441: Meals at Home
30 Jul 2021Playdate, Photo Memories, MagSafe Battery review, and the “quick, very very brief topic” of Apple Music and Spotify.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- Everyone, but especially Americans, please get vaccinated!
- More Safari Updates
- Live Text will be available on Intel Macs too!
- “Scorch marks” on Lightning connectors
- MagSafe “Soap Dish”
- Elective repairs for cosmetic damage at Apple stores
- RFSolution: How do I empty my Google Drive trash‽
- Casey’s Apple Music impressions
- Casey’s iCloud Photo Library impressions
- Casey’s MagSafe Battery Pack review
- Post-show:
- GM’s new battery tech
- Marco is going to a Phish show!
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Chapters
- Is U2 a jam band? 🖼️
- Playdate preorders
- Sponsor: Sanity.io
- PLEASE get vaccinated!
- Safari keeps digging
- Live Text on Intel Macs
- Darkened pins on Lightning connectors
- Bedside MagSafe follow-up
- AppleCare+ for scratches
- RFS: Empty Casey’s Google trash
- Apple Music, “very briefly”
- Sponsor: Fastmail
- Photo Memories 🖼️
- MagSafe Battery review 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Mini-Neutral: GM’s new batteries
Is U2 a jam band?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco skipped ATP last night, which is to say we all skipped ATP last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey night, because he wanted to watch slash listen to the first Fish concert,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you just mentioned, that had been performed in God knows how long. A year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. And, you know, I wanted to make fun of him real bad, but truth be told, I would feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similarly if I were Marco. And then Marco and I were chatting earlier today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I had explained to you that I had just, days you had sent me an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage, I had just finished splitting up a three-hour MP3 that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had recorded using Audio Hijack off of Chrome playing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SiriusXM website on Friday night when Dave Matthews performed their first concert
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in God knows how long, a year and a half, I suppose. And then I was using Phishin, this is I guess a de facto ad read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Rogamiba, but anyway, I was using Phishin to split all these tracks up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was doing all this because that’s the best thing I can do to get as close as I can to like a soundboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording of Dave Matthews Band. Marco, what did you do to get a soundboard recording of Phish?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well I just bought the season pass on livephish.com, their officially sanctioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live recording vendor. A couple hours after the concert was over, I could download my mp3s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right from the native app that runs that, well I think it’s a Java app, but it’s an app that runs on my Mac that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the bulk downloader or you can know right you know right from the website if you want to and get all these recordings for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I think it’s about nine dollars a show when you buy the season pass like I do and I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the same website watch the show live in 4k professionally produced in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course oh god you’re killing me smalls you’re absolutely killing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me yeah the the live stream I think that cost about 20 bucks I think and something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was great because I could you know I as I mentioned previously on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it would be really like a quite a cultural moment to see as a Fish fan to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the very first show back since COVID shut everything down for almost two years for them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really was. I was very happy to see it. Like and I didn’t want to go as far as to actually go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Arkansas in almost August, but you know, to actually go see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in person. But I’m very, very glad that I watched the live stream. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s funny, of all the things that we that our Wednesday night recordings have gone up against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we have decided to just have the show anyway it’s things like presidential debates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the World Series like all sorts of like major events that we’re like we’re gonna have the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway but damn it when the first fish concert after two years is about to start that’s what that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I draw the line it’s too much so I sat on my couch alone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and watch this fish concert, streamed in glorious 4k with soundboard, everything. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, cause they have a hell of a team behind the band and they really produce things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at very high quality live. And so you get an amazing experience of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very multi-camera setup and the highest quality visual and audio stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fantastic. Like to be a fan of this band is so much better than I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a fan of any other bands simply just in how well they serve the fans.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well maybe not so much better in terms of storage space. I do wonder if the band has
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of deal with like storage makers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well as I mentioned before like in most for all the recordings of the shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just download the mp3s. Like they offer FLAC, they offer 2496 FLAC. I don’t download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those. Like I just download the mp3s. I think they’re…
⏹️ ▶️ John I was saying like it’s just a never-ending series of downloads. Like you buy the season and pass and just like, there’s however many
⏹️ ▶️ John shows there are per year, even an MP3, it’s just megs and megs of just constant data on your hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless I suppose if you just like pick and choose shows, and like, oh, this wasn’t that good a show, do you just download
⏹️ ▶️ John them all? You mean you’re paying for them all?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It just seems like a- I download
⏹️ ▶️ John would I pick and choose? Well, I’m saying, so this never ends. I suppose the expansion of storage, as long as
⏹️ ▶️ John the expansion of storage outpaces their output, you’ll probably be fine because if you’re happy with MP3s,
⏹️ ▶️ John the files shouldn’t really get any bigger from this point on, I guess. I mean, to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you a data point here, all of 2019, oh wait, I missed a few, hold on. Yeah, okay, now all of 2019, they played 41 shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a pretty busy year for them, and that was a little under 15 gigs. That’s really not bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 41 shows is a busy year? 15 gigs a year dedicated to your favorite band.
⏹️ ▶️ John That stuff seems hefty, but as time goes on, that will be less and less, because storage will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess. Oh, come on, if you too play that many shows, you’d be there. I don’t, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John no. You have quite a tolerance or, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the record, Dave Matthews banned 73 shows in 2019. Just throwing it out there. But anyway, that being said, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave Matthews does have some forward thinking, for lack of a better term,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey policies. Like they let you record concerts using microphones in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audience. And they have since forever. Yeah, the tapers. Very early on, yeah, tapers, exactly. Very early on, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would actually let you hook into the soundboard and then very quickly they said, eh, that’s not such a great idea anymore. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then there was a brief window of time when people realized that they could grab one of the band members IEMs, their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in-ear monitors, and so they would start recording that. And that would be a very odd mix because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be like super heavy on the drums because it was Carter, the drummer’s IEM feed or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then the band put the kibosh on that, so now we’re back to just microphones in the audience. And you’d be surprised the fidelity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a microphone on a taper tower that’s like 30 feet up in the middle of the audience. It is way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than you would expect, but it is still straight trash compared to what you’re listening to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just so frustrating because I feel like the bands, I know you’re gonna be offended by this, Marco, I’m sorry, but I don’t feel like the bands are that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different in spirit. Yes, I know the fans are very different and so on and so forth, but I feel like the spirit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of the band is not that different. And the music and the band members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the style. Yes, yes, yes. But nevertheless, I feel like Phish gets this so very right in the Dave Matthews band.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I would go so far as to say it gets it wrong, but it certainly does not get it right. And I am very jealous. and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be buying all of the shows if I were able to, just like you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because like, you know, Phish went through a similar thing with, you know, allowing tapers, first allowing soundboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap-ins, and then eventually they caused problems, so they stopped doing that. But, you know, it’s a great example of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where there is demand, try to address it. Try to give, if people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John are telling you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over and over again, in big ways, we want live recordings of your shows of the highest quality we can get, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can find a way to sell that to them, with terms that everyone’s happy with, That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, take advantage, address the demand rather than just trying to either ignore it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or pretend like it’s not there or try to stamp it out, just unaddressed. If you can address that demand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s usually a good idea. And in this case, yeah, Phish does a fantastic job with doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You too, 15 shows in 2019. They’re getting old. Busy bees. They’re getting pretty old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you won’t download them because that might use three gigs of your hard drive space on your very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small hard drives. You two,
⏹️ ▶️ John Very short thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We can all agree on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I have many live recordings of their songs. I probably don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s how you know they’re not a jam band. Right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there, you go. That’s exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I’m surprised you and I agree on this, but yes, I completely agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, is this hard to agree on? I don’t think anyone has ever suggested that you two is a jam band.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, I’m more talking about our longstanding different definitions of jam band, wherein I think for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco it’s a flavor of music, whereas for me it’s about improvisation. We’re not going to reopen that can of worms for the love of God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason I started talking to Casey this morning about the show is that, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m watching the live stream, so excited, I’ve made this whole event out of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right as the band walks onto the stage for the first time, the camera pans out, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flanking the left and right of the stage are two giant digital billboard screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and during the performance they turn those off. So you don’t you’re not you know have seen like a giant Miller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light ad on the side of you know at the Walmart amphitheater here in Arkansas, but as the band
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walked out on stage everyone starts cheering camera pans out and they hadn’t turned the billboards off yet and what were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they showing an ad for an upcoming performance there of Dave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matthews band. So flanking the stage of this amazing moment targeted
⏹️ ▶️ John targeted advertising right. So I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yep so flanking the stage of this amazing moment for me. This fish fan is two giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ants which made Matthews man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The system works Marco. The system works.
⏹️ ▶️ John People listen to fish also like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, that’s the thing they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t but yeah some do, but probably not the common case.
