellular data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, there’s no mention of 5G. I thought, huh, that’s funny. So I started poking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about and asking people, I think mostly on the Relay Slack. And I was told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that A, you may or may not see that on an AT&T plan, like the whole, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use 5G always, use 5G sometimes, et cetera. And B, by the way, if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on one of AT&T’s quote unquote unlimited plans, you don’t get 5G in the first place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s such an AT&T thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s such an AT&T thing. So great. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have really loved to have known this upfront because I very well may have just bought this phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like with a Verizon SIM in it straight away Because at this point, I’m starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to wonder, well, should I just switch to Verizon? And up until the moment where I started looking at this vast swath of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no coverage in Virginia, I was going to tell you I am absolutely without a shadow of a doubt planning on switching.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I’m slightly less convinced. But nevertheless, I go digging into this and wondering, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can I get a reasonably comparable 5G compatible plan on AT&T?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can, but it’s like 10 bucks more a month, which in the grand scheme of things, it’s like effectively nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s frustrating, right? Like I don’t want to change my plan just for this arbitrary thing that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t even near me anyway on AT&T anyhow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you could get like two and a half additional boxes of macaroni and cheese each month for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. Think about how much bigger my waistline would be if I, if I didn’t have to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, so anyway, so I, I, I’m just in principle, I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoyed. And so of course, what do you do when you’re really annoyed by something and you want to get a corporation to pay attention to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, did you complain on Twitter?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh absolutely I complained on Twitter. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the whole DM us and we’ll be happy to talk to you. And then I sent a very nice person, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember what their name was, but a very nice person gets me on like a chat on the computer, which actually worked out very nicely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I said, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it’s something along the lines of, I pay $130 a month all in taxes, maybe it’s 140, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter, call it $140 a month taxes all in, Aaron and me, my watch, etc. But you just said $10 matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the principle. Touche, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re ruining my story. You’re ruining my story, but you’re not wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I say, oh, you pay $140 a month. I would like to have 5G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service, but I do not want to pay, you know, even more. And typically, like, for example, with Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fios, this is the moment where they say, oh, as it turns out, we have this special deal just for you and it’s half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as we claimed it was. You know what I mean? And they basically said, well, for $160 a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can do this. For $170 a month, you can do that. And for $190 a month, you can do this. What? I told you I want to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than $140 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wasn’t aware that modern cell phone plans were negotiable, like used car deals. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, as it turns out, if it’s, if you have, uh, if you have a like CableTown,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess Verizon’s not CableTown, but these companies do everything now. So yeah, Casey’s right to think like, when you
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to Verizon about your Fios and say you’re thinking of changing to Comcast, they will try to give you a better deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it works that way with cell phone plans. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did. Yeah, I knew that about like cable companies, but I didn’t know that this was a thing we could do with our cell phone plans.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s the same company. Like if it’s Verizon, it’s the same company. And AT&T also provides television as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So does only the television part of AT&T negotiate? But either way, when I was on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John with the nice person from Verizon, who was very patient with me, during the many
