418: Dangerously Close to Being on a Phone Call
18 Feb 2021Clubhouse, the Contacts API, iPhone 13 rumors, and somebody’s new drone.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Join us in our Clubhouse! (That’s a joke; not happening. —Ed.)
- Chatroulette
- Party line
- Newton’s cradle
- Should Apple remove the Contacts framework?
- Follow-up:
- Living outside the east coast… or America.
- The Concert for Charlottesville was posted
- Should timers sync? (via Richard Harris)
- What can Mobile Device Management really do? (via Chris Harper)
- An alternate way to think about RAM vs. SSD-wear tradeoffs (via Jonathan Dietz)
- Ada and MISRA C for car-computer safety
- T568A vs. T568B myths revisited (via Jon B.)
- iPhone 13 rumors
- Post-show: Casey’s new toy
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Chapters
- Clubhouse?
- Contacts API
- Other country to live in?
- Concert on Archive.org
- Sponsor: Linode
- Syncing timers
- MDM follow-up
- SSD wear follow-up
- MISRA C
- Ethernet in a castle
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- iPhone rumor: Always-on screen 🖼️
- iPhone rumor: 120 Hz
- iPhone rumor: Astrophotography
- Sponsor: Flatfile
- iPhone rumor: Stronger MagSafe 🖼️
- iPhone rumor: Rear finish
- Ending theme
- Casey got a drone
Clubhouse?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a party here once again on a Wednesday night.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Join us in our clubhouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have either one of you done that? I just installed it tonight and I just I did one dog walk with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and just listening. I’m not I’m not gonna say anything for a while just listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have not yet seen why people like it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. It just you know I need more time with it
⏹️ ▶️ John before you tell me anything about it. I’m gonna tell you what I think it is based on nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John other than like third degree Tweets about tweets about tweets about
⏹️ ▶️ John Clubhouse. Okay, my impression like multi-degree separated is
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s a thing where people are either lurking
⏹️ ▶️ John like you or are On audio speaking and it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like imagine if you had a Skype call but instead of there just being the three of us on the Skype call, there were 50 of us
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Skype call. And probably there’s some way to determine who is allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John to speak at various times and who is ever going to be allowed to speak or whatever. But in general, uh, like a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of people in a big audio chat room. And the draw is that sometimes famous people come in and say things
⏹️ ▶️ John in real time that are really dumb that aren’t recorded for posterity because people know how to record audio on their devices yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and, and it’s exciting to hear famous people talk just kind of like the same way it was exciting on Twitter to see
⏹️ ▶️ John a famous person type something like that. They wrote themselves. Presumably it brought you closer to famous celebrities
⏹️ ▶️ John than going through their publicists back in the day. Now you can hear them on audio. Presumably the next step is
⏹️ ▶️ John chat roulette where we get to see random people on video and then just,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know how that ends.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s my impression. How close am I to what clubhouse actually is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, I, again, based on one evening of listening to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That seems about right. But again, I don’t want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those people who like makes broad proclamations about this thing and then like two months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later I’m proven grossly wrong and everyone’s using my clip and they’re worth $10 billion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone’s like, oh, look at this podcaster who didn’t get it because it attacked podcasting. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have absolutely zero interest in it. The only reason that I asked a friend for an invitation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because everyone’s saying this is gonna disrupt podcasts, and I figured, well, I’m in the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business, I should probably know about this. I should probably have some knowledge of this thing that has the risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of disrupting my business or at least changing what my business needs to be. And I think the risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that is actually pretty low, honestly, based on my listening to it for, again, one afternoon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like it’s a very different kind of thing. And as a podcast listener,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we’ve all, Dear podcast listeners out there who listen to this show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you all like podcasts. But we’ve seen over the years, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco businesses and apps and startups and things like that, that seem to be designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by people who hate podcasts to try to make it easier for them to somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get value out of podcasts while hating them. This seems like it might be in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ballpark. And so for people who actually really love podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think this is gonna be for you in the same way that it hasn’t really caught on for me yet because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole time I’m listening to it, I’m thinking of all the things about podcasts that I miss.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now this could, again, this take could age poorly. When new things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come out, people often just complain that they’re not enough like the old things they’re used to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m aware that this could be a bad take. This could take off and be huge, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could be totally wrong, and I could be cringing listening 10 years from now at this take I’m having right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so far, when I listen to Clubhouse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I guess when I’m on there, I don’t know what the verb is, when I’m listening to a Clubhouse club room,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just miss podcast luxuries. I miss things like pausing and speed control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people who have some kind of production value and audio quality in their show and people who perform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editing for content. I miss all the things that make podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. And in some ways, like when we moved from old media to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new media in many ways, think about when we moved from magazine articles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to blog posts, it’s like here’s this thing that this old me was being served this way, in this new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, you aren’t limited to the bounds of a magazine or what one publisher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selected or what 10 authors wrote, you can read something from anybody and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be any length it needs to be and it can be published as often as it needs to be published and you can index it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search it and all these luxuries you got via technology. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if what you’re looking for is podcast-like entertainment or information or conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or amusement, Clubhouse is like the opposite. It’s like going a step backwards. It’s like going back in time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to AM talk radio shows, but by amateurs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, people said a lot of this exact same stuff about podcasts when they were new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lots of radio people said podcasts were like, crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productions of people who were boring and yammering on forever. So I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I should probably not be saying all this stuff, but it’s so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best analogy I can give is, I’ve never been one of the people, And I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes me weird, not them, but I’ve never been one of the people who sits down and just turns on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the TV and watches, quote, what’s on. When I wanna watch something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sit down, I seek out a particular thing I wanna watch or I browse for, like, you know, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available right now, what’s new, and I pick a show and I watch that show. I don’t just turn on, like, a channel and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s on. I recognize that makes me the weirdo because it seems like almost everyone else is the opposite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But podcasting to me is like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radio or audio version of selecting a specific thing you wanna hear because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care and you will seek out those things and you will listen to them and you will listen straight through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you don’t wanna miss a few minutes when you’re like pausing and having to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to somebody in the street or getting out of your car for a few minutes or whatever. You wanna pay attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To me, Clubhouse is the just sit back and watch whatever’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on of audio. And that’s fine, there’s a huge market for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably, but I’m not in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the chat room is all talking about introverts and extroverts, which is exactly what I was thinking when you were describing it,
⏹️ ▶️ John because a lot of the, I feel like a lot of the sort of foundational technologies
⏹️ ▶️ John of the internet, if you squint at them, kind of look like
⏹️ ▶️ John things made to fit within a stereotypical introverts
⏹️ ▶️ John lifestyle and worldview. And the example I was thinking of for Clubhouse is
⏹️ ▶️ John the opposite of that, which is it’s getting dangerous close to being on a phone call. So
⏹️ ▶️ John is it because a bunch of introverts made the internet? I don’t know. I mean, that’s probably not true. But like, it’s true that sending an
⏹️ ▶️ John email is less pressure than being on a real time phone call. You know, it’s true that asynchronous
⏹️ ▶️ John communication is less pressure than synchronous communication in whatever form it’s in, right? It’s true
⏹️ ▶️ John that being in your house in your pajamas is more comfortable than having to get dressed up and go to an office, like all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like technology and lots of foundational internet communication
⏹️ ▶️ John mediums and protocols are ideally suited to people who don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John interact with people all that much. And that probably means that
⏹️ ▶️ John the portion of the population that doesn’t like that is ill-served by those technologies.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so as technology improves and we can better serve the desires
⏹️ ▶️ John and needs of people who do want to socialize, I think that’s probably a good thing for technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the podcast analogy, a podcast is like they don’t know you’re listening to them and you can listen to them at your leisure,
⏹️ ▶️ John how you want, where you want, with no pressure, and feel like you have this relationship with these people who are in your
⏹️ ▶️ John ears, but never have to actually meet them or talk to them. And you know, just like watching a TV
⏹️ ▶️ John show or a movie or reading books, that is an ideal relationship with creations and creators
⏹️ ▶️ John for a lot of people. But for other people, it isn’t. And they want to talk to people and have an exchange and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John socialize essentially only over the computer. And podcasts don’t feel that need and email
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t feel that need and text messaging even doesn’t feel that need when it’s, you know, minutes or hours
⏹️ ▶️ John between messages. But real time audio communication feels the need. It’s like, well, don’t we already have real time
⏹️ ▶️ John audio communications and that just like phone call? Yes, but what if it could be like a party line? What do you remember
⏹️ ▶️ John those from the eighties where they’d pick a party line telephone where everyone would call up and then there’d be a bunch of people talking on the phone at the same time. Someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who has better knowledge of eighties party line history can probably point to some cool webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John going deep on what those were like. And that was more of a free for all. I’m sure Clubhouse is
⏹️ ▶️ John more refined than that. But I think services, protocols, or as they say in
⏹️ ▶️ John the chat room, features, if this is not a product, then maybe it’s a feature that will quickly be, you know, Stolen
⏹️ ▶️ John by all the bigwigs. So eventually instagram will have clubhouses and facebook will have clubhouses and all that other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that serve needs other than the needs of uh introverts to
⏹️ ▶️ John Hide in their house in their pajamas and absorb entertainment in a pressure-free way I think it’s probably good
⏹️ ▶️ John for those things to exist all that said Uh as an introvert, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not for me. Like even though I sit here and talk into a microphone all week I’m not really raring to
⏹️ ▶️ John go when it comes to the idea of essentially having a real-time phone call with strangers. Just not into
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But it doesn’t mean this is not A, a useful and necessary and potentially wildly popular
⏹️ ▶️ John idea and B, going to be very successful whether it’s through Clubhouse or someone
⏹️ ▶️ John else who takes this ball and runs with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve had a Clubhouse account for a couple of weeks, but I have never remembered to listen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on any of the chats at a time when it was convenient to do so. And so I’ll be sitting there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and think to myself as I’m like trying to watch a TV show, oh, I should listen to a clubhouse. Well, I can’t do that right now. I’m in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of watching a TV show or, oh, the kids are around. Don’t want to do that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t even done as much as Marco has, even though I’ve had my account for a couple of weeks. But my understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, even though everything you guys said I think is accurate and I agree with including that my take might be terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things that I think is worth noting is my limited understanding is that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone in the quote-unquote audience come up and join the chat. So for example, if we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were on Clubhouse right now and we found that somebody had a particularly interesting thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say in the IRC chat room, well, if this was Clubhouse, we could say to that person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat room, we could like bless them with the ability to talk on our show. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s a very interesting and novel idea, having never experience to get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, and I like the idea that you can have a regular Joe Schmo and join
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on a chat with a celebrity of any size, you know, a celebrity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the size of us, which is to say not really a celebrity at all or an honest goodness celebrity, you know, and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think that that’s super neat and novel because it is very much like, I forget which one of you guys said it, but very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much like Twitter where you’re watching these celebrities, but even more so you can talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to these celebrities and with Twitter, you’re talking via your keyboard with Clubhouse, you’re talking with your voice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that I think is clever and novel and interesting. Whether or not it’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cup of tea, I don’t know. Again, I haven’t really properly tried it yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing I would like, but I definitely do want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give it an honest shake before I make up my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a perfect opportunity for Mullen to do his pre-taped call-in gag from, was it from Mr.
⏹️ ▶️ John Show, where if you wanted to call in about the pets or the elderly, you should have called in last week. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, it’s a complicated joke for me to explain, and I can’t do it. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Give me the bullet points, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t even do the bullet points. But yeah, it’s like a call-in show. I mean, we’ve all seen call-in, you know, AM talk radio is like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hello, caller, you’re on the line. What do you have to say? And they’re pre-screened and all this stuff. But now this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John disintermediated version, where you’re just plucked from the audience and allowed to talk. I thought it was even more of a free-for-all than that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe it can be. But, uh, but yeah, if you have people picking people to come in and then, you know, then
⏹️ ▶️ John you get, it’s just a new venue for people to say Baba booey, I guess. Right. Like, or worse or much
⏹️ ▶️ John worse. Because once you bless them to talk, now they have the microphone and everyone can
⏹️ ▶️ John hear them. And yeah. Chat roulette. Let let’s never forget. But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, I don’t mean to say that it’s not a good thing and I definitely want to try it. Mostly the reason I want to try it
⏹️ ▶️ John is because I want my damn username. Do they have usernames? Yes. I probably don’t. I probably already don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John my username. You should cut this part out of the show. Someone’s gonna go and steal my username because I don’t have an invite. Do you want me to
⏹️ ▶️ John give you one? Yes, please
Contacts API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the other thing. Very quickly, I have like five invites, please don’t ask me. But I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use them because the only way to use them is to let Clubhouse have access to slurp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up all of your contacts. Like I would absolutely send you an invite right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope. Sorry, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. So I would send you an invite right now, John, if it wasn’t for the fact that they the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only way to do an invite is to bless contacts access to the app, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, they’re going to slurp up all of your data and do probably something terrible with
⏹️ ▶️ John probably have a spare device that you can turn off contacts from iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John and delete all your contacts and send me the code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Do I really like you that
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, don’t you have spare devices hanging around that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey give things you test on? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John easy just to log out of iCloud and turn off your contacts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I have a quick hot take on that, actually. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the address book API still a thing? Yeah, my opinion is that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs to deprecate and remove the contact access API, the address book API.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I strongly disagree.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it should it should be like photos. Do you want this app to have access to one photo that you select
⏹️ ▶️ John to all your content like and there’s so many ways to do the exact same features with no loss
⏹️ ▶️ John of functionality without actually giving the app access to your contacts. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want the ability for people with one or two taps to be able to share their entire address book
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even with their permission to some new app. Because here’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why this is kind of a special case is that when you grant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to your address book to some app, that app not only has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to your personal information but to the personal information of potentially hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of other people who didn’t consent to that. And so it’s different when you’re sharing your photo library,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re sharing your information. You are choosing and saying, I’m going to share my information with this app. When you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share your contact list, you’re sharing a bunch of information from people who did not consent to that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t consent to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically the same thing. Because when you share your photo library, you’re sharing photos of people who may
⏹️ ▶️ John not have consented for you to share their photo with this company, but you have pictures of them. Like it’s, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, it’s a very different thing. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because actually, it’s not even, it contacts is actually better because presumably someone gave you that contact info,
⏹️ ▶️ John whereas you took that picture of that person. They may not have consented to that photo, but they were in public, so they have no choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now their photo, you’re giving it to somebody else. It’s the same deal. Like implicitly, when
⏹️ ▶️ John someone gives you information or when you get information through some means that
⏹️ ▶️ John is deemed acceptable, like taking a photo in public, that you can then,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s an understanding that you can then take that information and do something else with it that they don’t control. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John price of giving it to you. So if you give someone your contact information, you understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John they could share that contact information with whoever they want. Now you can get mad at them about it, and you can say, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John they wouldn’t share it with these app vendors, and you can be mad at an API saying they didn’t mean to share it, or they don’t understand what it means to share
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But in the end, it’s the same thing. Once you give the information to someone else, it’s under their control. Who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what could happen to it from there? And I feel like photos are very similar. I mean, you’re thinking of like, ah, someone’s in the
⏹️ ▶️ John background of a picture, that’s not a big deal. But what if it’s like a photo of a personal nature, let’s say?
