419: This Week’s Gasp
25 Feb 2021John tried Clubhouse.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show diversions:
- Posting the bootleg
- Casey’s [hopefully useLiss] worries
- Marco’s ball situation
- Casey’s Compulsory Icebreaker
- Follow-up:
- Jef e’s doubts about SMART tools
- Contacts API updates
- Google’s astrophotography mode
- Magnets and MagSafe (via Ante Söderholm)
- More on Supervised iPhones (via Marc Wickens)
- More on Clubhouse
- Memory safe iBoot implementation
- MacBook Pro models with HDMI and SD card readers?
#askatp- Is it safe to use a High Sierra machine after security updates cease? (via John Hovland)
- How do we store our parents’ names in our phone’s contacts? (via Colin Meney)
- How do I clean up my Dock? (via Harjas Monga)
- Post-show: Some more kvetching about app-quitting strategies
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Chapters
- Diversion 1
- Diversion 2
- Diversion 3
- Diversion 4
- Sponsor: Fastmail
- Follow-up: SSD wear
- Follow-up: Contacts API
- Follow-up: Astrophotography
- Follow-up: MagSafe strength
- Follow-up: MDM
- Sponsor: Buzzsprout
- John tried Clubhouse
- Apple’s secure C compiler
- MBP rumor: HDMI, SD
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Security of EOL OS
- #askatp: Parents’ contact names
- #askatp: Non-closing Dock apps
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Automatic termination
Diversion 1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have an update about our household Alexa situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is this for everyone or just for the two of us? Are we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John live? Oh, we’re live.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay. It’s for every device that responds to that trigger word that you just said. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently. I decided to finally not say like, hey everybody, we’re live and started with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it’s very, like the first thing I do when, like so after we record the show, first thing I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like usually I upload the bootleg while we are still talking off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the air. If we’re doing like, you know, scheduling discussions or whatever, like, cause I want to get the bootleg up as fast as possible for the, for the members.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So normally I will upload the bootleg like in the browser with the drag and drop thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while we’re still talking. And I think it’s the right file cause you know, like I have a system that has made it the right file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time, but because I haven’t actually listened to it yet, I want to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like before I go to bed that night, cause you know, we record at night. I go to bed right afterwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. I’m in Casey’s sleepy shirt and… Nice. Anyway, normally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to, you know, my final task for the night after I, you know, close up the studio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, leave, turn the lights off, my final task for the night is to empty the dog before bed. And so I bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him outside and while I’m doing that, I open up my Overcast app on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone and I look for the bootleg that was released 10 minutes earlier, whatever it was, and I hit play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just make sure that it’s the right episode. But because all of them begin with, hi everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re live, it’s hard for me to really know whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the right one or not until at least a few seconds in. So I was trying to save myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few seconds of uncertainty and time later tonight by beginning this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one with something else.
Diversion 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know, it’s funny you say that because I don’t know if the two of you have noticed and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I promised myself I wouldn’t call attention to it. But here we are I have been trying for the last several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks to have some sort of like I Don’t want to say icebreaker because that has all the terrible connotations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like awkward corporate gatherings but like some sort of fun question sort of kind in the spirit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Snell talk at the beginning of upgrade but but just some sort of fun question that I come up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with with that I can ask the two of you each week. That’s kind of off the wall and totally random. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first couple of weeks I’ve decided to try this, I was able to sneak it in right up front. It was great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the last two weeks, I’ve been dedicated to doing it at some point, but I’ve been doing it semi-randomly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the middle of the pre-show or as the transition from pre-show to follow-up. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been trying so hard not to call attention to it so it would be more natural and take you guys off guard. But now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have ruined yet another one of my attempts and I think my last time in your defense last time was my fault because I made a clubhouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joke and then everything went off the rails but but you have ruined yet another attempt of mine because I do have a question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you all to have some sort of icebreaker in the beginning and it seems like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a futile attempt to add a new feature to the show. You
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s overthinking his like oh I’ve got to change what I would naturally say you’re overthinking like both the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you’re doing Casey happens naturally you don’t need to plan to do it. We just got to go with the flow. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why seven or eight years in it’s all of a sudden you’re trying to do this thing. Just go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so here actually, since you’ve asked, now we’re really going off in the weeds. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worry a lot. That worry is maybe too strong a word. I think a lot and I’m somewhat worried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that one day we’re going to wake up and we’re going to realize that we haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really changed with the times. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit. No, just hear me out for a second before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco all over. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matzka, Jr. Casey, I have news for you. We already aren’t changing with the times and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey fine. Casey McElhaney, Jr. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, and that’s fair. And that’s fair. And that’s fair. But I think that there are some things that we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do while not destroying the spirit of the show. And Ask ATP is an excellent example of that, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we totally didn’t steal from Upgrade. Not one
⏹️ ▶️ John Matzka, Jr. It’s the new feature of the show that we added five and a half years ago. Well, still.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, I think that there are things that, I just don’t wanna look around in five or 10 years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God willing, and be like, wow, we really haven’t done anything different in a long,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long time. And I don’t think we’re really guilty of that yet. You know, I think a membership almost a year ago now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that was a great development and I really am pleased with how that’s going. And actually, I was thinking earlier today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been a while since we thanked everyone like properly. And thank you everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really means a lot to all three of us. I think membership is a nice change like that, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to be in a situation where all of a sudden I realize the world has moved on and us three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old dudes are sitting here just talking to each other, which for the record I would still be doing even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if no one was listening. But if there’s something that we can be doing differently or some little spice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we can add to the show from time to time, I want to do that. And I’m scared that I’m going to get complacent, and I’ll just speak for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself now, that I’m going to get complacent and just be like, oh, I’m sure everything’s great. And then we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey become ever more relevant with each passing day, which is probably happening anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re getting a headstart in your midlife crisis here or something. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey should relax, Casey, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re wondering if we’re falling behind the times, just watch to see on all of the Mac websites,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever topic we’ve been talking about for the past month suddenly appear, and you will know that we are not behind the times. We are, as
⏹️ ▶️ John always, slightly ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s some attitude to that, and I hope that remains true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think a lot about making sure our show is good. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that, as I know you both do. And I think the key to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of this stuff is to know who you are and to know who your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audience slash customers are. And to do what keeps you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfortably making something that’s good for you and for them without trying to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something you’re not also. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is something like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look around the tech business, you got places like Twitter that is famous for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not knowing who they are, always trying to be somebody else to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco varying degrees of failure. They never succeed, they just like fail in different ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like Twitter’s always trying to be mostly Facebook and oftentimes other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things mixed in. How’s your reels? Oh God, I don’t even know what that is, I’m so glad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t that the Instagram stories?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram TikTok, I think, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something, I don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or is it Twitter, TikTok, Instagram? I don’t know, anyway. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you try to be something you’re not, then that doesn’t usually work. And you know, everyone can tell and it doesn’t go well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think if your customers have a certain thing they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can keep giving it to them in like a good, high quality way that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel stale, it just feels like consistent, there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Like usually when things start feeling stale is when they start getting like super repetitive and they kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like run out of things to talk about, and you’re kind of just like fishing for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topics every week. Like that happens to podcasts after a while, especially those that are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco particularly news-based, but that hasn’t happened to us because we are so news-based.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think we also have a healthy amount of diversion every episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Geez, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you mean? Keeps people interested. And so- Maybe too much diversion. Possibly, yeah. And we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually had ebbs and flows of the amount of diversion that we allow into the show versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of topic or structure, the amount of follow-up we allow in, the amount of questions, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fluctuates over time. But I think as long as we keep putting out a show that our listeners like, that we don’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to necessarily care about what everyone else is doing as long as what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are doing is working for our customers, which so far it seems to be. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s lots, I mean, the good thing, the tech business is so big, there’s so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that we can go through entire episodes not covering some massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story that everyone else that we listen to has covered on their shows. And it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one complains to us like, why didn’t you talk about this big like, you know, court drama or Android
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone? It’s like, well, that’s just not, you know, we ran out of time. We talk about other stuff more, you know? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, I’m fine with that. To keep making our show for our listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who seem to be fine with it. And whatever everyone else does, that’s up to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as long as we know who we are, and we know what we do, and we keep doing that for our customers who keep wanting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I think we’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t worry, Casey. Be happy.
Diversion 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, we got way derailed from you apparently have some Amazon tubes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are in or out of your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the tubes that we haven’t even got for some time, we’re now in the balls phase. That’s all they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. They just make a series of balls. But the recent Amazon Echo Balls, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talked about them when they first came out a few months back. It seemed like a really good buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they were something like 70 bucks or 100 bucks, something like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were, you know, kind of between the HomePod Mini and the big HomePod, and they sound pretty decent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially for their price. And the Alexa ecosystem has historically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been just much more reliable for us. It’s been faster to respond to voice queries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It had way more features, you know, like things like it had named multiple timers many years ago now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I regret to inform you all that tonight we unplugged the last Echo in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our house, and We’ve gone all HomePod slash HomePod Mini because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a combination of two factors. The HomePod Siri has gotten better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough and more reliable enough that the gap has narrowed. The Alexa ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still significantly faster and more consistent to respond, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod got close in many ways. And it got close enough now that we’re willing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tolerate the difference most of the time in that regard. But where the Echos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a problem is that the new Echo Ball series, the hardware is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very buggy, and we’ve had—we own two of them—we’ve had multiple issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with both of them, and right now, I don’t think I can recommend anybody buy this generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Echos. They’re terrible. Like, we have issues where the tweeter will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fail. There’s two drivers in there, I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure there’s a tweeter and a woofer, and the tweeter, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, like, the whole high range of sound frequencies will frequently fail until a power cycle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the way this manifests is the sound sounds really muffled as though all the music and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff is playing through a pillow because the high frequency sound is just dying, it’s just not being there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that will persist until a reboot. And I thought it was a hardware issue. We did a return and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco repurchase of one of them, and both the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco returned one, the one that replaced and the second one we have in the house all have this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think it’s just a problem with this whole generation. And we also have software issues like with them. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Echo service has been really buggy on these. And I don’t know if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like just a thing recently with Echo service with all Echo’s because these are the only ones we’ve used recently, but we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all in on HomePods now and so far it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, are you still running like 44 different voice assistants in the house?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when you’re talking about this, I was just thinking about the fact that I have Google home mini still
⏹️ ▶️ John unopened sealed in the box because the last like free one that we got as part of whatever Google stuff We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John paying for it. Just no one in the house wanted so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we have yeah, I’ve got I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them I talked to most of them at least once a week probably
⏹️ ▶️ John Talked to my big Siri ball, you know, the full-size Siri the most because it controls my lights
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I got a lot of these things in the house. I don’t know what I’m gonna do with that
⏹️ ▶️ John that completely sealed Google Home Mini. It’s pretty good as far as like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s better than the Amazon Dot, I feel like, because we’ve got one of those too. Like it’s better in terms of the speaker is slightly better,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nicer looking, and the Google Assistant is actually pretty smart and good at answering questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just that we don’t have that many rooms in the house and in general I don’t bring these things
⏹️ ▶️ John up into the second floor where the bedrooms are, so it’s all just first floor stuff. So, I don’t know. I’ll just give
⏹️ ▶️ John it away to a listener or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I feel like the, you know, there’s no way I would run the Google one in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just because, you know, privacy, trust and everything. Google, I mean, granted, Google and Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are both creepy companies, but I feel like Google is creepier in certain ways. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon one, like I was willing to run it all this time because it was so much better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the alternatives. Like first, it was the only one for a while that was really, you know, defining its category. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the alternatives came out, it was just so much better, you know? And it remained so much better for quite some time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so when something is that much better, it becomes worthwhile to a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to overlook or tolerate the downsides of having that company stuff in your house for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the upside it’s providing. But when that gap became smaller, when the HomePods have slowly gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better and when the Echo got way worse, that was no longer worth overcoming. So now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, while the Echo still better at certain things, I’d rather not run them in my house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re not going to be massively better than the HomePods. they’re not anymore.