⏹️ ▶️ John bouts of downtime as we waited for computers to do things, I did actually ask, hey, and by the way, do I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything to get 5G or is that part of what I already pay for? And he looked and said, you get 5G. Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is you’re paying for now, there’s no increase in price, you just get 5G. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John to hear. Of course, I’m waiting for the bill to come with my quote unquote activation fee. I didn’t ask about that because I’m just already resigned
⏹️ ▶️ John to eating it, but I honestly have no idea if it will ever appear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fair. So anyway, so I talked to this AT&T person and I was like, okay, no, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I’m going to go to Verizon if you guys can’t make a deal for me, and they were basically like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tough noogies, have fun. And so, okay. Uh, and so I’d started digging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on Verizon and nobody really cares about the particulars of what I found other than to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are also a Verizon Fios user, you can get a sum total of $20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month off between the two of them. They’ll give you, if you, you have to like sign up for something in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to tell them like, Hey, this Verizon wireless account in this Fios account, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are at the same frigging address, but whatever. Oh, we would like the discount please. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can get $10 off Fios and $10 off your wireless account, which is 20 bucks off in total, which was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something I was not aware of. And I don’t think that’s a temporary thing, but, um, check my math on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, so anyway, I came to find out that. But of course, you know, AT&T is trying to bundle like HBO,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever, whatever, whatever, because it’s free for them and all for all intents and purposes. Interestingly, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the plans on Verizon bundle Disney Plus and or Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Music, which I was not aware of. Maybe this is old news to everyone else, but I did not know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so if you consider the fact that we are Disney Plus subscribers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, you know, some of the discounts for files and so on and so forth, it is actually a little bit cheaper for us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to switch to Verizon and get fancy 5G service. And I think I had mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode, I might have, that there’s a park that in the before times I would sometimes like to go and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do work in that actually seems to be covered by their ultra wide band, which would be super cool. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not, having seen this coverage map, I’m now a little bit worried, which is funny because, when I switched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Verizon to AT&T in 08, AT&T was nowhere and Verizon was everywhere. Now it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost seems like it might be the reverse. But anyways, I’m probably still going to switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Verizon for the family, uh, in, in no small part to save a little bit of money each month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s so frustrating how not transparent this stuff is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, and I wish I, to some degree, I wish Apple had said, Hey, you know, if you’re an old AT&T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user, which they should somehow know about me, I would think, you know, just FYI, this ain’t going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work with 5g unless you switch your plan and, oh, by the way, the plans are kind of crummier in some ways and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than others. I don’t know. It’s just, I feel like this whole experience for now, both John and me have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really not as, as, as slick and easy as they have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the past, which really, really kind of bums me out. And I granted, I mean, this is the first worldliest of first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world problems, but I don’t know. I wish, I wish this wasn’t the case and I wish we weren’t getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nickel and dimed about everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should have given context though. Uh, I have had to call the carrier for most of my iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ John know if I didn’t, in last year, but yes, I don’t know if it’s because I have bad signal on my house or I just don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how to activate a new phone. Sometimes it’s worked perfectly. I bought it like I said, I think of this 10 s I
⏹️ ▶️ John ordered it with the my old phone. I said to replace the new phone it came I took out of the box and I was off to the races right
⏹️ ▶️ John this time I had to call the calling the carrier. I don’t know what explains that who can say
⏹️ ▶️ John right, but I don’t blame Apple for that because Apple has no control of that they’re not the carrier. And for