Playdate preorders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of ordering things online, did you guys get anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or order anything shiny and yellow today?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure did! I’m right there, one o’clock today, I was there ordering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two playdates for my family.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there’s three people!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well two was the most you can order at once. I didn’t want to try to abuse the system. I know from experience that two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is generally the right number for a portable system in our house. Actually, the reason I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, look this is a game system I am not much of a gamer but the other two members of my family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are occasionally I will take a risk on something gaming related that is fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not because it’s like the best system with all the specs like I don’t I have no interest whatsoever in the ps5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the xbox x series whatever no interest in those things at all because those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know the high-end systems or shooting people in high definition I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly be less interested in that. But, like little fun experiments here and there, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like fun systems that are kind of more, you know, casual audiences, or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going in a different direction. Things like the Nintendo Wii, those I tend to have fun with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least for a brief time, you know, before the fad wears off. And the last time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I took a risk on buying a portable system that I wasn’t sure how much I would like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I thought it might have a chance of being something fun, was was actually when the Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Switch came out. A friend of the show, Colin Donnell, who actually, you should follow Colin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are a programmer or whatever, because he does a lot of really good stuff. He makes a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of really good commentary. He always is starting some kind of new, interesting project. He’s doing some developer assistance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco projects right now. But he also is really good about talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Twitter about mental health issues as a developer. You know, facing mental health challenges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenges he’s faced, helpful things if you’re facing mental health challenges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially as a programmer. So Colin Donnell’s a good follow. But the reason I bring him up is that the last risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I took, right in the middle of Switchmania, Colin had placed a couple of pre-orders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and had gotten one more than he needed. So he offered to sell the Switch to me at cost, which was very generous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that time because they were selling for well above cost on the third-party market. And so I took a risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bought the Switch from him. I had no idea whether it would be good, whether the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family would love it, and it was like the greatest hit in the family that we’ve ever had. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone loved it, it was amazing. So much fun, I mean, you guys remember the early Switch days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So much fun, it’s still one of the most played things in our house. So I decided with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the play date, let me take a similar risk. It’s not that much money, it’s like 180 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not a huge risk, and I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be a lot of fun. Knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Panic, seeing the developers they have on board, seeing some of the preview articles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the press that got hands-on time with it, with some of the pre-release games, it looks really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. I trust them to make it really fun. And at that price, I decided to take the risk. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes those risks pan out for me and little fun game stuff for my family. And I’m pretty sure this is gonna be one of those risks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or one of those times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, John, did you order one?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I had a reminder set up on my phone to go off to remind me to do it. reminder went off I’ve ticked my phone to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the pre-order I already had the page loaded in mobile Safari and I had no bars
⏹️ ▶️ John because I was out of my house and
⏹️ ▶️ John was kind of a shame and I was too far away from any place where I could get signal so
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I mean I ordered it I pre-ordered just one it was kind of disappointing that
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean I kind of knew there might be a signal quality issue like well might be hard but I’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John there the second the thing open so surely it’ll get through. Turns out, no, it didn’t get through. The place I live, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely understand it. I usually just blame it on rich people not wanting cell towers in their area.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would pay so much money to put a cell tower in my
⏹️ ▶️ John right now. Please, just plant it in my backyard. I don’t care if it’s an eyesore, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John want cell signal. But anyway, everywhere around where I am, like a whole neighborhood, it’s just, cell signal is so
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. I think I’ve talked about this before. I think the frustrating thing is both of my kids’ schools are essentially cell signal dead
⏹️ ▶️ John zones, which is extremely frustrating because one of the major tools parents and children use these days
⏹️ ▶️ John and especially in COVID times and all that stuff to communicate about meeting up to pick up and drop
⏹️ ▶️ John off because you can’t like drive up to the school and pick up your kid because every other person is doing that because none of the kids are riding the bus,
⏹️ ▶️ John is texting. And what happens when you can’t text or call, it makes life more difficult. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John all this to say is I ordered, but my order is not coming until 2022, apparently, which is a shame. But on
⏹️ ▶️ John the bright side, don’t cry for me too much. I already used a Playdate in person two years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago WWDC with the panic folks so I’m glad I’ve already got to touch
⏹️ ▶️ John one and try it and even you know play a little bit of one of the games and stuff like that so
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I’ve already got a leg up but yeah I’ll be waiting a little longer for mine and honestly I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really play handheld systems for RSI issues but I just bought this just because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just so it’s so cute and so interesting and I’m actually I’m very interested in the games
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re developing just because of the constraints the game developers are under I just want to see what they produce. And in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of RSI, I’m assuming most of the games won’t be the type of games that you have to sink 500 hours into, unless you want to.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m hoping I can like play them and get a flavor for it. And then, you know, I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John hand it off to my kids. I’m kind of afraid they’re gonna destroy it. But anyway, I’ll buy a second one for preservation
⏹️ ▶️ John purposes once they come
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco out with the cool pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John holder thing that goes with it. Yeah, like the speaker dock thing. Yeah, that does look neat. I just want that to
⏹️ ▶️ John have that on my desk, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John the issue of Edge Magazine that they were on the cover of and everything. It’s just, I feel a vicarious
⏹️ ▶️ John sense of pride because I know the people who made it. It’s really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, they should put status board on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The resurrection of status
⏹️ ▶️ Casey board. Oh, that would be so amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because they’re selling this desk stand for it and Panic wrote status board. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know if they could get that approved though. Yeah, kidding, they have a strict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco review process there. That’s right. I’m curious to see, because they have what looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a fairly compelling developer story ramping up there. This is not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m putting Overcast there or anything, I probably wouldn’t do that just for time reasons, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that might become a really cool hobbyist platform as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m curious to watch it, because it looks… I too handled one at WDC a couple of years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a brief time, and it looked and felt delightful as you would expect. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I expect that it’s going to be a pretty fun platform. And I mean, they they sold out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they had, it’s not like a like sellout situation where you just can’t get one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they said they’re making like the 2021 manufacturing batch is 20,000 units. And so if you and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it told you when you ordered whether you were one of those or not, and they sold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the 2021 batch of 20,000 units in in about 20 minutes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty good indicator that there’s gonna be a pretty well-sized community for this device out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that I think, especially also considering it’s a pretty well-sized community of a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of nerdy people, I think too. So that suggests there might be some fun hobbyist stuff on here as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m looking forward to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, people who don’t know, every Playdate is a, what do they call it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John console world, like a dev console, or what do they call it?
⏹️ ▶️ John kit. There you go, thank you. is a dev kit, like there’s no special version of this hardware you need to develop games for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every single one that you get, you can develop for and the ID to develop for it is free.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s just, if you buy a Playdate, you might not care about it and don’t wanna do any of that, but if you do, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing else to get. So, and it’s, you know, it’s monochrome, it’s a small screen, it’s a limited environment.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re interested in making a game with a very simple game API, it’s kind of like going back in time of like when APIs were simpler,
⏹️ ▶️ John when hardware was simpler, you can make a game with far fewer resources
⏹️ ▶️ John than would be required even to make like a PC game. Or you can do this type of stuff on, you can make a
⏹️ ▶️ John web game or any kind of thing, but you have to like kind of impose the limits on yourself and decide that you’re not gonna do everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in, you know, full color, 3D, so on and so forth. The Playdate is, will limit
⏹️ ▶️ John all this, you know, on its own. So you will be within the constraints of the hardware and you’ll get to experiment with gaming. It’s actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine a pretty good platform to learn about what it means to write a game because you won’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John lost in the weeds of like, oh, I need to do this. I need to learn the shader language to make this cool shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome sphere. And it’s like, no, you’re just, let’s move some pixels around on the screen and make a fun game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You didn’t ask me if I ordered one. Did you order two? Well, so here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is going to be the heavier part of the scale? My unabashed, complete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frugality slash cheapness or my incredible fear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of missing out? So which do you think won? No, the FOMO
⏹️ ▶️ John dominates, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It absolutely did. I, because I am a professional, will have mine in this year because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not a poor planner like John. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I understood that it was a risk. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco content with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You plan to be out of your house. I am content with my trade-off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had the pre-order time in my calendar as a block of time. Like, this time is blocked out. Multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alarms set at different intervals before. So I would make sure that if I was out, I could get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home to be ready for it. It was all set, man. I even, I woke my phone up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on my desk, so the screen would be on, so that the Apple Pay checkout, I wouldn’t have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the screen to unlock to first show me that. Like, that’s how prepared I was. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my word. Anyway, I did order one. I have no idea if I’ll like it or not, but it looks super cool, and it, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am easily swayed by fatty things like that. Like, there was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three week window of time I was in, what was it, middle school or high school, that I was obsessed with Tamagotchi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it lasted like three weeks, but man did I enjoy that thing at the time, until it died. But you know, you can’t win them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and if you end up hating it, you can scalp it to John for a nice profit. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John long as you keep it in pristine condition, I’ll take it. Oh, are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding me? I would rather sell my car to like a family member
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a friend than sell a Playdate to you, John. There’s no chance. If I breathe on that thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be considered good condition at best.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just put it in your back pocket when you wash your car and jump to clean the roof. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right. We all screwed up.
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PLEASE get vaccinated!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should probably start the actual show. And I just wanted to make a brief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plea and reminder that if you are in the United States of America and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are over 12 years old, please, please, please, please go get your vaccination if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can. It would be really, really helpful. The Delta variant is starting to really take over here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not having already taken over. And it’s super duper contagious. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that none of that should be controversial. And whether or not it’s a panacea, whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a silver bullet, I can tell you that every bit of science that I’ve read says that the vaccines help and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they certainly don’t hurt. So if you can, on behalf of those of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who have children younger than 12, on behalf of those of us who are immunocompromised or can’t take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or can’t get the vaccine, please, if at all possible, now’s a great time to get vaccinated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re an American. For those of you who are not American don’t have access to these, I genuinely, my heart goes out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you. No snark. It’s a really tough place to be, and I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have the ability to get your vaccination sooner rather than later. But one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for those of us who are American and who are lucky enough to have an ample supply of vaccines available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to us, please do your part. Do your part for other people, even if you don’t want to do it for yourself. Do it for your friends. Do it for your friends’ kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do it for relatives. Go get your shot. Get vaccinated if at all possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It would make Uncle Casey really happy. Please and thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as a reminder for people in the US, the vaccine is free, which is so rare in healthcare in this country, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it literally is free. It’s never the case. I know some places
⏹️ ▶️ John will ask you for insurance information. You don’t have to give it. The vaccine is free. No one will take any money from
⏹️ ▶️ John you for it. You can get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and please do. We as Americans of our generation are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so fortunate that we’ve never really been called to serve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our country in a really big way, in a way that was mandatory. You know, for those of us who serve in the armed forces,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a different story and we respect them very much. But fortunately, most of us, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our generation have not ever been drafted or been forced to serve our country in some way. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are lucky to be in that position. This is one area where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we really need to all step up and do it. Because As Casey said, not everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can. People who are immunocompromised or have other conditions that prevent them from getting the vaccine, they can’t get it in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cases. So every one of us who is able to get it, please
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve your duty to society. This is what we have to do. We all have to work together to get this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done, to finally beat this virus, because we’re not out of the woods yet at all. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like we’re gonna gear up for another winter where we’re gonna have some problems. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we’re not out of the woods yet. We need everybody, we need as many people as we can possibly get to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please step up and serve society by getting this done. And anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your life who refuses to get it, I know that’s a really hard thing. I have people like that in my life as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a really hard thing to try to convince them or we have problems with a lot of rhetoric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our society right now, but do whatever you can do to get yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and anyone else who’s able to be vaccinated, to get them vaccinated, please do it. Serve the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by doing this. It’s very, very important. It will literally save lives. Please do it.