Diversion 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I need my icebreaker. It’s required now. That’s the way the show works despite what uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do an icebreaker? You have like too many topics and now you think you still need to throw in an icebreaker?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, i’m trying to get it in every
⏹️ ▶️ John too much If you then if you’re gonna do that See marco’s got his thing that he does before follow-up and then you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got your thing you do before follow-up And then sometimes marco has two things they do You’re just building a whole separate show
⏹️ ▶️ John before we begin the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what that’s bonus content. You’re welcome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone. All right. So, I would ask this question of John, and I probably will try because I’m a fool, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, since you can deal with hypotheticals that are not completely and perfectly fleshed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out in every measurable way, you are given the keys to either a boat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that can be a speedboat, a sailboat, it doesn’t matter, a yacht, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an airplane. And let’s assume something more in the direction of Cessna and probably with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a boat less in in the direction of yacht, more in the direction of like speedboat or sailboat. You’re given the keys to something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a personal-ish sized, you know, seating maybe four to 10 people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plane or boat. All of the expenses are paid for. You are magically, through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the magic of the matrix, able to pilot whatever it is that you choose. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of vehicle are you choosing? Boat, no question. I’ll tell you why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t particularly love boats, honestly, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two things, number one, you said I have the skill to drive them, however, I still think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d be more comfortable driving a boat because I’d be way less likely to die while doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s number one. Number two, again, while this is not something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually plan to ever indulge myself in in real life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a boat would provide some utility for my actual life in the sense that we frequently have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to travel across a body of water. And having your own boat does make that better in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain ways. Whereas I don’t really have any problems that having a small plane would solve for me. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not frequently traveling, moderate distances across the country. I don’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any like drive to fly, to get in the sky and fly my own plane. Like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like super driven to do that. So they wouldn’t have a lot of utility for me. Whereas the boat would have utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’d be way less likely to die doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t want you to viz me anyway, then fine. Now all kidding aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you had a motorboat, and define that however you want, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily saying a cigarette boat, but let’s say you had some sort of motorized boat that moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with some amount of quickness. I presume there is a place where you are right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that you could dock it, probably for $11 gazillion, and then there is a place on the other side of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Sound that you could also So dock it temporarily when you’re trying to go to the mainland, is that fair?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound. The bay, and yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew I probably had that wrong and I was like, no, I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is—sorry. It’s the Great South Sound. Anyway, it’s in Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the issue with boats here is exactly that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, you don’t just have to buy the boat, which itself is a whole thing, right? All the jokes about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it being a hole in the water you throw money into. is that, but then also you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to pay for parking, boat parking on both sides. They don’t call it that. They call it like, I think slips,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s, you’re basically buying boat parking spots and yeah, you have to buy them on both sides of the body of water.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t have them year round. You have to take the boat out of the water for the winter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it freezes sometimes as it recently did. So you have to have boat parking on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both sides, which is, as you mentioned, limited and expensive and the boat, which is very expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and highly maintenance intensive, and you have to then have a place to—a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place and a method to lift the boat out of the water for the winter and put it somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, wrap it and, you know, do whatever care is required to do that. And so it’s just—it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a massive pain in the butt that I feel like it’s only worth it if you really love boating as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing. And I don’t care about boating as a thing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would appreciate the utility in transportation that it would provide me, but for the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having a boat, I could hire my own private water taxi from the ferry company every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single time I crossed the bay and still come out way ahead. Oh, that’s interesting. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though. Yeah, so like, I don’t think it’s ever gonna be worth it. The only reason I indulge this is that you said all expenses were paid for magically. Sure, sure, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, I know you’re gonna tear this all apart, but let’s go ahead, make me earn it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What would you choose?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not gonna add any more constraints to this thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not yet. I will fill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blanks if you need me to, but let’s just go with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it as presented.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t just change it after I have my answer, because you’re not gonna like my answer, but given what you’ve said, my answer,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s just fine, I would pick the one that has the highest resale value and I would sell it because I
⏹️ ▶️ John a boat and I do not wanna be on a plane. I don’t like being on either one of those things. I wouldn’t wanna own them. I get
⏹️ ▶️ John seasick, I get airsick. I don’t want to die in a plane crash. Just none of them appeal to me whatsoever. It was all
⏹️ ▶️ John about resale value.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not want green eggs and ham. I do not like you, Sam. I am. All right, that’s fair. That’s fair. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, in this magical world where I could just snap my fingers and know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to fly a plane and have a Cessna or something like that, it is appealing. But I come back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you had said, Marco, as much as I was giving you grief about it. There’s not a lot of places that I could just casually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fly my Cessna to, right? if I’m going to go somewhere, in all likelihood, I would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving. And if I don’t drive, then I would need to acquire a rental or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the piece of garbage. I forget the term for it, but my understanding is general aviation has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the house car, so to speak, where it’s some beat up caprice from 50 years ago that you can borrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make a quick errand or run a quick errand or whatever. And so as much as I think knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to fly a plane would be fun, and flying it would be incredible fun, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole falling from the sky thing notwithstanding, I think I would definitely want a boat. And when I was growing up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my family had a Yamaha jet boat, and it was phenomenally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun. We used to go on Candlewood Lake in Western Connecticut. And I think we even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had it in the lake that Marco and I met each other at a couple of times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember my grandfather was furious about it because he hated anything other than a rowboat in that lake, but here we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. And then we also brought it to Lake Wampapack in Pennsylvania, which you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might know from The Office, because it was very near Scranton, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my grandparents lived there, and they had a pontoon boat. And that was impossibly fun, because you could either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive all of these boats right up on the sand, on an island or on the shore, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a jet boat has an extremely small draft. A pontoon boat has an extremely small draft. You didn’t need a lot of depth to run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Or the pontoon boat made a great floating anchor, so to speak, where you could just tie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to the pontoon boat. And, and it was extremely fun. And I miss that dearly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gosh, I miss that so much. And in this fantasy world where I could, you know, snap my fingers and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have whatever boat I wanted, I would totally get like some obnoxious, ridiculous cigarette boat with like two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey humongous, like supercharged V8s in it and be that jerk that’s like blowing up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blowing up and down, you know, the Lake at a hundred miles an hour, which is probably illegal. Um, it would, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just be impossibly fun. And I remember when I was really young, my dad, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a mechanic professionally for a brief window of time before he started working for IBM, he, I guess he was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing this as like a side gig. He took a very wealthy friend of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a friend’s cigarette boat and was like doing something to the motor because there was a Chevy motor in it. I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what exactly it was, but I remember when dad was done, the guy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who at the time I think was running a Chiquita banana distributor at Newberg. He took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us on the boat on the Hudson, which is kind of hazardous in many ways. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember doing like 50 or 60 on the water, maybe even more than that, going under the Newburgh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Beacon Bridge and thinking, well, I usually am in the car with mom and dad up there. And now I’m on a boat, blasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under it, probably even faster than the cars are going. It was a lot of fun. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I would do.
Sponsor: Fastmail
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Follow-up: SSD wear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s start with some follow-up, because we haven’t been talking for half an hour already. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some smart tools doubts from Jeff E. And John, can you tell me about this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the topic I was alluding to in the part before, which I may or may not make into the show, where a bunch of Mac websites
⏹️ ▶️ John have picked up on the story we’ve been talking about for a few weeks about potential SSD wear
⏹️ ▶️ John on M1 Macs. as we discussed on the past
⏹️ ▶️ John several shows, this is all derived from people’s doubts
⏹️ ▶️ John about the output of this smartmontools command line tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, as we said earlier, we don’t know if that tool is correct
⏹️ ▶️ John or accurate or able to give valid statistics. We also don’t know how much to compare
⏹️ ▶️ John it to because unless you’ve been using this tool for years, maybe what you’re seeing is normal, maybe it’s not, Everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John comparing their numbers, they’re not sure. So Jeff’s doubt is based on the tools. He says,
⏹️ ▶️ John drive makers often use raw values and may obfuscate numbers in the smart fields. Attributes are not really required
⏹️ ▶️ John to follow any format. Makers can use their own attributes and they may not share how to translate them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your mileage may vary by vendor. So the tool to read these attributes from the drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, obviously the tool is not endorsed by Apple or blessed by the drive. And also there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even a good standard for tools to comply to, to make sure that they’re interpreting the values correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So who knows what’s going on. And in case you were wondering, all the different stories and Mac websites about this
⏹️ ▶️ John have added as far as I’ve been able to tell, zero new information. So if there was more information,
⏹️ ▶️ John we would give it to you here. But there isn’t. It’s just a bunch of people running that tool, looking at the numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and feeling afraid in varying amounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems like there’s definitely some smoke here. You know, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John things- Is there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though? Well, it’s funny you say that. So one of the things that I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrestling with of late, with regard to the show, is when we should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indulge the latest, because I feel like there’s always a, that’s happening in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey community. And I don’t think that’s unique to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And I think that’s what this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the pearl clutching, oh no. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of us, I’m certainly guilty of this, like I am no angel, but we all have something that we’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked up about, Like, I don’t know, maybe SMS messages, for example. We all have this thing that we’re,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfectly executed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we all have this thing that we’re worked up about. And a lot of times, if you just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give it a week or two, the thing will get resolved or it’ll blow over, more information will come out or so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a bunch of topics in the show notes document that nobody can see but us, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing was like super dramatic and then it got resolved and we never had the time to talk about it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we, I, the three of us keep arguing as to whether or not we should give it any airtime at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, and I feel like this is one of those things that we’re right on the cusp of between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, this is something to legitimately be worked up about or no, this is just this week’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not sure which one it is, but we’ll see over time. I’m quite sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John My criteria for deciding which way to go on those things is, is there something technically interesting to discuss?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because even for stories, like, and that’s why I’m the big defender of the one story you’re referring to on the topics, because even if the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is over, even if the controversy is over, very often, there is some related technical
⏹️ ▶️ John detail that is not over and is very relevant and is a thing that listeners to the podcast, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, would be well-served to know about. And the reason I brought up this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD-ware thing is entirely because I was hoping and expecting that we would get to some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of technical explanation. Yes, in the beginning, it’s all dramatic and like, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John something weird is going on and the M1s are new or whatever. at this point, if you look at these stories, it’s like, people have it
⏹️ ▶️ John on Intel Macs, people have it on old Macs, on new Macs, on Macs with lots of RAM, on Macs with not a lot of RAM, look at my numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at your numbers, it’s all over the map, like it’s not, it’s getting less clear instead of more clear.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this may be one of those things that we’ll have to revisit, like when it starts to manifest
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that is consistent enough for someone to take action. So
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, if Apple does like a repair program, where like, oh, if you got one of these early M1 Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a problem that was causing the SSDs to wear out and we’ll replace them for free, right? And then we’ll know
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s absolutely definitely a thing, right? But for now it’s still just a bunch of people running a command line
⏹️ ▶️ John tool that may or may not be accurate and looking at numbers that they have no comparison for except for other people who ran the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing 10 minutes ago. Um, I, I, I hope there’s some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John reason for the variance, but the reason may very well be just like Jeff said, oh, well, actually it’s different
⏹️ ▶️ John vendors drives and they return bogus numbers or the tool doesn’t know how to interpret them so that’s why it looks like somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John is writing 100 terabytes an hour and the other person is writing 100 terabytes every 10 years.
Follow-up: Contacts API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We spoke last week about Clubhouse, and we’re probably going to talk about that more in a little bit, and how we were all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grossed out to varying degrees about the Contacts API in iOS and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you’re allowed to basically slurp up an entire address book full of data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rick Santos wrote us to point out that there is an API to auto-fill email addresses without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking for contacts permission. This was mentioned in WWDC 2020 sessions. They’re called, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll put links in the show notes, Build trust through better privacy and autofill everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t have the chance to go through these and look through them, and I’m guessing that neither of you did either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, it sounds like there is at least some amount of motion in this direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where was it? Was it on dithering that I think that there was some call, like we had said, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having a photos-esque front-end from a user perspective to the contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey API. You can bless a small series of contacts, or yeah, you can just slurp everything up, have at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe I was half remembering this WWDC session when I was proposing an
⏹️ ▶️ John API like this, because I did watch a lot of these and I probably had it in the back of my mind. So I’m glad that’s a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing that people have talked about that I think doesn’t quite exist yet, but that I was also alluding to in past episodes, is
⏹️ ▶️ John even for situations where you want to answer the question, hey, has anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else in my contacts signed up for this service? so I can know to like friend them or whatever. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can even answer that question without giving out your contacts. If you just do one-way hashes of everything and have a standardized
⏹️ ▶️ John system for sharing those one-way hashes, you can find out, you know, sort of in a secure
⏹️ ▶️ John way where all you pass over is a bunch of one-way hashes that cannot be turned into contact information
⏹️ ▶️ John and then people can match them up. Now, obviously this is up to the existence of these APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John and also the willingness of the service to be nice about it, right? because
⏹️ ▶️ John currently if you give contact access, they have access to your actual contacts. So they could be nice and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh no, we only make hashes of them and compare them, we don’t store them, but that’s not what they’re doing. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John baby steps here. But the point that we tried to make last week is lots of things like this are technically
⏹️ ▶️ John possible where you can get almost all the features you have now without giving your contacts to anybody,
Follow-up: Astrophotography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also spoke last week about the rumor that the iPhone will get an astrophotography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode, and we were fairly clueless about it. And a handful of people have written in to point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us in the direction of Google, who has already been doing this, which we should have known. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an excerpt from Android Authority that I’d like to read. The Pixel 4 combines 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 15-second exposures into a single 4-minute mega exposure, for lack of a better term, while the Pixel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3a and the Pixel 3 combine four of these frames into a one-minute exposure. To actually capture astrophotography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shots, you’ll need a tripod or some other makeshift way of holding your phone completely still, and then you’ll have to enter night shift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode for the phone to automatically enter astrophotography mode. If you click through to this link,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it actually does have some darned impressive images. And I know that Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone still images are, generally speaking, accepted to be really, really, really good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these are no exception. They’re very impressive and worth checking out. And obviously, the link will be in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, whether or not Apple actually does this the fact that there was a rumor about it and the fact that Google already does The
⏹️ ▶️ John thing likes it puts strong weight towards Apple doing whatever Whatever they need to do to be competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John with what Google’s doing or they could just not do it at all I remember is totally wrong But knowing that this feature exists
⏹️ ▶️ John on Android really pushes heavily in the direction of Apple saying we’re gonna do that, too Or
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna do that same thing, but we have a better way that like doesn’t require a tripod or something You know, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, absolutely Absolutely.
Follow-up: MagSafe strength
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then we spoke, I don’t remember if it was last week or the week before, but recently we’ve spoken about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magnets and MagSafe. And Ante Soderholm writes, regarding magnets and MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accessories can use magnets of their own to make the attachment stronger. I’ve got a car mount for my phone that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses MagSafe. It has its own magnets to make the attachment stronger so that the phone doesn’t come loose when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hit a bump while driving. I’m actually a little confused about this. Isn’t MagSafe, doesn’t that require magnets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on both the receptacle and the phone itself? like there’s going to be quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magnets of their own regardless. Right. I think I’m just confused.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is just the idea that, uh, like, so there’s probably some standard for mag safe, or you’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to make these many magnets in these positions of these strengths,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that you can’t, there’s nothing saying that you can’t put much, much stronger magnets
⏹️ ▶️ John on the accessory side to try to help out, you know what I mean? So this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the theory. We got a lot of feedback from people saying, I have a bunch of mags. They have accessories to my car and they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John plain old magsafe. No super strong magnets, just like the same ones you’d get from a puck.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my phone doesn’t fall off when I go over a bump. So apparently it’s good enough to work for a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people. The other factor that we talked about, I forget what Marco called it. What did you call the the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandwich closing force?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the to to be a little bit more precise about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The magnets are pushing the two services.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sandwich closing. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the magnets are pushing the two surfaces together, but the thing you care about in a car mount is the
⏹️ ▶️ John friction between the two surfaces. And Apple’s puck has terrible friction because it’s hard metal. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a ring of hard, you see what it looks like. It’s like a little silver ring of metal and then a slightly indented reason that that metal
⏹️ ▶️ John region is the surface that is pressing against your phone. If you have
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing on your phone, then it’s a ring of smooth metal against smooth
⏹️ ▶️ John or matte finish glass. There’s not a lot of friction between those surfaces. If you have leather case then
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a ring of smooth metal against leather. What you really want is tacky
⏹️ ▶️ John rubber against tacky rubber. And given the same magnetic force, if you have tacky rubber against tacky
⏹️ ▶️ John rubber with that same sandwich closing force, as Marco calls it, that’s actually pretty strong.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, it really depends on the size of the potholes in your area. I can’t imagine any magsafe thing surviving some of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve hit that have bent my actual wheels.