⏹️ ▶️ John me, all of the pain of my setup process was crap that has nothing to do with iOS or Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s two factor stuff, right? And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that bed yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Because right, that’s what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. Like, I have obviously gotten two factor religion,
⏹️ ▶️ John and enabled to factor on every single account I have, which I think is good. And people should do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I just didn’t, I didn’t understand the repercussions for that didn’t viscerally, intellectually
⏹️ ▶️ John understood them all. Because I, like I said, last phone, I had to reset up my two factor two, but I think I had to factor on like five accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I got my tennis. Now I have to factor on like every account. And so it is a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I’m going to do anything about it. I’m not going to go to, like I said, Cloud Sync or Authy or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But honestly, I don’t blame the phone or the product or Apple or even Verizon for that because that’s just the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I did. I feel like though, if I’m ahead of the curve and if
⏹️ ▶️ John best practice will eventually be for everyone to have two-factor, then we need better solutions because I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine like a non-tech nerd tolerating what I went through. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think a non-tech word would even tolerate, we even tolerate someone doing it for them. Because they’d be like, when do I get
⏹️ ▶️ John to use my phone? I’d be like, you get to use your phone eight hours from now. Just give me some space. Right? Oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I might accidentally lock you out of all your online things and lose everything because this is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John fraught process. And I really hope you still have your old phone with all this stuff in it, right? Now, maybe the solution to
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, you know, sign in with Apple type things or face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John and touch ID on the web, which is a cool thing that Apple has. they have a bunch of videos on it from WWDC you
⏹️ ▶️ John can check out, where if you have a website and you want people to be able to sign into your website
⏹️ ▶️ John using face ID or touch ID, they can do that, which is super convenient. And that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John biometrics have their own limits because obviously you can’t change your face or your fingerprints easily, but you can get a new two factor
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So all this is very fraught, but if we want people’s security to increase, it’s almost like there
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be a first party solution for two factor, but even that won’t solve the problem because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if Apple comes up with a first party thing for two factor that is like on device and you know, does the finder
⏹️ ▶️ John backups and does all that stuff. That doesn’t help me with my work stuff or my semi work stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John or like other people’s random servers where they require their specific two factor app. I’m being cagey about what
⏹️ ▶️ John these specific ones are because it’s all part of the security thing. You know, OPSEC, whatever, as Merlin would say. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is one of those solutions where, one of the situations where you can’t just come in with one unified solution
⏹️ ▶️ John because the whole problem is that it’s fragmented, right? and that you have to deal with multiple different
⏹️ ▶️ John security protocols. And I think I’m overkill, I think I have too many accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I disabled two-factor on some of my less essential things about a year ago, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John glad I did because I noticed those two-factor things still on my old phone, but then I realized when
⏹️ ▶️ John testing them, oh, I must have disabled two-factor because I don’t need to use it anymore, like for sort of non-essential, no
⏹️ ▶️ John personal information, not connected to anything type of things. And that I think is gonna be my policy going forward,
⏹️ ▶️ John only enable two-factor if you care if anyone breaks into it. But if it’s just some random website that you tried once,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t reflexively enable two-factor because you’re just gonna cause yourself work later. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think we’re…
MagSafe 15W charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have time for ask ATP do we
⏹️ ▶️ John know but I want to do this magsafe thing because I think a lot of people are Talking about this and I think it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be relatively quick. It’s just an interesting an Interesting quirk. All right, so you may have seen some
⏹️ ▶️ John stories going around the web about the new Apple’s magsafe charging puck
⏹️ ▶️ John which will charge your new iPhone at 15 watts
⏹️ ▶️ John If you buy the puck as I did it comes as a little puck with a wire attached to it We’re just kind of ashamed of the wires attached because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you screw up the wire You can’t just replace it because it’s like physically attached on one end But anyway, there’s a puck