⏹️ ▶️ John laws against, you know, revenge porn and all sorts of stuff like that. But even if it’s just an embarrassing picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of you looking goofy and you really wish that person hadn’t uploaded it to something that
⏹️ ▶️ John put it online for everyone to see and find forever. You know, I, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John in both cases, I’m with you that I think there should be much more control over what’s shared and it should be much harder
⏹️ ▶️ John to indiscriminately share. But I think that both situations are similar in
⏹️ ▶️ John that once, once you give of information that you care about to somebody else, you are at their mercy somewhat.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re at the mercy of their decisions to some degree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I think there’s a huge difference in degree and in actionable uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between leaking of other people’s data through photo access and through contact access. I mean, through photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are you gonna do? Like upload two terabytes of photos to your service without somebody noticing? Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a big deal. And then once you have those photos, what do you, like, are you gonna like analyze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single one of them to try to match faces. Whereas like a contact book, the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contact book is uploaded within, what, a few hundred kilobytes? Then you have all the data in seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then every single bit of that data is instantly cross-referencable to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get emails, phone numbers from all these people. And so the degree of leaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people’s personal data and the ease with which it is leaked through the address book API is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much higher and easier for bad actors to use. you can instantly spam them, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you know how to contact them. So you can instantly spam these people, you can send emails, you can send text messages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can cross-reference those phone numbers with other databases and everything. It’s such a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree that Apple should not be in the business of enabling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps to have massive, instant privacy violations for everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know in a way that the user might not be considering or might not even be thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about, like, oh, maybe there’s somebody in my contact list who just got a new phone number for some good reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t want all these services or other people to know it. There’s so many bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abuse cases where the address book mass data dumps to a service can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly used wrong and instantly have negative effects. Whereas picking a few photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for an app to see is a very, very different context. And I don’t think there’s enough positive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses of the entire contact list API to make up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this massive negative downside that’s not only possible, but that’s probably much more frequently used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than any positive use case.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you can also give access to all your photos. And I feel like the protection of data volume for photos
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of like the protection of data volume for movies. In the beginning of piracy, it was difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to even pass around MP3s. And the idea that we would be passing around
⏹️ ▶️ John pirated movies to each other was ridiculous, because who can put an entire movie, you don’t even have a room for that on your hard drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a matter of time before that stuff becomes tractable as well. And I feel like it’s the same deal, yeah. Contacts is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John the best case because it’s a low volume of data because people don’t have 100,000 contacts. And it’s text, so it’s real easy,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you set aside the contact images, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also precise. Like a phone number and an email address are precise. Like they specifically identify somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with very high certainty.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, the photos have potentially location information and I feel like the thing that is protecting,
⏹️ ▶️ John currently protecting photos and videos from the same problems that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re describing is the volume of the data and the precision
⏹️ ▶️ John that we are able to extract from photos. But imagine a future where it is extremely easy and there
⏹️ ▶️ John are giant databases to cross-reference locations and faces and people where you can just go
⏹️ ▶️ John to a website of some terrible company that has aggregated all this information because they made some cool, fun
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that everyone needs to use that you give permission all your stuff and say, uh, show me all the pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of this person when they were on vacation at Disney world and you and it can aggregate photos and do a three d render
⏹️ ▶️ John of a fly through of you walking around the Disney park collected from thousands of people’s phones who took pictures with you
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background. That sounds ridiculous now, but it’s like, Oh, think of the data that would take in the computation and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be in a freaking webpage in 20 years. Right. So I, you know, I get it. I mean, the
⏹️ ▶️ John future is the future and we’re talking about the present and yes, contact should definitely be locked down and it’s the worst case scenario right right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think photos and videos are just as bad, if not worse, and we’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John protected for them essentially by being down in the slowness to use a reference from a cool science fiction
⏹️ ▶️ John novel I read once, and that sometime within our lifetime, photos and videos will fall to
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing that contacts do now. And especially if we forbid contacts but still allow access to all photos
⏹️ ▶️ John with one tap, that’s where they’ll go next, just because who knows what you can extract. How many people
⏹️ ▶️ John have ever taken a picture of their driver’s license or an ID card to to upload to something that requires identification
⏹️ ▶️ John in a website and left that picture in the camera roll and forgot about it. You may not be able to find it, but the computers can, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, this is a grim warning from the future of even cheaper computation.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should protect our photos and videos too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, on an infinite timescale, you’re right. But today, address book access is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly way more problematic than photo access.
⏹️ ▶️ John 20 years, not infinite timescale. I’m putting a cap on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so as someone who has actually worked heavily With the Contacts API, may I have a chance, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I see both of you, to be honest. I think for me, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rightest answer is the same style of API where you get different levels of access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such that one could bless an app to have the ability to slurp up all their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contacts. However, I definitely see Marco’s point, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the thing that strikes me about Contacts in particular is that to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eyes today, it’s more actionable. And I think one of you said precise a second ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s more actionable. Like when I have a photograph of Marco that’s been uploaded. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess if it was a weird photo of Marco, like a computer could maybe figure out that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an uncomfortable photo of Marco and like do something with it maybe, but when I upload Marco’s phone number,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody could call him right then and interrupt his day right then. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it is far more actionable data than I think a photograph is, at least today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Matz Well, you can do associations with photos. Here’s Marco with the founder of the Proud Boys. Not an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that happened. Aaron Powell Sure. Paul Matz No problem. We could do that today with machine learning and start doing graphs of associations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially you have dates and locations to say this person was with – ate dinner with this person at this time at this location.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s current technology. And I feel like that is probably more damning than, realistically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s phone number or their email address, which honestly is pretty easy to get via other means.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not like most people and their contacts have everyone’s mailing address listed. So contacts are bad, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think photos, I feel like you just need a little bit of imagination to understand exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John how bad that can be, because it’s not like they’re going to look for the embarrassing picture of you. They’re going to do the same crap they do with contact
⏹️ ▶️ John information, which is make graphs of associations and times and places, put you in demographics,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess your age and your gender, figure out if you’re about to have a baby, like all the things that they can do based on
⏹️ ▶️ John all your other activity. Photos is a treasure trove of that crap. And if you lock down contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John or make it more difficult to retrieve or everyone uses sign in with Apple and doesn’t give people their email addresses,
⏹️ ▶️ John photos is a gold mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still, I agree with you, but I still think contacts are far more problematic in today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world. But all of that said, I once wrote an app that slurped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up all your contacts and did something I’d like to think novel and interesting with them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would hate for there to be a scenario wherein a user couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use my app because there was no API for it. Now maybe that’s the cost of doing business, but I think it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very tough pickle for Apple to be in where they don’t necessarily want to kill the vignettes of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the world because I did that already. They don’t want to kill the vignettes of the world or whatever the case may be. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they also don’t want to make it easy for the clubhouses of the world, and maybe I’m unfairly besmirching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, but you know, the clubhouses of the world to do something nefarious with your contacts. So what is the happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey medium? Well, I guess you trust the user, which is what John was saying, what I think I agree with, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, what I was saying is you could make an API that lets you do all the features that you care about. Forget about the vignettes, because
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, vignettes should be a feature that’s built into the OS, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it is now. It was.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not really, but like exactly what he did is like, well, there, you might have other other pictures and other services. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS will go out and find them, right? That’s really just something like another example of a third party makes the thing and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should really put in the OS, right? But everything else like auto completes or even sending to contacts, there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John reason that the app ever needs to see that data to accomplish those features, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can have an auto complete in a widget that runs with XPC and another
⏹️ ▶️ John process that is essentially as far as the app is concerned, a fancy way for you, the user to auto complete
⏹️ ▶️ John something, but the app only ever sees what you finish auto completing and type into the text field. It has no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John like what was being fed into the auto complete. That’s an eminently makeable API,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And same thing with like, oh, do you want to, you know send this thing out to
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of your friends here, pick a bunch of these friends from this list and another UI comes up that the app does
⏹️ ▶️ John not control that runs in another process, lets you select contacts and is mediated by an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple service that hides all the email addresses. Like that functionality that is a quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote essential part of a smooth application experience can be done without giving applications
⏹️ ▶️ John access to any of your contact information. The address book API that Marco was talking about does not
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. And so that’s why, yes, that API should be canned and replaced with a better one
⏹️ ▶️ John that never actually gives your app access to anything. Because in most cases, unlike photos, where the app
⏹️ ▶️ John literally does need one photo if it’s like a photo editor or something, it needs at least one photo. You need to give the app the photo,
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise it can’t edit. But you don’t actually need to give the app the contact in many cases, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John given that Apple has this whole thing now where they make their own private email addresses with random names and connect it up to your own
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the scenes. So the plumbing’s already there to essentially never give apps access to contacts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s an interesting, I guess what I’m saying is it’s an interesting tug of war that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple would have to go through. Like, what you’re describing is somewhere between a moderate to massive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineering challenge, I’d reckon. But it’s not unreasonable, especially for a company that’s as big and as everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Apple is. But here again, I keep coming down to, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey initial take is, of course, let everyone have access to everything. And then you see the clubhouses and all the other gross things in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you come to Marco’s point of view. You know, what are the little balls, the Jacob’s ladder, whatever it is, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bonk into each other? I forget what that thing is called. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John ______ Jacob’s ladder is the thing with the electric spark that goes up.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, no, that’s not what I meant. Sorry. You know what I’m talking about? The little desk. Newton’s cradle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, so I start all the way on the right-hand side with, sure, why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not give everyone access to all the contacts? What could go wrong? And then you see what goes wrong. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ball falls, and it bonks into other intermediate balls. And now I’m swinging the other way of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, you should only ever be allowed anonymized contacts, or whatever the case may be. But for Apple, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think you need to kind of ride that line. And that’s a very, very difficult thing to do. And that’s one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things that I think I lose sight of when I criticize Apple a lot, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a very different thing to have to be all things to all people. And it’s a very different thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operating at the scale that they operate at, where a bug that hits one 10th of 1% of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users, like, I don’t know, my SMS bug, which by the way, is mostly gone away for reasons I don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, anyways, uh, for, for a bug that hits 1% of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users, that’s still like a million, a hundred million, 10 million users, however many ridiculous amounts of users it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it’s a hard thing because you don’t know where the line really should be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But certainly if Apple’s going to say, we’re the privacy company, we’re the privacy company, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say they should err on the side of what Marco was saying, which is no contacts access at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus, Address Book is like a C, C++ API, isn’t it? So they’re just candid for that reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s gotten better, but it’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, I’m not saying that there’s no legitimate users of this API. I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that certain things wouldn’t get worse without this API. What I do think, though, is that this API, the benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it brings are substantially less than the privacy damage it does, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of its nature of such easily exploitable in-mass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data on not only the person who’s saying, yeah, allow contacts, but on every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single person they know whose data they are giving away without those people’s permission. messy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seems to be, I think a good way to look at it is if Apple were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designing this product today, this whole OS, this whole platform from scratch today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would they offer that access to anybody? Of course not. Like today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privacy conscious Apple, in today’s data leaky, horrible, tracking analytics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world, would they do this if starting fresh today? Almost certainly not. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think that’s a good reason. Ignore the sunk cost here. That’s a pretty good reason to say that we probably shouldn’t have this API
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, for sure. They wouldn’t do it today. And as an example of going back far enough, Unix was like
⏹️ ▶️ John that in the beginning, created in a hippy-dippy environment where we’re all just computer
⏹️ ▶️ John users here and we all trust each other and everything is open for the most part, even though Unix had a permission system and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even when I first arrived at college and got on my first Unix system in the early
⏹️ ▶️ John 90s, It was basically a free for all. Like there was no SSH, Telnet,
⏹️ ▶️ John FTP, plain text passwords everywhere, world writable TTYs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you would think, oh, well, that’s the internet age. Everyone was savvy then and knew about bad things that could happen. No, no, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. We had to teach them by being terrible people on that unique system. By the time I left that school, I’ve told
⏹️ ▶️ John this story before, they had locked down. World writable TTYs were no longer a thing. And SSH
⏹️ ▶️ John was starting to come into being. and Telnet and FTP with
⏹️ ▶️ John plain text communications and passwords were out of fashion because too many people were hacked and
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to get the cipher text from the password file was also out of favor and there were alternatives to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the way things go. And so the iPhone was made in 2007. At that point,
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that like what Path did, do you remember Path, the company that took all your contacts and uploaded it to a server? Yeah. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John made that API and they were still in the hippy-dippy Unix mindset of like, well, you know, we’re making a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s super secure and it’s sandbox and boy, isn’t this iPhone security amazing? But like, they
⏹️ ▶️ John still didn’t have a full grasp of the bad actors, right? It’s just, you know, people can do incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John novel. It’s like, no one’s ever gonna like, what good would it do to secretly take all your contacts and upload
⏹️ ▶️ John it? What value is there in having everybody’s contacts all together? Because having millions
⏹️ ▶️ John and millions of contacts, like that’s not useful, it’s just too much data. It turns out that actually is very useful to
⏹️ ▶️ John advertising companies and Apple didn’t foresee that. So they made an API that seemed like a good idea at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that this API was on a system that they were like locking down with the tightest security
⏹️ ▶️ John they could imagine with all the applications can’t do whatever they want and no private APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything’s sandboxed and everything is encrypted. They were doing all that, but at the same time, they didn’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John that, oh, yeah, there’s actually value in just en masse extracting everybody’s contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John and jamming them up to a server, at which point they become a giant bucket of slop for
⏹️ ▶️ John the ad industry. So yeah, live and learn.