Follow-up: MDM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we had a little bit more on supervised iPhones from Mark Wickens. If you recall, this is an iPhone that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is owned by your employer and thus they can do a lot with it. And we were talking about how,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, there’s not actually that much they can do with it from Apple’s perspective in terms of snooping what you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like your web browsing and whatnot. And Mark wrote in a good point that I had considered,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t think I mentioned on the show and certainly glossed over if I did. And Mark writes, regarding managed devices and privacy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something I don’t think you mentioned is that it’s possible for an employer to enforce and always on VPN via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a configuration profile. You should know about it if your employer’s done this, but just in case anyone thought, based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your recent follow-up, that everything was guaranteed to be private, if the device is sending all internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey traffic via your employer’s VPN, then they can monitor a lot more. You’ll see earlier episodes when we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mentioned a Facebook VPN app that got banned. There’s a page that has instructions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to find out if this is the case, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. And that’s a really excellent point. So basically, your employer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could hypothetically force all of your internet traffic to funnel through them. And if they’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effectively your ISP, then yeah, they can look at whatever they want and that’s worth considering.
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John tried Clubhouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you have some Clubhouse thoughts. Tell me about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’ve used Clubhouse a lot more since last episode, and you know, at all, I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey More than zero? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was sad to learn that my username was already taken. In fact, it had already been taken when we were discussing it. But it was
⏹️ ▶️ John taken by someone who I think is actually Italian, so I guess that’s fine. But I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John really wish I’d gotten that first. There’s a lot of people with my last name in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, not all of them are in Italy. Anyway. Um, a few points to note before I talk about my
⏹️ ▶️ John experiences on there. Um, the, the sign up for
⏹️ ▶️ John clubhouse is that you sign up with your phone number. Uh, you don’t sign up with your email address, although you can enter
⏹️ ▶️ John an email address and everything, but you sign up with your phone number. And that’s interesting for
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of reasons having to do with social network. But before we get to that, there’s an aspect that Marco will love, which which
⏹️ ▶️ John is they don’t have passwords. They use the Marco login system. So every time you wanna sign
⏹️ ▶️ John in, it’s like the things that Marco makes that drive me up a wall where you go to sign in and it says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna sign in? Enter your identifier here. And then it says, okay, great, we’ll email you a link. And they email you a
⏹️ ▶️ John link and you click the link and you log in, that’s it. That’s the only way, I mean, for now. I mean, maybe they’ll change it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I thought that was interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like having to go, I’m at the login page, I wanna log in. I don’t wanna be at the login page and have to go back
⏹️ ▶️ John to my email client, but that’s what they do. Apparently, if you’re going to invite somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were talking last time, oh, I don’t wanna share my contacts because it forces you to share your contacts. It was like, oh, Casey, just get another phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and empty out all your contacts and turn off iCloud and then do it and then invite
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Apparently, the app only lets you invite somebody who’s in your contacts. So if you were to empty
⏹️ ▶️ John out your contacts and then say, okay, here you go, here’s my contacts, ha ha, there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Now, please let me invite somebody. When you went to invite me, it wouldn’t work. So you’d have to add me specifically to
⏹️ ▶️ John your contacts and then invite me, which is silly. Again, this is a young service, things change a lot. So
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s to say how this will be, but all this is to say is they’re very adamant about getting your contacts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because really, there’s no reason they need your contacts for you to invite people. And then even if you try to work
⏹️ ▶️ John around it, it’s like, you know, forcing you to at least add the people you want to invite to your contacts.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the phone number thing and the contacts thing brings to mind a topic
⏹️ ▶️ John that is near and dear to any new social network’s heart, which is how do you
⏹️ ▶️ John bootstrap any kind of social network? How do you start building the web of people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John friends or followers or whatever terminology you use to make your social graph and your network?
⏹️ ▶️ John How do you get that going? A while back, various social networks used to allow
⏹️ ▶️ John you to essentially hijack their their their social network by
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, please tell me all the relationships between this person and any other person that they
⏹️ ▶️ John have as friends or followers or whatever. And that turned out to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John bad idea as far as those companies were concerned and they started locking it down. So it used to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, that if you went on a social network, you could give your Twitter a handle and then it could crawl
⏹️ ▶️ John your Twitter relationship graphs and just say, oh, we know all these people, looks like that you know, and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John invite them and you can invite them here, you know, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that honestly, I’m pretty sure that is what made Instagram take off. Like Instagram took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off massively because they were sucking in the Twitter graph and then Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut it off like about a few months into that once they realize like, oh, this is probably strategically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a great thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it’s in some ways it’s a little bit of a cat and mouse game because you can get this.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, you know, the information is available to a human with a web page clicking with a mouse. It’s supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John not available through APIs. It depends on how devious you want to be and how much you anticipate being
⏹️ ▶️ John sued or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, it’s a problem. Every social network faces, people don’t want to go in and have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, I’m on this thing and I don’t have any friends or followers or people who I follow. How do
⏹️ ▶️ John I find people to follow? Why can’t you just tell me if any of my friends are on here so I can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ John or better yet, why don’t you just make me automatically follows everybody who I already
⏹️ ▶️ John follow on Twitter or who I already am friends with on Facebook. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that while that’s good for users, it’s bad for Twitter and Facebook. That’s what they can do it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone number thing as the way to build a social network is interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because, well, for a couple of reasons, one, as was discussed on a different recently, most people
⏹️ ▶️ John only have one or maybe two phone numbers. So it’s more of a it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a slightly more a reliable identifier for a person. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John things like email addresses or usernames, you can make an unlimited number of those. Bots can make them really
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly. Any individual human probably already has many email addresses and it’s really easy to
⏹️ ▶️ John make new ones. And so it’s hard to say what the actual social graph
⏹️ ▶️ John is if people can just make up usernames. I have multiple Twitter accounts, they’re all me, but there’s no real
⏹️ ▶️ John way for Twitter to know that unless they’re doing some kind of IP tracking and even then that can be unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you have phone numbers, it’s harder to make bots. And I say this and knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John full well that next episode someone’s gonna send us follow-ups saying, well, you don’t understand how easy it is to grind out new
⏹️ ▶️ John phone numbers for these giant spam farms. So I’m saying it’s harder, not impossible, right? But it’s harder to make bots,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it ties your identity for regular people who don’t easily have
⏹️ ▶️ John access to get new phone numbers constantly or it’s just a big hassle. It ties your identity and reputation
⏹️ ▶️ John more closely to the thing that you are signing in with. And then for your social network,
⏹️ ▶️ John although you might not have like knowing all the Facebook names and
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter handles of everybody, in your contacts, the most likely thing you are to have is either an email
⏹️ ▶️ John address or a phone number. And if it’s on your phone, maybe, you know, and especially if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not, if everyone you know doesn’t use iMessage or whatever, you probably have their phone numbers, which is their identifier
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as you’re concerned for text messaging and other things that you do from your phone. So if you can’t get access
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Twitter graph and you can’t get access to the Facebook graph or the Instagram graph or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John your best bet for building that network is to go with telephone numbers from people’s cell
⏹️ ▶️ John phones that are more reliably, uniquely identify
⏹️ ▶️ John people and that are likely to be in their contacts database. And you can ask that for access for it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes perfect sense why Clubhouse is very enthusiastic, let’s say, about
⏹️ ▶️ John getting your contacts because it wants to build its network And it wants to build its network in a
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable way that’s not, that’s harder to spam or pollute or, you know, fill with garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, part of this identity based, you know, more reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John identity based, uh, system where you can’t easily make a million throwaway counts
⏹️ ▶️ John is that when you get on to clubhouse, I don’t know how long this is going to be there, but when I was invited
⏹️ ▶️ John on and I go to my profile page at the bottom of my profile page that says
⏹️ ▶️ John nominated by, and then the person who invited me. And I don’t know how long that’s gonna stay there. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John that gonna stay there forever? And so it’s like, if you invite someone to Clubhouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John forever you are responsible for any garbage thing they do, because everything is going to their profile and say, this person was
⏹️ ▶️ John nominated by so-and-so. Why did so-and-so invite this guy on? He’s a jerk. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how long it’s gonna last, but I thought it was interesting, especially given how hard it would be to sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, again, make throwaway accounts disassociate yourself from your number. It’s a hassle to change your phone number. It’s real
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to make a new Twitter handle. So I will continue to be nominated by the nice person who gave
⏹️ ▶️ John me an invite. When someone
⏹️ ▶️ John gets, when you’ve shared your contacts and someone in your contacts comes
⏹️ ▶️ John on to Clubhouse, I don’t know if they do this all the time, but many people have been reporting that they get a
⏹️ ▶️ John notification that says, hey, welcome your friend Joe Schmo to Clubhouse, like
⏹️ ▶️ John an iOS notification on your phone, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of creepy because it’s like they’re rubbing it in your face that they have all your contacts. Wait, how did you know that I know? Oh, I gave
⏹️ ▶️ John you all my contacts. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thought you weren’t going to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco look at those. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the thing when you people give access to their contacts like, okay, well, this is probably just for something to make it easier to do
⏹️ ▶️ John in the program or whatever. But it’s like, no, they actually look at those and use them. And so every time
⏹️ ▶️ John they say, we noticed something that happened and then you’re like, oh, it’s it’s depressing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the second aspect of this that’s creepy and disconcerting and it already caught me is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you tap that notification that says, hey, your friend, Joe Schmo, uh, join
⏹️ ▶️ John a clubhouse. Why don’t you welcome them? If you tap that notification, it launches you directly
⏹️ ▶️ John into a live real time, two way audio conversation with that
⏹️ ▶️ John With no intervening like it makes a room in clubhouse like it just throws you right in there like not even
⏹️ ▶️ John like a like because there’s nothing in the welcome message that makes you think that’s going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re like well i can tap this and they’re probably like show me their profile page or at the very least prompt
⏹️ ▶️ John me hey do you want to talk to so and so nope i’m making a room here you are they’re invited in and you could be in
⏹️ ▶️ John a real suddenly in a real-time audio conversation you had no expectation would happen so oh
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco my god that seems like it backfires so many ways
⏹️ ▶️ John a part of of the app the Clubhouse folks might want to reconsider because that
⏹️ ▶️ John is going from zero to 60 awful fast. I get a creepy notification, I tap it, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John they can hear what I’m saying and I can hear what they’re saying? No, that’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I mean, because, I mean, geez, if you think about every possible scenario that you could be in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who could they be? Like, you know, people you have in your contacts. I don’t know a lot of people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequently go through and delete people out of their Like most people have contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their phone and they just the number just always increases They never go through and filter them because it’s usually not much reason to go like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete contacts Like I just I went through mine when I had that sync issue a few months back with big sir
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went through that and that was the first time I deleted contacts in probably 12 years Like I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through deleting people who like I literally haven’t talked to since 2006 Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had their constant info from back then but there was no reason to ever go through so imagine you know like ex-boyfriends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be in there, ex-bosses, like oh god, that could go very badly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, those are two things brought up by a lot of our listeners, like all these social networks,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just trying to make edges, you know, make lines between nodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they don’t have the knowledge based on, oh, we got all your contacts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this your abusive ex-boyfriend or girlfriend? Is this
⏹️ ▶️ John the boss that you hate? Is this your ex-wife who you’re currently not speaking to?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this just someone who you just don’t want to be talking to? It doesn’t know that. It just knows, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s some contact information. It’s not like people annotate them with the desirability of suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John being in a real time conversation with them. So this seems like not
⏹️ ▶️ John the correct default for anyone. I mean, in many ways, it’s similar to the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John that Facebook and everything had forever, where they’ll try to bring up memories
⏹️ ▶️ John from your past, but they have no idea if they’re good memories or bad memories. Even if it’s something like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, it’s a picture of your dog and your dog just died. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to be helpful, but they don’t know what they don’t know. And it’s a dangerous
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to do at scale. So I would suggest that Clubhouse reconsider this. I have heard a lot of reports from people who are on Clubhouse
⏹️ ▶️ John way earlier, because Clubhouse has been around for a while. I haven’t seen Twitter discussions of it forever. And I could not for the life
⏹️ ▶️ John of me figure out what it was. like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for whatever, however
⏹️ ▶️ John many months people have been talking about it. Maybe they’re talking about two different things because I think there might be two things called Clubhouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. I’ve heard that the app has changed a lot in the
⏹️ ▶️ John short time that it has existed. So, and you know, it’s still in closed beta invite only. So these are
⏹️ ▶️ John some suggestions that Clubhouse might want to change. Now, as for experiences, I intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to, once I got on the thing and finished mourning about not getting my username,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I wanted to be- You’re still over that.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m just really upsetting. I’ve written now
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as many people said
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of fishy facetiously, but not really facetiously now I’m rooting for the service to fail because if I can’t get my username
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just needs to be burned down. That’s it
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, I mean they’ll just get bought by you know, Facebook or whatever the heck happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social media So I bet they’re bought within six months
⏹️ ▶️ John or they just get uh, they get Instagram storied.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I should be fair I think both will happen. I think they’re gonna be bought by somebody within six months and also they’re gonna get Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to get into a bunch of rooms to try to use this thing. That was tricky for me because
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t given it my contacts, so I don’t have much of a social
⏹️ ▶️ John the network. I mean, I’m doing it the old-fashioned way, which is follow one person that you know is there,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the person who invited me, and then look at who they follow, and then follow all the people you know who they follow, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John just keep iterating, and then look at those people, and then look who they follow, and then look who they follow. So I’m bootstrapping my social