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a wire and then a USB C connector And Apple says if you take that
⏹️ ▶️ John USB C connector and plug it into their new small 20 watt thing Which is not as small as their old 5 watt,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not super big either It’s just a plug with a little USB thing USB C connector on the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom if you use that to plug it in you can charge your phone at 15 watts Which is faster than the
⏹️ ▶️ John old 7.5 watts that the old phones used to charge on Qi charging, right? And people have been testing this puck
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re saying alright Well, I’ve got the puck but I don’t have that little Apple 20 watt thing But I’ll just plug it into this other
⏹️ ▶️ John USB C power adapter thing that I have and then you were measuring the power and saying Huh,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I plug it into this other little brick, it’s not charging at 15 watts. I’m getting I’m getting less
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m getting 7.5 or I’m getting 5 watts or whatever. I don’t know why that is. Let me try a bigger adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me try like a 60 watt MacBook adapter. Huh still not getting 15 watts
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me try a 96 watt adapter still not getting 15 watts and then they try the Apple 20
⏹️ ▶️ John Watt adapter and it gets 15 watts to the phone. It’s like well, wait a second. What
⏹️ ▶️ John what the heck is going on here? Why can an ostensibly more powerful charging brick
⏹️ ▶️ John not get 15 watts to go into my phone? But the Apple 20 watt one does and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John it used to sell a brick that looked the same as the 20 watt But it’s actually 18 watts that one also can’t put 15
⏹️ ▶️ John watts into the phone, right? So I’ll link to the Mac rumors posts about this
⏹️ ▶️ John and be like oh, it’s some proprietary thing You need the special Apple one or it’s it’s a negotiation protocol
⏹️ ▶️ John because the puck senses the temperature of your phone and adjust the output But the other ones don’t so it goes down to you
⏹️ ▶️ John know lower power It’s it’s a very strange situation if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care about the details, and you just want to be sure You know absolutely sure that you’ll be able to charge
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone wirelessly at 15 watts get the Apple adapter They actually reduce the price for once it’s only 20 bucks or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’ll that’ll work for you But we’ll also put a link to Alvin limbs video on YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John where he does a bunch of testing with a bunch of other comically large USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John power bricks and a whole bunch of them that are not apples 20 watt adapter have absolutely no
⏹️ ▶️ John problem putting 15 watts or more into a phone now there is obviously some adjustment
⏹️ ▶️ John of power going on Supposedly it’s temperature related. It’s hard to confirm
⏹️ ▶️ John that without knowing the mechanism, but experimentally, phone gets hot,
⏹️ ▶️ John power goes down. You can see that happening in the video because he’s got an IR camera on the back of the phone and seeing when it gets hot,
⏹️ ▶️ John the power goes down. But he demonstrates a whole bunch of adapters, including Apple’s pumping more
⏹️ ▶️ John than 15 watts into the back of a phone, or at least more than 15 watts over the wire, whether it
⏹️ ▶️ John actually gets into the phone, obviously is going through the Qi charging thing and losses for heat and all that other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, right? But this is a weird situation where your intuition
⏹️ ▶️ John about what might work and what might not, for example, let me just use the giant power brick that came with my MacBook Pro, surely
⏹️ ▶️ John that will be able to drive my puck. It won’t, but I think the more interesting part of this story,
⏹️ ▶️ John until we figure out what the whole deal is here, and there are a bunch of very prosaic explanations that aren’t very exciting, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the more interesting part of the story is if you are not a tech nerd and did not see this MacRumors story and did not
⏹️ ▶️ John see it flying around Twitter and just plugged your Apple puck in to your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and you weren’t getting 15 watts, I’m not sure how many people would notice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, because if you want your phone to charge fast, plug it in with a lightning port. Like we all know that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Wireless charging is slower. You get more losses to heat, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John is someone trying to charge their phone in a hurry with a wireless puck
⏹️ ▶️ John and being disappointed that it’s not faster? If you’re in a hurry, you plug it in. But if you’re just putting it on your nightstand
⏹️ ▶️ John overnight or wherever you charge it, you don’t care that it’s charging at 7.5 watts because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using the 18 watt adapter or because you’re using a 96 watt power book adapter, but it’s charging your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone at seven watts. You don’t care, because when you wake up in the morning, it’s charged.