Safari keeps digging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on to far less important things. I I just can’t be bothered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by these Safari changes yet I’ll be bothered about it when the final, you know GM lands, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone else seems to be really intrigued The day-to-day machinations of Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Casey updates you especially John So I am I am passing the chief summarizer and chief baton to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you for at least this segment John Tell me what’s going on with Safari these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple keeps changing it. Like we said in the last show So they’re not done with the changes. And if you look at the build date
⏹️ ▶️ John on the betas that we’re looking at now, even these took place a while ago. So Apple continues to work on this
⏹️ ▶️ John design. Here’s what they’ve done recently. Again, this is probably not the end point, but just someplace,
⏹️ ▶️ John a stop along the way. In macOS Monterey, the latest beta, the reload button
⏹️ ▶️ John is gone from the choices in the customized tool bar. Remember at first
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t there, then it was there and it was backwards, then it was there and it was forwards. Now it’s gone again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? I don’t know. I’m the only person who probably cares about this reload button. I want there to be one and
⏹️ ▶️ John I want it to be facing the right direction. Why did it disappear now? Who knows? But it’s gone, just FYI.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone on Twitter pointed out that they added darker outlines around the window widgets, the little red,
⏹️ ▶️ John yellow, and green circles. All the window widgets, even in current MacOS, have like a little bit of an
⏹️ ▶️ John outline, but they made the outlines darker. The theory is that it lets the window widgets stand out better from a similarly
⏹️ ▶️ John covered background, because remember the background can color, can color that toolbar in Safari. And they added
⏹️ ▶️ John an outline around the address bar, whereas before it was just kind of like a solid thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, anyway, they continue to tweak. I didn’t dig too much into the Mac one because I’m just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John see. Like the most important thing is that they didn’t change is you can still choose the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John to have the tabs below the address bar, right? And the tabs still don’t look like
⏹️ ▶️ John tabs, which as we mentioned in the last show doesn’t really make any sense because the whole reason they look the way they do is because they had to
⏹️ ▶️ John be those, those quote unquote tabs that transform into the address bar and the address bar is
⏹️ ▶️ John a rounded rectangle with text in it, so it made sense. But now that they’re in a separate line, I don’t know why they just don’t go back
⏹️ ▶️ John to looking like tabs, but fingers crossed on that one. The iPad, iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ John Beta 4 finally has the standalone tab bar like the Mac one does. Apple more or less
⏹️ ▶️ John said they were gonna do this, so it now looks much more like the Mac one. Again, it’s inexplicable why these things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are supposed to be tabs look exactly like the address bar, unless you know that, hey, they used to be up next to the address bar and they would transform
⏹️ ▶️ John into the address bar when you clicked on them. But if you don’t know that, this design doesn’t make any sense. So there’s iPad. It is now
⏹️ ▶️ John caught up to the previous mess from the last beta. Gruber had
⏹️ ▶️ John some things to say about what they’ve done to iOS Safari. I still haven’t installed iOS 15
⏹️ ▶️ John on any of my devices, so I’m just looking at this from the screenshot, so I’m kind of glad. What Gruber says is,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are nine tap targets in the new toolbar in beta four. that’s nine tappable
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons or effective buttons on a single phone with toolbar. Apple’s own example in the human interface
⏹️ ▶️ John guidelines of a toolbar that’s too crowded has nine buttons. Like literally there’s a screenshot from the human
⏹️ ▶️ John interface guidelines that shows a toolbar in iOS app and says, you know, provide ample touch targets for interactive
⏹️ ▶️ John elements. Try to maintain a minimum tappable error of 44 by 44 points for all controls. And they show
⏹️ ▶️ John green check, yes, look, three buttons in the toolbar, plenty of room to tap them. Red X, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John nine buttons in the toolbar. Apple literally has nine buttons. Now you’d be forgiven for thinking there aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually nine buttons, but Gruber provides a handy diagram with arrows showing. If you tap over here, it’s the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John tab, then there’s the back forward navigation, then there’s the address bar, then there’s a reload button, then there
⏹️ ▶️ John is another thing that you can tap for previous tab, I guess. Oh no wait, I forget what that other
⏹️ ▶️ John one is. I can’t tell what that region does. There’s a share button, there’s a tabs
⏹️ ▶️ John button, and then there’s the next tab thing. This is all, everything I just described is from the left to the right edge of
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone. So, it seems like they heard the complaint that it was too minimal and there weren’t enough functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just jammed everything they could into that. It’s still floating lodgings, it’s still up above the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, we’ll see what they do next version, just to let you know things continue to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, the iPhone version is still killing me. It’s just this bar, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco floating capsule thing. We’ve seen a number of mockups now from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designers who are more talented than I am, two toolbar tall mockups. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a two row toolbar on the bottom that slides up and then collapses into the collapse state like we have now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is so much better than what they have now. I think that the main, the cardinal sin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iOS version is this floating blob state. Because not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it block a whole bunch of content and it wastes a ton of space, that if it was a double
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high status bar, you would waste about the same or less space and still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more room for more controls and be more usable. But also, the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it messes with web content continues to be a big problem. Web content assumes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a rectangle viewport and they assume to be able to pin stuff to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edges of that viewport, controls, content, things like that. And so, so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web pages are still broken by this. And so I feel like any design that relies on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overlaying critical browser controls over parts of the webpage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can’t be moved out of the way easily, or that just try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to automatically adjust the web content and have it flow around it, and that of course keeps breaking and breaks a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different things, those attempts are going to fail. They’re not gonna be usable, they’re gonna break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too many pages, and the web is not going to adopt to them uniformly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and perfectly. Safari as a web browser needs to accommodate the web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it is. And the web as it is really expects a rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco viewport. And there’s nothing they can do to fix every single web page in the world. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give us back a rectangular viewport. It’s hard enough having the bar shrink and hide in the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like iOS 14 and before having the bar like shrink and show and have the content at the bottom occasionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, collide with the tap target to expand the bar or whatever. That’s bad enough. This makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even worse because it tries to then render the background content behind the bar and so it’s this whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is never going to work in addition to I think looking hideous and being really cluttered and unreadable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like any part of the page that’s covered up by this floating bar or its giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drop shadow it might as well not be visible. Like there’s no there’s no utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to showing me a significantly occluded part of the page. I don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the left few words of the paragraph that’s below that or like part of the sentence that’s covered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a giant drop shadow but I can’t see the sentence that goes between the top of the bar and the bottom so I can’t actually read it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting no benefit by rendering more of the page behind these controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same way that we get no benefit by rendering additional background color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or border color up in the notch area. Like there’s no there’s no benefit to that. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that because the notch is a hardware thing that, you know, kind of has to be there for their current goals, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess we’ll work around it and try to put something up there so it doesn’t look like an Android phone, but the bottom is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like that. The bottom, we can render however we like, and web pages are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly more frequently assuming the bottom is a straight line compared to the top. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this behavior of this floating bar going above the content with this giant drop shadow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is always going to cause problems and doesn’t look very good and is a usability failure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hope, you know, it seems like Apple is just digging and digging and digging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deeper with this design. Like it seems like they’re committed. Oh, we’re going to keep this. This isn’t a bad design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We just need to add a few things here and there and just, oh, add one more thing here. And just, they’re just jumping through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoops trying to make this design work. It’s not going to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The sooner they realize that, the sooner they can make something better. But until then, they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digging and digging and digging and they’re just, it seems like they got their heels in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dirt just saying, nope, we’re gonna stick with this. This is not a bad design, damn it. This is gonna work, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna make it work. And it’s just not gonna work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said, this is still back in time, so who knows what they have actually changed. And as we mentioned the very first time we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about this the spec that allows web pages to accommodate for this isn’t some Apple specific thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s part of the CSS spec where you can find like the safe area insets essentially of a webpage,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? The trouble is that most websites don’t implement this and certainly don’t implement
⏹️ ▶️ John it towards the bottom because if they implemented at the top, it’s because of previous iPhones, which as Mark pointed out had the notch
⏹️ ▶️ John that essentially did force webpages to do something different to accommodate Apple’s hardware in this case. It’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit more excusable. It’s like, well, Face ID is awesome and we all love it. And if there’s gonna be a notch, it’s what they’ve chosen to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like they’re making the same choice here, but the difference is when you explain like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, here’s a bunch of stuff you webpage authors have to do to accommodate our new phone with Face ID. You can say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple, you could have not had the notch. We had this discussion in the show many times. You could have not had the notch and just made it straight across.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would have made everyone’s lives easier. But I do see the benefit of Face ID. And in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, you know, Apple, you could have just had a regular toolbar on the bottom and web developers wouldn’t have accommodate
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but there’s no but. It’s like, but I see the benefit of a lozenge with a drop shadow. No, I see more
⏹️ ▶️ John problems with that. I don’t like the lozenge with the drop shadow. There’s no benefit, like there’s no benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other side of this thing. We know web page, all this, you’re gonna have to change your stuff, but there’s a benefit on the other
⏹️ ▶️ John side of it. Because if you just did something that simpler, like a toolbar on the bottom, web
⏹️ ▶️ John page developers wouldn’t have to accommodate this. And I mean, I personally agree with Marco, I don’t like how
⏹️ ▶️ John this looks, and I don’t see any benefit for it being a floating lozenge. And it really does read like,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, what we’re seeing is weeks back in time from Apple, so it knows what it looks like now, but it really does read like someone really wants this floating
⏹️ ▶️ John lozenge, and they’re just gonna do whatever it takes to somehow get this floating lozenge to ship and they just keep throwing more stuff at
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s like, hey, think about not making a floating lozenge. It’s like we all like the idea of things in the bottom. We all
⏹️ ▶️ John like swiping to get other tabs. Like that’s all good. We like that. That’s the benefit we want. The floating
⏹️ ▶️ John lozenge is nothing. There’s no part of this that requires a floating lozenge and a drop shadow,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that is the root of the problem. And I feel like eventually, hopefully this already happened at Apple, someone say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s list the benefits of the design and let’s list the downsides. And let’s just say, is there
⏹️ ▶️ John a way we can change design where we keep literally all of the benefits and eliminate the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are bad and also make it so web page authors don’t have to do safe variants
⏹️ ▶️ John of this? Now, you could be argued that like, well, this is a forcing function and really every web browser should already do safe variants,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s for everything. That’s a nice view of the world, but if you’ve been a web developer for a decade or two, you can know that any
⏹️ ▶️ John argument that says what the web writ large quote unquote should do is probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John a winning argument and change happens slowly. I don’t think Apple can force the entire world to
⏹️ ▶️ John use safe area insets in their CSS any more than they forced everybody to accommodate the notch. You know, Apple-centric
⏹️ ▶️ John web developers accommodated the notch, but most didn’t if you go to websites and look at how they
⏹️ ▶️ John handled the notch. So, fingers crossed for the next beta which will, you know, which already got baked,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess two weeks ago or whatever.
Live Text on Intel Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Live Text, which is the thing where you can select text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of like an image or things that the computer doesn’t know is text,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is coming to Intel MAX as of Mac OS Monterey Beta 4, which is really exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A friend of the show, Jason Snell, wrote, Live Text uses the neural engine on Apple Design Processors to convert text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and images into text you can select and copy. But in the just released fourth beta of Mac OS Monterey, Live Text has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also been enabled on Intel MAX, which is very exciting. I’m very happy about that because at the rate we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going, I’m not going to have an M1 Mac for quite a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Snell says that they’re using GPU-based processing because, of course, the Intel Macs don’t have a neural engine in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we talked about this earlier, the features that were not an Intel Macs, maybe because they weren’t written for it. You know, if
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature was written for the neural engine and there isn’t one, oh well. But if there’s enough demand, of course, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can write a version that works without the neural engine and apparently they did because I think there was demand. This is a great feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of all of Apple’s upcoming operating systems that I’m glad to see on an Intel Macs. I tried it.