⏹️ ▶️ John network by digging down the tree of people I know and just scrolling through all of their contacts until I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John recognize anybody. You know what I mean? That is so much better than how I did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I decided like normally my problem usually with new services is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually wait. Usually anything comes out that everyone’s talking about. I’m too skeptical of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and or I’m too slow to it. So I’ll be like, it’s not going to that’s Twitter is going to be a passing fat. I don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up on Twitter and then but usually you know that that resulted in me missing some huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco activity there and then I get there late and I regret having missed the earlier stuff. And so this time I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me do it right even though I know it’s again as you said it’s been around for a while but let me do it right I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go into this all optimistic and so I went in and I actually did the thing where you fill out your interests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front which are hilarious by the way like one of the interest you could pick was podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period just podcasts like okay that’s a bit broad
⏹️ ▶️ John TV and movies but I I was baffled by those lists too, because they were so short. There was like a
⏹️ ▶️ John list of seven things. And it’s like, is that the world of entertainment? Those seven things?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and so I went through that. I actually look, honestly, like, well, yes, I do like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts, so I picked that. I picked probably five or six other things on the list of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poorly chosen blobs. And then I went to, and then it shows this list of people you might like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to follow. And it was all just like investor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dicks. Like it was just like, it was nobody I want to follow. It was just like a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like trendy, like futurists and all those people who I just, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no tolerance for. And I accepted every single recommendation. I followed all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. So I’m like, I wanna know what people are at, like how this service is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being, you know, experienced by the people who are saying how great it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to see why it’s so great. And so I followed every single person they recommended. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these people who I would never in a million years choose to follow on any other service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I thought, hey, I want to get a good picture of this thing. And so, yeah, the list of channels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I was exposed to during my time trying it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh man, I did not find anything good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why you would do that. I mean, I get your idea of like, I want to see what other people are seeing, but you know you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to see what I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny because I think I did something in between you guys. I definitely and honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey filled out that interest, like a questionnaire isn’t the right word for it, but you know, like, what do you like?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, do you like this? Do you like that? And I filled that out honestly. And then I saw or I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried to look up a handful of people that I thought were already there that I know or enjoy their work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I started following them. But I feel like the suggestions that I get 99% of the time or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the suggestions from people that I’m not following. So it’s one thing if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I think it’s this coming Friday, Matt Bischoff is doing some sort of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Clubhouse that sounded reasonably interesting, but for like just random things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I’m getting, Oh God, I keep tapping into these rooms like an idiot. I’m getting housing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around, which is a bunch of people I don’t recognize. Welcome to Clubhouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In Convo with Mike Judge, I don’t know if that’s the Mike Judge or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I like Mike Judge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’d be kind of cool if that’s the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to listen to that some other time when I can. Exactly. A feature of most modern media.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey State of Crypto Policy and Houston Lives benefit concert. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the things that are offered to me on the main screen. And I’m not particularly interested in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of that. And every time I open up Clubhouse, which I keep doing to just see, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, what is there that people are talking about right now that may or may not be interesting to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s just never interesting to me, which isn’t by necessity a failing of Clubhouse. Like that could be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey failing on my part because I just don’t like the sorts of things that Clubhouse seems to like. It could be a failing on my part because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t follow the right people and so it’s not bubbling up the right stuff. But I don’t know. It’s, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a lot of talk about this on Upgrade this week and I really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought it was an excellent, excellent discussion and a lot of it was around, and this is what I was kind of referring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to earlier in our show, you know, are we getting passed by, says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike and Jason, you know, because we’re not particularly interested in this, you know, I don’t, and I think Jason in particular said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to approach any new thing and be like, oh that sucks, you know, I want to at least invest, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were saying this also, both of you were.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve done that in the past, I regretted doing that in the past, and I’m trying to get better at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing that, you know, to new things now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same, same, completely agree. And, and I don’t know, I just, the, the impression I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had before having gotten an invite was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it seemed very like Silicon Valley bro-y, which I have like a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a deep repulsion to, like, I just find all of that just repulsive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in so many ways. And I do think, I do think Clubhouse is more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, but it is also, it also seems pretty clear to me that that’s where the like bread and butter is still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now like you know growth hacking and and Influencing and doing all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that stuff that like it’s just I don’t know. I find it icky and That’s that’s not to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it will always be that way. I think obviously it started that way because That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the people who made it, you know or vc people and they showed it to their vc friends and they’re all having VC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fantasy lives in their VC, you know, fake world. But nevertheless, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, it’s, I haven’t seen anything yet that makes me say, Oh, that’s totally sweet. And I can envision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways that it might be totally sweet. And like, if the two of you wanted to sometime and get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and do a show or whatever it’s called, whatever the vernacular is, and do something for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes, just for funsies, I’d totally try it. But I don’t know, nothing about it has really grabbed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me in the way that it like only took a few minutes or maybe I don’t know a day for Twitter to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really land once I gave it an honest shake because I had the same impressions you did Marco like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who cares like no I don’t want this in my life no and then once you give Twitter an honest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shake was at least back in 2008 before it was truly toxic it was pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious pretty quick that it was good stuff and Instagram holy crap Instagram it was like four seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before you realized oh, this is delightful. And I haven’t yet gotten that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Clubhouse. And maybe this is just reason 7,455,002 that I’m an old man. But I don’t know. It just hasn’t stuck with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite yet. Well, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like these communities are influenced by the founding members. And whether or not it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re a VC-backed company that it seems VC-bro-y, or whether that’s just the first people who are there,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think things like Twitter benefited from the fact that the founding settlers, the first people
⏹️ ▶️ John who who had Twitter accounts were in our circle of friends. So of course it’s gonna feel welcoming and normal to us.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as I was trying to say last time about introverts versus extroverts, it could be that there is a community
⏹️ ▶️ John of people that is ill served by the current services. And those are exactly the people who are sort of the founding members of
⏹️ ▶️ John this one. So when they show up here, it’s all their people doing things that they wanna do. And so it
⏹️ ▶️ John may be awesome for them. Like the reason we’re looking at it at all is because it has some amount of buzz.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, that said, it’s a young service and young application, and there’s lots of complexities. the whole thing of
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you, again, bootstrapping your social network, that thing where it asks you your interests
⏹️ ▶️ John is an attempt to do that because, okay, if you wouldn’t give us your contacts, we can’t help you there, but even if you did give
⏹️ ▶️ John them, we can’t really make heads or tails of most of it because, again, we don’t know which person
⏹️ ▶️ John in this contacts is the type of person you’d like to talk to on Clubhouse and which is the type of person you’d never want to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to again and they just happen to still be in your contacts. So the interest thing, which, you know, music services, of course, do
⏹️ ▶️ John this for recommendation engines and, you know, anything. pick from this big giant cloud of stuff and tell us what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into. And then we’ll try to give you some kind of intelligent suggestion. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John that is undercut if what you pick as your interests, no one is talking about that in Clubhouse because it’s still invite
⏹️ ▶️ John only, it’s a small group of people and those people are of a particular type or a particular circle of friends
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Because remember people get onto Clubhouse by being invited by other people. So it’s kind of, you know, it’s growing
⏹️ ▶️ John from whatever that original core was. If there’s no one discussing your thing, you can pick it as an interest, but you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John see it. But as I was mentioning before about the interest thing when I was filling them out, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was shocked at how bad the interest interface was just because there are things I’m interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in that I couldn’t select and they weren’t super weird. So Marco picked podcasts, I picked
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and gaming or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John This one should really drive it home for everybody. They have a category for sports. Here
⏹️ ▶️ John are the sports that you can select. As far as Clubhouse is concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the entire world of sports. The whole world of sports. Yep. Football,
⏹️ ▶️ John soccer, MMA, cycling, baseball, cricket, tennis, Formula
⏹️ ▶️ John One, basketball, golf. That’s it. There are no other sports. Nothing else
⏹️ ▶️ John exists in the world of sports except for those 10 things. I’m pretty sure I came up with a better list than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure. Like, that’s not even like, even if you wanted to be charitable and say it was a very US-centric
⏹️ ▶️ John list, it’s not. They’re trying to cover the literal world of sports. the entire globe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and they came up with 10 things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sports is a little bit, and I’m pretty sure sports is not an obscure topic that they wouldn’t have lots of detail
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Now maybe these categories are fed by people creating rooms, maybe I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand how they’re coming in here, but if you can’t get a good social graph and recommendations for your contacts,
⏹️ ▶️ John because say you didn’t share them or they’re just not anything go for, and people try to diligently fill out
⏹️ ▶️ John their interests, like Casey was doing, I’m gonna say what I’m interested in, and then they go back to your main screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re trying to say, show me something. I wanna do this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I filled out my interests, I gave you my contacts, I don’t know what to do next.
⏹️ ▶️ John Clubhouse needs to find a way to throw up something that you can tap on and get into
⏹️ ▶️ John and understand it. Now, the one thing they have that does work a little bit better than these two
⏹️ ▶️ John things is what worked for me is if you enable notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I never do for any app, but pretty quickly I learned with Clubhouse, I’m never going to, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be like Casey, where you launch the app, you look at it and go, nah, you turn it off.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that for like a couple of days in a row, I’m like, I’m not using Clubhouse, I’m just launching the app and then saying, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing interested me and leaving. So I’ve got to do something else. And what I did was I enabled notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is very rare for me, I think notifications is almost nothing on my phone. And the reason I enabled them is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I understood that if you follow people, I did do the thing that I was describing where I would
⏹️ ▶️ John follow someone and then go through the list of everybody they follow and follow those people and so on and so forth. So I built a little graph for myself of
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of people who I follow. If one of the people you follow starts a room
⏹️ ▶️ John subject to whatever algorithm they’re using, they may or may not send you a notification that says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John your friend Joe Schmo just made a room on Clubhouse. Do you want to join? And again, if you tap
⏹️ ▶️ John that notification, you are in that room instantly. Although you
⏹️ ▶️ John probably won’t have the ability to speak. Anyway, so that’s what I did.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was lucky enough of the small handful of people that I was following, one of them was actually
⏹️ ▶️ John experimenting with Clubhouse by creating rooms and doing stuff, and that was
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Hudson of, what’s his website, Hacking with Swift, I think. He
⏹️ ▶️ John was just trying the thing out, and the way he was trying it out is, as a bit more of an extrovert than I am,
⏹️ ▶️ John he was making rooms and inviting people in and saying, okay, we’re gonna have a room.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the first rooms I was in, he was like, let’s do iOS interview questions, where
⏹️ ▶️ John he was going to pull people from the audience and give them a question that they might receive
⏹️ ▶️ John if they were interviewing for a job as an iOS developer. And the person from the audience would try to
⏹️ ▶️ John answer it, and then they would talk about it. That was it, that was the whole room. And he did
⏹️ ▶️ John that for like hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And I just listened to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I listened to it ambiently, like you would listen to a podcast. It’s the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, it’s kind of like a call-in show, but here’s me
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing my own interests to Clubhouse. It’s basically like a tech podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like talk radio and people calling in to tell you that what their
⏹️ ▶️ John coach or their favorite sports team should have been doing, or political talk radio or stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would work in this format as well, but I’m not interested in any of those things. same deal with growth hacking and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know how to get press for your startup or bitcoin or all sorts of other things that I’m not interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in and they have rooms that where people are talking about but what I’m interested in is tech nerdy stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John people who run websites to tell you how to program in Swift right and so when he made a room and started doing
⏹️ ▶️ John these interview questions uh it was like a nerdy version of talk radio where instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people uh coming on the line and and yelling about their favorite sports team,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would politely answer questions about iOS. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John got two things from it. One, I actually learned a lot about iOS and Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because how can you not? Like it was just question after question after question, most of which I didn’t know the answer to until
⏹️ ▶️ John they were answered and then they discussed the answers, so that was fun. And two, it has the same entertainment value
⏹️ ▶️ John as a call-in show where there’s a host who’s doing a good job and Paul
⏹️ ▶️ John does a really good job of being a host. He’s cheating by being British, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds very proper and correct and official
⏹️ ▶️ John and important to our American ears. And he’s also super smart and knows everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you’re the participants who were unfailingly polite
⏹️ ▶️ John and conscientious and humble and smart and just
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that you would expect. Nobody yelled, Baba Booey, no one was being a jerk, right? It was just a bunch of programmers
⏹️ ▶️ John answering programmer questions. So I felt like I was in my element for that type of thing. He did a bunch of other rooms and every time he started
⏹️ ▶️ John one, I would join it and just listen to it. I forget what his other ones were. Some general discussions
⏹️ ▶️ John of things, like Q&A type stuff. And then the final one I did
⏹️ ▶️ John was, This is the first big wiggy thing that I’ve been in. It was a room, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how I got invited. It was probably someone I follow, but it was some famous person that I follow, famous in
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Circles, and it was Steve Jobs stories. I think people were mentioning this on Twitter, so maybe people might
⏹️ ▶️ John have joined it from just seeing tweets about it. It was a bunch of people who knew Steve Jobs when he
⏹️ ▶️ John was alive and who worked with him in various capacities telling stories about Steve Jobs. Granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of which I’d heard already, but you know, like, it’s, if you read every single book that comes out about Steve Jobs and Falling