⏹️ ▶️ John And slower charging in general is better for your battery health. So I do wonder how much of an issue this
⏹️ ▶️ John actually is versus tech nerds flipping out about it. The more prosaic explanations is that
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a precise combination of volts and amps that is detected by the device to decide that it can charge at the
⏹️ ▶️ John higher rate. And if you don’t exactly match those values, it won’t do it. We
⏹️ ▶️ John will put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page on USB power delivery.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can see this big chart of volts and amps and the various combinations that are valid. But of course, Apple has their own thing going
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Marco did a bunch of research on the exact
⏹️ ▶️ John power delivery capabilities of a bunch of Apple’s adapters, and you can correct
⏹️ ▶️ John me if I’m wrong, Marco, but do any of them exactly match the nine volts at 2.2 amps
⏹️ ▶️ John that the 20 watt adapter uses?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they are higher. Like the big bricks, like for the laptops, will do nine volts at three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amps, which is like more than what this needs. But, and I’m, you know, most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time, when things specify a certain amperage output, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can draw less, and it just works, it’s fine. I don’t know the specifics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the USB PD spec to know whether that’s okay here But I have to imagine that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah If you look at like I said you look at Alan limbs video with his measurements to like six decimal points or whatever this little device
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s using which knows how accurate the device is, but you can see wide variances of
⏹️ ▶️ John as the power draw fluctuates No matter what adapter is using uses the Apple one uses a non Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John one use 20 watt 18 watt They’re the the volts and amps are all over the place
⏹️ ▶️ John right so the power the the USB You know CPD power delivery spec thing
⏹️ ▶️ John Has a bunch of specific values that you’re supposed to target this many volts of this many amps From this power
⏹️ ▶️ John device so on and so forth But obviously the actual draw from any given device at any given time varies
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the load the device is putting on it. I Would like to see ifixit tear one of these apart
⏹️ ▶️ John to see what kind of smarts are in the puck We’ve heard reports of the temperature sensing experimental
⏹️ ▶️ John evidence shows that happening. How does that work? Is that entirely hardware side on the puck?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there some kind of data communication? Surely not but who knows because I mean nothing will surprise
⏹️ ▶️ John me after seeing the The tiny iOS computer with an h264 decoder chip
⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever was lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a tiny computer that would boot up every time you plugged it in and run a little version of
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was I forget, run a tiny little operating system and pipe your video through a hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John H.264 decoder and that was in an adapter, and something that you would think is passive, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not willing to speculate on what is inside this puck, but iFixit will surely tear it apart and let us know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But all this is to say is if you really, really, really want that full 15 watts, just buy the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple 20 watt adapter. It’s a little bit bulky for what it gives you. I don’t like that it’s bulky and that it
⏹️ ▶️ John blocks other outlets if you have it in an outlet strip that’s oriented
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain way. But it’s a fine product at 20 bucks if you just wanna be sure you’re getting the maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fine. But I would instead recommend that you don’t worry about how fast your thing is charging. It’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John to charge more slowly. And if you’re in a hurry, use a cable connected to a powerful adapter. But if you’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ John just accept whatever your wireless thing has given you. I didn’t even mention the wireless thing. Like I have the puck.
⏹️ ▶️ John As you can gather from me telling you that I always want to put my phone down gingerly on surfaces.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did not like the idea of a metal thing magnetically snapping against the bottom of my nice phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know the back is glass and the metal is smooth and flat and I’m sure it will be fine. And it’s a story that we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about probably next week about chargers leaving circular imprints on cases and everything. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John just didn’t want that puck connecting to the naked back of my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then once I got the case, I’m like, you know what? I don’t want that case connecting to the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want that puck connecting to the back of my case either. So I’m just gonna continue to plug my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John in. But I did find a very good use for that puck, which is in my little nightstand charging setup. I
⏹️ ▶️ John never had a good, I had a place to plug in my AirPod case, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John always annoying because the case is so small and I didn’t want to plug it in. But now I just, I chuck my AirPods in that. So now
⏹️ ▶️ John that very expensive $40 Apple charging puck, It
⏹️ ▶️ John is my designated air pod charger and the air pods fit on it perfectly and the magnets in it actually even kind of make The
⏹️ ▶️ John air pods like a line a certain way So that’s what I’m doing with that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just be clear there is an I fix it teardown for the magsafe charger Is that what you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey referring to or were you referring to the puck the the or the the brick the puck?