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s got a little bit of the characteristics,
⏹️ ▶️ John the case we’ll probably describe later in the show, of Apple features where like, hey, there’s nothing to do. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John works. And so I was on my Intel Mac running Monterey Beta 4 and I just said, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John so how do I, I wanna try this image text thing. Do I have to do something special
⏹️ ▶️ John or, and so I just went to a webpage and there was an image on it with text and I’m like, so do I,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, can I select the text? Like, nothing was happening. I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I need to save the image and I opened it in preview. I was like, no, still, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just get the regular cursor. When I drag my cursor and click on the image, it like just drags the image. I’m like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not selecting any text. So I was like, how is this feature supposed to, and then all of a sudden my cursor
⏹️ ▶️ John turned into an I-beam. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, oh, there it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, there’s no indication that you need to do anything at any point, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ John actually take a second. I mean, obviously I’m being an impatient person and I use the computer very quickly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know this. It’s probably like less than a second, but like, I’m just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me try it. No, I can’t select text. I used to do this when my relatives would come over and they would watch me use the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and they could not keep track of what I was doing because, you know, on the old, I’ve talked about this before, on the old like 68K Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing to the screen was so slow that if you use them a lot, you can anticipate where like the okay
⏹️ ▶️ John button would eventually draw itself and click before the entire dialogue has even entirely drawn itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was very difficult to track what I was doing. So I tend to move very quickly on the computer. All this is to say
⏹️ ▶️ John is that I think it probably takes fractions of a second on any image anywhere in the OS for you to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to select text, but it’s not actually immediate. But it really does, as far as I can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell, work everywhere. Anywhere there’s an image, like I went back to the webpage where I couldn’t select text and then I could select it there too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like everywhere, like, you know, in preview and web browsers and any graphics,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s just, I don’t know how it works. I don’t know if it’s only certain image APIs. Maybe it doesn’t work in Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. I don’t actually know, but anyway, it works. And it works really well and it’s super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of in some ways, I don’t prefer the TechSniper technique, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I will continue to have TechSniper installed, I think just because sometimes, first of all, I think TechSniper
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes does a little bit better job. I gave it some challenging things by like Googling parking signs, you know, with the
⏹️ ▶️ John blurry, you know, sign text telling you all the times you can and can’t park.
⏹️ ▶️ John Text Sniper sometimes does a little bit better. And also sometimes I actually want to just sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John drag select a region and say, do what you can to get this text out versus selecting the text or rather
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting around for the IBM cursor to appear. And that of course is the weakness of all these type of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John features, which is like, is it going to work eventually or is it not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John work eventually? Because I’m assuming there’s some parts of the OS where it’s not going to ever actually work. And the only way you have to know that
⏹️ ▶️ John is wait a long enough period of time where you just assume okay But it hasn’t happened by now. It’s not gonna happen
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s a bit of a bummer. But anyway, it’s cool. And I’m glad it exists and I’m glad it exists on Intel max
Darkened pins on Lightning connectors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about scorch marks on lightning cables John
⏹️ ▶️ John I Mentioned in the last show I was talking about the little dark marks that you get on the tiny little contacts on lighting tables sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said whether they’re scorch marks or corrosion or whatever they are. I think we’re all familiar with them So
⏹️ ▶️ John someone named mr. Glass wrote in to say this. I don’t know. I I don’t have a good way to gauge the
⏹️ ▶️ John Reliability of information, but I thought it was interesting and worth considering and presumably there is a way we could test
⏹️ ▶️ John it So here we go. The discoloration on lightning cables is actually metallic plating slash corrosion due to 5
⏹️ ▶️ John volt power being continuously applied to the pin when the phone is not connected. It is definitely not a scorch mark due to heat, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ John To avoid this happening, you can unplug the cable from power whenever you’re not charging your phone. Of course, nobody’s going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John This problem has actually been silently fixed in current official Apple lightning cables as they do get revised.
⏹️ ▶️ John The latest USB-A cables will pulse a smaller voltage of about 1.5 volts at a very low duty
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle less than 1% with a piece of custom silicon specifically designed to address this issue. So in
⏹️ ▶️ John theory, if you buy a brand new USB-A to lightning cable from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and use it in some context next to an older one, you should not see the corrosion
⏹️ ▶️ John on the newer one because it’s not continuously applying voltage. This is the first I heard of an actual like
⏹️ ▶️ John concrete cause and effect explanation for this and with the added information that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has apparently known about this and fixed it. If this is true, I would love for Apple to say this somewhere, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s buried in a tech note or something, to let us know, hey, if you’re sick of getting these little scorch
⏹️ ▶️ John marks, maybe you should get a new,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, a little Apple sell more of its expensive accessories. Maybe you should get a new cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having said that last show, like I said, I’ve had these scorch marks on cables for the entire time lightning’s existed.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve never actually caused a problem. The only problem they cause is mild anxiety and me worrying that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to cause a problem, but for me personally, they never have actually caused a problem. So maybe Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John silence on this issue is like, we have actually improved it, but it’s not important enough for us to tell you about. So just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just keep buying Apple stuff and eventually you won’t have scorch marks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ll make, take another opportunity to pitch the thing that I discovered only, what, a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago. The magic of electrical contact cleaner. I don’t know what’s in it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is a purpose-built product. And I, you know, on my old phone that I had taken to the beach many,
⏹️ ▶️ John many times. The shutter button was getting a little bit wonky and my speakers that I have connected to my PlayStation 5
⏹️ ▶️ John and my old PlayStation 4 have a flaw in them where the little potentiometers get wonky
⏹️ ▶️ John and they start making staticky noises when you turn them. Electrical contact cleaner. It’s probably some terrible toxic
⏹️ ▶️ John substance, but it does what it says. If you have something that makes electrical contact and you wanna clean it, put this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, it will clean it right up. I haven’t actually tried it on lightning cables because again, I haven’t actually had any problems with the scorch
⏹️ ▶️ John marks, but I imagine it would work great.
Bedside MagSafe follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you remind me the context of the MagSafe soap dish? I do not remember what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we were talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is Marco trying to get his phone aligned on his bedside and sometimes having a little bit of trouble with his little
⏹️ ▶️ John suction cup. MagSafe thinks he’s got to align the two circles. And I mentioned having a soap dish-like thing, and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe there was third-party ones like that. And a listener named Lacey wrote in to say, here
⏹️ ▶️ John is a – I’m assuming it’s like a 3D printer CAD model of a soap dish. Looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like it. Yeah. something like this for a while, but I never had a name for it. Can I call it Soap Dish
⏹️ ▶️ John and sell it on Etsy? Are you gonna want royalties or what? No royalties, feel free to make this and
⏹️ ▶️ John sell it on Etsy. I think it might be a tough sell because it looks kind of nerdy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of people actually wrote in, like when I was talking about that issue with like aligning my phone on the MagSafe thing. Because as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned, like my MagSafe is like adhered to my nightstand. So like with that micro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suction tape. So it’s great in the sense that it doesn’t move so you can pick the phone up with one hand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is why I did that. because I really wanted that. But a lot of people wrote in to say that if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just leave the MagSafe puck floating, like loose, just resting on the stand and don’t adhere it to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand so that it can move, you can just kind of wave your phone over it by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an inch or a half inch or whatever, and the MagSafe puck will lift itself up off the table with magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco force and perfectly align to the back of the phone. So that’s another option.
⏹️ ▶️ John Make tiny scratches in the back of your caseless phone too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is why you’re not getting my play date. This is why. This moment right here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I didn’t make,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a thing. Go look at, even if you have a case, you’ll see the little circle from people who use MagSafe all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. I’m looking now, hold on, I’m looking. I don’t see any,
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably more resistant than cases, but in both cases, just like dirt can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was gonna say, like I do see a couple of minor scratches on my back glass, but none of them are in the MagSafe area. They’re all like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, around the edges and stuff. There’s nothing in the MagSafe area. So that’s the magic of glass. It’s pretty,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s much more scratch resistant than aluminum.
AppleCare+ for scratches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, from a couple episodes ago, this has been floating around in follow-up, we were talking about, I think Marco had said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you wanted to potentially try to do like an elective AppleCare Plus repair, and then people had said, no, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t do that. Well, a self-professed genius wrote in to tell me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scratches were added as a part of our troubleshooting classification. Yes, scratches are part of our updated VMI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what that means. It wasn’t advertised to us that it was a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option. So if you go to a store and they say no, know, just ask them to type in scratches and it’ll pop up. This genius
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says I only discovered it by chance a few months ago, it really was a quiet update. We used to have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upset customers that wanted to get stuff fixed for cosmetic damage and would call AppleCare once we denied a repair. AppleCare would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn around and give them a customer satisfaction code, a CS code, and get the repair done for free for their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote bad store experience. I’m sure Apple got tired of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in other words, mom says no, go ask dad. Yeah, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, actually, that’s pretty true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure you’ll sound great talking to the person at the Apple store and saying, just type scratches.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They’ll hate you so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They will, they absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People love when you tell them how to do their job.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, type this into your computer, especially because you’ll hear this on a podcast and then do this in real life
⏹️ ▶️ John for years from now when everything has changed and you’ll just. Yeah, that’s true. That’s very true. You can ask
⏹️ ▶️ John nicely and say, you can say, I heard on Accidental Tech Podcast, a great show that everyone should listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to and you should preload on all your iPhones, that there’s a possibility that you might be able to get scratches repaired.
⏹️ ▶️ John We say it in a nice way, maybe it’ll work.
⏹️ ▶️ John you include an ad for the show, that might also work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, something like that.
RFS: Empty Casey’s Google trash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I have a request for solution, please. So we’re gonna talk in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a moment about me and iCloud Photos. But simultaneously with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switching to iCloud Photos, guess whose Google storage is exploding at the seams? This guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I thought to myself, well, screw it, I’ll just- Wait, why is your
⏹️ ▶️ John Google storage exploding?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I only have a terabyte and I’m using it all in Google Photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, Google? But that’s not related to your iCloud Photo stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, so, all right, let me back up and try this again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I missed something. How did Google get involved in your iCloud storage library? OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, no. So I have moved all of my stuff to iCloud Photos. Thus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Photos is redundant. And it’s not, I know, John, it’s not literally redundant. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would prefer to only pay for one of these things. And since I’m not uploading most of my photos to Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore, because their desktop uploader just has absolutely stank since like three years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seemed as good a time as any to get rid of Google Photos. Right? Are we with me so far?