⏹️ ▶️ John for Your Whole Life, you probably know a lot of these stories, but some of them you won’t know. In fact, some of the, even some of the people who are telling the stories
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t know because they worked with Steve in a very obscure capacity, obscure enough that they
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t been in seven Forbes profiles, you know, telling their stories or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this, this was this entire room. I don’t even know which of the famous people was hosting it, but you know, a bunch of people were in there
⏹️ ▶️ John from the original Mac team and old ex-Apple people. And they would just get invited on on stage
⏹️ ▶️ John and they would tell their story and then someone else would come up as a speaker and they would tell their story. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I was at hours and hours of people telling stories about Steve Jobs. Some of the people who told stories were really good storytellers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of them weren’t. Some of the stories you heard, some of them you hadn’t. Um, but that’s what it was
⏹️ ▶️ John now. And that was interesting because it was like, you know, famous people,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So in that way, it’s, it’s a lot like regular people’s relationship to podcasts where it’s by some,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t, I almost said Joe Rogan. I didn’t mean to say that, but I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a famous NPR personalities or a podcast featuring Barack Obama, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John actual famous people who just happened to be appearing in the medium of podcasts. This was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, semi-famous and nerd circle people who were on Clubhouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the type of thing that you can imagine would be
⏹️ ▶️ John more to my taste. I was going to say better, but I’m not going to say better. I’m going to say more to my taste if it had been a podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if if you did a podcast, oh, here’s a podcast with people telling stories about Steve Jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get only the best stories. You’d edit them, right? You’d you know, you would produce it. You’d get rid
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the dead air and the parts didn’t work. But making a podcast of people telling
⏹️ ▶️ John stories about Steve Jobs require hunting down all the people who have stories, getting them to agree to
⏹️ ▶️ John be on your podcast, arranging a time for them to come and record, making sure their setup so they can record,
⏹️ ▶️ John getting their recording, doing that 20 times, editing it all down, producing it, putting it in, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s way more work than what seemed like this was more or less ad hoc. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re doing a stories about Steve Jobs clubhouse right now. And then people just come to you. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John People just people come and say, Oh, I see they’re having a clubhouse thing. And Andy Hertzfeld joins
⏹️ ▶️ John and Bill Atkinson joins and they’re all and once that once they appear in the room, the moderators like bless them and say, Oh, come
⏹️ ▶️ John on stage, you talk, you know what I mean? And so it was ad hoc and messy and
⏹️ ▶️ John not like a produced podcast. But it’s also a thing that probably just wouldn’t have happened period,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless there was someone with an established podcast willing to put in the time and energy to make a produced
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast version of this. I saw lots of people saying like, this is what clubhouse is great about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you would never see this in a podcast. No, you could absolutely see that in the podcast, it would just be a lot harder.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like I said the result of that would be more to my tastes But some people may like this more freeform
⏹️ ▶️ John one And also of course if you’re in that room and you happen to have a story about Steve Jobs You can raise your hand and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll let you tell your story and you can never do that with the podcast because you’re not There you’re not a participant. You’re just listening, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of these things though made me think of a few more features that Clubhouse should
⏹️ ▶️ John add To the to their platform and we’ve been talking mostly about like
⏹️ ▶️ John what is like in Clubhouse? And what kind of people are there what are they talking about? But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John like Twitter or email or Facebook or Instagram These things are essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms They it’s a system that works in a certain way and that
⏹️ ▶️ John system encourages certain behaviors and discourages others But it doesn’t dictate subject matter or
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know population or relationships really
⏹️ ▶️ John You could be anything that works in this way where you want to come into a room where a bunch of other people can be and you can nominate them
⏹️ ▶️ John to speak, anything that fits within that platform will work on Clubhouse. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John so happens this is what we’re getting now. And so within that platform, platform features that I think they could
⏹️ ▶️ John really use are pausing and rewinding. Now you may think that’s totally counter to this. It has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be live. If you can pause and rewind, like you’re gonna be ruining the liveness of the
⏹️ ▶️ John experience and you’re gonna be behind other people and you won’t be able to participate and all that other stuff. But I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John those two features are kind of essential for the
⏹️ ▶️ John best functionality of their, of the features they do have. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John when something is live and you’re sort of listening to it the same way, like, I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you listen to podcasts, like you’re doing dishes or whatever, you don’t wanna miss like the good part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John person who’s telling the story about Steve Jobs. You don’t wanna miss the good part of their story because, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John had to talk to somebody or you got distracted for a second or whatever, or like
⏹️ ▶️ John a dog was barking or you’re outside taking a walk and a loud truck went by and you didn’t hear that last part.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not actually that difficult to add a little bit of a buffer to allow you to pause or
⏹️ ▶️ John rewind to figure out what somebody said or to pause for a moment. As long as
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a good UI to say, OK, well, when you’re ready to catch back up to real time, do so. In fact, you could even
⏹️ ▶️ John use something like SmartSpeed that would let you catch back up without actually skipping over anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying the buffer should be a half an hour long, But five or ten seconds of grace would go a long
⏹️ ▶️ John way towards making Clubhouse a more satisfying experience because I missed a bunch of things that people
⏹️ ▶️ John said because either I misheard them or there was noise or I had to pause to do something and there’s no way for
⏹️ ▶️ John me to get that back and I’m sure the Clubhouse people would say well That’s the beauty of Clubhouse. It’s it’s here and then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gone. It can’t be recorded or of course it can’t be but anyway We discourage it from being recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s all about being there in the moment and it’s not about recording or rewinding. We just
⏹️ ▶️ John need you to be there in the moment and if you miss it, that’s the beauty of clubhouse. Sometimes you just miss it because the dog barks
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m not down with that particular beauty. I feel like people want to people want to go there
⏹️ ▶️ John to get the value of hearing the cool stories about Steve Jobs. And I love the fact that someone didn’t have to arrange
⏹️ ▶️ John all those interviews and make it into a big podcast and everything and anyone could just join. But I don’t like the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John if I missed what somebody said because I was distracted for a moment, that there’s no way for me to get
⏹️ ▶️ John that back. Just a little tiny buffer to pause and rewind would do it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I still don’t, I’m still not sure Clubhouse is for me. Uh, I didn’t actually participate. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John raise my hand to participate in any of these things. It’s not my kind of MO. I did think about types of things that ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John could do in that scenario. Just didn’t seem like, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John For now, it just didn’t seem like something that I was enthusiastic about participating in as
⏹️ ▶️ John a, I hate when people say that, as a creator, as they say. That’s not to say that will change over time, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think I understand some of the value people get out of it. Again, the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who want this type of experience are probably not the same people as me. I like podcasts for
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason, and I would love podcast versions of everything else that I listen to, but I just think
⏹️ ▶️ John that there wouldn’t be podcast versions of those because it’s so much more work to make a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John version of those things. It’s kind of like how Twitter was the low effort version of blogging. Clubhouse
⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways can be the low effort version of doing an interview podcast. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Some semi-real time follow up. A long time ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was for a Twitter account. I don’t remember which one. I needed a phone number in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to do something. Maybe it was do something with an API and I didn’t want to give them my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular phone number or I tried and I couldn’t. And so I was trying to figure out a way to get another phone number so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could just hand it to Twitter just for the purposes of clearing this hurdle so I can do what I wanted to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I had stumbled upon an app called Burner, which makes sense. And at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, you could get a free burner that would receive a handful of text messages or only last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week or something like that. I don’t know if that’s still the case. I think you have to pay for everything. But it worked really well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it gave me a temporary phone number that I could use for the purposes of what I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to do. And then it just went away. And additionally, you could use something like Google Voice or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case may be. But yeah, I don’t negate your point earlier. I’m just saying that the barrier of entry for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting a new phone number is ever lower, even lower than I would have expected a while ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John The good thing about phone numbers is that the namespace, so to speak, at least in the US of phone numbers, is
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly limited. Unlike the namespace of email addresses, which is essentially unlimited. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it’s not really unlimited because there are length limits, but there are way more possible email addresses in the world than there are
⏹️ ▶️ John possible phone numbers. So I always wondered how Google Voice gets away with just handing out free phone numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a Google Voice number. It’s very easy to get one, but it is still more
⏹️ ▶️ John of a hassle than getting an email address. And most of us do not currently have seven phone numbers that are just ready
⏹️ ▶️ John to pull out of our pocket and sign up with a service in another way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s see if we can get through two topics today before we run out of time.
Apple’s secure C compiler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But something flew by, flew across my desk a few days ago that I wanted to briefly call attention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. Apple Platform Security released, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a series of pages or maybe it’s a PDF, I don’t know. But one URL that I can give you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is about memory-safe iBoot implementation. And I just thought that this was cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we don’t necessarily need to talk about it a whole lot, but it was something that I thought was very interesting. And on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey page, Apple writes, in iOS 14, iPad OS 14,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple modified the C compiler toolchain used to build the iBoot bootloader to improve its security.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The modified toolchain implements code to prevent memory and type safety issues that are typically encountered in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C programs. For example, it prevents buffer overflows by ensuring that all pointers carry bounce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information that is verified when accessing memory. It prevents heap exploitation by separating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heap data from its metadata and accurately detecting error conditions, such as double free errors. It prevents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey type confusion by ensuring that all pointers carry runtime type information that’s verified during pointer cast operations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And finally, it prevents type confusion caused by the use after free errors by segregating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all dynamic memory allocations by static type. This technology is available on iPhone with Apple A13
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bionic or later in iPad with A14 Bionic chip. I just think this is so cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, hey, we want to write something in C, but C is inherently a little bit unsafe. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modify the C compiler to make it a little more safe. Please and thank you. I just think that’s super, super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John So a bunch of discussion from some folks who do low-level programming at
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and other places about the general topic of C just being
⏹️ ▶️ John an unsafe language to do any new development in modern times. Every time there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of bug or security exploit that comes out, it’s just another
⏹️ ▶️ John nail in the coffin of C when it comes to security. Like there was the Sudu one recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s this silly bug in the Linux version of Sudu that also affected Macs by the way. It was just
⏹️ ▶️ John straight up normal, you know, C, rookie C mistake that everybody makes because it’s very easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to make them of, you know, I forget what it was. It was, I think it was just a straight
⏹️ ▶️ John buffer overflow. But anyway, C makes all these things eminently possible
⏹️ ▶️ John And therefore it’s probably not wise to
⏹️ ▶️ John start some new project of something security, something that has security implications
⏹️ ▶️ John in C. And when C was the dominant language,
⏹️ ▶️ John people say, oh yeah, well, it’s difficult to remember, but it’s the only choice. It’s not the only choice anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are so many memory safe languages. And if your choice is, well, I need to use C because only
⏹️ ▶️ John C gives me the performance I need. If we were to tell you, OK, fine, but 10 years from now, there’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John a terrible security flaw that will infect billions of computers that you still want to use C. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when it was the only choice, there was also this machismo about, well, I’m a good C programmer. I won’t make those mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I’ll use a tool that will help me figure out whether I’m making those mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or the people who do that, they’re just the bad C programmers. Or there’s too much code written by people who don’t understand C. And all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of excuses. But the bottom line is history has shown if you’re writing any security critical
⏹️ ▶️ John software in C There will be security related bugs in your code There’s no way to stop it no
⏹️ ▶️ John matter how many eyes are on it if it’s open source And everyone’s gonna look at it and they’ll find it Nope, they didn’t find
⏹️ ▶️ John it in whatever was the the heartbleed thing that was in there for years The sudo one has been in there for years
⏹️ ▶️ John C is just never going to be a tool that humans can use to
⏹️ ▶️ John make programs that don’t have security flaws and And today we have
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are better in that regard, not perfect, but better. Things like Swift or Rust
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t let you make a lot of the common errors. This memory safe boot implementation C compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is like taking C and trying to mutate it to have a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of the memory safety that things like Swift and Rust have, which is a great idea, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re also kind of changing the language as you do that. And as you start to do that, you’re like mutating
⏹️ ▶️ John C into a, you know, a poorly specified
⏹️ ▶️ John half implementation of Rust or Swift, which is probably not ideal. And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have the option in most of these cases to say, I’m just gonna rewrite everything in Swift or Rust. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s, you know, you’ve got a bunch of software in C, you’ve got to deal with it. The core of Darwin,
⏹️ ▶️ John BSD, mock, all that stuff, that’s C and there’s tons of C++ code. Like it’s not going away anytime soon,
⏹️ ▶️ John But the Twitter discussion I found interesting was, general agreement about people who work
⏹️ ▶️ John on this type of code in C all day long, at the highest levels,
⏹️ ▶️ John all agreeing that, yeah, humans will never be able to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we need to just use different languages. There’s nothing we can do in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John discipline and linting and testing that’s going to save us. The compiler helping
⏹️ ▶️ John here is great, but it just adds sort of another variable,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because there could be parts of this implementation of this, you know, safe C thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that themselves end up being venues for exploits. You really kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of have to build in this type of safety from the very beginning to have a little bit more confidence.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would say using this compiler is vastly better than not using it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if given the choice and you’re writing some new code that doesn’t exist, that’s going to be in a security
⏹️ ▶️ John critical area, I’m starting to agree with the notion that C and
⏹️ ▶️ John to a slightly lesser extent C++ are just non-starters and you should really think about using something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no argument here. I, you know, the first several years of my professional career were in C++
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there was a brief window of time where I thought I was an okay C++ developer, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just indicates how young I was. I do not miss those times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really at all. Like I am glad that that’s how I learned, and I’m glad that that was the foundation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upon which I started using other languages, but man, I just, I do not miss it.