⏹️ ▶️ John I want I wanted to know if there’s anything inside the puck any electronics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay that I’m not sure about I haven’t clicked through to figure that out But
⏹️ ▶️ John more more next week if it’s interesting if not just assume is nothing interesting in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week Backblaze and flat file and thank you to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who pay us directly for supporting the show You can join an ATP that FM slash join keep an eye out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our merchandise sale starting in a few days And please once again, everybody, please
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please vote Thank you, and we will talk to you hopefully next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t mean to. Accidental, check
Marco’s brief hands-on time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually I didn’t want to interrupt you guys during your iPhone reviews, but I actually did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to an Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him and I actually got to you know, play with all these phones and handle them and see them in person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s there’s not I don’t have much to say it cuz you know, I was in there for 10 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I happened to I was doing As part of my my new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life here I have to periodically go back to civilization and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know an allergy shot or get my dog serviced or whatever. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was, I happened to be walking past an Apple store on iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, like right as they opened up. And because they’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we are in the time that we were in, there’s almost nobody there. And I didn’t have any kind of reservation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything because, you know, I don’t have anything to order yet. But I figured, let me go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If now that I’m here and there’s no one in there, let me see if I can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go in and see the colors in person. Cause I was concerned about what color I would get. The red didn’t look very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco red in all the review videos and everything. So, they let me in. Like, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t looking to buy a phone, I basically walked right in. Like, I asked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people who were doing crowd control, you know, for the little tiny bit there was, you know, oh, you walked down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this lane, then you walked through this lane, and oh, you’re not looking for a phone? I’m like, yeah, I just, I wanted to buy some MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pucks. Let me get a couple of MagSafe pucks. They’re like, okay, sure. They walk right in, so I get my MagSafe pucks, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, hey, you know, while I’m here, you mind if I look at the iPhone table and just look at the colors and everything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, the person was very friendly. Yeah, sure, of course. And I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, I think I’m still going red. Even though it is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very salmon-y or slash coral color in person. And I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t care much for the color of the back of it, But I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the color of the sides. And when I looked at every other option,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including the pro colors, frankly, I didn’t think the pros looked that nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it just immediately was covered in fingerprints on that sideband. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much are the fingerprints a big problem for you so far in in practice? I’ve seen a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of complaints about the fingerprints and I’ve seen the sort of, you know, horror shot photos of like the gold one with a
⏹️ ▶️ John million fingerprints, right? but anything that’s shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be like that. And it doesn’t bother me because the whole point is like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stainless steel. Like, you know, any kind of polished stainless steel,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that you have, yes, it will have fingerprints on it, but yes, you also know that they will rub
⏹️ ▶️ John out really easily because it’s stainless steel. It is a very smooth surface. So in my
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, I guess it got fingerprints all over it, but I never noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not, unless you’re actually, it’s kind of like if you’re taking shots, like say you’re trying to, say I was
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do a review, like a product review, or even just make a YouTube video. That is the worst case scenario. So it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of doesn’t surprise me that reviewers are freaking out about the fingerprints, because when you try to take the glamor
⏹️ ▶️ John shot of your phone for your, you know, for your review in the Verge, or for your YouTube video
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, you don’t want the fingerprints on it. So you’re constantly polishing them off, but oh, I touched it to polish it off
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a pain. But in real life, I just, I mean, Me personally,
⏹️ ▶️ John I never even noticed that they exist. I know they’re there, but I mostly was
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoying, when it was a naked phone, the feel of the stainless steel, the
⏹️ ▶️ John slight rounded over edge, the fact that it was like sometimes cool, that it was very smooth, that it was very hard,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that it was shiny. And did it have fingerprints all over it? Sure, I mean, maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John graphite one hides a little bit more than perhaps the gold or the pure silver, but it wasn’t a big
⏹️ ▶️ John issue for me. I can understand if you’re looking at them to just look at aesthetics, especially with other people’s fingerprints, it could freak you
⏹️ ▶️ John out a little bit, but I don’t know how much of an issue it’s going to be for people using