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, sure. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK. So simultaneously with this, there’s an urgency behind it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a terabyte of storage with Google Drive or what have you. I don’t even know the vernacular. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am basically out of storage, which is fine in and of itself, except that also affects my email, which is on a legacy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Apps for your domain thing. So because I don’t have any storage, I am probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days away from never receiving email, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John You would have been days away from never receiving email, even if you didn’t do the iCloud photo storage. You were just
⏹️ ▶️ John getting close to the edge of Google and it just happened to be simultaneous with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you. Correct,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my request for solution, my RFS, which is something that does not exist, but I’m trying to make a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By the way, it’s super fetch. So my request for solution is, how in the name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Zeus’s hindquarters do I clear out my Google storage? Because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally gone into Google Apps, like the admin interface, and I have told it, Nobody on my domain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can use Google Photos because I’m the only person on my domain. So I turn that off. And then all this stuff seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be still lingering in Google Drive. And I’ve deleted everything from Google Drive. And even a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days later, it appears that it is all still lingering, still taking up all of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space. And I don’t know how to get rid of it. And it is so inscrutable to me what I’m supposed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. So please help
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you still see it in your Google Drive? Like when you go to like-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I did, not anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John But so when I did this, I think I talked about it on the show, when I did this, I had to delete a bunch of stuff because I was messing
⏹️ ▶️ John with my Google storage. Like this was back in a time, and I’m not sure if this is still true, when like I was using
⏹️ ▶️ John the terrible Google backup thing, and it would put things into basically a folder
⏹️ ▶️ John in Google Drive, and it was a huge folder that had all the photos in it. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John like deleted that folder in Google Drive, but then it went to the Google Drive
⏹️ ▶️ John trash, essentially. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried emptying the trash.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and do you remember? But I just, you probably don’t. You never remember these shows. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember I couldn’t empty the trash? Right, like I had thousands and thousands of photos in the trash, and I would try
⏹️ ▶️ John to empty trash, and it would just give an error. And so if I selected
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like 100 photos from the trash, and I hit
⏹️ ▶️ John empty those 100, it would delete, permanently delete those 100. But there was thousands of photos, so I was faced with like, do I
⏹️ ▶️ John sit here and select in batches of 50 or 100 and delete? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I contacted Google about it, and they said, Oh yeah, sometimes when you got
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of stuff in the trash takes a long time for them to get cleared out. But don’t worry about the error you’re getting. Cause when I hit the, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just empty everything from the trash button, it says, don’t worry, even though it gives you an error, we will eventually delete all this stuff from the trash.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sure enough, it was like a week later and eventually it disappeared from the trash and I got my space back. That said, I know Google
⏹️ ▶️ John has changed how they deal with photos and storage recently. So all this could be completely outdated information, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I would actually suggest trying to contact like Google support and tell them your situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you may get a crappy answer like I did, which is like, oh yeah, that’s a bummer, but maybe it will eventually work, check back
⏹️ ▶️ John in a week. But at least that’s better than, you know, not having any option, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ John you get some kind of explanation. And the other caveat, as you well know, Casey, is that what I heard from
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody who pays for the Google My Domain, whatever the hell it is, is that it’s worse than the free
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Like worse support, it has more bugs. Yes. Oh, see mine’s still free. Oh, you’re using the free?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, I’m sorry. No, no, no, I’m sorry. I’m paying for extra Google Drive storage on top of a free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Apps from my domain that was grandfathered from 84 years ago. Wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know they were still free. But anyway, I still hear that the Google from my domain is much worse than the, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just the plain old public version, just because that’s the one that gets all the bug fixes and everything and you people
⏹️ ▶️ John get nothing. You people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right. All right, so yeah, please tweet me or if you have to, write an email and explain to me what to do, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John out. Or just
⏹️ ▶️ John someone go in, someone who works for Google, just go in and empty Casey’s trash right now. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be acceptable too. I mean, an alternative solution, well, there are some aspects on this one, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could just post three videos to YouTube with copyrighted music in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think he wants to destroy his Google. Speaking of the Google backup thing, by the way, I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how long ago I did this, probably months, but I realized I had disabled the Google photo uploader, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it just kept grinding and grinding and never actually making any progress. And I didn’t notice, remember
⏹️ ▶️ John that I disabled it. I said, huh, the updater’s not running. I should launch it. Then I launched it and watched it grind the
⏹️ ▶️ John computer for like 17 hours without doing
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, oh, this is why I disabled it. So I’m kind of stuck with
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Photos uploading in that I don’t think I can
⏹️ ▶️ John upload my photos to Google anymore because the software that they give me to do that never
⏹️ ▶️ John like gets to the point where it updates anything. Cause it just says, oh, you want me to upload your photo library? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to look through it. Yep, I’ve got this file. Yep, I’ve got this one. And it never actually gets to the point where it
⏹️ ▶️ John decides to upload new stuff. And at this point, it’s months behind. And I let it run for like a week straight. And all
⏹️ ▶️ John it did was cause the fans on my computer to, or on my wife’s computer, which is even worse,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to run constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John and just thousands of Python processes to be running. And it never actually got to the point where it was doing useful work.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not sure what I’m gonna do there. I may be in the same situation as you soon, Casey, if I decide, well, if you can’t upload
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore, maybe I should delete what I have. Or knowing me, I’ll probably just leave the whatever half a terabyte that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have there and just say, well, at least this is a, you know, septuple backup of
⏹️ ▶️ John my library as of six months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I hear you. And you know, all things being equal, I would have just left it, but because I’m now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exploding through storage and I don’t, and I’d like to, I’d like to just get rid of that monthly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, fee, because I don’t have that much email, I don’t think. So I’d rather not pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for extra storage. And that means I need to get rid of all this, but I just can’t figure out how. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have an answer or if you work at Google, please feel free. Just clear that out for me.
Apple Music, “very briefly”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually speaking of that, a quick, very, very brief topic that we don’t have in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, which is John’s favorite moment in the show. I have been playing with Apple Music recently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I think I had mentioned on the show last week or two that I’m now a paying Apple One customer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’ve been trying out all these services that I hadn’t tried before, including Apple Arcade,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’d been using Fitness Plus. And now I’ve been trying to use Apple Music for the first time since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it debuted, you know, two years ago, whatever it was. It kind of sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I don’t know. Like, I really, really don’t want to. This is what cued me off on this topic. I don’t want to continue to pay for Spotify since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to be de facto paying for Apple Music, but it like sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we’re going to listen to your podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m going to have to listen to Overcast. I mean, I have no choice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but no, yeah, I would never listen to Spotify. I mean, come on. But here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I go to play a song on Apple Music and like one time out of three, I get some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey message about how I don’t have rights to it. What? Like, this is Apple Music. I pay for it. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an account. What? Two times out of three, it takes like an obscenely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long time for playback to start. Like stunningly long. With Spotify, it’s almost instant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And with Apple Music, it’s like one to two seconds. I’m not playing over AirPlay or anything like that. just on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to play a song. It takes, there’s a noticeable latency, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s Spotify, it’s fricking instant. Um, I mean, the thing I was expecting to, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate about Apple music is not having my Discover Weekly. Uh, well actually Discover Weekly, that playlist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been utterly ruined because it’s nothing but like, um, kids music now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the before, in the before times, both in a figurative and literal sense before, you know, my kids started requesting, you know, Disney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music all the time, that was a really good playlist that would just say, Hey, based on what you’ve already listened to, here’s other things you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like. And, and perhaps I’m wrong and I would love to be wrong, but as far as I know, there’s no like direct equivalent to that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple music or even that much of a spiritual equivalent and then release radar, which thankfully has not yet been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ruined by my children, by my children, that’s, you know, new stuff that, that is based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the things you’ve already played. So it’s the Discover Weekly could be older than dirt, but release radar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is all new things. And I don’t think there’s any equivalence to that in Apple music. If there are, please send me a tweet. Genuinely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love, I would love to see it, but, um, I figured I would miss that from Spotify,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but what I miss is an app that fricking works and is understandable. Like, I don’t know, I guess it’s just because I have so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much momentum with Spotify, but I feel like the music app is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Like it’s pretty, but functionally it’s okay. Sometimes it’s got like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this full screen, like playback cue, which I almost never want to see. And it takes me a second to realize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve got to swipe that down to go back to like the regular interface that I was expecting to look at. And the latency and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you don’t have rights thing is really driving me bananas. Like I don’t, I don’t dig it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so here it is, like we’re talking about $10 a month for Spotify, which is in and of itself, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much money, but you know, it over time, it starts to add up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to get rid of it if I can, but golly, Apple music is the, the, the, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service may be okay, but the interface, man, the app is just not great. Am I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys don’t really use Apple Music, do you? So I’m talking to- Well, I do. Okay, so tell me I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the way I use it though, is like an old man. I-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought I was doing though. So for some context here, while I have Spotify,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hardly ever use it. I have it basically, you know, for research purposes and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally like I’ll be referring to a song and maybe on top four or something and I want to get like Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco links, so I’ll open it up there and copy the link and make a playlist or whatever. So I use Spotify, but only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rarely. It’s not my regular listening. Apple Music, first of all, some of the problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re seeing with just weird load times and stuff, I see those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not all the time, but regularly. And it seems like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it almost feels like Apple Music is hosted by Siri. Like whatever is hosting Siri, I think is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey hosting Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music. In the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John when people will hear this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna hear two completely different sets of responses. You’re gonna hear a lot of people saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are you talking about? It’s fast and works every time for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re also gonna hear a lot of people who say the same thing that I’m saying, which is like, yeah, it breaks for me in all those same ways all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time too. It seems like there might be regional differences, maybe based on certain CDN nodes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or different data centers that you’re hitting, or just different internet weather affecting different people at different times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the same inconsistent performance problems that I see with Siri, I also see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Apple Music and with Apple TV hosted stuff. So it does seem like there’s some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, and this is not recent, this has been for years. This is like for the last decade and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in two different houses on two different internet connections. So I know that it’s not like my router