Other country to live in?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have some follow-up about my question last week about where we would live if not the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey East Coast, but to ease into that and to kind of get us in the right mood, Marco, if you had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to live in another country, where would you where would you live?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh that’s a good question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ll accept like you know a top two or three if you need, you know, whatever the case may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do I instantly magically know the language of any of another country or do I have to stick with what I know now? No, Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like the spirit of your question, but I concur with John. For the purposes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what I’m driving at, let’s say no, you do not know the language.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you can learn it if you want, but you don’t instantly magically get to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Right, okay. So that’s gonna restrict me, not because I refuse to learn anything new, but because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m extremely self-conscious about that, and so I would not wanna live somewhere where I don’t already know the language.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that will limit it to either English-speaking or at least commonly English-familiar countries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like Germany, when I’ve traveled to Germany, I wish I’d liked a lot, and actually might be my answer here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So many people there know English that it wasn’t a big problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to not know much, if any, German. I could plausibly live there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get by okay while I learn the language a little bit better. So, like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an option. But ultimately, I would probably end up picking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UK. Is that a country? England, one of the… I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there’s a video on that. Yeah, I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a video on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because I have really enjoyed what I’ve seen of the UK, both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco London and even other cities as well. I’ve enjoyed that a lot. So probably, yeah, probably either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Germany or England.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a tricky because I never go anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The only other
⏹️ ▶️ John countries I’ve ever been to are the UK and Canada. that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John much to choose from based on personal experience, and both of those places I’ve only been to briefly.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I’m hesitant to pick the UK is not because I don’t like it, because I’ve spent a total of about,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a little over two weeks in the UK, and I thought it was great, and I loved it. But of all
⏹️ ▶️ John the English-speaking countries in the world, theirs seem to have a government that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the second worst screwed up, second to us.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John depressing to me, to leave the most screwed up English speaking government in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John being the US, for the second most. And it’s like, oh, come on, there’s so many better choices. You gotta go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John second worst? Like it’s just, it’s all the same problems, but like with a different accent and on a
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller scale. And that would really depress me. So I ended up leaning towards places that I’ve never been,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just seen pictures of. And the thing that comes to mind immediately, and maybe this would be a terrible mistake, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’ve never actually been there, but New Zealand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought about that. It’s beautiful. The people are sane. It really looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s probably a nice place. I don’t know. Maybe I’d go stir crazy on a little island. Maybe I wouldn’t like the culture
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. But boy, in pictures, it looks really good. And their government is not screwed up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they speak English-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of asterisks on that, but yes. Yeah. Yeah, I did go there. And I love New
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zealand. It is a bit far from North America in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways that I think would irritate me. And I found that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internet connection situation in New Zealand, and from what I hear, I believe this applies to Australia as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, is generally not—it’s harder to get really good, fast internet connections
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And that could be outdated information, I’m sorry, for everybody who lives there. Because otherwise, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think both Australia and New Zealand seem to be significantly better run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as countries than what we have here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Australia’s got a little bit of a screwed up government and it’s mostly a giant desert so I’m a little bit wary of that. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John seen too many Mad Max movies.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But it also doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad winters so that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John feature for me. And I don’t want to give Canada a short strip, it’s just I know it’s Canada you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna feel bad. It’s the cold, I’m sorry. You’re actually pretty far north and I don’t think I could do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Canada is beautiful in the summer. I I cannot do more severe winters than what I have now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, for me, I think if I were really and truly being honest with myself, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really and truly had to leave America, I would go to Canada, despite the fact that the thought of a Canadian winter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just chills me to the bone, much less actually being in a Canadian winter. But that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this fantasy world where I think I could handle moving that far away from everyone I knew,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the UK would be a very strong contender. I think if I could convince
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself that I could learn the language, I would strongly consider Germany as well. You know, we traveled there together,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco. Oh, you went one other time with… before, though, didn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Okay. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. So, my only experience with Germany is when we all went, and as we’ve said many, many times on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I freaking loved it. And I went into it thinking, well, I mean, I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ve been to Europe a few times before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ve always liked it, and it’ll be okay. And I loved it. I was very surprised with how much I enjoyed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, I like to think that I would give Germany a shot. Every American I’ve ever met that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent any time in Australia swears that they would move there if they were given the opportunity. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the same is probably true of New Zealand. But I don’t think in, Marco you said this a second ago, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I could stand being that physically far away from everyone that I knew. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in a literal sense, of course, that’s hyperbole. But you know, I don’t think I could handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being that far away from like my family, you know, my extended family and so many of my friends and so on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I think realistically, Canada would probably be my first choice because of proximity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in a fantasy world where I could do whatever, I would probably try for Germany and realistically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end up in the UK. Now, that brings us into our follow-up. Many people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were perturbed of varying degrees, sometimes amusingly perturbed and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely perturbed, that we forgot about the Midwest and the Great Lakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, we didn’t forget. You guys, you… I’m from the Midwest. Yeah, you all forget that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have awful winters there. Oh, no, I’m absolutely not doing that. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the summers are gorgeous. I’ve lived in the Midwest. I know it. But winter, hell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. Absolutely not. Not even possible. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Yeah, like, I mean, growing up in Ohio and then going to college in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done with winters there. That was enough. The winters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are way colder, way icier. In the case of northwestern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pennsylvania, way snowier, because of the Great Lakes and that whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then also, the summers are also hotter. The further inland you are, you typically don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tempering effect of being closer to the ocean. So it’s actually it’s significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less temperate. So you have much bigger extremes of, you know, you have way colder winters, way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hotter summers. I’ve lived that for a long time. If I’m picking places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go, I’m gonna try to make an improvement on that area, not make things worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, I think it does fit the bill in a lot of ways if you can live the snowbird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life. You know, the Great Lakes are enormous. They do have plenty of beaches. In some ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could almost argue that the Great Lakes are an improvement over the ocean because they’re not saltwater and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fewer waves if you have small children, for example. This makes them worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve discussed the mud beach, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying you could make an argument, but those winners, absolutely not. Absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. So thank you, all of you from the Midwest. We hear you, we love you, but no. Moving
Concert on Archive.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last week we discussed, I believe in Ask ATP, some precious media that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all have. And I got a couple of people emailing me saying, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice ways, stop being a loser and just upload that concert for Charlottesville. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually I listened. And so as I sit here tonight on the evening of February 17th,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the concert for Charlottesville that I spoke about many times in the past, I have uploaded it to archive.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is still there as of right now. It is, I believe, 13 gigs. It is a 10-hour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show. I think I said six last week, but it’s actually a 10-hour video. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that all of the chapters I put into Mark, each individual artist’s performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did survive the upload and then a re-download from other people on the internet. So if you would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to check out this concert, which I really think is a really special thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I strongly recommend it. I will say that if you try to just stream it from archive.org,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does not seem to work in my experience. You have to download all 13 gigs and they seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be throttling it to about a megabyte a second. So it’ll take a while, but it is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. And if you’re interested, it is up. And I wrote a small blog post about it, which we will link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve just been ignoring this Charlottesville thing cause I just assumed that there are no bands that I have heard of or care
⏹️ ▶️ John about in it. But is that actually the case, Casey? was the type of thing that I should watch? Tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John something that played there that I would be interested in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s quite possible. It was opened with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, there was a small Dave Matthews by himself performance, but it’s Cage the Elephant, who I’d never heard of and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found to be okay. It was, shoot, two guys from Coldplay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the singer pianist whose name is Chris Martin and Johnny Greenwood is the guitarist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope I have that right. It doesn’t matter if I don’t. It’s the guitarist and the singer from Coldplay, just the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two of them. Their performance was good, and there were some really funny,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest moments in that where Chris Martin says, I want to try. I think it was a Beatles song,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe a song. I forget who it was. But I want to try this cover. Please don’t put it on YouTube if it sucks, because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to be embarrassed about it for the rest of my life. So that, I think, is worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The best performance, possibly, of the entire show, I think was the roots, which are not a band that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically like, but they did a lot of like old school soul covers, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought was, um, really, really good. Oh, I’m being told real time follow up. Johnny Greenwood is radio head. My bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, so anyways, uh, the roots and then Pharrell comes out with the roots and that was very good. Uh, Chris Stapleton,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who was country singer who I can tell is very good, but it’s not really my cup of tea. Uh, Ariana,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ariana Grande did a solo set. Like she was the only person on stage against like a, you know, a backing tape,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will. And her performance was actually very good. Another great one was Justin Timberlake, who I know is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really problematic right now, but if you can accept just his performance and not anything else about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him, his set was extremely good. And then Marco’s favorite band
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the entire world, the Dave Matthews Band, closes it out, including a guest appearance from Stevie Wonder, which is pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then, like I said, the whole thing is something like 10 hours. And I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth at least listening to his background music. You don’t necessarily need to watch it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a really, really cool thing. And they have some like interludes in the in between sections talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, you know, what makes Charlottesville special, what makes this event so terrible. Well, not the concert,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the things leading up to the concert so terrible. I don’t know. I really think it’s worth watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or listening to at least once, but if none of those artists mean anything to you, then no, don’t bother.
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Syncing timers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have from Richard Harris some more information about watch timers. Another obvious thing missing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Apple Watch timers, why are timers set on my watch not synced with my phone and vice versa? If I start a timer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my phone, I see the countdown on my phone lock screen, but nothing appears on my Apple Watch, not even when you go and open the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch timer app. And if I start a timer on my watch, there’s no corresponding countdown shown on my phone. Note
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that once the timer is set on my phone ends, the alert appears on both the phone and the watch, even though the countdown did not. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a really good point. However, I will say that I actually like this behavior because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oftentimes I want a silent timer. And in my experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I have this wrong, but I believe if you set a timer on your phone, it’s going to beep, even if you’re in silent mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, you know, vibrate mode or whatever. But if you set it on your watch, and if your watch is in tap, tap, tap mode, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will just tap, tap, tap you, and that’s that. So I understand Richard’s point, but I actually kind of like it the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, but maybe I’m bananas. Marco, what do you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s a really tricky thing. Like, you know, you could argue that should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like timers sync across more? Like, what about HomePod versus phone? Like, should those sync?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s certainly utility to that. Like, if HomePod, watch, and phone all sync their timers, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could set a timer by shouting into the air. No matter what device picked it up, you would have it displayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all of them, and they would, I don’t know, all alert you when it was over or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure, but that’s the problem. Like when you start figuring like, okay, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should the behavior be defined as in cases X, Y, and Z? It starts getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit messy. Like the silent switch, should that be activated or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it goes off on the HomePod, or if you summon it on the HomePod, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should it go off on the HomePod every time? Or what if the HomePod’s in the next room and now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a different room, should it go off then, or should it only ring your phone? What if you expect it to ring on the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your phone is actually sitting on the counter somewhere and not in your pocket or not in your hand and then it buzzes just the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you miss it. Like there’s all sorts of weird cases that like once you start syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and having it try to show up everywhere, you start running into these kind of like, you know, messy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas of how the behavior should be. And so it would be nice if there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was more like unification like that in many cases, but not in all cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is an obvious thing. I agree with Richard that this is obvious and this should absolutely be a feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just because you have global awareness of a thing and it’s synchronized doesn’t mean that you have to surface
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So assuming that Apple could get the sync right, which is not a given
⏹️ ▶️ John based on how difficult it’s been for them to sync like, you know, what was it, keyboard completions
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, auto-complete things and other tiny pieces of data that should be trivial to sync, there
⏹️ ▶️ John should be global awareness of timers, right? and the default behavior should probably be like it is now, which is everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John in the house that signed into your Apple ID knows about the timers, but they don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about them. Just the device you did it on does something about them, right? And then if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have desires, like Richard, like you know what I would actually like whenever I set a timer on my phone and watch them to
⏹️ ▶️ John show each other or whatever, you can opt into that because global awareness of the timer is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like having multiple timers, like how hard a feature is that? Just have multiple timers in the air, right? It was like, oh, it’s too complicated or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just allow that to exist and allow there to be global awareness and allow people to opt in. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s like, hey, you’re in the room with the HomePod, the HomePod knows about your timer. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to ring you because you set it on your phone, right? But you could ask the HomePod, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John how’s that, you know, what do you call it, potato timer doing? And the HomePod won’t be like, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about, potato timer. It’ll be like, oh, I know about that because behind the scenes, we’ve all been talking to each other and synchronizing through
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud because it’s just a timer and it’s really easy to sync. It’s got like a string and like the
⏹️ ▶️ John start time and it’s like, it’s not a lot of data. That’s exactly what you’re looking for from
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple ecosystem. Global awareness, not necessarily global cacophony
⏹️ ▶️ John of like alarms going off or whatever. So I think starting from a baseline
⏹️ ▶️ John of trivial data should be synced everywhere and do not leap from that to,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it should automatically display everywhere and automatically go off anywhere and don’t even try to do like, oh, well, proximity, like, because Apple has all
⏹️ ▶️ John these proximity APIs where it tries to figure out what you’re near to. Don’t even try to do that if you can’t nail it. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John by default, you set a timer on your phone, it goes off on your phone. But if you happen to be somewhere else,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can ask the HomePod to do it. And if you really want it to always show up on your watch, you can ask it. Just like now,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the whole reason that Richard said that this shows up on, the alert shows up, is because there is a single option that
⏹️ ▶️ John says, hey, do you want me to, your phone to mirror the alerts, your watch to mirror the alerts on your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone or not? And that’s it, that’s the only option. And it’s the same type of thing could be with like timers. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want your watch to mirror the timers on your phone or not? And that would be like opting into, oh, I just always want it
⏹️ ▶️ John to display in both cases. That alone would be a big upgrade, being able to ask any Apple device
⏹️ ▶️ John and being able to opt into phone and watch synchronization, because that makes sense, because they’re both sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ John personal devices that you probably have on or near you, as opposed to HomePods and who knows what else, which could be anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I like this idea, Apple should do it. I really wish Apple could. I really wish we had faith
⏹️ ▶️ John to say that this task of synchronizing tiny pieces of trivial information, trivial
⏹️ ▶️ John ephemeral information that we don’t even care about, it can just go away after it’s done. I wish it was just a given
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple would be able to instantly sync that everywhere. But unfortunately, we
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t just assume that based on how well Apple has done with syncing for real things in the past.
MDM follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Chris Harbour writes in with some more information on MDM, which is mobile device management. This comes out of Ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP last week about would you let your personal life seep into your corporate devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris writes, I manage about 350 Apple devices using Jamf Pro, who I believe are a past sponsor. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these are iPads, but some are iPhones, and there are a few iPod Touches in the mix. What I’ve learned since we started device management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2015 is that all the mobile device management platforms have pretty much the same capabilities in Apple devices. These
⏹️ ▶️ Casey platforms all operate differently, but the commands they are sending to the devices are all the same. by what Apple allows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a good support article from Apple, which we’ll link in the show notes, that explains Apple MDM in detail,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well as the differences between what is available for restrictions, policies for supervised and non-supervised devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So quick aside from me, from Apple, they’re quoting Apple, supervision generally denotes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the device is owned by the organization, which provides additional control over its configuration and restrictions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now back to Chris. I was going to make a long list of things that you can and can’t do with MDM, but then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found this helpful PDF linked in the show notes that explains it well. In particular, take a look at page 10. So let me read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from that PDF. MDM can see device name, phone number, serial number,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey model name and number, capacity and space available, iOS version number and installed apps. MDM cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see personal data such as personal or work email, calendars, contacts, SMS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or iMessages, Safari browser history, which is something that I did not know. I assumed it could.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FaceTime or phone call logs, personal reminders, notes, frequency of app use and device location.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So back to Chris, basically the IT MDM admin can see some basic info about the device itself, but nothing that is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal. And more appropriately, they can’t really see anything that they don’t already have access to in other ways. Things like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the content in email, Teams, your file server, Slack, et cetera, those all exist in other server environments with their own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways of monitoring employees for whatever reasons they may have. So that’s a bunch of words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say that it’s not as scary as I had thought even. And I assumed it wasn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as bad as I thought, but it’s actually considerably less scary than I thought. And Apple really doesn’t let your employer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see that much. That being said, your employer can still read all the emails sent via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your employment email address. It can read all your, you know, Slack messages and so on. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t mean you’re out of the woodwork, but it’s not as bad as I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that list of see and can’t see stuff from the supervised device or the non-supervised?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, that’s a good question. I don’t know, to be honest with you. I just clipped it out of the PDF and put it in the show notes. We’d have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to look back in that PDF. But that’s a very fair question.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to say the other reason that I don’t think we touched on about MDM on devices and why I was wary
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is kind of the same reason that I moan and complain about stuff on my laptops. Setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ John the privacy stuff, that software sometimes affects
⏹️ ▶️ John both the performance and the sort of reliability of the thing that’s running on. Certainly in the
⏹️ ▶️ John case of the Mac, where it’s obviously a much more of a free-for-all situation than on a phone. But I’ve always imagined
⏹️ ▶️ John that some kind of MDM stuff happening on my phone could also cause problems that
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise wouldn’t happen, right or wrong, because I’ve never actually had a phone enrolled in MDM, but just the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, work, running software, installing stuff, you know, doing whatever it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John sending commands to my phone when I don’t know they’re doing it, they could potentially do things that,
⏹️ ▶️ John know, slow down or screw up my phone just doesn’t seem appealing to me.