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone as a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. I haven’t really noticed the fingerprints at all. Not to say they’re not there. They’re definitely there, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t really notice. And actually, I apologize, Marco, for interrupting your review here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but John, that made me think of, again, I believe it was on Upgrade, that they were talking about, particularly Jason,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he really didn’t like the graphite. Now, I’ve not seen it in person, but as someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who I think you have pretty much always had black phones, right? So how do you like it in comparison to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space grays of years past?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, I would prefer that it actually be black on the back and pure silver on the sides.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, it’s gray. I’ve heard people say it’s like the most boring gray. I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ John equally as boring as every space gray. Like I don’t find, like it’s gray.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a nice gray. It’s got a little bit of character in my opinion. Even the gray
⏹️ ▶️ John stainless steel, I was afraid that the graying of the stainless steel would take away from its shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John stainless steelness. I don’t think it does. It does a little bit versus just pure
⏹️ ▶️ John silver stainless steel, but I think it’s still, I was surprised by how shiny, it’s one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things, you know when you have something that’s shiny and gray, depending on the photo, it can look very dull, but also you could be like, wait, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that gray or is that just pure silver stainless steel? I was surprised at how stainless steel
⏹️ ▶️ John it looked and how happy I was with it. Not that I’m ever gonna see that, is gonna be inside a case, but for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a gray phone. It fulfills its job to be a gray, boring phone. I’m never gonna see it anyway. I would have preferred
⏹️ ▶️ John black and silver, but I have no regrets about choosing the one that I picked.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like things like the Pacific blue, for me, I’d rather just it be color neutral or be very bold,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the red or the blue of the non-pro, but graphite, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is what you expect. If you don’t want a phone that is entirely gray, don’t get this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t get the one that is entirely gray. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no other character to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I saw the pros and I saw the regular 12s and I handled them both.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the pros, I thought this is great for people who like blue, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the blue is a nice new color and it’s fun. None of the rest did anything for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just felt like, it felt no different than my 11. And I think the colors could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use some work on the pros. On the regular 12, I thought, again, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue looks pretty nice. The red, I don’t know, the red made me excited, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though I don’t like the color of the back so much, the color of the sides and what it was like when you are handling it. Because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost never see the back color of my phone, whereas I see the front of it all the time, and the sides,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on the side. Wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the red, my impression from the photos is that the red of the 12 is different
⏹️ ▶️ John than the red of the 12 Pro, especially the back. Was
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no, there’s not a product red 12 Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Oh, all right, well then nevermind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, yeah, the regular 12 has a, has like a kind of pistachio green and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, and a corally red that, and that’s, and then, and even, even the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the blue, white, and black are different from the blue, white, and black of the, you know, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black of the Pro line. So anyway, the 12 I think looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better, and it also felt way better. Because not only do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the colors, they’re just better colors, they’re more bold. And I think the polished,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or rather, I think the brushed metal aluminum edge, I think it looks better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the super polished stainless steel. I know what they’re going for with the polished stainless steel. In practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the aluminum just looks and works and feels better. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure enough, as we expected, and as some of the earlier reviews pointed out, the back glass finish being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a textured finish on the Pros and being a flat glass on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-Pro 12s, the flat glass is easier to hold. So overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just was much more pleasant in the hand to hold the 12 than the 12 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, the 12 is noticeably lighter. And so you pick up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one side by side from the other, and like it’s no contest, the 12 just feels better. So to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks and feels better. So I’m actually, I’m excited to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my mini, like whenever that actually can happen, God knows when, but whenever that can happen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna be excited about it because I picked up this phone, and honestly, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of, I think, the same opinions as you about the size of it, which is, yeah, you know what, this is a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big, and it’s a bit chunky, And even though the straight sides look better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they felt slightly worse at that size for me. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the smaller size of the Mini, it’ll be overall great. So I’m expecting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna be right about this, I think the Mini’s gonna be awesome. I think it’s gonna feel fantastic to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use because it’s gonna be so much smaller and so much lighter and it’s gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better feeling back and the better feeling sides. I bet we’re gonna see a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going my way on this, going for the Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John The original SE was too small for me. I don’t wanna go back to that size. But the new,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mini being bigger than that, if they ever make a Mini Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John with like all the Pro features, but in the Mini size, I might strongly consider that because, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I got the XS, the 7 was kind of my max size. The XS