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. Like it’s not something weird like that. It’s whatever infrastructure is running a lot of these services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has some consistency problems just in certain areas or at certain times, and it just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work the same way for everybody. And so maybe the people at Apple actually think, like maybe it works great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at ADQ’s house, right? Like maybe they don’t see these problems, but certainly many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us do. So that’s part of it, that you just have bad luck with whatever servers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serving this to you, whatever infrastructure, and you’re just out of luck on that, and that sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, and I’m on a symmetric gigabit connection, as are you, I thought, or certainly fast enough. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, if anyone’s supposed to be having these problems, theoretically it’s not the two of us, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have super fast connections to the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s why it doesn’t feel like our local setup. It feels like a regional CDN node or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that being wonky here and there. Now, as for the actual apps, Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels confusing and weird to me because I’m not accustomed to it because I hardly ever use it. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, when I use it, there’s a lot of stuff about it that I notice instantly. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I notice how incredibly fast everything loads. Exactly. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instant. It still feels like a garbage web app, and so does, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music app is also a garbage web app. It’s just differently built, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a garbage web app. But in typical Apple web services style,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple version of the garbage web app is really inconsistent and relatively slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the Spotify garbage web app is fast and relatively consistent. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do find it is refreshing whenever I use Spotify’s app that I just see how fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is to just navigate around, to search for stuff, to find stuff. It is full of garbage as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, they have their own problems, but the speed and the responsiveness of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just so much better. Night and day difference. See also, I mean, look, this is exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same difference between Siri and Alexa for me. It’s exactly the same thing. As much as I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Alexa ecosystem, I’m almost totally out of it now. When I do occasionally use it, it’s just remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how fast it is. I just wish I could get that kind of speed from Siri and I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never do. But my main complaint here with these services is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music listening used to be a much more diverse ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It used to be, first it was like a hardware and physical media based ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where everybody had different record players tape players and CD players and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are all sorts of ways to do that. So then in the computer age you could rip everything to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mp3s or you could buy mp3s legally or get them off of Napster or whatever so everyone had these common files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of which were DRM free and so you could open them up and whatever music app you wanted and play them however you wanted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whichever interface you wanted and there was this wonderful dynamic ecosystem of everything. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the era of streaming you have this very small number basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two services that have enough scale to matter and to last. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything is being defined by the really crappy apps from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these two services. And the way everyone experiences music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or practically everyone experiences music these days, is through one of two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy sets of apps. And that to me is kind of a weird and sad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and dangerous place to be. I wish there was more diversity in these client apps. Now, that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of these services offer APIs to various degrees. I could write an app for iOS that plays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple Music. And there are people who do that. There are lots of apps out there. I’ve never found anything particularly compelling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re out there. So maybe that’s an area where this can be improved over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like there’s much of a market for it. It seems like most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the market just tolerates either Apple Music or Spotify or occasionally both, which I’ll get to in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a moment. The result is that the apps we use to listen to music have gone from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the different hardware in the world down to all the different software in the world, now down to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two crappy apps. And that’s, I don’t like where that has left us. And I hope that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t have horrible effects over time. But, so going back to your services question, do you keep subscribing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to both? Now, yes, in the grand scheme of things, we’re very fortunate. You can lose a 10 bucks a month and it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the worst thing in the world. but I do get how on principle, you don’t want to be having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redundant services that seem wasteful. The way I look at this, first of all, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying for Apple Music, you’re paying for Apple One for other reasons. So Apple Music is something that you’re getting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, quote for free, or at least, you know, for no additional charge, it’s already part of something you’re paying for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That doesn’t mean that you now have no reason to ever have another music service. I pay for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon Prime because of the shipping. I also pay for Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t care about Prime Video very much. There’s much more stuff I want to watch on other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services. And I know it’s not a perfect analogy because there’s catalog differences there, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the streaming services, there really aren’t meaningful catalog differences. So you could say Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is giving you, quote, the same thing as Apple Music and be largely correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although for Prime Video, I just noticed this last night, there are sometimes pricing differences. Surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John price. We wanted to watch a movie, I wanted to just watch to find out where it is. I subscribed to all the services and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John available for rent and purchase in many, many different places. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John rental price for Apple was $399 for the movie. The purchase price on Amazon was $450. Ooh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s purchase price was $14. So, you know, it’s, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it applies to Casey. But if you pay for a service in the case of Apple Music, but if you pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for a service, and you have it and you never use it, fine, you don’t need like I agree with Marco, like use the one that you like and pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that you you’d like and don’t worry about the loan. But just knowing that you have it is occasionally handy
⏹️ ▶️ John because I would never choose to watch a movie on Amazon. But when I’m in that situation where it’s like, oh, we wanna watch a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John tonight, but it’s probably not a movie we actually wanna own. Should I just rent it? Should I buy it at 450 versus $4
⏹️ ▶️ John for renting? Yeah, I’ll buy it. So we did. So yeah, don’t forget
⏹️ ▶️ John that you actually do quote unquote, pay for Apple music because like, say you’re looking for a song, like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying with catalog difference, say you’re looking for a song and you don’t find that on Spotify. Remember that you have Apple Music and say, hey, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s there and check it out. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think psychologically you can think of it as like, you know, you’re paying for one service by itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that Spotify, Apple Music, you’re kind of paying for it but, you know, very indirectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of not really and so it’s not super redundant. But you could also say, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re paying for Spotify because that’s what you like. You bought Apple One for other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. So you don’t even have to make this decision. like Apple One is worth it to you even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without Apple Music. So you don’t have to rationalize it this way. Now, I also consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the purchase of Apple Music through whatever means, whether it’s through Apple One or by itself, I consider it kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, I know this is gonna sound bad, I don’t mean it quite this bad, although it’s not that far off, it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like paying the mob to stop harassing you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, no, that’s why I got on iCloud Photo Library, so you jackasses would leave me alone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, but it is, so like, you know, Apple with their glorious push towards error increasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services revenue, they are continually further and further degrading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the user experience for people who don’t buy all their services. For people who don’t use Apple Music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Apple’s devices is increasingly sucking, and that’s only going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep being the case. Apple’s only going to keep tightening those screws to further and further drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services revenue. They will happily throw every bit of integrity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the user experience out the window to increase services revenue. They already are doing that and they will continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that to an ever-increasing degree over time. So it’s becoming kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard and annoying to use Apple’s built-in music app especially without being an Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscriber. They’re gonna keep harassing you, they’re gonna keep putting up full-screen interstitial ads, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna just keep being jerks about it. And as much as it sucks to just pay them off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have that be the solution, that is a solution. So you can largely look at like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Music membership is something that as a user of Apple devices, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to use their music app at all for anything, or use Siri to play music or anything, your life is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be made easier if you’re an Apple Music subscriber. This is not a good reason why you should be an Apple Music subscriber,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is a reason, and it is a real effect that you can consider like, okay, I’m going to pay their extortion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money so they stop bothering me so much. Again, I don’t love how this makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me feel to say this, but that is a value that they’re giving you. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco justify having Apple Music, even if you’re not actually using it to listen to music most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time, there is still value it is providing to you in that terrible way, but that is legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you’re right. And what I plan to do is continue to mess with it and try it because it may be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s as simple as me having, you know, gosh, it must be like 10 years of momentum with Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And basically once I really embraced Spotify, which was very early on when it was available here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the States, several years after it was available elsewhere. Yet once I really embraced Spotify, I rarely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used at the time iTunes and then eventually Apple music anywhere. Like I was all Spotify all the time. Occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would bust out, you know, Apple music or iTunes at the time. If I wanted to listen to like some Dave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matthews recording I had or some other esoteric recording I had that wasn’t on any of these services, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve basically been all in on Spotify for easily a decade plus I would imagine at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I do have a lot of momentum and maybe, maybe I just need to give it more time to sink in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t think that any amount of time of me using it is going to change the fact that I find it slow. It’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to change the fact that search kind of sucks. There’s, you know, who’s surprised that an Apple’s product doesn’t have great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey search? No way. And we’re going to talk about that more in just a minute with Apple Photos. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey search sucks. Apparently, there may be some sort of automated playlist. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting tips from the chat from Eric. WVGG has pointed out that there’s a playlist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It already flew off the screen, but there’s some sort of playlist that, uh, a new music mix. There we go. That seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it might be similar to one of my Spotify playlists. Although that being said, I have hand curated a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Spotify playlists, and I’m sure that there are like third party services that will let me integrate those into Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music. And if there’s a good one, please let me know on Twitter. But why doesn’t Apple music do that? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me give Apple my Spotify credentials, which is the sort of thing I would never normally do for any service ever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I trust Apple in this regard. Give, let me give them my Spotify credentials and let them just suck in all my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playlists. Like, why is that not a thing? So I don’t know. Apple Music so far, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might end up just sticking with Spotify and double dipping, so to speak, in terms of payment. You know, I might pay Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and implicitly pay for Apple Music. But I think you’re right, that I should probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, give it a fair shake and then just stick with what I like more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s, I’m not even saying don’t even give it a fair shake, just stick with what you like and don’t worry about it. Because honestly, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I consider Spotify, like, Like when I look at like alternatives, you know, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty heavily in most parts of the Apple ecosystem. And Spotify is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the only areas where I kind of feel like maybe I made the wrong choice. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of various, you know, details of my music listening and equipment setup and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty much bound to Apple music. Like, you know, our smart speakers around the house are all home pods now, except for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And so, and again, this is all very like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, Apple anti-competitive stuff, but Spotify still sucks trying to use it from a HomePod. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we’re gonna use App Music for that. Also, just in a legitimate feature difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not based on antitrust stuff or Apple’s bad things, it’s actually a very good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I mentioned before, Apple treats my own files that I upload and manage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better than anybody else does. I know Spotify has a feature where you can do that, but from all accounts, it sucks. I tried it a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, it sucked then. Having my own files, like the aforementioned 41 Phish concerts per year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a huge part of what I listen to, and that stuff is not available in streaming catalogs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least most of it isn’t. So I need a way to listen to that, like for my preferences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s just not a good way to do that with anything but Apple Music. And by using iTunes Match with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music, I have that available on all my devices. Like last night’s Phish show, I imported it this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning onto my computer, and it’s already on my phone. Like I haven’t checked it, but I know it’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I walk in the dog, I know I can play that show. It’s gonna be right there in my like recently added list in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music, because it’ll just sync over. And I bought these files on my own, downloaded them, imported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them into what used to be called iTunes and then now Music, and it just worked. That’s great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s not an experience that anybody else offers. At least not in a good way, or even a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remotely usable way. So I’m kind of stuck in Apple’s ecosystem, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of am jealous of Spotify people. Like most alternatives,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really, you know, I use Windows here and there for gaming stuff. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not tempted at all by Windows. I really never use Android, and I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tempted at all by that. Like most alternatives to Apple stuff, I’m not tempted at all by, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jealous at all of, and I couldn’t be less interested in. Spotify is one exception where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am envious of how much people love Spotify, how good it is at certain things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how it’s not part of my life and I don’t know anything about it and I’m not used to it and I’m not built into it and everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to get into Spotify would require not only for me to just not listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my Phish shows there, so I’d have to maintain still two different apps and everything, but also I’d have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to figure out the smart speaker situation in my house. And also I would have to get used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their app on the desktop, because I do a lot of my music listening on the desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think their Mac app is just utter garbage. Better than Apple Music in the streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, but in just the library playback part, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garbagey. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. Yeah, see, that’s the thing. I can’t speak for library playback, and I was gonna say, before you get well-actuallyed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last I looked, I haven’t looked in a while, you can, at least on the desktop, you can have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spotify client suck in all of your local media. I think you are correct either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there is an option to do it such that you could listen on your phone as well to like your Phish concerts, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t expect it would work very well at all. I’ve not tried it, but I would expect it would be garbage. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, their desktop app, it’s like Slack, which is not a compliment. Like it does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It works. It’s fine. I wouldn’t say it’s good. I don’t, I don’t, I personally wouldn’t say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straight garbage. It’s fine. name.