SSD wear follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jonathan Dietz writes in with some information on SSD wear in RAM. Can you tell us about
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a point we didn’t bring up when we were fretting about whether the
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD usage on M1 Macs was going to wear them out prematurely. John says, NAND flash
⏹️ ▶️ John memory endurance is based on the finite number of program slash erase, or PE cycles,
⏹️ ▶️ John of the individual memory cells. Given equal workloads in SSD with twice the capacity, having twice the number of cells will last twice
⏹️ ▶️ John as long, unless the additional page outs from having only eight gigs of RAM rather than 16 gigs of RAM result in more
⏹️ ▶️ John than doubling your total lifetime rights to the SSD, there’s no way that spending 200 bucks on 60 gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM instead of the 512 gigabyte storage option will be better for extending the lifespan of your SSD. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is obvious, but worth saying, if you have a, the same amount of RAM, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If the use is this or not RAM, the same amount of stuff that you’re storing, but you get an SSD that’s twice
⏹️ ▶️ John as big, you’ve got more sort of green field that hasn’t been worn out by your activity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the more cells you have to wear out, and if you use them the same amount, which is the real
⏹️ ▶️ John tricky part about this assumption, then yeah, it’ll last twice as long. Now in reality, it’s kind of like getting a bigger house.
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD, you’re gonna fill it with stuff. Like no one gets a bigger SSD and says, wow, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got all this free space, now my SSD will last longer. No, you fill it with stuff. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John realistically, I’m not sure how much this saves people because it’s inevitable that you will put stuff in it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, more SSD to wear out is better, right? Now
⏹️ ▶️ John on this thread, on Twitter, there’s been ongoing threads of people posting their
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers from the smart tools thing about their data being written.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t, you know, it keeps going on and people still keep getting staggered by the numbers. When we did comparisons
⏹️ ▶️ John last week, Casey and I were in the same ballpark and it didn’t seem that ridiculous to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John But some numbers that these people are putting up seem a little bit ridiculous. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, is this like a very, you know, because people use their computers for different things. Is this a
⏹️ ▶️ John very strange scenario? Is there something going on with their particular computer? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John there a bug in the tools that is reporting incorrect numbers?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, but I pulled out one. We’ll link to the tweet. This is from David.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s got a 16 gig M1 MacBook Pro, which by the way, most of these are 16 gigs. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a bunch of computer nerds and they all bought the one with more RAM. So I think the only thing we can conclusively say is that eight
⏹️ ▶️ John versus 16 gigs of RAM is not a factor because almost all of
⏹️ ▶️ John these ridiculous numbers are from people with 16 gigs of RAM. Like it’s not the swap that’s doing this. Or if it is, it
⏹️ ▶️ John means these people need way more than 16 gigs of RAM and they can’t get it because that’s all the M1s come with. But anyway, power
⏹️ ▶️ John on hours, 432. That’s a small number of hours, very small,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Data units written, 150 terabytes. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if we do the math on that, that’s 347 gigabytes per hour written. That doesn’t seem right. That
⏹️ ▶️ John seems much bigger than the numbers that Casey and I had. Weren’t we like 200
⏹️ ▶️ John to 300 gigs per like day or month or something? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I know. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember our exact numbers. to refer to last week’s show, but I keep,
⏹️ ▶️ John in this thread of people just posting their numbers, this was the one that I was like, okay, this seems like it
⏹️ ▶️ John might be a problem because 350 gigs per hour, something’s going on here. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, it’s trivially easy to do that amount of I.O., just get something that just constantly writes big
⏹️ ▶️ John files, use DD in a for loop, you can absolutely do this. Like, there’s no problem doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this. The question is like, are these people using their computers in a normal way
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is some kind of systemic problem. I don’t understand how it could be. Like what is it? What are they, you know, this is one of those sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John vague slow motion computer panics where we’re like something is going on, but no one will ever say,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, what? What’s going on? Computers are knowable. This is the thing we should be able to know. You can’t just say, but
⏹️ ▶️ John something’s going on with these M1s. They’re wearing out those SSDs. Are they? How are they wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John out those SSDs? It’s not the type of thing, you can’t just leave it there and say, they’re wearing out their SSDs, look at these numbers. Okay, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that? Run FS usage. Figure it out. You know? So I don’t know what the problem is, and it’s frustratingly
⏹️ ▶️ John vague. And I don’t like vague technical problems. But all I know is if you want to follow us on Twitter, feel free to look
⏹️ ▶️ John at this thread and watch people slowly, vaguely panic about high numbers without ever actually figuring out what
MISRA C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man. All right. Last week we talked about more safe programming. I think this was with relation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like the Apple Car. That may or may not ever happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And Tesla’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy ambitions that might not match their quality levels of software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Inside brought up ADA, which was a programming language that I had thought was used kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot in the defense industry. And an anonymous person wrote in to say, well, yes, or actually several anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people wrote in. Several of them said, yes, Ada is a thing in the defense industry, then a different anonymous person said that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of this kind of development is actually now done using MISRA-C, where MISRA is an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acronym, of course, which is Motor Industry Software Reliability Association. And pulling from Wikipedia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently MISRA-C’s aim is to facilitate code safety, security, portability, and reliability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the context of embedded systems, which is about what a car is, you know, or wants to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A car would like safe code that’s secure and portable and reliable. And it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be run on an embedded system. So yep, checks out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got to make my joke about this now. So Mr. C is like C, but with limitations. There’s a bunch of stuff that you aren’t allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John to do because they’re unsafe, so on and so forth. And so it is, you know, it has fewer features than C. Like, you know, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t, I think you can’t do function pointers or whatever, like it’s more provably correct. It’s easier to understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I can imagine if you’re a C program working in it, it will will make you miserable. Not to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to use all those features. Oh my God. Oh my gosh. It’s right there, MISRA-C. Who’s naming their
⏹️ ▶️ John thing MISRA? Don’t name your thing MISRA-C when it’s gonna make C programmers miserable. It’s right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dad jokes. All right.
Ethernet in a castle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As punishment for that dad joke, we all now have to live through even more of this stupid T56-8A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versus T56-8B. Your dad joke is now getting all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us punished. So I’m not even helping you on this. This is all
⏹️ ▶️ John John. Yeah, no. So I, last week we had a follow-up item that was cut from the show because it turned out to be follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ John for another one of my podcasts. But it paired well with this one because it was about, it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like, it was about like urban myths or sort of anecdotal stories that people
⏹️ ▶️ John make a leap from a personal experience to a generalized theory, right? That is definitely the case
⏹️ ▶️ John in our past discussions of T568A versus B, where various people think there’s a super important difference
⏹️ ▶️ John because they did this one thing one time, and they changed from A to B, and that made all the difference. Therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ John B is better than A, or A is better than B, or whatever the case may be, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for context, these are the two different ways you can wire Ethernet jacks or wires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with which color pair you split between the terminals where you split the pair.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And we were misled by articles that said that they were different, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then everyone said, no, they’re electrically identical. The only difference is the colors of the insulation, and electrons can’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John colors. So they’re electrically identical, right? And yet, people will continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to insist, hey, I did a thing, and one time when we changed to B and made everything better, therefore B is better, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I always ask these people, OK, but what’s the mechanism? Why is it better? There should be a reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just, hey, we did a thing and it was better, therefore B is better, right? And John B
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote in with at least a theory, a hypothesis that could be
⏹️ ▶️ John tested, right? And the hypothesis, you know, based on fact, right? So here’s John
⏹️ ▶️ John B. I’ve learned the hard way, oh, anecdote, it begins.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The pairs are in fact
⏹️ ▶️ John different. The number of twists per inch is different for different pairs, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why the B style is commonly used for high-speed links. It puts the pairs with more twists in the right
⏹️ ▶️ John place. Now, I tried to look this up and say, is that true that each pair of wires has
⏹️ ▶️ John different number of twists? And as far as I can tell, yes, that actually is true. Just a part of ethernet, like I
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned, the twisted pairs are two pairs of cables that are twisted around each other, and they vary the number of twists
⏹️ ▶️ John per inch. So one pair is twisted, like, I don’t know, like two twists every inch, and the other one is two
⏹️ ▶️ John twists every five inches or whatever, because varying the number of twists minimizes crosstalk
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. This seems like a type of thing that would be trivial to confirm by just simply cutting open anything at wire and looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ John twists and saying, are any of them twisted more closely, more tightly together than other pairs? But I just did
⏹️ ▶️ John internet searching and it seemed, it seemed like I could confirm that, yes, this is true. But the real question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, they’re twisted different amounts to avoid crosstalk. This last bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John it puts the pairs with more twists in the right place. What does that mean? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John more twists better than more than fewer twists? What is the right place? There’s no further
⏹️ ▶️ John analysis of this, you know, like, like is, are, are they twisted different amounts or
⏹️ ▶️ John is one pair always like the green and green and white one always twisted more than the red and red and white
⏹️ ▶️ John one? Or is it just arbitrary? I don’t know. But here’s the, here’s the story. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to be story. Cause we got to include the story. I was once called to a castle. Yes, really. He says
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for an ethernet network that couldn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John out of its own way. One contract did the patch panel and type B and one did plates the wall plates in type
⏹️ ▶️ John A. Amazingly, the Nicks managed to figure it out, but it was slow as anything. So for the fun of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, we fixed half the castle to type A and half to type B. The Bs were faster. We redid the As
⏹️ ▶️ John to B and they got us fast. It’s real! So there’s your castle-based
⏹️ ▶️ John anecdote. We changed to B and it fixed everything. I don’t doubt that that happened. Okay, that happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the reasoning behind it, it puts the pairs with more twists in the right place.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still going with they’re electrically identical, but at least at least John B came up with a
⏹️ ▶️ John hypothesis as to what might be causing a difference because apparently there is a physical difference
⏹️ ▶️ John in number of twists for each of the pairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love I love that this story is continuing that we still that we’ve been talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, it seems like a thing that’s knowable
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like obviously none of us care enough
⏹️ ▶️ John about it to cut open one of our ethernet cables or to do any kind of testing, but it just seems like the type of thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John look, I I think probably if it is real, it is so minor
⏹️ ▶️ John that no one cares about it. Because if people cared about it, like someone with actual, you know, equipment would like
⏹️ ▶️ John test it. Like an electrical engineer would go through and test it and just the answer would be on the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ John But apparently if there is any, there aren’t. It’s so small that no one even cares enough to test it. So it’s left entirely to the realm
⏹️ ▶️ John of people with stories about castles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s why like I would I would expect if this were true that it had to be this certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way because of these reasons that these would be so well documented because Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so widespread and so well-known and so old that like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would think that this would be documented like crazy and it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like no one has any act like it’s all based on like myths and hearsay which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is ridiculous for something that should be eminently knowable.