⏹️ ▶️ John was bigger than that. and now the 12 is ever so slightly bigger still. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John would definitely consider that smaller size because basically I’m looking for a replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John for my 7. Make me a roughly 7-ish size phone with edge-to-edge screen and face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID and all that other stuff, and I will check it out. I think also for the first time in a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John given the square sides, and if Apple sticks with this for a while, for the first time in a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would actually appreciate, physically if not in any other way, the phone’s getting
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner, right? Because again, perception, this is actually thinner than my other phone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems thicker, right? So if you could take the current 12
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and make it thinner, I think it would feel, it would get more of that mini slash iPhone 5
⏹️ ▶️ John feeling of having squared edges, but it’s not such a big deal because the thing is thinner. The glossy
⏹️ ▶️ John edges versus the matte back, the matte back is not good for grip, but I think the glossy
⏹️ ▶️ John edges are better for grip than the matte edges, not having felt the mad edges, but I appreciated the, I
⏹️ ▶️ John appreciated the grippiness of the stainless steel, right? Both the, both the squareness of having the squares
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of cut into your hands or, you know, to give you that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, friction feeling, but also that it was grippy. And then aesthetically
⏹️ ▶️ John and as a piece of sculpture, the increased weight of the 12 makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it feel more like a heavy, expensive, you know, object of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John sculpture objects or whatever, piece of jewelry, right? None of which is good for being a phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I went through earlier, but it really does make it seem like, wow, like people saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes it feel expensive. It’s the old trick of like, if it feels dense, if it feels heavy for its size,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is very solid and it is also shiny, it feels expensive and it totally does. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I fully agree having never picked one up, 12 being lighter and being matte on the,
⏹️ ▶️ John being glossy on the back, that’s gotta be the better experience as a thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John hold in your hand and use as a phone. It’s just a shame about the cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s, like, it’s funny, like, ever since I’ve made the decision to go mini, but I don’t have it yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time I use the telephoto camera now, I’m like, oh no! You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco saying your goodbyes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. I should, I know I didn’t do it last time, I’m checking how many 2X do,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think I use it like crazy. I should do it, run one of those scripts to grind over my things, or do a search
⏹️ ▶️ John and see how many times I use the 2X. I think I might beat Marco 16%. Don’t you use iCloud Photo
⏹️ ▶️ John Library? Just do a search, do the smart album thing. What do you have to search for? I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John know the search query.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You basically search for iPhone 11 6mm and that’s it. If you search for lens name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contains 6mm, that’ll be it. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John this should have been in follow-up but I skipped it but lots of people were saying, oh you can search by date in Apple Photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t want to go into all the stupid details but like the way it does it is infuriating because
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, you can do a search, but, and it’s like a search result of your main photo view, but the second
⏹️ ▶️ John you click on anything else, it forgets that search ever exists. Whereas the old photos way, the iPhoto
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do it was you could like filter, persistently filter with a bunch of controls. The old iPhoto
⏹️ ▶️ John used to have actual controls and like the toolbars. Remember when Apple helps you to do that? Like instead of just having a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John blank expanse of gray, there would be actual toolbar items. And sometimes there was a second toolbar on the bottom with
⏹️ ▶️ John more buttons and things. Anyway, you could filter persistently. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the alternative is obviously to manually create smart albums for each year,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is so tedious. Right, it’s just, that’s basically what I want, is a quick filter, quick persistent
⏹️ ▶️ John filter, so I can switch back and forth between albums and other things and filtering by date. And that was so, like, I think the original iPhone had
⏹️ ▶️ John like a calendar pop, and you could just pop up the calendar, click on the month, or click on the month and the year, or just click on
⏹️ ▶️ John the year, and boom, you were filtered. And now you can go to the text field, and you can type it, and you can hit return, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John click on the show all photos because it doesn’t initially. And then never change your view again because if you click on anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else in the sidebar, it forgets that search ever existed And that’s why photos annoy me.