MBP rumor: HDMI, SD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Ming-Chi Kuo has some interesting information for us. New MacBook Pro models with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI port and SD card reader to launch later this year. Marco, I thought I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard your celebration from all the way down here, several hundred miles below you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you okay? Do you need a moment? Do you need a beer to kind of calm you down? How
⏹️ ▶️ John We know how Marco always loves to hook up his laptops to the projector so he can present to the room,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, like here’s why this is very good news. So, you know, we heard the rumors, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also from Mark Gurman, or whoever was reporting it a few weeks back, talking about how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new MacBook Pros were rumored to have a few different improvements that were all like really pretty good fan service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements, as well as, you know, quote, more ports, or more types of ports, more connectivity,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however they worded it. But they didn’t specify like, well, what ports? Like, what’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be added? Besides the rumor about MagSafe, but it left the rest of it as an exercise to the reader
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to speculate. So what’s nice about this is that Min-Chi Kuo, who is pretty well sourced and pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable with stuff like this, is saying specifically which ports are coming back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to MagSafe, which again has many benefits, including just freeing up a USB port.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But to have the SD card slot back and the HDMI port back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say I don’t think I will ever use the HDMI port on a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, as I said back when we talked about this a few weeks ago, if you look at what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like every single dongle has, everyone, like, I don’t know anybody who has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a MacBook of any kind from 2016 forward, so you know, the USB-C only generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who doesn’t have some kind of multi-port dongle. And you look at what ports are on those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as kind of an indication of like, what ports do most people need from their laptops that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe should be on the laptop if possible, like as this is like evidence of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they all have the same ports. Ethernet, which okay, it doesn’t really fit anymore, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-A, HDMI, and SD card slot. All of them have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things, because clearly those are very common needs. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can look at both, you know, just generally the way Apple does things, and also the physical side profile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these laptops and we can say, okay, USB a might be a stretch. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think many of us are expecting that even though I still would like it. If it, if it could fit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to have one USB a port because you just still frequently need that. But okay, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can understand arguments against that. You know, the it is easy enough to get USB C cables and USB C peripherals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of the time now. So, okay, maybe we can go without that one. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ethernet, many people don’t need it anymore and it doesn’t fit on the side. So, okay, I can go without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one. But HDMI is so commonly needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think it should be there. Even though I don’t use it, I think it should be there because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people need it. And that’s an area where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need for it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon because it’s so often used for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like projectors and stuff like that in workplaces and stuff like that. So, you know, that’s, that’s a common thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, the HDMI ports on dongles are historically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very unreliable. It’s really hard to find a good one. That is something that needs to be rock solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, like, nobody is presenting their presentation on a projector who can tolerate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that being flaky. No one is watching a movie on their hotel TV from their laptop who really wants it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be flaky. Like, that really needs to be solid, and it’s a tricky thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get right from dongles, as we have learned from practice, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s so true, it’s so true. I had bought, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, three or four of knockoff versions of the Apple USB-C in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI out, USB-A in out, dongles. I forget the official name,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like USB-C multi-port adapter or something like that is the official
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’d bought a few knockoffs because the official one is literally like $70 or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. It’s absurdly expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, I have one, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey sucks. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have one and it’s fine, but I can tell you that all of the knockoffs that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve tried, and maybe it’s just the particular devices I’m using, who knows, maybe I like stepped on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or something that I don’t remember, but every single one of these knockoffs, it’s exactly what you described, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that sometimes if I plug it in the wrong way, the TV will be showing nothing but static.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sometimes if I plug it in the wrong way, it’s showing things, but the colors are wrong. Like it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbelievable to me that this completely digital transport mechanism can fail in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many different ways. Not completely fail, mind you, just mostly fail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t understand why this is so difficult. It seems like it should be fairly straightforward, but I guess it ain’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of that, the only dongle that I ever use, even though I have literally like have the official and three or four knockoffs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only one I ever use is the Apple one because it’s the only one that reliably works for me. It’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you can reduce the need for most people to need a dongle at all, that’s a huge advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if most people need a dongle, then I think that’s a product design failure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t like a case where people put cases on their phones, I mean, that’s partially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a design failure in that the phones are too breakable, but people also have lots of different preferences for which cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want and everything else. But a dongle for a laptop means, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a pretty significant need for some kind of ports that this laptop doesn’t have. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if everyone bought different kinds of dongles, then you could argue, well, it’s good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to offer people flexibility because then they can pick what they need. If everyone is using the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three ports on their dongles, that needs to be built in if possible. When things are built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, they are inherently more reliable because you’re not, everyone’s not using some like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird $10 no-name chip that all these manufacturers on Amazon that have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Markov generator brand names with the same plastic enclosure around it with different things printed on it. And you’re like, okay, well that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might not be very reliable. And compared to the built-in port on the laptop that is usually 100% reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To make a large portion of your customer base rely on dongles is not a great thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if everyone is requesting the same three ports and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just build them in, that’s great and you should. And so again, USB-A,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see why, you know, that one’s easier to go without. HDMI is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the people who need it, like, they need it, period. And you can, if you can build that in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. That resolves a huge problem that a lot of people have. And SD card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slots. This is, again, I’ve made this argument before, I’ll be quick. People who don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use SD cards always think, oh, those are in the past now, you can just use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi or whatever. Like everyone always thinks SD cards are not useful anymore if they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them. But to the people who use them, we know, oh no, we still need that. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use SD cards in your workflow, chances are nothing can or will replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, except at best, a future removable card standard like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that just has bigger, faster cards, whatever. But like right now, SD is still like the most mainstream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco widely used one. It’s supported by the most devices. I know some of the higher end ones are having these like, you know, C-Fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like other like faster things, but for the most part, that is still like, if you’re gonna pick one slot to build in, that’s the one to build in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And nothing replaces that over time. Like, it’s not like all the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now go to wifi. There’s no like sound recorders that record to wifi. Like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that never materialized because for lots of good reasons, but like basically SD cards still work really well and are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used in massive numbers of devices and peripherals and specialty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workflows that people still need and that need has not gone away in the last, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five, four and a half years that we’ve had the USB-C world. So, again, build that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back in if you can. SD card slots are really small, they can be really thin, so there’s no reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can’t fit on a redesigned laptop. So, this is great news.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so happy to hear this from such a reliable leaker as Ming-Chi Kuo because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this isn’t 100% guaranteed going to happen but it’s a it’s a pretty strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signal so if these laptops are roughly what is rumored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is you know some kind of faster m-series chip or you know a bit bigger GPU or whatever it is and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow expanded m-series chip it probably expanded RAM ceiling for people who need more than 16 great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly bigger screens possibly redesign enclosure but the return of MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and HDMI and SD while hopefully not ruining anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like no new keyboards please don’t mess with too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh and the alleged departure of the touch bar. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all great news. I’m looking forward to this. Even if only half of this stuff comes true this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be a great series of products in all likelihood. So I’m really very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to this year of products.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve been talking about this for a couple of weeks just because of the way these rumors have been rolling out. Like, like Margaret said, it started off
⏹️ ▶️ John as like, oh, they’re going to have new things with new ports. Well, which new ports? And then it’s like, oh, one of them is going to be an SD card. And then we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And this week it was like, oh, then the other one’s going to be HDMI. And I feel like they’re really, we talked about this before, like
⏹️ ▶️ John really straining the limits of my, of how much I’m willing to believe these rumors, because it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John in many ways too good to be true. The selection of ports is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John because so USB-A, lots of people have wanted that for
⏹️ ▶️ John a while, but as Margo said, we do actually have USB. It’s just the little
⏹️ ▶️ John connector and that little connector slowly but surely is making inroads.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, I know A is still very, very common, I understand, but unlike some of the other things,
⏹️ ▶️ John the replacement exists and is making steady progress. And USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually pretty big, right? HDMI, like obviously I haven’t been
⏹️ ▶️ John in the office in forever. When I was in the office, everyone had one of these stupid dongles to connect up to HDMI and they’re just as reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John as you said. HDMI is interesting because it ties into the form factor rumors.
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI is too big to fit on the edge of current Apple laptops, but that’s only because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have the curve that lets you get your fingers underneath it. If they have flat sides and then rubber feet to bring them
⏹️ ▶️ John off the ground so you can actually pick them up, the flat side is probably gonna be there to give
⏹️ ▶️ John it enough room for HDMI unless it’s mini HDMI, which everybody hates and won’t actually solve the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John because now everyone’s gonna have mini HDMI to regular HDMI adapters.
⏹️ ▶️ John This HDMI rumor is really pushing against, you know, I’m just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that I don’t think they should have it, I’m like, but HDMI, that’s big. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that just seems like complete wish fulfillment of like, remember what you complained about in 2016?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we’re fixing all of those things. And you know, I granted, like I said, this is this is what we’ve all been wanting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fix the keyboard, bring the ports back, do all the things, it’ll be awesome when it happens. But in
⏹️ ▶️ John some respects, I’m like, all you’re doing is catching back up to where you were in 2015. In
⏹️ ▶️ John some respects, obviously, the computer is gonna be way faster, the screens are better, they’re lighter, you know, the battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John is better, like, it’s not exactly the same. But in terms of like, the the product features and
⏹️ ▶️ John benefits. Oh, it’s a laptop. It has a big screen. It has a keyboard, a trackpad, and it has ports on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside the march of technology that allows everything inside there to get better, you’re not really
⏹️ ▶️ John making that much progress. You’re more or less going back to the last good idea you had, which you should. Don’t keep going
⏹️ ▶️ John with the idea that we don’t like. You know, good. But it’s a little bit depressing
⏹️ ▶️ John when I think about the time that we wasted. Forget about the time we wasted on the butterfly keyboard. Just the time that
⏹️ ▶️ John we wasted. I’ll never forget. Dealing with the insistence
⏹️ ▶️ John on just having Thunderbolt slash USB-C ports for everything. Right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if these rumors turn out to be true and Apple finally does consent to have useful
⏹️ ▶️ John ports on the side of its laptops, whatever they may be, and that they are as welcomed
⏹️ ▶️ John by the customers as we all expect them to be, it’s just going to be like so depressing to think about,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, cause during all those years, cause during all those years it was like, well, Maybe this is the future and we just
⏹️ ▶️ John have to get used to it or whatever and just we’re waiting so long for Even for just USB C to come
⏹️ ▶️ John around to replace a and although that is still slowly happening all the other ports
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s nothing for them. Like it’s just you know, it’s dongles or nothing And so
⏹️ ▶️ John while we still have the ability to fit any of them on there because SD will fit because it’s skinny
⏹️ ▶️ John Ethernet won’t HDMI might fit if you make that side a lot flatter and
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger and maybe be you know on the wedge shaped computer you could have
⏹️ ▶️ John the fat side of it or whatever but I don’t know how long like some of these connectors
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure how long they’re going to last. SD card I guess it will last for a while or if they replace it with the
⏹️ ▶️ John one that also reads the whatever the new compact flash standard is that looks like an SD
⏹️ ▶️ John card that could last for a little while too and presumably these things would just be on the high end
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that are made for like pros or whatever because you know who needs this stuff on a
⏹️ ▶️ John lower end laptop and on something as skinny as a replacement for the MacBook Adorable,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way you’re even getting an SD card slot on the side of that thing, so forget about that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, at this rate, it’s been like every week there’s a new rumor, next week is the rumor that they’re adding an ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know what comes next.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like are they gonna add a giant, chunky back to it? Is it microethernet?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does such a thing exist? I don’t even know. So, hopefully this is the last
⏹️ ▶️ John of the features of the new MacBooks rumors, and the next time we talk about this it
⏹️ ▶️ John will be about an actual product, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’d like to enter old man corner, if I may. When I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco was… That’s our entire show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, touche. When Marco and I were in school, in college, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unusual, possible but unusual, to find a laptop with built-in wireless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in fact, it was particularly at the beginning of college, it was very unusual to find a laptop with built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet. You would always find a laptop with a built-in modem, but it was very unusual to find a laptop with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey built-in Ethernet. And what you often had to do was add—well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially for us PC users—you would have to add a PCMCIA card, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was like an expansion card specifically for laptops. And I think cable cards in cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boxes use the same form factor, if I’m not mistaken. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time, you would slide this card into the laptop, and then you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often have a little mini dongle coming out of it in order to plug in like your phone jack or your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet cable. And then the magic of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X jack appeared. And what they ended up doing was there was a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pop out like not a door necessarily, but a little pop out thing, receptacle, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess, wherein you could just plug the phone cable or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ethernet cable directly into this little receptacle that was popped, that popped right out of the cord.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No dongles required. Guys, kids, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. And I think I’ve told the story at least once or twice and I apologize for repeating it, but it was so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbelievably cool. See also when you had Wi-Fi PCMCIA cards where it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the antenna hanging out the side of the computer, which was often like a solid inch wide.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was so bad. And then I remember I got, I know I’ve told this story, I got a something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pad, I can’t remember which one it was, that had a port on the bottom of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you could slot in a Cisco Wi-Fi card. So it was internal and it already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the antennas and like the display that I think you had to like hook up or something like that. But I didn’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could get on the internet using my laptop without having this thing sticking, this wart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sticking outside the side of my laptop. Oh my word, kids, it was like a whole new world. It was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, I’m ready for an X Jack Mac, MacBook Pro is what I’m saying. Matt Stauffer Please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t do that. Jeff Lackman Come on, man,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’d be awesome. Matt Stauffer Is that the thing that looked like a little like square basketball hoop that looked like it was ready to break at any second?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it looks incredibly perilous. Like, I don’t know how scared they actually were in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it looks like you would just look at it wrong and break it.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s the opposite of MagSafe, where MagSafe, if someone jumps over the cord,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your laptop will be okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John If someone sneezes on the court, it’s going to snap that thing off.