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iPhone rumor: Always-on screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, do you want to talk about iPhone rumors? Sure, why not? iPhone 13 rumored to include always-on display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 120Hz ProMotion, astrophotography capabilities, stronger MagSafe, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more. I did not pay too much attention to this because I assumed it was a bunch of BS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that nobody really knows yet, but maybe it’s not? Who really knows? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are the highlights on this? Did either of you really dig into this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Mean it’s early in rumor season right, but I think you know it’s early It’s late enough that
⏹️ ▶️ John there could be some nuggets thrown out there, right? I what I wanted to start with we can just go in the order of
⏹️ ▶️ John this headline always on display for phones Right so Apple watch is in its second generation
⏹️ ▶️ John of always on display now with a brighter display It’s obviously a much smaller screen, but it’s also got a much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John battery Lots of Android phones have always on displays to varying degrees
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an obvious feature for Apple to adopt. They’ve been a little bit late to this game. It seems plausible to me, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes this year or next year or the year after. I mostly wanted to talk about it in the context of what kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of value, if any, do you think you personally would get from a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John with an always-on display?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’ve seen it on Android phones plenty, and it doesn’t seem like a bad feature. Like, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a bad idea by any stretch of the imagination. Typically on Android phones that I’ve seen, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the the current time and little to nothing else, which I don’t think is all that terribly useful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Especially since on an iPhone you can just tap the screen and it’ll wake right up That being said some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the renders on here include like the current temperature and weather conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like how far you are through your music that you’re listening to and how your rings are doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s sort of like Ambient information I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of kind of in the spirit of of what was the Windows phones like live tiles or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although not nearly as visually busy. I think that is pretty cool and could be very, very interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s so hard to say without having seen any of this, if this is useful, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s certainly not the sort of thing that I would thumb my nose at. Marco, how do you feel?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m with you. I don’t immediately get super excited about this, but I think it really depends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on how you use your phone physically. Like where do you hold it? Where does it sit when you’re doing things?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me personally, I’m not a phone out on the table kind of person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A long time ago, I think it was Scott Simpson who said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably in a tweet years ago, something along the lines of, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know you’re a cool person if, when we’re out to dinner, I never see your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever, ever, ever. And I kind of internalized that. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try to never be the person who has my phone out unnecessarily, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not the kind of person who, when I sit down somewhere, I empty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my pockets onto the table in front of me. And so because I don’t do those things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone is always either in my hand being operated, in which case the screen is on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s in my pocket. And so this feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I would get significant value out of, but there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people for whom that entire list of qualifications and use patterns is not true,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where so many people are just like, their phone is like out on the desk, face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up all the time. And so for those people, it could then have similar value as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal with on screen on the Apple Watch. So I’m not super excited about this, honestly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would be a pretty big deal to a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought this feature was interesting kind of in the same way that all features that
⏹️ ▶️ John are gated by technology are interesting, right? It’s like, why didn’t the phone always have
⏹️ ▶️ John an always-on display? Well, battery, right? We know why, right? Screen would take up too much battery, having it on all the time when people
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t looking at it is a waste of battery, it would kill your battery life, nobody wanted it, right? So OLED screens, which have been in iPhones for several
⏹️ ▶️ John generations now, don’t have that problem because you only kind of pay for the pixels you’re lighting up, and if you don’t light up a lot of pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can get away with a lot. And the variable refresh rate helps with that too, and bigger batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John and more power efficiency. And so finally technology can give us the feature that we didn’t have. But we had all
⏹️ ▶️ John this time where the feature didn’t exist. And all that time does a couple of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John One, it kind of cements in a lot of people’s minds the idea that, well, I haven’t had it before
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not immediately obvious to me why I would get any value from it, then I don’t need it, it’s not a big deal,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the flip side of that is, you know, oh, now we’ve got an Always-On Display,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can think of all these cool things I can do with it. I can show the weather, I can give indications of what kind of things
⏹️ ▶️ John may be available. Like obviously you can’t, or you probably don’t want to show actual messages and other notifications, but you can put little red
⏹️ ▶️ John dots or badges or, you know, information that you don’t mind, that
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t a privacy violation that you would like to see on your phone. And being able to have your phone on your bedside
⏹️ ▶️ John to be kind of like your alarm clock with the time always visible, like there’s tons of applications, your mind goes wild. Like now, if I
⏹️ ▶️ John can have an always on display, I have so many great ideas of cool things I could do with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think both of those positions, like have a little bit of a lack of imagination.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously the ones that are saying, well, I never needed it before, therefore I can’t think of any use for it. There’s a little bit of a lack of imagination there
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you have this feature, who knows how you might use it? Who knows what value might drive for it? Even Marco might find a reason
⏹️ ▶️ John not to have his phone in his pocket. Who knows what it might be, right? But the other side, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John people recognize that, like, oh, you’re an old flutty dutty. you just like things the old way, embrace the new. But the other side is also
⏹️ ▶️ John true. That your mind spins with all these ideas of amazing things you could do and it’s always on display. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that having a display that is off when you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John using it also has benefits. Now we got those benefits for free by
⏹️ ▶️ John accident because we couldn’t afford battery life wise to keep the screen on. But having the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John not be on is absolutely a feature. If it’s in a dark room, if you don’t wanna be disturbed
⏹️ ▶️ John by your phone, right? Because it’s been the default, we take those benefits for granted.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you were, for example, to put out a phone with an always-on display, that you couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John switch to not do this, that you couldn’t say, oh, just when I’m not using my phone, be entirely black,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be worse than the current phones in many ways that people
⏹️ ▶️ John would find annoying, right? So, and I’m not saying Apple’s gonna do this, I assume they will give the option, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they do on the watch, to not have the always on display. But I think it’s important to recognize when
⏹️ ▶️ John the technology comes along to finally give us a thing, even when it’s a thing that’s an obvious thing, like on the watch that, you know, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s who wants to do a weird motion with your hand to get the watch invisible? Everyone wants it to always
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on. Apple’s smart enough to say, you know what? That’s probably true. And this is a no brainer
⏹️ ▶️ John for a watch, but sometimes people want to make a different trade off, you know, with battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life. So you can turn that feature off. And I’m sure there are some people say, You know what, when I’m not looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at my watch, I want it to be entirely black because I work in sound behind the stage where
⏹️ ▶️ John all the lights are off and I don’t want something bright flashing. Who knows? Everyone has reasons. And even more so on a phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John not having anything visible on your phone when you’re not using it is actually a feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I hope and expect that if an iPhone comes with an always-on
⏹️ ▶️ John display, that it is merely an option. On by default, sure, because it’s cool and everything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that you can turn it off. Now as for me personally getting value out of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are occasions where I will have my phone face up on like
⏹️ ▶️ John the end table next to the sofa while I’m watching a tv show or something and occasionally I will glance at it
⏹️ ▶️ John to see if someone replied to a message that I sent a half an hour ago or that email finally
⏹️ ▶️ John came in or even just like uh wonder what the weather is going to be like or whatever where
⏹️ ▶️ John I will tap the screen to get that information to see the lock screen or or where I’ll actually wake it up, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If I could get that information passively in a well-lit room where my phone is,
⏹️ ▶️ John on the end table next to the sofa without having me to go over and say, hey phone, wake up, hey phone, wake up,
⏹️ ▶️ John and tapping it like that, because I do do that. I appreciate being able to tap to wake for this very
⏹️ ▶️ John reason. Before I had tapped to wake, I don’t think I used my phone like this. Once tap to wake became available,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, it’s not that much effort to just reach over to the table and tap the phone, because I usually have it face up, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If I didn’t have to tap it, that’s a benefit to me, and I think I would use this provided I could configure the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John to have the type of information that I would be interested in. The time probably doesn’t interest me as much,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I got clocks around the house, but, you know, I would take it. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John am cautiously optimistic about the always on display.
iPhone rumor: 120 Hz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along. 120 Hertz ProMotion in the iPhone, because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in the iPad, it has been for like two or three years now. Oh, more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that. Has it been more than that? It’s 120 Hertz has been in the iPad since the 10.5 inch iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well, however long it’s been, it’s been a while. Because I remember sitting in, what was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beloved coffee shop that just folded a couple of years ago at San Jose?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, the slow service, but nice setting. Oh God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah. Shoot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco now it’s the name of the speaking. Social policy. Social distancing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Social policy. Social distancing. Social policy. Anyways, I remember sitting outside there and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone who maybe should remain nameless walked up with one of them and let us all play with it. And I remember thinking, oh, that’s really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to be honest with you, even though I use my iPad a lot to this day, I can’t say I ever really noticed the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe I turned it off for some reason, although I don’t know why I would have. But I don’t notice it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day to day. And apparently, Mike really does. And that’s fine. So I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I’m sure this would be nice. I’m sure it would be cool, but it’s not something I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I’m yearning for. But ask me again if I have it, and I tell you, it’s the best feature in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I mean, when the 10.5 launched,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remember the event you’re talking about where we were shown one at Social Policy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remember very clearly, because when you first see 120 hertz on an iPad, it blows your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind. Like when you’re used to 60 hertz, and then you see 120, it seems almost unnaturally smooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know some people even have a problem with it, and that’s why there’s actually an accessibility option to turn it off to go back to 60
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hertz, because some people are a little bit weird about the motion with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s striking when you see the difference. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, when I first saw that, and then when I soon afterwards got my own 10.5 iPad Pro, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought, oh no, this is gonna ruin my phone and my computers and all other displays that I use that are only sick turrets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that didn’t happen. Like instead, I love the way it looks and feels on the iPad, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I switch between the iPad and the iPhone that doesn’t have it, I don’t notice that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m sure it would be great if they could do it on the phone, I’m not saying they shouldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m not super excited about it the way everyone else seems to be because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that I have devices with both, I see like, wow, this is really cool when I have it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when I don’t have it, I don’t notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, I think that’s well put.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, speaking of, this is kind of like the Ethernet thing where there’s lots of myths and legends
⏹️ ▶️ John surrounding this with a little bit more science. So the realm I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking of when looking at these rumors is video games, right? There’s been debates about video
⏹️ ▶️ John game frame rates forever. In the beginning, it was simple, higher frame rates are better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, technology advanced to the point where we could get very, very high frame rates And then the debate began,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the point of diminishing returns? Can you tell the difference between 30 frames per second and 60?
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone pretty much agrees, yes. Anyone can tell. Can you tell the difference between 60 and 120, between 120 and 240?
⏹️ ▶️ John At what point is it not possible for you personally, or people in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John to actually notice the difference? What is the point of diminishing returns? And
⏹️ ▶️ John you would think this is an open and shut case that could be measured and tested. It is extensively measured and tested, gamers
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be gamers and they still argue with each other about it because there are many nuances involved here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus there’s also latency and response time and a bunch of other stuff that’s mostly not related to this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the context of the iPhone, I think this is very much like
⏹️ ▶️ John the other technologies that deal with human perception, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And in general, we’ve talked about this in the past with music, we’ve talked about it with with displays,
⏹️ ▶️ John technology is going to advance to the point where further advancement is wasted
⏹️ ▶️ John on our senses, right? So retina displays, they may not be at the limit, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re close, right? The whole point of retina is like, oh, you can’t discern the individual pixels. Well, if you have really good eyesight, you can still kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of see them. And if your phone is real close to your face, you can still kind of see them, but we’re definitely near the
⏹️ ▶️ John knee in that curve of like, you know, another doubling or tripling of dots per inch on
⏹️ ▶️ John our phones is really diminishing returns at this point. Right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John people won’t be able to see that difference. Arguably for the distances most people have their TVs,
⏹️ ▶️ John 8K could be near the knee and neck curve. Maybe even, you know, 16K, put it this way, 16K
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions and video for typical television sizes that we have today and distance that we sit from them
⏹️ ▶️ John is the point of diminishing returns, right? And I think it’s the same deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John frame rate. Obviously, technical limitations keep us from having really high frame rates, plus there’s also a battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life issue, but as those dominoes fall and it becomes possible to have higher frame rates, the question becomes, at what point
⏹️ ▶️ John do we not bother adding any more frames per second because nobody can tell the difference?
⏹️ ▶️ John 3060? We can all tell. I’ve yet to meet someone who can’t tell the
⏹️ ▶️ John difference between 30 frames per second and 60, just to give a round number, right? 60 and 120?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you will start to find people who can’t tell between 60 and 120, even though Marco could definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John tell some people are less sensitive than others 120 to 200 120 to 240 You will
⏹️ ▶️ John find way more people who cannot tell the difference between these two things
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, potentially like you know, the the sampling rate of input is not necessarily tied to the frame rate
⏹️ ▶️ John So the Apple pencil is sampled at 240 Hertz, but the display is 120, right? So there
⏹️ ▶️ John are certain applications where where the various things that have to do with how often is
⏹️ ▶️ John the input read and how soon is that input reflected on the screen, that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat independent of the frame rate. Apple Pencil can definitely get way more responsive, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a video that I linked to on my blog way back when of a demo display showing latencies between
⏹️ ▶️ John input and the reflection of that input going from 100 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds
⏹️ ▶️ John to 1 millisecond, and it startling and we still we’re not close to the point of diminishing
⏹️ ▶️ John returns for for example tracking the tip of your Apple Pencil. But that is mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John independent of how often does the screen update. If the input was read and
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly tracked by the computer with one millisecond of latency even if
⏹️ ▶️ John the display only updated 120 times a second it would eventually update to reflect
⏹️ ▶️ John the line that you expected to be there as opposed to now where it eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John updates to reflect a line that lags a little bit behind where you thought you brought the pencil, right? So those are
⏹️ ▶️ John all mostly independent, but for things like scrolling, I think 120 Hertz
⏹️ ▶️ John will put us over the line in terms of smoothness for most people,
⏹️ ▶️ John the majority of people, they’re like going to 200 frames a second or two 40, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John more than half the population will not notice a difference from one 20 to that new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think 60 is a little bit under people’s perception limits. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we will spend a long time at 120 and I think that is a reasonable place to hang out for a while and then we
⏹️ ▶️ John can concentrate on input lag latency, latency of reading you know your touches
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Apple Pencil and all that other stuff while maintaining 120 Hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also remember with variable refresh part of the reason we can do this without killing the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John is variable refresh allows us not to just repeatedly update the same image 120
⏹️ ▶️ John times a second and burn your battery when the image isn’t changing. So that technology, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, again, it’s from the iPad and it’s, you know, it’s widespread everywhere, is what makes this possible and I think is the
⏹️ ▶️ John real important feature for all these high frame rate things. So I am,
⏹️ ▶️ John I endorse 120 hertz like Marco, like my wife has an iPad that has
⏹️ ▶️ John it right. I see it there. I appreciate it. I don’t miss it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I play video games at 60 frames per second now in Destiny where it used to be 30, and that is wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like 120 even more. So, you know, obviously using your iPhone and
⏹️ ▶️ John scrolling with your thumb is not the same thing as playing a first-person shooter in a video game, but I can tell you just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the difference of the application. I would love 120 Hertz in Destiny. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would like it on my phone.
iPhone rumor: Astrophotography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along. Astrophotography capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I honestly don’t know. I’m assuming this means taking pictures of the night sky, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to get better?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Do we have any other information on what that… Because typically, the needs of astrophotography are typically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about taking long exposures so that you can capture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful images at night, but not so long or somehow compensating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it becomes a problem that the stars are moving fairly quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the context of a long exposure. So like, if you take a long exposure, you know, if you take like a minute, two minutes long exposure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re at high enough resolution, the stars that you’re shooting will have moved enough that it might cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small streak on each star during that exposure time or you know, whatever the times are. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically, that’s what you would need for astrophotography is like some way to compensate for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe just making really short exposures that somehow get enough light to make it work. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. So I’m curious what this is referring to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we don’t have much, but it says in this MacRumors article, the mode will allow the phone to detect different artifacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such as the moon and stars and adjust settings such as exposure accordingly, which doesn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix what you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that sounds like it’s just like, you know, better photo processing for a certain subject matter, which is fine. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge part of what makes the cameras on the iPhone so good, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s certainly not a headlining feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I feel like it’s probably making up for a weak area. It sounds to me like basic machine learning. The camera
⏹️ ▶️ John recognizes that what you’re taking a picture of is the night sky, and it recognizes that through machine learning, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then applies a custom set of image processing that understands, hey, I know image
⏹️ ▶️ John processor, you might see these little pinpricks of light, don’t freak out, it’s not noise. Like those are stars,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what a star looks like. Enhance and double down on the stars instead of treating it as noise and trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John smooth it over. And, you know, so recognize that that is the moon and recognize that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do an HDR exposure and what the moon is supposed to look. It’s like machine learning of like understanding that
⏹️ ▶️ John you are taking a picture of the night sky. Cause the night sky is not that varied. There’s the moon,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s stars, maybe there’s clouds and that’s about it, right? So you know, what’s going to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you can make lots of custom machine learning stuff. I don’t think this is what Marco was talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like leave the shutter open for three hours and get a cool swirly pattern of the stars. I don’t think that’s what this is about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Third-party apps could surely do that and probably do that now. It’s probably just about one more thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that your camera kind of understands what you’re taking a picture of and can do a decent job of it. Because I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John night sky pictures are probably the type of things that people with iPhones take because they’re out at night and they see a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sky and wanna take a picture of it. And then they’re disappointed with the results because all of the phones sort of default
⏹️ ▶️ John image processing work against the idea of a completely dark background with 10 Frames of Light.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Flatfile for sponsoring our show.