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Photo Memories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, we should move along. Let’s talk about iCloud Photos. So if you recall, I think the last we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left Art Hero, I was still uploading everything on my iMac. And that took,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember how long, but I want to say it was about a week to upload about a terabyte worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of stuff. And there was a nice little progress bar right on the bottom that showed me approximately where it was and how it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going, which was great. On my laptop, it just said updating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all I get. Do you want a progress bar? Too bad. Want to know if it’s actually working or not? Tough noogies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just come back. I mean, that is more than you usually get from Apple sync services. That is true. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now in the defense of Apple, I did have my laptop with me at the beach and the connection there was not stupendous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was only part of the time that the laptop was updating. But certainly some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portion, last like two or three days, I think, that it was downloading or doing whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magic was doing in the background that was part of that time while I was at the beach. But nevertheless, any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of indication that it was going to take more than a day would have been nice. Like I, as a nerd,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can expect that, oh yeah, it’s got a terabyte of data to churn through or download or God knows what. Of course
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s going to take a while, but I honestly expected it would be a day or two, particularly when I’m at home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this symmetric gigabit connection. And in fact, I had left the laptop wired via ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a lot of that time, just to try to speed things up. But I had no indication whatsoever. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t say, should this take a week, a month, a year? It just said, updating. That’s super annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Super, super crummy first run experience. Yes, I understand that most of you came to this with like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four photos and then built them up over time, but some of us come with 70,000 photos, okay?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think that’s that out of the ordinary. So I really think that Apple should look at their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user experience and provide some sort of idea as to whether or not this is working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank God for iStep menus, right, Marco? So I could see what kind of bandwidth is being used by a Photos app, just saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Moving right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along, having your photos everywhere and basically available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instantly. I mean, maybe not instantly, but pretty quick. You know, in the same way that I was lamenting that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Music is very, very slow, I haven’t, for the most part, had that experience with iCloud Photos. And having your photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically everywhere, basically instantly, hey, turns out that’s pretty cool. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s actually real nice. So-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco enjoying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So in that sense, that’s really good. Uh, it isn’t always as rel… Nah, reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is too strong a word, not the word I’m looking for. There are times that I’ll take a picture on my phone and then like immediately look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over at my iPad and it’s not there yet, which is a little bit frustrating. But I think that part of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is me having unfair expectations. And if I wait like a minute or two, typically it does show up. But still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even that said, as you know, I’m doing all of these things, including in a couple of cases where I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would like shrink down a video or, you know, and cut off, you know, the beginning or the end or what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Having all of that available, including your edits pretty much everywhere. Turns out it’s pretty nice. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wish you guys had said something. I really would have jumped on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Welcome to what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had I mean, I’ve used photo stream, you know, the thing where the most recent 1000 pictures or whatever is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey duplicated across all your devices, but I hadn’t been using you know, a proper, you know, iCloud photo library. Alright,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here’s the thing, here’s where everything takes a turn and it’s actually a turn for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the better, which I did not expect to say. I started glancing at their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different, I don’t know what the term is for them, but they’re, you know, like auto-generated albums, right? So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s day at the beach or what have you, things like that. Right. And one of the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones I noticed was mom’s 62nd birthday. Thought, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s really cool. Because sure enough, we had seen my mom on what I believe was the day of her 62nd birthday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s pictures of my mom, which I think I had identified as my mom’s name. And so, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think in my contact card for my mom, it says, this is my mother, et cetera, et cetera. So, I can understand how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this happened. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco going to say, this is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be real creepy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s like, wait a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute. Well, but hold on. Hold on. We’re getting there. So, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my contact card because I’m me, I have my mom’s exact birth date. They could cross-reference the day these photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were taken with the date and look at the contact card because it’s my mom. I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see how they could put together, well, this is indeed her 62nd birthday. Very cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. I’m not trying to say that this is not extremely cool and very well executed, but I can trace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as someone who wonders if he’s an idiot developer, I can trace how you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make this happen. So far, so good. A couple of days later, Go team,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey University of Virginia. Whoa. This was an automated album
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us at a University of Virginia football game. Now, the only way I can imagine they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were able to put this together was by like OCRing some of the texts, like recognizing that we were in a football stadium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and OCRing some of the texts in that stadium and somehow or another being able to decide with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable confidence that we were at a UVA game. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John that I had the geo tag. The geo tags, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, you’re right. I’m sorry. I did not consider that. You’re right. right. Geo to see this is why you do tag things, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re exactly right. The Geo tag was in there. But still, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, so this is slightly less impressive now that I thought about that, but I still think it’s cool. I still think it’s cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it put together. This is a football game, you know, we’re at a football stadium, et cetera. The two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that really, really blew my mind, and I don’t think this is Geo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tags, but maybe it is, or maybe I’m just not, maybe I’m not thinking outside the box enough. There was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, I should have this with you, Marco. Dave Matthews band, 15 December 2018. How?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do they know that? Like, yes, it’s geotagged. I think that was at John Paul Jones Arena at UVA. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey geotagged, but how did they know? Maybe, I didn’t look close enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so maybe there was a video that had a little bit of audio that maybe they ran through Shazam. That would be something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But not only that, not only that, the backing music was not one of my favorite, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Dave Matthew song. It was the space between now granted if you’ve a if you’ve ascertained that it’s a Dave Matthews concert,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like yeah, of course, they would go to Apple Music and put in a Matthew song. But like, that kind of integration is super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. I still for the life of me don’t know how they concluded that it was a Dave Matthews concert. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s something obvious that I’m not realizing like geotags, for example. But for the life of me, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how they pick that out. And I think that is crazy, super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So then it gets even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. So many jokes to make here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then it gets even better. There was a different concert, I went to what was up until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they broke up, my favorite band, Mute Math. There was a concert we went to wherein we had like paid for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early access and we got to watch like the soundcheck and so on and so forth. I don’t have any f***ing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea how they figured out that it was a Mute Math concert. Like none, zero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zilch. How the f*** is that possible? How is that possible? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this blows my mind. I want someone to explain to me how this works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the nice thing about it being Apple is that it has never occurred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that they’ve done something nefarious with my data or anything like that. There is no doubt in my mind that they are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somehow, some way, deducing via what they’re seeing in these photos and geotags and metadata and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so on, figuring out what these concerts are. The best answer I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come up with, and again, maybe this is the case, I didn’t look to see if there were videos there, Maybe I recorded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a song, which at a concert, if anyone has been to a concert recently, when you record
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even with an iPhone, even with a brand new iPhone, the audio fidelity is straight garbage. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible. So to be able to take a live performance of a song and run it through Shazam,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is usually not good at altered versions of songs it does know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe that’s how they did it. I don’t know, but this is blowing my mind and I find this extremely freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m putting, I was just looking through the memories. I usually don’t look too much into them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John every once in a while I’ll see them like in a widget or something. I just put in our Slack, one of the ones that often comes up for
⏹️ ▶️ John me, or variations on this. Like, because if you have Apple Post for a long time, you start to see themes or trends.
⏹️ ▶️ John You see it in the Slack channel. Four-legged friends and it’s pictures of my dog. It’s like, yeah, you’re right,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I do take a lot of pictures of my dog. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna do that, I mean, it’s mostly for one-legged friend, but I get this stuff like this a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot too. Check out the next one. but oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magnificent. Okay, so let me paint a word picture for you. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memories and there’s a lovely rectangular photo of underscore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Smith. And then the text written on this memory. So the title of this memory is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in all caps, underscore subtitle over the years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s because I have underscore written as his nickname and his
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco contact card.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do have pictures of him over the years, right? I know, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey makes me- That’s so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t like, and the thing is, I don’t think I have more pictures of Underscore than
⏹️ ▶️ John other people. Certainly I don’t have more pictures of him than people in my family, but this is what it chooses
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to make me. We have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free. You’ve got to, you’ve got to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh my God, that’s magnificent.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people find those things impressive. And it’s nice when like, just to see a little thing. It’s kind of like the photo widget. Like it’s very similar
⏹️ ▶️ John to the photo widget. The photo widget, the reason a lot of people like the photo widget is it will pull photos out based on
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, you know, sort of simple machine learning algorithm that says, there’s a bunch of people who you have lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of pictures of who are facing the camera and smiling, right? Like you can do things like that. It’s like, this looks like a good picture,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? As opposed to a blurry one or somewhere where you can’t see any people or whatever. And it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it pulls them out of your giant library of pictures. You say, oh, I haven’t seen that picture in years or I haven’t thought about
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing in years. And it gives you a good feeling. And that’s why people like the photo widget because we have a lot of photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and most people don’t do what I do meticulously go through and arrange them and do it. Like you just, people don’t have time for that
⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re not interested in it. And so they can do that for you. And these, the memories are the same thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of just finding one picture and throwing it up there, it’ll, you know, do like what Casey’s saying. They’ll make a little slide show.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll come up with a fun name, four-legged friends, you know, fluffy pets, or
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going through this bunch of ones, Disney World, obviously, you know, you don’t, it doesn’t take much to identify Disney World. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially things where lots of people have been, or if there’s a geotag and they know you’re in Disney World or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can make albums in a way that is convenient. It’s not the same as what a human would do, because you would look
⏹️ ▶️ John through some of the pictures like, oh, I wouldn’t have picked this one. And, you know, this is not the way I would have done it. But you’re getting this
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially for free. And like Casey said, you have the confidence that it’s like they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it on device and it’s not like they’re not transmitting it back to Walt Disney Company
⏹️ ▶️ John or selling access to Walt Disney to let them know how many people have been in Walt Disney World.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s just that’s not Apple’s business model. Right. So, you have some confidence that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not happening and you get to experience these fun little things. I don’t spend too much time looking at them, but I do look at them
⏹️ ▶️ John just because it’s fun to see, fun to see what the computer came up with, you know? Fun
⏹️ ▶️ John to see and sometimes critique the selection of backing music and the pictures and the animations
⏹️ ▶️ John and sometimes it’ll incorporate video into them. Or, you know, like in Casey’s case, they figure out Dave
⏹️ ▶️ John Matthews’ band and what song do they expect to put behind it. It’s pretty neat and I can imagine this just getting better
⏹️ ▶️ John and better because I think it’s not just a thing that we have technology for, I think it’s a thing that people respond
⏹️ ▶️ John to, like that they find appealing. I also think it’s one of those features that
⏹️ ▶️ John you often see in a keynote, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s gonna be like digital touch, where it’s a feature that Apple is super excited about, but no one cares
⏹️ ▶️ John about. But they present these type of features the same way, of like, oh, isn’t this great?