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#askatp: Security of EOL OS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. John Hovland writes, I have a 2009 iMac running High Sierra and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently learned that Apple plans to discontinue security updates as of the end of January 2021. Sorry, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the most timely. My question is, how dangerous is it to continue to operate a Mac under these circumstances?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey While old, the iMac is meeting my needs and I would prefer to delay a replacement until an Apple Silicon iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is available. It’s a tough spot that John’s in. I mean, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it were me, I’d probably still continue to use it and just try not to visit the dark corners of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet. But I don’t know. What do you think, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this, you know, there are security flaws in this already. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John just the sudo thing that I mentioned is probably in this High Sierra thing and it’s never going to be patched, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But if that’s the latest OS your Mac can run, you know, it’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ John to just ride that out for a little while. Like you should be planning to eventually replace this computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the grand scheme of things, just because you have security vulnerabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t mean they’ll be exploited. There’s more risk than if you had an up-to-date patched version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the OS, but how much more risk? Because even in a patched version of the OS, there are flaws that
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t yet patched or that Apple doesn’t yet know about. So it’s not as if you’re going from, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong way to think about this is, previously I had a secure OS and now I have an insecure
⏹️ ▶️ John one. always had an insecure OS. It’s just a question of how many vulnerabilities are there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as time progresses, High Sierra will gather more vulnerabilities probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John up to a limit because eventually no one cares about exploiting it anymore. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t characterize it as a sort of binary black and white, I was supported and now I’m not. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more of this long gradient and you know you’ve been sort of abandoned at the back end of this gradient that
⏹️ ▶️ John things are just going to slowly get worse for you. So start planning on a new Mac, but As someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who has run Macs that could no longer be upgraded to newer versions of operating systems for literal years,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s mostly okay, right? Like I said, don’t think about it as running an insecure
⏹️ ▶️ John OS. Thinking about it as running an OS that is not getting any better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, any other thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would just add that like, this is probably gonna be for a reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short time, because John says they prefer to just delay replacement until an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Silicon iMac is available, that’s probably gonna be within a few months. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would be, it’s not that big of a time that you’re in this state.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would just say, John’s right, but I would just say, once you are no longer being security patched,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just be a little extra careful. And I know that’s hard to say. Just be a little bit careful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with weird websites you might visit, like dark corners of the web. Try to use a web browser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is more up-to-date then whatever version of Safari will be in that. So maybe use like Firefox or Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something else that is, if you can get some other browser that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still being updated for that OS, I believe Firefox goes back pretty far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that could be something. Just because your most likely attack vectors are gonna be like weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network stuff, which I’ll get to in a second, or weird web exploits. So if you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduce your attack vector there by using a more up-to-date browser on the built-in Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably a good idea. And then for the network side, you know, just make sure that you’re not directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connected to the internet, you know, but these days, no one is. Like these days, everyone’s going through a router
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some kind, so you know, the basic security inherent in being behind a NAT router
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be largely protecting you from like, you know, weird like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network port scanning kind of threats, so you’re mostly okay on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, just the web browser I think is your biggest attack surface. So try to get better than the built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff for the web browser. And then when the new WebMX come out, jump on them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably quickly. But again, I think that’s probably gonna be within a few months.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe don’t install lots of new software, don’t download a lot of attachments and double click them to launch them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way to think about it is, whatever was on your computer when it stopped getting patches, just use it in
⏹️ ▶️ John that mode. The desire to say, oh, there’s a cool new program, I should try it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where you get yourself into trouble. That’s what sort of being slightly more cautious means. But like I said, I ran my 2008
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro with an OS that was multiple years old. And mostly,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I mean, I have a certain level of caution I’m always operating with, but it wasn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the end of the world. And so, you know, we don’t know when new iMacs are coming out. We’re hoping they’re gonna be this year, but you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be spending three years using this computer. So I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to put things in perspective, I actually meant to talk about this earlier. somebody I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who shall remain nameless, they were running Big Sur on their MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roughly the same vintage as mine. And they noticed that when they were going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a search in their web browser, and this was true of both Chrome and Safari, which is where the story starts to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get alarming, they would do a Google search but end up on Yahoo. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey browser settings are for Google, and I verified this myself, but they ended up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Yahoo and some spelunking later, I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they had both HTTP and HTTPS proxies in their networking settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they absolutely did not turn on themselves. And so, suffice to say that computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been burnt down and rebuilt from the ground up with no migration assistant and things are looking better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. But that was on Big Sur. And for the life for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea how this individual ended up getting this particular virus or malware or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was. Not a clue. They’re not the kind of person I don’t think that would be on the darkest of dark corners of the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or even the particularly gray corners of the internet. So I don’t know what happened there, but it can happen to anyone,
⏹️ ▶️ John You click on an ad banner, download a thing, say OK to a bunch of dialogues you don’t understand, it can happen. And like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, one of the things that’s protecting your older computer is that it becomes less interesting as an exploit
⏹️ ▶️ John target, as the installed base. how many people are still running High Sierra as that installed base shrinks, you
⏹️ ▶️ John become a less interesting target. Even though your thing is not getting any more secure, maybe Big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ John is where all the new action is happening or all those hot new M1 malware software things.
#askatp: Parents’ contact names
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Colin Minney writes, do you store your parents’ contacts under their real names or are they under mom and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dad or similar? It’s worth noting that there’s a nickname field in contacts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you use it, it seems to take over in all Apple UIs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the one true version of that contact’s name. So, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you use mom as your nickname for your mother, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in messages, in, I’m trying to think of other places, but in, in, I think the phone or in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone app and all the places that Apple controls, you won’t see Janelle Liss, you’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mom. And, and that’s fine, but it does kind of take everything over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, also there is a way, and I forget exactly how to do it other than apparently you can tell Siri, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way to establish relationships, I think through your own contact or perhaps through other contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you can say, oh, this person is related to this other person because this is their mother
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or this is their sister or brother or what have you. So for me, I do have nicknames for my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parents. And I think I do have relationships for my immediate family in terms of both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron and the immediate family that I grew up with. I think if this started as an email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thread that maybe John and I both participated in. So John, do you have more thoughts about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. My general advice is use the people’s real names, put their first name in the first name with the last name and last
⏹️ ▶️ John name field, but then use the nickname field. That’s exactly what it’s there for. At various times, Apple software has had,
⏹️ ▶️ John like some of it, some of it has sometimes had a preference to say, should I show the nickname?
⏹️ ▶️ John Should I show their first name? Should I show the long name? But Apple being Apple, those options are few
⏹️ ▶️ John and far between and I think have been disappearing over time. But that’s what I recommend people do.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t see the nickname field in your contacts, if you go edit contact and you don’t see a nickname, you have to like scroll down
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s like a thing at the bottom that says add new fields or something. And then you can pick from the fields that you can add. You can pick
⏹️ ▶️ John nickname and it will appear like it’s there. You might have to dig for it a little bit, but it’s like an officially supported field that Apple will
⏹️ ▶️ John honor. There’s a bunch of other fields that you can also fill in for relationship stuff, but I don’t even know what those
⏹️ ▶️ John things are because the way I’ve mostly done it is the way that Casey just described. You can have
⏹️ ▶️ John a conversation with Siri about this. And it has all the benefits and drawbacks of having a conversation with Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So you can just say, you know, Hey, dingus,
⏹️ ▶️ John Jane Doe is my mother and James Doe is my father-in-law. And it will do it will essentially make
⏹️ ▶️ John those relationships for you in your contacts. I think it will just fill in the fields that you could fill in manually. But if you don’t know what they are, you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John talk. The downsides of conversations with Siri is that if it misunderstands
⏹️ ▶️ John you or you say the wrong thing, you don’t know what Siri just did to establish that relationship.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you didn’t know about these secret fields at the bottom of contacts or you don’t know how to show them in the editor or whatever, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I fix that? Hey, dingus, James, though, is not my father.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s my father-in-law. Hey, and it’s like, I’m sorry, I don’t understand. But it’s like, oh, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri’s not a human. It just it knows it’s like a text adventure. It knows how to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John who is my mom and my dad. But now what I want to say, the thing you just did is not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Can you just undo that and do something different? And it doesn’t know. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what the best way to do with your relationship stuff is. The
⏹️ ▶️ John way I’ve had the most success is sort of the demand-paged approach where I ask
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri to do a thing for me and it says, I don’t know who your father is. Can
⏹️ ▶️ John you tell me who they are? And like sort of that type of thing where I try to do a thing expecting it
⏹️ ▶️ John to know who my wife is, but it doesn’t yet know. And it asks me and I answer. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if that works out and I answer correctly from that point on, it’s all set.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this entire realm of features deserves a better
⏹️ ▶️ John interface than what it has, than, you know, obscure fields at the bottom of contacts that you don’t even see unless you
⏹️ ▶️ John add them. Because, and I bet Apple would say, well, that’s what Siri is for. We don’t want people messing
⏹️ ▶️ John with OCLs. It’s too fidgety. We just want them to talk to Siri, but Siri’s not up to the task a lot of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you get it wrong. But anyway, I recommend using real names everywhere and
⏹️ ▶️ John then just somehow try to get into the system the various relationships. Because once all those relationships
⏹️ ▶️ John are in, you can pretty reliably say, hey, Dingus, call my wife at work, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it will figure out what to do. I mean, even my ancient Honda Accord can do that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing, where I can
⏹️ ▶️ John yell into the air and specify someone by their relationship and specify a location,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will just do it. So we are at that level of technology that a 2014 Honda can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple can do it as well.
#askatp: Non-closing Dock apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Hargis Manga writes, you know, fun fact, when Declan was really little, his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word for grandma was manga. And so when one of the moms showed up, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manga, manga. Anyway, Hargis writes, I’m irrationally annoyed by the non-permanent apps in my dock that stick around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after I close all the windows. I don’t necessarily want to quit those apps. I don’t care if they keep running, but I don’t want them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cluttering up my dock. I really don’t need to be aware that TextEdit is running three days after the one time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I opened a random file with it. Is there a way to auto-hide apps from the dock that have no open windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not entirely sure that I understand what is being asked here, because there’s like several different things that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this could mean. First of all, in Big Sur, and it might’ve been even in Catalina before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, there will be, I think, up to three recently used apps that will show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up on your dock next to the trash, which you can turn off in system preferences. There’s a checkbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show recent applications in dock. And those apps may or may not be running at any given point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so maybe that’s what it’s being referred to. Also worth noting, although I don’t think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the question, there used to be little dots or lights next to apps that were actively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running. And then those lights or dots would go away if the app is not actively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running right now. This is one of those things that I always turn back on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I try to stick to as vanilla an installation in terms of preferences and things like that as I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s show indicators for open applications, again in dock and menu bar and system preferences. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think what’s actually being asked is if you open an app and then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess like it was said, close all the windows, but the app hasn’t been terminated,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does still sit in the dock for a while. And I guess to me, if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a problem, just quit the darn app. And obviously, that’s not the actual solution. That’s not fair of me to say. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I do. If I have text headed open and I close the last window, I’ll just command Q,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then the problem and the icon goes away. But I’m guessing one of you, maybe John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has more or better thoughts about this. So what should be done?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are those dots really off by default? This is what happens if you never do a clean install. I have no idea what the defaults
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not 100% sure, but I’m close.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re on by default.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey OK, maybe I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. So the general complaint here seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John it sounds like the common Windows user complaint. Because in Windows, the sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of hierarchy that exists on the Mac doesn’t exist in the same way. On the Mac, you have applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there is an application that is the front application, and that owns the menu bar. And within that application,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have multiple windows. And the original Mac model and the Mac model that more or less has stayed
⏹️ ▶️ John since day one, subject to the caveats that I’ll get to in a moment, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John an application can be open and running independent of how many windows it has on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can tell that it’s running because you look at the menu bar in modern Mac OS. You can see the name of the
⏹️ ▶️ John app there, right? It’s the front most application. It owns the menu bar. It’s running. It doesn’t matter if there are any windows open.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas in Windows, the windows themselves more or less are the application. And if you close all the windows
⏹️ ▶️ John by hitting the little X button and they’re all gone, well, the app’s not running anymore. Because how could the app be running if there are no windows open?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because on Windows, there is no menu bar at the top of the screen. So if you’ve literally closed all
⏹️ ▶️ John the windows, how would you access the UI of the application? it is not running anymore, right? And that’s what Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John users expect. Now on the Mac, there’s always been exceptions like desk accessories, which no one knows what those are unless you’re super
⏹️ ▶️ John old, or other applications like Calculator, for example, where you close that window and it’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, when I close the Calculator desk accessory, the Calculator’s not running anymore and desk accessories
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t own the menu bar. Anyway, so at some point during, I think it was probably in the
⏹️ ▶️ John early days of Mac OS X, Apple made it more or less an officially supported thing that hey, if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a little application like calculator, you can make it so that when you close the last window, your application
⏹️ ▶️ John quits. Now, you’ve always been able to do that on the Mac. It’s just a program, you can make your app do anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it hasn’t been in the culture. Like, especially in classic Mac OS, the culture was, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have an application and it’s launched, and someone closes the last window, like if you have like a text editor open
⏹️ ▶️ John in this example, and someone closes the last open text editor window, you would never quit text edit. Of course, you would
⏹️ ▶️ John leave the application running because maybe the person closed it and the next thing you wanna do is make a new text edit document, so they hit Command
⏹️ ▶️ John N. And if text edit quit after you close the last window, how can you hit Command N? You have to go relaunch it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So, and that’s the way I’m used to. That’s the way Mac culture tends to work. And so this complaint
⏹️ ▶️ John is the opposite of saying, once I close that last text edit window, it annoys me that text edit sits there
⏹️ ▶️ John still being open, waiting to see if I wanna make a new text edit window or open a new document in text edit. Why doesn’t it just
⏹️ ▶️ John quit? I don’t have any windows open. In fact, TextEdit specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one app, that and Preview, but TextEdit, these apps drive me
⏹️ ▶️ John up a wall because in, let me see what version of it, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John in Lion, Mac OS 10, 10.7 from 2011,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple added a feature called automatic termination. And the way that works is you can opt
⏹️ ▶️ John into it. The way it works is if you close all the windows belonging to an application,
⏹️ ▶️ John an application may decide to automatically terminate because it thinks you’re not using
⏹️ ▶️ John it anymore after a short period of time. If you use the doc without that recent applications
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, which is a new thing, it didn’t exist in Lion anyway, what you’ll see then is you’ll close the last
⏹️ ▶️ John window for text edit. And let’s say, or let’s pick preview. You open a bunch of pictures in preview. I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at the pictures. All right, no, I don’t like that one. I like that one. So I closed the window. I’ve got no windows open