iPhone rumor: Stronger MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, continuing on, a stronger MagSafe. I have yet to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any MagSafe anything, so I don’t really know how strong or not strong it is now. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard it’s not as strong as people expected, but I don’t know. Do you guys have more input on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I use MagSafe all the time because our bedside cable solution is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MagSafe. And I must admit, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s only, you know, I mean, the iPhone 12 series is still fairly new, but I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite disappointed in how little MagSafe stuff there is so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume there’s a good reason, maybe this is the reason, maybe the reason is like a lot of stuff was just, it was too hard to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to make it good with the existing MagSafe magnet strength, I don’t know. But just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Apple stuff, which is my solution, it’s very low tech,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I just have the MagSafe cable and I have the Apple Watch cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have stuck to the bottom that adhesive that’s like the micro suction cups, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what I’m talking about? Like certain, some things have those. I bought a sheet of that on Amazon, and so I cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out little disks of it to stick on the bottom. So I have the Apple Watch charger, and then a few inches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away I have the phone MagSafe charger. and those are just suction cups stuck to the desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that special tape. So they just sit flat on the nightstand. So I’ve basically made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my own unmovable Apple dock, which is great. I like it better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than any other dock I’ve ever used. Because both things, they stay fixed in place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can pick up each device with one hand because the things are sucked onto the table. So it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that being said, the issue with MagSafe that I have is that even with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mini, which I think is the easiest phone to align on MagSafe because the MagSafe disc itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not that much narrower than the Mini. So like you have less kind of slop in one direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deal with. But even with MagSafe, it’s kind of hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to align the phone correctly because the magnets don’t pull it so hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the correct alignment as you’d expect it to. It is kind of difficult. Like I have to kind of wiggle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it around sometimes And sometimes I have it in a way that it does feel like it’s stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, but it’s like an off by one error with the magnet alignment or something. It’s like, it’s slightly off and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t charge and I have to like move it over until it makes a little like thunk ding sound when it’s charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Current MagSafe, I love the concept. The execution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been a little, I don’t know, a little disappointing I think. I still like it better than like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco un-magnetized Qi charging because it does solve the alignment most of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of the time, whereas unmodified Qi chargers solve the alignment problem none of the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nicer than that, but it could be made better. And I think one of the ways it could be made better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be stronger magnets. I think that would also greatly improve things like car mounts, where right now the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MagSafe is not, I don’t think, not strong enough. I haven’t actually tried this, although I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought about it. Not quite strong enough that you could just like stick a MagSafe disc to some part of your car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick your phone on it and expect it to stay there. But if the magnets were made stronger, that might be possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can see this being plausible and welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, any thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I have a MagSafe puck. The only thing I use it for is to charge my AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ John which don’t magnetically align to it really in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey any way intentionally. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most John thing I’ve ever heard.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they kind of, like, I don’t know if you’ve tried this, but I have the second generation AirPods and the
⏹️ ▶️ John non-pro ones. AirPods do have little magnets in them to pull the
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods in. And there is some interaction between those magnets and the puck, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like it’s an intentional interaction. I don’t think my AirPod case was designed with that puck in mind because it’s just, it predates
⏹️ ▶️ John it by so many years, but they do kind of align. But anyway, my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John has MagSafe. And when I first got it, I got the puck with it and I tried it and I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like it. I didn’t like it for a bunch of reasons that have little to do with the feature being bad. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s great for, you know, like Marco said, it’s better than not magnets because then you got to align the thing yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re worried about if your thing’s charged, right? And there’s some complaints about the pucks, which Marco solved by sticking it to the surface
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but anyway, like in general, a good idea. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in my context, my fuddy-duddy context, I have readily available cables to plug in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if given the choice, like the extra convenience of putting it on the MagSafe thing didn’t outweigh
⏹️ ▶️ John my own, you know, weird paranoia about slower charging,
⏹️ ▶️ John extra heat buildup, all that stuff. And also, to be honest, this is probably the biggest one, marks
⏹️ ▶️ John in the back of my case, right? Little
⏹️ ▶️ John marks and indentations. You know, it’s whatever, that’s just me, right? Doesn’t mean it’s a bad feature, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the real thing that makes me worry about MagSafe and especially these rumors of stronger magnets is the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone has magnets in the back of it now. Now I have a case on
⏹️ ▶️ John it that is not a quote unquote MagSafe case that somehow conveys the magnetic strength
⏹️ ▶️ John through either by having their own magnets You know aligned the same way as the regular magnets or whatever like my case is
⏹️ ▶️ John just has no magnets in it whatsoever So it provides a gap between the
⏹️ ▶️ John magnets that are inside my phone and the outside world It’s kind of also one of the reasons why I didn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the Apple cases because they do have the little Magnet rings thing whose sole purpose is
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it so that the strength of your magnet is not as diminished by the fact that that you have a case on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I put, as we’ve discussed in past shows, I put my phone in my right pocket of my jacket with my wallet
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s filled with credit cards, that have mag stripes. Now I know mag stripes are prehistoric and everyone has the tap
⏹️ ▶️ John cards now and everyone has the chip cards now and who cares about the mag stripe? But again, worrying about
⏹️ ▶️ John the marks on the back of my phone, I’m also kind of worried about even stronger magnets on
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of my phone being next to my wallet in my pocket. There’s probably enough gap there with the case and
⏹️ ▶️ John the leather of my wallet and all the other stuff that is not a big deal. And yeah, who knows when I’m ever gonna use my MagStripes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But having powerful magnets on the back of your phone is not the type of thing that you can get rid of because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John embedded in the phone. You can’t turn them off. They’re not electromagnets. They’re like permanent
⏹️ ▶️ John magnets, right? And there was some articles going around about how Apple recommends that you not
⏹️ ▶️ John put your phone in your breast pocket if you have a pacemaker, right? Now, to some degree,
⏹️ ▶️ John people with pacemakers and other medical devices that are sensitive magnetic fields have to be aware that there are many products in the
⏹️ ▶️ John world that could potentially have powerful magnets in them that are a danger to them. So it’s not like Apple is doing anything necessarily wrong by
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this and putting magnets in them for the convenience of most people, because the people who have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, medical devices that are sensitive to magnets just have to be aware of that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a non-optional, increasingly powerful, permanent magnet in
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of my phone is not something that I think pays for
⏹️ ▶️ John its convenience. right so I get that there’s an alignment issue with wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John charging I would prefer a solution that either mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John alignment which is the thing that you can do you can have things aligned by having a little notch or nubbin or other sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of things right that’s I know it’s not as elegant but it can be done right or
⏹️ ▶️ John a you know a non fire inducing air power type thing which is like hey but just don’t worry about just chuck
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone on the thing and however it’s aligned we will magically figure it out under the covers
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure we charge it in as fast a possible way given the alignment and so on and so forth. We don’t have either one
⏹️ ▶️ John of those things so magnets may be the best bet right but due to the unique nature of the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or not unique but the the special nature of the phone it is unlike for example MagSafe on a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John because most people are not holding the magnetic parts of either part of their laptop or the charger
⏹️ ▶️ John up to their body but phones go in your pockets right next to your body all the time next to other things
⏹️ ▶️ John in your pockets, unlike things like your AirPods case, your laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the other scenarios in real life. Like my faucet has like a little thing that you pull out of it
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, that you can just pull the end of the faucet out and it’s got the long hose so you can spray in different places.
⏹️ ▶️ John goes back in with a little magnet. There are many applications where magnets for alignment is a great idea,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for a rectangular thing that I stick in the pockets of all of my clothes, I’m not super enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ John about them making those magnets more powerful. Now I agree that the current set of magnets are a little bit wimpy and seem not
⏹️ ▶️ John to give all the benefits you’d want them to have, but I don’t know if the solution is stronger magnets. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of hoping this rumor is bogus, or if they’re stronger, they’ll be stronger by such a small degree that no one
⏹️ ▶️ John will even notice. But not looking forward to this.
iPhone rumor: Rear finish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else? A finer matte finish on the back, that sounds good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. No, that could be huge. I mean, well. I’ll believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We talk a lot on podcasts every year about the details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iPhone surface treatments, both visually and how grippy they are, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy they are to hold and everything. And this is largely an academic discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because effectively nobody doesn’t use a case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t been using a case in my mini, and it’s almost weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t. And whenever anybody learns this fact, they’re like, what? They
⏹️ ▶️ John you an Apple executive?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when I look around in the world, and I try to take notice, how many phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see without a case. Granted, I haven’t been seeing as many people as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would in a normal year, but it’s basically zero. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as close as you can get to zero. Like, especially because I haven’t seen John Gruber yet this year, so that would at least make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. But, you know, it’s basically zero people that don’t have a case, except me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, this kind of thing probably doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, the current line of pro phones, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, made grippability significantly worse. We all thought that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new flat sided design and everything would be a huge improvement for handholdability. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Pro line, it largely hasn’t been. Now on the non-Pro line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the aluminum is textured instead of like that polished steel, and because the glass has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a kind of a flat glass back, so it’s kind of tacky, as opposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like kind of sandblasted glass back that the Pros have. The Pros actually, again, I think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got less handholdable this generation. And so if you care about nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handholdability, the non-pro phones this year are the way to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it must bother Apple that anything about the non-pro phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is significantly better than the pro phones. Like I think they want it to be a pretty clear distinction that the pro phones should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better in every way. So to have something go the other direction would probably irritate them. In addition,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the people who I’ve seen not use cases are Apple executives, as you said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, probably they want to correct this. They probably want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Pro phones to both look the best, feel the best, and be the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I would expect for feeling the best, that kind of matte texture on the back would be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some kind of change to the texture on the back would have a chance of being a very good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would also hope that they get rid of this super highly polished stainless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steel case band design on the Pros, because that does not look the best once anybody has touched it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, again, all of this is academic because most people put cases on their phones and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people never even see or touch the actual raw sides or back of their phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the steel, the shiny steel. I know people complain about fingerprints, but like, you’re gonna touch it, it’s gonna have fingerprints, even
⏹️ ▶️ John with fingerprints I think it looks nicer and more importantly, it feels nicer. Like I use my phone without a case for what? A whole day
⏹️ ▶️ John or two before, whatever. I tried to use it for a while without the case. And it feels like a
⏹️ ▶️ John really nice object. But I agree with Marco and everybody else that the non-pro phone actually
⏹️ ▶️ John has better grip ability. And it’s interesting because the non-pro phone’s back grip ability is because it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s perceived as being grippier because it actually is glossy on the back, right? The matte one feels
⏹️ ▶️ John slipperier in the vein of, what was the slipperiest one? The iPhone 6? That was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like seven. The one that was made of Teflon. A bar of soap. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, so like, when you have very glossy glass, it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John grippy right up to the point where you have a dollop of moisture and then it becomes slick as anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I think we perceive the non-pro phone as being grippier because we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gripping it with essentially dry hands. But in real life, maybe if you got a little bit of water on your
⏹️ ▶️ John hand and tried to grab your phone with a slick glass back, maybe it would be different. But either way, this rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they’re changing the back, the matte back with a grippier, more comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John feeling. So it sounds like they’re sticking with matte. Like the current Pro has a matte glass back,
⏹️ ▶️ John as in it’s like, it looks like frosted glass, right? And that feels slipperier to us because it’s very finely
⏹️ ▶️ John textured frosted glass. And it’s kind of like the back of like the iPhone 6 was, where it was like a matte kind of aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. It feels slippery because it’s not like the glossy glass that is grippy, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you get that squeaky sound where it’s like, oh, I can really grip on this, right? But it’s also not
⏹️ ▶️ John fuzzy like a leather case where you actually get real grip on it. It’s the worst of both worlds. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor is that they have improved the matte back to be grippier than it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how you can make it matte, but even grippier. Does that mean make the texture less
⏹️ ▶️ John fine? So if you looked at under a microscope, you know, the mattness would be higher hills and valleys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it mean that would actually, here’s the thing, Naked robotic core is my whole deal. I’ve been talking about it for years, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple continues to not do the obvious other solution, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John make your naked robotic core really grippy by not making it out
⏹️ ▶️ John of quote unquote premium materials, by putting wear surfaces on the naked robotic core. They’ve never done that. They’ve stuck with
⏹️ ▶️ John the naked robotic core, which is here is a small so we can make this phone. All the surfaces are hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put a soft case on it, express yourself, make it grippy, do whatever you want. but if we actually put
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially wear surfaces on the outside of the phone, people might
⏹️ ▶️ John like it, but then they will wear them out. And that’s your actual phone, you can’t remove it. When someone destroys
⏹️ ▶️ John their case or wears it out, they take it off and they get a new case, right? If the back of
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone, like my stupid Microsoft mouse, was made of soft touch rubber, once you destroyed
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of your soft touch rubber phone, it would be like, oh, my phone is all gross now. And I can’t take it off
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s part of the phone. Right. So I don’t fault Apple for not taking this approach.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are very committed to naked robotic core. I think it’s the right approach, because like Marco said,
⏹️ ▶️ John so many the vast majority of people just put a case on it, in which case they are benefiting from naked
⏹️ ▶️ John robotic core, which is make the phone as small and beautiful as you can get it. And then you have the option to put whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John cases on you want. And if you’re a weirdo like Gruber and Apple executive or Marco now and you want to use that a case,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? You got the smallest phone possible with really premium surfaces that don’t wear out like my stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft mouse and everyone’s happy, right? But I continue to think about
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe one model of phone that is a little bit chunkier, that has actual, I’m calling
⏹️ ▶️ John them wear surfaces and it’s derogatory way of saying they eventually wear down, but it has surfaces on them that are not
⏹️ ▶️ John hard, durable materials, but instead are designed to be grippy. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John weird because I think that phone would get the reputation as the grippy phone, which makes no sense
⏹️ ▶️ John because every phone is the grippy phone. If you just buy one and put a super grippy case on it, you’ve got a grippy
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. But it’s like, yeah, but you buy this one, whatever model this is, the iPhone 15,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, pro rugged edition. I don’t know, someone can come on the fly with some sort of branding name for this
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. That the actual phone itself is like a Makita
⏹️ ▶️ John power tool. It has like plastic and rubber all over it. And like, it is just a grippy thing or whatever, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe not go that low end, like something, a premium feeling,
⏹️ ▶️ John actual grippy material that the phone is made out of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What about like the iPhone 5C plastic? That felt great. The iPhone 3G and 3GS, also plastic,
⏹️ ▶️ John Very shiny plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But I’m thinking more
⏹️ ▶️ John of like devices, like I think of power tools because very often they are made to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John to have positive grip and to also be durable. You don’t want the handle of your power
⏹️ ▶️ John drill to wear out, but you also don’t want it to be made of glossy plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, fair enough. But like, yeah, I mean, one of the huge benefit to this is that compared to the phone that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal and glass on it that you’re putting plastic on top of, the phone that actually is made of plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to begin with would be significantly smaller and lighter weight because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal and glass are heavy. And you know, you would be replacing some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that frame. I mean, there would have to be some kind of structural, you know, probably interior metal frame for some part of it for support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or rigidity or whatever, but you would result, the resulting product would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly smaller and lighter and simpler than a metal and glass phone with a plastic case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added to it aftermarket.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the tricky part is the screen still, because OLED screens are flexible, you can roll
⏹️ ▶️ John them up, right? But the glass surface of the phones is part of the experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of using an iPhone, like it’s part of the reason the original iPhone, they ditched the plastic one and went with glass, because
⏹️ ▶️ John running your finger across a plastic screen is not great. And we’re not, what kind of plastic they make it out of, glass
⏹️ ▶️ John just feels better. And glass, unfortunately, is not super enthusiastic about bending a lot. So
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic, I think, is a great idea for a phone. You mentioned having a metal frame for rigidity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the reason it needs that rigidity is the glass. Part of the reason, of course, is the printed circuit board, which also kind of doesn’t like to be bent.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, plastic could go a long, setting aside the grippiness, plastic could go a long way towards
⏹️ ▶️ John reducing weight increasing durability of phones, but Apple feels shy about that because people didn’t like the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John 5c. I thought it was great I still think the iPhone 5c is a great phone But it didn’t sell well, and I think Apple may
⏹️ ▶️ John have taken the wrong lesson from that That like oh we shouldn’t make a plastic phone and in reality just the price and
⏹️ ▶️ John features of the 5c given the line that was Around it was not right So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s two separate things one Make a phone out of materials that are not aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John steel or glass but it still is essentially a premium phone. It still would be the Naked Robotic Core. And two,
⏹️ ▶️ John make a ruggedized phone that comes out of the box as a beefier, bigger battery, more
⏹️ ▶️ John grippy, with what I keep calling wear surfaces all over the thing. But those are
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely diversified models. I feel like Apple’s iPhone line is now perhaps as
⏹️ ▶️ John diversified as it’s ever going to get. I’m not sure Apple has an appetite to go into the more
⏹️ ▶️ John exotic realms. I feel like that is more the domain of Android phones where there’s more variability,
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple does have a brand, and I think with the current phone lineup, they’re covering
⏹️ ▶️ John so many bases. If you want a small phone, that’s good, they sell one. If you want a gigantic phone, that’s good, they sell one. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ John a quote-unquote normal-sized phone, that’s good, they sell a couple. They’ve pretty much covered the market as well
⏹️ ▶️ John as they need to, given current phone technology. So I don’t expect them to do either one of these things, and I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, think, I couldn’t even make a strong pitch for it, but it would certainly be cool, mostly because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing they haven’t tried yet. because everyone uses the case and Naked Robotic Core has served them so well, they haven’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John looked at that other thing, I just think it would be a fun variation. Now, all that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John this rumor about, oh, a mat back that’s grippier, I think it’s going to be one of those things where if they mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John it at all, it’ll be like, oh, and we improved the mat back, so it’s a little bit grippier and none of us will be able to tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, while you’re on the subject of the variability of the lineup, all these rumors that the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini is not selling at all and they’re gonna discontinue it, boy, I hope that’s wrong because I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone mini still. I’m, I’m a big fan. The size feels totally normal to me now. Every other phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels like a giant monster phone to me now. Like it’s so nice and small and light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it fits nicely in my pocket and I never get that feeling when like I sit down and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like whenever I’ve like tried a plus phone here and there, like you sit down and it’s like a line so that you’re wrong in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket and you’ve got to like shift around or move it over. Like I’ve never had that happen with the mini. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delightful. I’m so happy with it and I really, really hope they continue to make flagship
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t remember if I said this on Twitter or here or both, but like the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would bail on the mini because it sells less, of course it sells less. That’s what diversifying
⏹️ ▶️ John the line means. You have the sort of the mainstream phones that most people buy
⏹️ ▶️ John and when you make the weirder models, fewer people are gonna buy them. That’s the whole point of diversifying your line is you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to address smaller and smaller subsets of the market. You do it after you’ve satisfied the fat part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the bell curve, then you go after the edges. And yeah, you introduce a little phone, fewer people
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna buy it. Now it could be, oh well, it’s not that it’s fewer, it’s fewer than we even thought it would be. It’s fewer than
⏹️ ▶️ John projections. And kind of like the stock marketing business very often, you make some wild ass guess about how many
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna sell, and if you don’t meet that expectation, it’s worse than if you had sold the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ John number of phones, but had predicted a lower number and exceeded it. Which doesn’t make any sense, but that’s just human nature. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John but as with so many of these things, yeah, Apple, you’re gonna sell fewer of them, stick to it. Because if you,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if it’s not like, if you didn’t sell like half a percent of what you thought, just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. Because honestly, the, you know, the technological investment, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what did I talk about this before? Like Star Wars, Disney bailing on Star Wars after they had some trouble with
⏹️ ▶️ John the franchise. Part of what makes people, you know, know and trust your brand is you
⏹️ ▶️ John not immediately running at the first sign of trouble in a product line. You know the people who love the mini really
⏹️ ▶️ John love it. You may be disappointed that there aren’t more of them and that it costs you so much money to get this whole other
⏹️ ▶️ John production line up and running, but honestly, you should just eat that because having
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely loyal mini customers in your camp and having them give you 37%
⏹️ ▶️ John margins on their purchase instead of 38.5% margins, just make the bean counter swallow it and
⏹️ ▶️ John keep making the mini, honestly. Like it’s not this terrible disaster Apple’s losing money. They make so much
⏹️ ▶️ John money they don’t even know what to do with it. They can’t give away their cash fast enough. Keep making them money for crying out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Linode, and Flatfile. And thank you to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly you can join at http.fm join we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John the show is over, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ 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, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so
Casey got a drone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been eyeballing this for a while and finally I just decided to pull the trigger. I got myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a DJI mini 2 drone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh nice Those are those look so fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it is so much fun I Know not what I’m doing And one of the scary things about the mini is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t have the accident avoidance that yours does Marco like it doesn’t have Forward and rear sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to prevent it from running into things. Hmm. Oh, man, though. It’s so much fun. And it’s so sweet See,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so adorable. It’s like it’s like the drone adorable edition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you get the drone care plan that they offer? So that like, if you do crash into something, it’s no big deal?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did. They do have like an AppleCare Plus thing and I put it off and then it was like, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this within two days. And that was this morning. And so I was like, ah, fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 50 bucks, I get like two replacements, I think or something. Well, I think I still have to pay for them a little bit, just like you do with AppleCare,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but significantly cheaper replacements if I do something extremely terrible. And I figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least for the first year, while I don’t know what I’m doing, it seemed like a reasonable thing to do. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got the DJI Mini 2 Fly More Combo, which basically means it gives you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some extra batteries, which actually are worth discussing. It gives you a controller, which I guess it doesn’t come with, generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some extra propellers, and I forget what else. But I freaking love this thing. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely stupid and useless and wasteful, and oh my God, it’s so much fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s awesome. It’s gonna be useful, or it’s spying on your neighbors, menacing
⏹️ ▶️ John we going to see some Instagram stories of drone footage of you flying through cool things?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I don’t think so. So my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intention with this was just to get something. I feel like I need something a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit happy after the last year. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, you’re an adult. You’re a professional. It’s fine. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey have to excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s a fun toy. You’re a tech podcaster. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so anyway, so I wanted to give myself a little treat. I got myself a treat. But I figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on occasion, I think it will be nice to have. So as an example, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a listener of the show was kind enough to lend me, shoot, I forget what model it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, but I think it was an earlier version of your current drone, Marco. Because what do you have? You have the something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey think. It came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out like two years ago, but not the one with the zoom lens, the one with the big sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think I had borrowed from this very kind of listener, Eric, a previous version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that. And it was phenomenal. There are definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of things about it that I miss. For example, the accident avoidance, because the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big guys will—I guess they have like IR sensors or something, or sonar or something on the front,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where radars such that it will try not to run into walls or trees or what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the Mini does not. The advantages of the Mini other than being cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are that it’s quite small. It is stunningly small. And it’s under the magic 250 gram limit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that certainly America and I think other countries have decided that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if a drone is under 250 grams, it’s considered like a complete and utter toy rather than something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that could arguably be used professionally. Now naturally, there’s nothing stopping me from using this professionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would need to go get my FAA certification, what have you, but I could. It’s not that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a decent enough drone that I think I could do it, but the point is is that like, you don’t have to register it with the FAA.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s some, I think a couple other differences, check with your local jurisdictions and what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s just, it’s portable, it’s super portable. Like Eric, when he lent me his drone, it came in this huge backpack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the drone is not small and so on and so forth. But the thing is so tiny, Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bag it came in is like the size of an average purse, I would say. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been really enjoying using it. And the thing moves. Like when I was borrowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whatever Mavic it was, I don’t recall exactly the model number. But when I was borrowing that Mavic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kept it on super slow mode because I was so scared I was going to break this fellow’s drone and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to send him like a carcass back in the mail. He was kind enough to ship me this drone and say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’d borrow it for a couple of weeks and I didn’t want to have to ship a carcass back. And so I was using it in super slow mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, even the mini, when you put it in sport mode, will do 30 miles an hour,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is nuts. Wow. It’s 250 grams and it’ll do, I mean, I think it’s a little shy of 30,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it has a readout on your phone screen and it says, you know, 28, 29 miles an hour or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s bananas. But so much of the tech is so cool. And just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as someone who appreciates good engineering, And I think I speak for all three of us in saying that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just so cool that so much incredible technology is in this little tiny device. And if you’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really used a drone, in and of itself, it’s exactly what you would think, right? You can make it go up, down. You can make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it spin. You can go left or right. You can forward and back. But there’s so many cool things you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can do. And as silly as it sounds, and anyone who has flown a drone in the last 15 years knows this already, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can fly it wherever and say, come home, please. And sure enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will ascend to whatever the, you know, stated, uh, come home, uh, altitude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to make sure it gets over trees and, and other obstacles. It will fly over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you at, you know, a couple hundred feet and then descend down directly in front of you. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the coolest thing. Like it is so freaking cool. And, and when you’re flying it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your phone screen, you know, so you, you, the way it works, at least for DJI drones that I’ve used is you stick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phone in a like holster within this controller, a controller like you would use for like an RC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car, and you hook a cable up into the lightning port and that’s your viewfinder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, and it shows you, you know, what the drone sees, but you can also call up a map and see exactly where the drone is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in relation to you and so on and so forth. And so much of this is so cool. And the DJI Fly app is surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good for a company that you would think would probably have a mediocre at best app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It lets you do like playback of the route that you took insofar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you can watch the little arrow like dance around on the map and it’ll even show you the messages it sends you like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, this is where the wind was too strong or what have you. I don’t know. This is so cool and so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun and I’m so glad I got it. Now, ask me again in two months, I’ll probably be like, oh, yeah, that’s right. I do have a drone. I forgot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that. But sitting here now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John three days in, it is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the coolest thing and I, and I cannot recommend it enough. They’re not a sponsor. They should be, but, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the, the mini two is so fun and so neat. And I did,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I, Aaron was taking Penny on a walk in the neighborhood. And so I did fly, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tracked her down and flew and was kind of flying behind her, trying to get a cinematic video and not going to post this anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for several reasons, but I was trying to get like a cinematic looking video of her and when she got home,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she said, you know, you gotta be careful with that. And I was like, well, yeah. And thinking that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I flew too close to a tree and I didn’t realize it or something. And she said, well, you know, as, as you were chasing me, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was fine, there was a guy getting out of his car at his house and he was looking at that drone and looking at me and looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that drone and looking at me. And he was like, huh? And definitely was like looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me funny, says Aaron. And so I guess she was like, it’s trying to make it like less awkward. She says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Penny, the dog, oh, daddy’s using his drone again. That silly fellow, you know, I forget what she said, but you know, something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, you know, to indicate that it’s not like some freaking creepers. Well, I mean, arguably I was a creeper,
⏹️ ▶️ John but. Yeah. Are you going to get the neighborhood watch on your back or whatever, the homeowners association? Sorry, no drones in the
⏹️ ▶️ John neighborhood, Casey. New rule.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s funny because my reign in the homeowners association is a month away from being done. So you never know. It
⏹️ ▶️ John could happen. Yeah, that rules. That rules coming down on you hard soon. Yeah. You’re under the FAA
⏹️ ▶️ John limit. But guess what? The neighborhood limit is zero grams.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s so true. And I’m just waiting for the next door post like, hey, I hear of this drone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John which I was doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, we don’t need to,
⏹️ ▶️ John the leaf blowers are bad enough. I don’t need to hear drones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s all the post-apocalyptic literature and movies and televisions that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John super into, but every time I see these drones, I think of how incredibly useful they are in any kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of sort of zombie apocalypse, end of the world scenario, where they’re like, you need
⏹️ ▶️ John to have sort of, you know, situational awareness and if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of threat, right, where you need to know what’s around you and who’s what and where and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you had told me as a kid that you’d be able to buy something like this drone for
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple hundred bucks and like how amazing it is and what it does and that you could just buy
⏹️ ▶️ John one and have this, like, obviously there are military drones and all sorts of other applications that like the real uses, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever, whoever does the next end of the world story with modern technology
⏹️ ▶️ John and smartphones and everything, Like I can, you know, whatever the threat is, whether it’s other people
⏹️ ▶️ John or zombies or who knows, aliens or whatever, having ready access to drones
⏹️ ▶️ John to just grab them from a store and charge them up, assuming there’s electricity in this
⏹️ ▶️ John end of the world story and fly them out to, you know, see, to
⏹️ ▶️ John surveil your perimeter and everything. It’s just, it’s so science fiction. I’m so old, I just can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John over how cool it is. Like just, you just go to the website, how amazing it is. You can just fly anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John in any direction with live video in essentially disposable hardware, disposable
⏹️ ▶️ John from the perspective of like, there’s no humans in it and it’s a couple hundred bucks. And in the apocalypse, there’s warehouses
⏹️ ▶️ John full of these things. So just grab them and fortify your castle with drones and just have
⏹️ ▶️ John them flying constantly. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey course, the noise
⏹️ ▶️ John is something, but you know, it still beats leaf blowers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Totally. Not by much, but it does. Not by a lot. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, I don’t know, I just find it so fascinating. Like leaving aside the engineering of it, I just think it’s such a nifty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change of perspective. And I mean that in both the literal and the figurative senses, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not often that I get to look down on the roof of my house. And as it turns out, we’re going to be doing an addition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime in the next couple of months. And one of the things I’m excited to do is not film it happening,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe at the end of each day after the crew leaves, take an overhead shot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s an external thing that’s happening, take an overhead shot of the progress and just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of have maybe not literally a time-lapse, but be able to go through the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week or two weeks or month or whatever it’s gonna take them to build it and see the progress happening,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in real time, but sort of speak in real time. And I’m really looking forward to that. And plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time that we had borrowed that drone from that extremely kind listener, it was when we were at Cape Charles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And whenever we can start vacationing properly again, I’m really looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s appropriate, when it’s legal, et cetera, being able to take a couple of videos like that. It doesn’t have to be 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes of it. It can be just a few minutes, but the videos we captured at Cape Charles a few years ago when we were borrowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that drone were super cool, and I don’t think anyone else really cared that much, but I thought they were phenomenally cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m really excited to be able to do that sort of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to be able to get just a different perspective on life and document