⏹️ ▶️ John in preview Then I go back to the finder to find the next image I want to open while I’m in the finder looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for the next image preview quits out from under me and disappears from the dock And I was like, oh wait, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was just about to go back to you So now you have to reopen preview or double click the image and reopen preview or
⏹️ ▶️ John if the image is owned by Photoshop Manually open preview and then drag it on to preview because you don’t want the thing to open in Photoshop when
⏹️ ▶️ John you double-click it Which is a whole other ball of wax. I don’t like the application quitting behind my back
⏹️ ▶️ John because it thinks I’m done using with it using it based solely on the signal whether or not it has any windows open.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we have the opposite complaint here, right? That he wants these apps to
⏹️ ▶️ John quit as soon as they have no windows open and I can’t stand when they do that. The other feature that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple added related to this again around the same time is called sudden termination. And I’m pretty sure both of these two
⏹️ ▶️ John things still exist. They’re both things that you can opt into. Sudden termination is a way for
⏹️ ▶️ John your application to essentially set a flag or signal to the OS that
⏹️ ▶️ John not only is it okay to terminate me, but you can terminate me with prejudice. You can send me
⏹️ ▶️ John SIGKILL. Like you don’t have to like politely send me an Apple event asking me to quit.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can just literally just kill me. I don’t have any cleanup work to do. I don’t have any open files. I don’t need to write
⏹️ ▶️ John any preference files. I am ready to be terminated suddenly. And this feature was added,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think in Snow Leopard actually, to make it so like when you log out or shut down,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it doesn’t have to essentially send a quit Apple event to every single application, have
⏹️ ▶️ John that application swap back in, have it respond to the quit Apple event, have it to run all the handlers
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can run and, you know, AppKit has handlers for it and Classic Mac has handlers for it. And, you know, like there’s things you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do on quit, clean stuff up, like close your indexes, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s all sorts of crap apps can do on quit. And that would make logout slower
⏹️ ▶️ John or shutdown slower or restart slower because you’d have to wait patiently for every application to
⏹️ ▶️ John be done doing what it’s doing. It was especially true on the days of spinning hard disks and not a lot of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John when these things would have to swap back in from disk just to get to the point to say, okay, you finally swapped
⏹️ ▶️ John back in, now process this quit event up, now you’re exiting. And it would just be, you know, torture
⏹️ ▶️ John to wait for the thing to come off the disk into RAM just so it could quit itself. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John if you allowed the OS, if you had previously signaled, I’m not actually doing anything here, you can kill me,
⏹️ ▶️ John then macOS would just send, I think it would actually literally send SIGKILL, kill minus nine, to just kill that
⏹️ ▶️ John process off. Like I don’t, no chance to do anything. You don’t get to swap again. You don’t get to run again. You’re just dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then automatic termination is the thing where it says, oh, when no windows are open and you haven’t used me in a while, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna exit. And both of those, you could use them in any combination, right? And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John this was in my Lion review. It’s a good thing I go back through my old reviews and learn things that I had long since forgotten. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure if they’re still doing this, but one of the things that Lion did was, If
⏹️ ▶️ John an application was automatically terminated, it would disappear from your dock if it wasn’t like permanently
⏹️ ▶️ John there, or the dot would disappear underneath it. I do wonder how many people understand how the dock works these days,
⏹️ ▶️ John like what makes an icon disappear from the dock when it’s quit versus what makes it stay there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John How does the fact that I dragged an icon one space to the left mean that it’s forever on my dock, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the model hasn’t changed in 16 years, but it is kind of a weird model. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say this thing wasn’t permanently on your dock and it was automatically terminated and disappears from your dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re like, oh, that application I was using, you made it quit? The OS, as of
⏹️ ▶️ John line anyway, reserved the right to just keep that application running anyway. So you could go to activity
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor and you say, wait a second, I thought preview just quit. I saw it disappear from my dock. Why do I still
⏹️ ▶️ John see preview and activity monitor? Is there some kind of lag or something? No, the OS would
⏹️ ▶️ John terminate preview, but it wouldn’t actually terminate it. It would keep it running just in case
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to launch it again, and you would click to launch it again, and it would be up instantly. This is, again, a lot easier
⏹️ ▶️ John to notice in the days before SSDs. Like in the days of spinning disks, you would really notice when you launch an app for real.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it would automatically terminate in scare quotes preview, but it didn’t actually terminate it, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John hit it from the dock. And so the next time you launched it, it’d be like, oh, here I am, I’m still running. You didn’t know that. Look, I launched it instantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I find this entire approach maddening, right? The thing that iOS does, which
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t help and people still love to force quit all their applications, but the thing that iOS does, which is, don’t you worry about whether
⏹️ ▶️ John an application is running or
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a thing you have to concern yourself with. The OS will manage all that. As far as you’re concerned, running application,
⏹️ ▶️ John not running application, they all look the same in the app switcher. From day one, we’ve required the applications
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to resume where they left off and have auto save and all that stuff. That’s the model of
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS. That is a fairly clean model, even if it didn’t account for the foibles of human nature
⏹️ ▶️ John that would result in millions of people swiping their applications upward all day long,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? The model on the Mac has never been like that and attempts to make the Mac like that, like
⏹️ ▶️ John sudden termination, automatic termination, and all the other stuff they did to try to iOS, ISFI,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS back in the lion days, have not been particularly successful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas the previous model that the Mac had, which is you launch applications, when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John done with them, you quit them. Windows are owned by applications, so you have a bunch of applications, each of
⏹️ ▶️ John which own a bunch of Windows. You save explicitly. You can save to save the current
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, you can save as a save in a new name. Like that whole paradigm, that was also understandable,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not quite as friendly as the iOS model. And I feel like where the Mac is now is in this
⏹️ ▶️ John uncomfortable in-between place where there’s a bunch of features of macOS that are trying to give
⏹️ ▶️ John you the benefits of iOS, but failing in various ways. And they’re also
⏹️ ▶️ John not configurable enough to let people with differing preferences decide, hey, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John me to yank preview out from under you because you glance away from it for one second? Or do you want preview
⏹️ ▶️ John to always stay running? Now, there are hidden plist keys for a lot of these things. You can disable automatic termination.
⏹️ ▶️ John You might be able to disable sudden termination, or at least there were hidden plist keys for these back in the day, but I’ve long
⏹️ ▶️ John since given up trying to tweak them, and for all I know, disappeared in recent OS releases. But these should be
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple insists on having these features, they probably need more flexibility in Mac OS. So it behaves
⏹️ ▶️ John the way the user wants it to or expects it to behave. Because the current default behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John is like dependent on whether the app supports automatic termination. And off the top
⏹️ ▶️ John of your head, do you know which applications that you use every day support automatic termination? Or do you just have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a great situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Buzzsprout, and Fastmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can go to atp.fm slash join to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join them. and we will talk to you all next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long.
Post-show: Automatic termination
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you actually know which applications support automatic termination on your Mac? Do you notice this happening
⏹️ ▶️ John or is this a non-issue in your life?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t know about the sudden termination thing. I did know about the automatic termination thing. But I don’t know. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of surprised that I mean, like, there’s areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of macOS that seem like common stumbling blocks for people learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco macOS or, like, you know, common, like, little sticking points that people just never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really understand who aren’t like super nerds. And you know I think like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disk image distribution of apps is definitely one of those things. And I think window management,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s certain things about it in application lifecycle management that a lot of people just don’t get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t mesh well with them. And this thing about like you know the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app being quit versus an app having no open windows, I I think this trips people up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often and is so counterintuitive to how most people assume their computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will work that I am kind of surprised that it hasn’t been changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time. Like if you look at the kinds of things that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done that make Mac OS worse in certain ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that they do in the name of trying to make it more easily understandable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for offices. There is so much low-hanging fruit that they haven’t touched,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially like in this area. I think of window management, application lifecycle management, disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco images. I mean, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they tried to, they, they, they touched it a lot. They just didn’t do a good job. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was constantly like every release around this middle period of like the 2011, 2012, 2013,
⏹️ ▶️ John they were changing stuff, tons of stuff related. So it was the whole auto save thing. The reason we got like duplicate
⏹️ ▶️ John menu items and you had to hold down modifier
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to get Save As, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, and I think that, by the way, that gets me every single time. Every time I open up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an image in Preview to make it a chapter artwork image or something, and I modify the size and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit, I go to Save As and I’m like, oh, actually, I modified the original. You’re welcome. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, that’s, see, again, I’m sure they had the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of intentions trying to bring the iOS data lifecycle to files on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac, but the problem is that when they introduced that, most of society
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had already been using computers. And most of society was already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very familiar with the saving and save as workflows and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meanings and behaviors on computers. And so by completely breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I think they caused more confusion than they could have possibly resolved by having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved to that system.
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t completely break it. If they had completely broken it, they would have been better. They partially broke it. That’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was getting at with my question.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know which applications support sudden termination? Because the Mac was and continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to be this mixed environment where some apps do that, but some apps
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. Some apps support automatic termination, some apps don’t. Some apps have save as, some apps don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’d have to essentially keep an inventory of your head and know, well, text edit and preview
⏹️ ▶️ John work this way because they’re simple Apple apps and they’re trying to demonstrate good behavior. But BB edit works the other way, but Photoshop works
⏹️ ▶️ John a different way, all the Microsoft apps work a different way. No one can keep track of that in their head. And if you try to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John to somebody, okay, let me explain to you save and save as or duplicate and whatever, or versions
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. You can explain that to them. But then they say, okay, but this app works different. How am I supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to know how this app works? And you’d have to say, yeah, well, some apps work the other way. And some apps work this way. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even say one is the old way and one is the new way. And we’re in a transition period because this transition period has been like 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years long at this point, right? It’s just been left in this inconsistent state where a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of sort of flagship simple Apple apps have one behavior. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, you also have apps like calculator that have the other behavior or things like iTunes. Like there have been various
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of I life apps that supported the when you close the main window, the app quits right for
⏹️ ▶️ John a little while. But then later on, they didn’t support that because they changed in various ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s too hard to explain. They never landed on one thing. In the classic days,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was one thing and it was not a particularly friendly thing, but at least it was consistent and once you learned open new
⏹️ ▶️ John save save as quit if you learned how the window opening closing works The only exception you had to explain was desk
⏹️ ▶️ John accessories and they were so different because they didn’t have a menu bar It was pretty easy. But now calculator. I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John I got a launch it to find out Calculator does have a menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ John But it also quits when you close the calculator window Like trying to explain this to a new
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac user and believe it or not every day someone who’s born has never used the Mac It’s impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas iOS has worked this particular way since day one and even though they’ve added Multitasking, you added background tasks
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that other stuff and it’s gotten more complicated It’s way easier to explain the paradigm of iOS, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPhone than it is to explain the stuff on the Mac So if I was still writing Mac OS X reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John I would probably still be complaining about this stuff despite the fact that I complained about these exact issues ten years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago They haven’t been solved. And so those of us who have Macs just muddle through that’s again. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why I was asking like Like, how do you deal with this in your daily life? Do you just have a memorized
⏹️ ▶️ John list in your head of which applications behave in which ways? Or do you just, are you surprised every time you go up to the file
⏹️ ▶️ John menu about what you see there and which modifier keys you might have to hold down to get the options you want?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, like for me, I think, I haven’t, it’s one of those things where like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ask somebody what the keyboard command is for something they do all the time, it’s kind of hard for them to tell you because it’s just by feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think the normal behavior of this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that are not document window based are, so like Calculator,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, like you’re not supposed to open Calculator and hit Command N to open up a new Calculator and then have multiple Calculators on screen sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s just a single window app. So I think apps that are not document based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are supposed to quit when their only window is closed. But apps that are document based that have the potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have multiple document windows open at the same time are not supposed to quit when their last document is closed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that to me, like, so I’m pretty sure that’s like the standard and I’m pretty sure that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John most apps do. But it’s not because
⏹️ ▶️ John preview and text edit both quit when you close the last window, eventually. And it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was trying to at one point say, hey, everybody’s app should do this, right? Like there’s one part of the Hig
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, oh yeah, if you’ve got a calculator app, it should totally quit when you close that window. It’s a particular mode that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can operate in. And it makes sense, I’m not arguing against that. Like they’re just the modern version of desk accessories. It’s a little bit confusing that they
⏹️ ▶️ John have menu bars, but so what, it makes sense. But the text edit thing was like, well, we wanna make
⏹️ ▶️ John it, like the whole thing with the dots that Casey was getting at, the whole point of that, this is also straight out of one of my old reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they wanted to do the iOS thing where you don’t know whether an application is running or not. And the best way to do that is, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John previously for all these years, we’ve had dots underneath, and the ones with dots are running, and the ones without dots aren’t running. What if we
⏹️ ▶️ John just take away the dots? It’s like iOS now, isn’t it? And the answer is no, it’s not like iOS at all, because iOS has,
⏹️ ▶️ John every single app in iOS has the ability to auto-save when you leave it and pick up where it left off when you relaunch
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and pretty much no apps in Mac OS do that. I mean, maybe BB Edit and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe a few other exceptional apps that are really good about state preservation like web browsers. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the way Mac OS works. So no amount of yanking the dots out from under us or having the applications
⏹️ ▶️ John quit, but not really quit, but quit, but not, you know, like it’s just so confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s hard to even keep track of all the different things that different apps are doing. And over time it has not converged. There
⏹️ ▶️ John has been no consensus. Applications continue just to do what they feel like doing to the point
⏹️ ▶️ John where, I mean, we’ve talked about this before, like hold down Command Q to quit Chrome. Why? That’s what Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like doing. People are accidentally quitting it. And it’s damaging if you accidentally quit and
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have the preference set to restore your session the way it was before, which is not the default in Chrome.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we get a little overlay that says, hold down Command Q to quit. That’s just trying to explain how the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John works to someone who hasn’t been using it for a few decades is extremely difficult and frustrating. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the solution is not just let’s make the Mac like iOS, but the solution is also not to just leave it in its current
⏹️ ▶️ John state. Cause it’s kind of a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it, it, when I started using the Mac, which was roughly Oh eight, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different enough from windows that it was very frustrating at first, but it was knowable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Oh, what do you mean? The mail is still open when I closed the last window. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumb. Why? Why would I want to do that? Well, as it turns out, You don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to have any mail windows open when you’re not actually reading your mail But you probably still want it in the background
⏹️ ▶️ Casey checking for mail So guess what you can close the last window and it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there still checking. Oh Okay, this makes sense. I like it. But now to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey y’all’s point there’s no it’s not knowable I mean it is noble, but it’s not effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not obvious. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a better word for it It’s not obvious. Like I think it is noble, but it is certainly not obvious And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even early on, like, okay, well, how do I know if an app is running or not? Because this, you know, mail is always in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dock. Well, there’s that little dot or that that I think early on it was a light like I’d said earlier. There’s that little light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and if the light is on that means mail is running and if the light is gone that means mail is not running. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, that’s a little wonky but I can get behind this. And it was pretty straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now it is neither obvious nor straightforward and that’s really unfortunate.