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I think this is a topic maybe for another day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think it’s fun for me and very neat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m very lucky to be able to have a, a kind of an,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an arsenal or a tool chest that I can use when it comes to capturing moments, you know, because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the GoPro and I’ve used it as I think we mentioned just a week or two ago, I use the GoPro from,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for even just silly things like sticking it on a window so I can see of Penny, how and when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Penny is escaping from her like pen that we put her in. And the GoPro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be used to like film Declan back when, you know, swimming lessons were a thing and we weren’t allergic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the indoors. I can bring that in the pool with me and Declan when we’re doing like a swimming lesson or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free swim or whatever and film him underwater and film him, you know, and not worry about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breaking, you know, like you were saying about just disposable to some degree, John. And having a proper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera with a zoom lens, you know, granted it is a pain in the ass in a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways, but nevertheless, it is also cool to be able to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out this camera and, and be a little bit further away from my family and taking more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey candid shots of them. Like having all of these different tools and now a drone in my arsenal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really enjoy it. And it’s really, really neat to be able to have all these different tools in your tool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tool chest to be able to use the right tool for the job at the right time, which of course 99% of the time is just my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn phone. But nevertheless, when you have some amounts of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ability to plan, it is really, really cool. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that said, Marco, you haven’t touched a drone in like two years, I assume?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, about a year. But I bought it for a purpose. And we were also doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some construction and I wanted the same thing. You were saying, like, dude, to be able to, you know, take,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, capture some of it going on. And it was good for that. And then, you know, it was also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, just as a novelty, you know, like the year of, like, having this, like the first year I had, like having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing as this great novelty where, like, you know, I would, I brought it, like, to the family gathering at Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they live in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey rural area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we were, like, you know, zoomed up and showed their whole, you know, their property and, you know, zoomed down to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone else’s house. Like, hey, here’s an overhead picture of your house. It was just it was fun like there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco novelty value to drones as long as you’re in an area where you’re not around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of other people because they are super annoying, but we were lucky that we were in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two such areas where there were not a lot of people. So it was wonderful and it was it was it was like a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco novelty to bring it around like that first year and you know then the novelty has worn off and and I it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting on the shelf and I’m actually I’m going through a big wave of like cleaning out and and trying to like get rid of a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sell some stuff and give some stuff away. And I was just thinking today, like should I give away the drone or sell the drone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I was just thinking about that literally earlier today, not knowing you’d done this. Because like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you know, because mine’s also significantly larger than yours. And so that means everything about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The batteries, like the chargers, like everything about it is big. The noise level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it is. I wouldn’t say it’s dramatically different. And granted, I haven’t heard a Mavic in a couple of years now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my vague recollection is that it is noticeably louder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Mavic, the big guys are noticeably louder than the one that I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the one that you have, like it has, as you mentioned, it has a few limitations compared to mine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the image quality is a little bit different because it’s like a much smaller design. But yeah, I mean, no question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I were buying new today, I would buy the one you bought, exactly that one, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was basically using it, as you are kind of as a toy. Like so, I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco professional needs. I bought the one I bought at the time I bought it, which was, I mean, probably about three years ago now, it was a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. It was as soon as the Mavic 2 came out. Like I bought it like that week. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought the one I bought at the time because that was like the one that I knew would be easiest for me to operate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it had all those convenience features. It had like the return to home thing and all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protective features to protect you from being too likely to crash it into a lake or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would automatically fly, it also, like mine automatically flies home if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting to the point where it’s not gonna have enough battery life to make it home.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way, like again, it kind of saves you from yourself and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like there are all sorts of like little convenient features, you know, the anti-crashing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into things sensors that make it so that this was gonna be really nice for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both needs and my skill level. But now, the one you got, the Mini 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so much smaller and so much, like I feel like that makes it a lot more delightful in certain ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also makes it a lot smaller to fit in a bag. Yep, that’s exactly right. And I would imagine because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so much lighter weight, you probably need less battery weight and battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bulk as well to get the same amount of flight time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would suspect, so this thing will do about 20 to 30 minutes, depending on wind and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because like I said earlier, the particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup that Eric had lent me, it was in a fairly large backpack and there were plenty of accessories in it. So it could have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been in a smaller container, but it was the sort of thing where it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely a burden or at least a conscious decision to bring the drone anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the couple of weeks that he let me borrow it. Whereas this, it’s certainly still a decision,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s a lot more casual. like, eh, why not? You know, well, I’ll just throw it in and can’t hurt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that I really like. I mean, it’s small enough that I would consider if I was going on like an airplane, do you remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey airplanes? I don’t know if I do. If I was going on like an airplane vacation, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consider bringing it because it’s not, you know, tremendous. I’m not sure that I would and certainly depend on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I would be going, but it’s small enough that it could hypothetically work. A couple of quick things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in case you’re interested in this sort of thing and potentially buying one. The Fly More combo, I think I’d mentioned, comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with like this with three batteries, but it also comes with a battery like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charger thing where you can slot all three batteries into it and it charges via USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what it’ll do is it’ll just charge, yeah it’s USB-C, and it’ll charge whatever battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is closest to full first and then it will charge the next one and then the next one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But additionally, and this is relevant because we’re supposed to get a bunch of ice overnight, it will also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey act as a just standard battery, you know, like charger, like the other direction. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has a USB, A, B, I always get it wrong, a standard USB.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, USB out port.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, now that one’s USB old, it’s not USB-C. It’s A.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could hook up like a standard lightning cable to this triplet of batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and charge my phone if our power goes out overnight, which is super convenient, especially if you’re traveling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I really dig that. And apparently like getting the batteries in and out of the Mini One was a real pain. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s super easy on this one. Additionally, the controller does not have any sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of screen on it. Like my recollection of the Mavic that I had borrowed was that it had like some basic readouts, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what mode you’re in, what height you’re at, I think how much battery time was left. Does yours have some sort of like LCD on it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, it’s very similar to that, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well, this has no screen whatsoever, which is fine, but in a perfect world, it would be neat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have that on the controller as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I mean, honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never use that screen. Like I’m always just looking at my phone screen when I operate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and also the phone is above the controller, not below, which I don’t think was the case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Mavic that I use. The phone was below the controller when it was all mounted up. And this, the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sits above the controller, which is really nice, and I much prefer that. Do you remember how yours is? I know it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco a minute since you used it. My
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone sits below, mine’s the old style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curious though, I don’t think that, are you aware of the goggles? Yes, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are those compatible with the Mini yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so, but I haven’t looked into it. And Eric had a set for his, I believe it was a Mavic, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be misspeaking. He had a set for his Mavic, which I tried like once or twice and was freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trippy. Very cool, super cool, very weird though. Super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s how the
⏹️ ▶️ John drone racers do the racing. Have you seen those? You ever see the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey drone racers?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, yes, yes, yes, yep. And it amazes me that, I mean, if you watch them doing the races, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the drones are flying so fast that you’re like, how can anybody possibly be controlling
⏹️ ▶️ John that? And you’re like, well, they have these goggles, let them see what the drone is seeing. And then you see what they’re seeing, like, nope, doesn’t help.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t understand. It’s so true. It’s so true. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, viewing through the lens of that thing, it’s like, they’re still going so fast. How are they doing this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I suppose it’s like any other thing, like racing or video games or whatever. It’s just practice and skill,
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably a lot of crashes in the case of drones, because unlike being in a race car, if you crash a drone, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t die. So, but it’s just, it is amazing. And yeah, it is very,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the trippiest thing would have to be kind of like Marco was talking about with the VR stuff of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if what you’re seeing is a thing that is progressing through space and yet you
⏹️ ▶️ John are standing still, that’s gotta be disconcerting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John motion sickness inducing. But yeah, with the speeds these things go, the other thing is just plain reflexes
⏹️ ▶️ John and just, you know, talk about flinching when you run this thing into a wall, it’s gonna feel like you hit it with your own
⏹️ ▶️ John head, right? Yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. But yeah, so I mean, I kind of wish I had the screen, but not a big deal. But the other thing I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that if I wanted to on the Mavic, I think you would push down and twist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit to pop off the propellers. And with this, and I believe this is the only DJI drone where this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case, they actually are screwed in, which is a little bit of a pain and I don’t love.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Why are you taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the propellers? No, no. I wouldn’t generally speaking, but like if I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave the drone alone for a while, just so I don’t break them, I would occasionally take them off. Or like when I shipped them back to Eric, I took them off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, so general, not a big deal. And, and eventually it’ll end up that I will break one of these propellers and hopefully not the whole drone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I will need to replace one and that’ll be a little bit of a pain, but. All things being, all things being equal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, with the fly more combo, I think was 600 bucks if I’m not mistaken. So that’s the drone, the case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the batteries, the controller, you know, some extra propellers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really am so sitting here now, I’m so glad I spent the money. I think it’s so much fun. And I think it really will be a neat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and novel thing to have from time to time. I’m sure in the next couple of months, I’ll go from using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it every day to like once a week to like once a month to, oh yeah, I have a drone. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, it is super neat and super cool. And if you have a burning desire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to spend a few hundred bucks, first of all, atp.fm slash join. And then after that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can go to DJI or Amazon or what have you and check it out. I just think it’s super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John This just strikes me as one of those toys that if I got it, I would just be angry at how unappreciative my children are of the amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John technology in the world they live in.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because how much I would have
⏹️ ▶️ John killed for this as a kid, and then be like, yeah, it’s a drone, so what?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, it’s so true. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John understand? It’s like, yeah. I don’t know what the equivalent is gonna be when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John old people and they’re angry that children aren’t amazed by some new technology, but these drones are it,
⏹️ ▶️ John just phenomenal. I can’t even believe they’re real.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are so amazing. Like, the drone I have, which is again, like three years old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the pictures it takes, the video it takes, I’m like, this is better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than almost any camera I’ve ever owned. And it flies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs less than most of the fancy cameras do. It’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s, you’re right, you almost can’t believe that it’s real, that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of those products that you use it and you’re like, wow, technology is amazing. Like I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe that we can do this. And what’s especially impressive too, is just how incredibly good the gimbal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. And the combination of the gimbal and the actual, you know, the flight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control of all the rotors is such that like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can fly it up in the air and it can be a decently breezy day, and you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the video afterwards and it is not moving. Like it is rock steady. And you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how is that possible? This thing is hovering 400 feet in the air on a windy day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like gently moving it, and it doesn’t rock back and forth at all. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shake. It’s shocking how good, like how stable it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, how, of course, and this thing has a great sensor, So it’s like how clear and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharp everything is. It is mind-blowing how good this technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for, granted, I’m not gonna say it’s cheap. It’s not, you know, these aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low prices. You know, as you said, like, you know, 600 bucks is a pretty good entry point for like a decent mid-range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drone. But for that price, considering that it happens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also be an amazing camera that flies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s pretty amazing. Like, especially when you compare the quality of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a $600 point and shoot camera, like, you’re almost getting the flying for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really unbelievable how good these are.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is kind of the aviation equivalent of computational photography.
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside the photography, just the flying thing, the reason all these drones exist is because
⏹️ ▶️ John computers and software, you know, advanced and shrunk to the point
⏹️ ▶️ John where we could both fit them in a device that doesn’t weigh too much, so you need, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John die shrinks and smaller and smaller feature sets and more efficient circuits so you can have a smaller battery that doesn’t weigh as much.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then software-wise, the control software, to be able to put essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of dumb motors and servos in here, being controlled by a very
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated computer program that is fast and responsive with all the various sensors,
⏹️ ▶️ John accelerometers, and gyroscopes to be able to stay in the air. I remember as a kid watching
⏹️ ▶️ John the precursor to all of these drones which was like university projects where they would take some computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and connect it with an umbilical cord because they couldn’t actually put it in the flying thing, connect a flying thing with an umbilical
⏹️ ▶️ John cord to this huge array of computers and these computers would be trying to control the flying thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with some really complicated software program at some grad student wrote to figure out, oh, when you’re tipping this way,
⏹️ ▶️ John change your rotor angle that way, and do, you know, to eventually, essentially be a drone. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they made it look so hard, right? Because the drones were, everything cost a bazillion dollars. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was tethered to a giant cable to look like a pool hose, or it wasn’t even just like an extension
⏹️ ▶️ John cord. It was this huge cable connected up to a wall of the most expensive computers that they
⏹️ ▶️ John could buy, and the thing would crash all over the place, right? And it’s just that we needed to just
⏹️ ▶️ John get over that hump where it’s like, can we get the electronics small enough? Can we figure out this software
⏹️ ▶️ John problem? And once we got over that hump, it’s like, guess what? We, you don’t have to be tethered anymore. We can put the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John in there and guess what? We figured out the basic software program to more or less stay in the air.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then, then that was it. Like, there’s just like this discontinuity of like before this was not a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could even have. And now it is well known enough and the technology is widely available enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that it costs less than a good laptop, right? It absolutely costs less than a good laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John because we crack this problem. This is what’s so exciting about technology that like something that seems so hard
⏹️ ▶️ John is to almost be impossible, and then we get over the hump and it is amazing. And in case you’re wondering,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I do not file self-driving in this category because self-driving really is super duper hard. But a
⏹️ ▶️ John remote control thing that merely knows I can stay level and I can adjust when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John mashed by the wind and you can control where I go, we did get over that hump and that is a much smaller hump, but
⏹️ ▶️ John even that one was so hard to get over that, you know, for my entire childhood, the reason this is so amazing to me is that I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John people trying and failing again and again to do this. And now it’s just like, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody can make one of these because the software idea, certainly the hardware is so widely available that
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody could assemble this amount of hardware. Like, right, maybe it wouldn’t be as nice as this, it wouldn’t be as good as this and refined
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, so on and so forth. It’s a hard problem, but like, this, the hardware that’s in these drones
⏹️ ▶️ John is not super secret. That’s why you can get one for a couple hundred bucks. And then the software seems like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tractable enough that any company with reasonably good engineering resources
⏹️ ▶️ John can make a drone that flies successfully and can keep itself level and move around. And then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a question of who are the good drone makers or who are the bad ones or whatever. But the problem of fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John inexpensive thing that flies has more or less been solved by humanity. And that’s why these drones
⏹️ ▶️ John all over the place in the same way that how can you get decent pictures from a phone sensor, the sign of your size
⏹️ ▶️ John of your pinky nail that computational photography stuff to be able to pull reasonable pictures out of that was solved many
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago. Now we’re all just iterating on it. So drones really are a, an amazing technology success
⏹️ ▶️ John for a success story. And maybe my kids should be bored with them, but I will never be bored with them because they just
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like, you know, they, they seem like such an amazing triumph and such a sci-fi thing. Cause that’s what it’s like when you
⏹️ ▶️ John read sci-fi stories. The thing that’s amazing is just the everyday thing in the background of the sci-fi story. And that’s how you
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell it’s the future. So I guess we’re living in the future. I mean, we do have a pandemic after all.