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes it really is. Like I said, the photo widget, a rounded rectangle that shows you
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures selected by a computer from your collection does not sound like a killer feature, but people love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would never have imagined how much I love the photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco widget. That’s the kind of feature that would be installed by default, and the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I would do when I updated that version of the OS is just delete that. But for some reason, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t delete it. I guess I was lazy that day. And it just starts picking this amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. I’m like, oh, okay, well, I’ll delete that some other day. And then days go by, and it keeps picking amazing stuff. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, wow, this is working pretty well. I’ll delete it next week. And then eventually I’m just like, no, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually, I’m gonna admit to myself, this is actually a really good feature and I’m not gonna delete it. I’m just gonna have my photo widget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my screen and it’s fantastic. I
⏹️ ▶️ John put one more in the Slack. Oh yeah, Fluffy Friends, I’ve seen the Fluffy Friends, but I put one more in the Slack. Obviously I have a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John boring life, so the memories thing is really trying hard to come up with something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Based on my location and things I take pictures of, it came up with a memory called Meals
⏹️ ▶️ John at Home and it hasn’t taken care
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of my plate from Thanksgiving 2020.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re right, you’re right, Apple. I do often eat food in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s delightful. Meals at home. That’s almost like sad, it’s like lonely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John home. I mean, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John eat that alone, it was a family thing, yeah. And I have to say that’s a good looking
⏹️ ▶️ John Thanksgiving plate, if I do say so myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s exactly what I
⏹️ ▶️ John want on Thanksgiving, it’s all featured on that plate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is pretty good. And I also am paging through now, I see one for Aaron and I’s 10th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anniversary, which sure enough was on our 10th anniversary. And that one, like things like that are, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still impressive, but they’re less impressive because in knowing me, I probably have my anniversary in my contact card, even though I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember it offhand, but, um, but I, you know, it looks at the card, it looks at the date the picture was taken. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, oh, okay, sure enough. That’s the 10th anniversary. That one, like, I still think it’s cool, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blow my mind, but freaking figuring out mute man and Dave Matthews band, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t understand how that happened. and I kind of wish I did. The only thing that does kind of stink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this is I forget what it was I was trying to send, but I think it put together like a montage, a video montage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from our beach trip. I was trying to send it, I think to Aaron, and it had some sort of completely arbitrary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you know, reasonably catchy music associated with it. And then I went to share it, and it said something to the effect of, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can’t share with that music, pick different music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, was this before you were an Apple Music subscriber?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, this is literally earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I guess because it’s baking the audio into the video, I guess they didn’t have rights for that particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey song, but if that’s the case, then like, don’t fricking use that song. You know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that was a little bit of a letdown.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but it makes sense if the most common case is that you simply enjoy this on your phone yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, all in all, I really shouldn’t say this publicly because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna get shamed by everyone, but I am glad that I listened to literally the entire internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have finally joined iCloud photo library. This so far has been going really well. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey search is not nearly as good as Google Photos, which is a bummer. I forget exactly what I was looking for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think I was looking for, oh, it was a picture of me, which we spoke about on the show many years ago, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a picture of me when I was a kid at that Lamborghini dealer. And I think I searched for like Lamborghini, it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. I think I searched for like exotic cars, something like that. And I came up with, I shouldn’t say it didn’t work. I came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with Lamborghinis, if I remember correctly, I came up with exotic cars, but I didn’t come up with the specific picture I wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I went into Google Photos, searched for Lamborghinis, and scrolled all the way back to the beginning of time, and sure enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was that photo immediately. So in that sense, it was a little bit of a bummer. Like, I wish their search was better,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I am still overall extremely pleased with this experience, updating,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notwithstanding. And now I’m riveted by their,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you, galleries or montages or whatever you call them. They’re super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a search experience with photos just earlier today. I was, we mentioned in one of the slacks
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re all in, what were we talking about? It was, oh, I’ve mentioned a celebrity, local celebrity sighting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was at my wife had a celebrity sighting a couple of years ago, and she also got to sit next to Bill Murray on a plane
⏹️ ▶️ John flight. And I was like, oh, I have a picture of that too. I should go find that picture. Yeah, good luck. And so I go to my photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library, my wife’s photo library, cause she’s, does apples understand families. And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John where is that picture of my wife sitting on a plane next to Bill Murray? I can’t search
⏹️ ▶️ John for my wife, because there’s a lot of pictures of her
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and that’s not gonna narrow it
⏹️ ▶️ John down. And so I go to the search and I’m like, all right, I guess like airplane,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. Like, is it just gonna show me pictures of the outside of airplanes? And now Apple search does okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John It shows me lots of pictures of like, out the window of an airplane or
⏹️ ▶️ John interior space of airplanes, but not the picture I want. Like, is it a favorite? Let me
⏹️ ▶️ John search for favorites. Doesn’t like, you know, I have a lot of favorites. I scroll for a while. And unlike Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t remember when the hell anything happened. I can’t even get the year, right? Cause I’m old. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know when this happened. All right. And so I’m like, all right, maybe it’s gotta be an iPhone picture,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Cause no one’s gonna, it must’ve been, it was just my wife and traveling by herself. And so for business, and so probably she
⏹️ ▶️ John just gave someone her iPhone to take a picture of the two of them together. Right? So it’s gotta be an iPhone picture. So I searched
⏹️ ▶️ John for, I make a smart album for all photos by iPhones. But let me tell you, that’s a lot of pictures too. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John scrolling and scrolling and I guess they don’t go past 2007, but still I’m not coming
⏹️ ▶️ John up with anything. And so now I’m like in desperation programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John mode. I’m like, okay, I go to Google images, I search for pictures of Bill Murray, I add them to the photo library, I identify
⏹️ ▶️ John the face as Bill Murray, add Bill Murray to my people, and I say, find other
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco faces like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I’m like, first I’m like, it’s like the text selection I
⏹️ ▶️ John just talked about, finding text in the photos. I put pictures of Bill Murray in, I import three pictures of Bill Murray looking roughly the age that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he was, right? At the time. And then I’m waiting for Apple Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the thing where it identifies a face, where it puts, I don’t know if Casey’s experienced this yet, but it puts little circles around.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you, it puts little circles around it and then you can type underneath the circles, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is whatever part, like that’s how you do it. And I’m waiting and it never does that. I’m like, okay, if I quit the app
⏹️ ▶️ John and relaunch, if I go edit the picture, there is a way you can do the info panel and do
⏹️ ▶️ John add face, where you can place that circle yourself. So eventually I just give up waiting for photos to identify, And these are
⏹️ ▶️ John all head-on, headshot, high-resolution pictures of Bill Murray. These are not challenging, like I can’t find a face
⏹️ ▶️ John in this picture, right? It’s right there, right? But it never does it. And of course, there’s no way in photos for you to press a button that
⏹️ ▶️ John says, hey, photos, right now, use CPU and memory to find faces in this one picture that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking at, because of course that would be too convenient. And they have to, it just does what you mean. You don’t have to ever do that. It’ll do
⏹️ ▶️ John it automatically. Eventually, maybe, who knows? Good luck. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I made the little circles. I said, add face to this photo. I tried to place the circle over his face, which is weird because it like
⏹️ ▶️ John repositions itself. And I’m like, are you finding the face? If you could do that, why don’t you just do that all the time? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I make the pictures, I type in Bill Murray, and then I go to the Bill Murray people thing. I say, find more
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures of Bill Murray. And it shows a spinner at least for once and says, searching for pictures, blah, Bill Murray, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. Sorry, couldn’t find any other pictures of Bill Murray.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ John that one I’m defeated and I have to fall back to the ultimate technique, which is to ask my wife. when we were on that flight.
⏹️ ▶️ John When we were on that flight. She wasn’t home at the time, to be fair. But as soon as she came home, I said, hey, when were you on that flight with Bill Murray?
⏹️ ▶️ John And she narrowed it down to the month and year. And I found the picture and guess what? It was a PNG image.
⏹️ ▶️ John It had no metadata about what it was. I don’t know where it came from. It had no metadata about what it was. Screenshot maybe? Maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know where the hell it came from, but it didn’t have any metadata about anything. It wasn’t taken on an iPhone. There was no lens
⏹️ ▶️ John information. There was nothing. And it wasn’t a favorite. So anyway, I made it a favorite.
⏹️ ▶️ John I changed the title of the image to Bill Murray. So I’m hoping like, you know, instead of like
⏹️ ▶️ John image one, two, three, four, five, I changed that to Bill Murray. I didn’t add a Bill Murray keyword because I
⏹️ ▶️ John felt that would be going too far, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco did identify Bill Murray.
⏹️ ▶️ John identify Bill Murray’s face. So the picture is called Bill Murray. Bill Murray’s face is identified in it
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a fave. And so next time I want to find that Bill Murray picture, I damn well better be able to type Bill Murray into the search
⏹️ ▶️ John field in photos and find it out. I didn’t actually test that. I should have actually, I would test it right now, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to switch to my wife’s account because again, Apple families. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree with Casey. Google search is better, surprise. Oh my God. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John one more Apple memories for you album I just put in the Slack. Christmas Eve 2020,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you guess what pictures it’s chosen to put on that album? Are those garlic knots?
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are garlic knots. I mean, I guess, sure. Like, yeah, we did have garlic
⏹️ ▶️ John knots on Christmas Eve 2020. We always have pizza. The traditional Christmas Eve garlic knots.
⏹️ ▶️ John We always have pizza on Christmas Eve. I don’t know when this tradition started, but we’ve done it for years and years. We always
⏹️ ▶️ John have pizza. Usually I have friends over and have pizza. And I guess this is one of the years that we decided to also
⏹️ ▶️ John add garlic knots to it. So yeah, Christmas Eve 2020. As you know, Christmas means garlic knots.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want garlic knots on Christmas. These look awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. I want it. All right, so anything else on photos? All in all, I’m really impressed. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not flawless, But in the same way that I’m like, in the same way I feel like Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, eh, I guess it’s okay. I’m like a step away from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s no good. It was Google with, or I almost said Google Photos, with iCloud Photo Library, I’m a step
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away from this is amazing. Like if search was better, I think I would be a million percent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on iCloud Photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John We will talk more about this in the future because I think it’s time to start having you do things
⏹️ ▶️ John with your photo library. I know it’s nice that Apple is doing things with your photo library for you, which is cool, but there are things
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do. So we’ll get into that in future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episodes. Yeah, there’s things that you could do too, John. You could geotag your photos. That’s something you could do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of them are, I think my geotag thing is actually working, like my Bluetooth pairing with my new
⏹️ ▶️ John camera. I’m pretty sure it’s actually working. I should go check, but I think all my photos are now geotagged.
MagSafe Battery review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we are running long, so we’ll try to make this brief. Let’s talk MagSafe battery pack. My two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jerk co-hosts didn’t volunteer to spend $100 on the MagSafe battery pack. So somehow…
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco bought one. Are you kidding? Did you? No, I haven’t. Oh, look at you. That seems inconceivable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does seem inconceivable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going anywhere. Like most of the time I’m spending, I mean, my battery life is not great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I spend a lot of time like playing podcasts through the phone speaker and everything. So my battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is certainly not good. But most of the time I’m in my house enough of the day that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if the afternoon has come and I see my phone’s down to like 60%, I’ll just plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in on my desk as I’m working. Like, it’s not a big deal. So if I was traveling, that’d be a different story. Traveling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no question, I would bring a battery pack. And in fact, the other day, I was running some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco errands on the mainland and I brought just, you know, a little USB battery, like a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standalone battery for that. And I was thinking like, it would be kind of nice to have the MagSafe battery pack right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not so nice that I’m gonna like drive to an Apple store right now in the middle of this errand trip and buy one for $100, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this little like $15 battery in my backpack is working fine for the once I’ve used it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna tell you since your wife is not here that we don’t say on the mainland, please don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you aren’t on Fire Island, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I’m speaking for everyone on Long Island. That’s different. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John if they give me that story, I’m not sure who where they it’s like it’s like the key to the city dispasses. I mean say you john speak for every
⏹️ ▶️ John person on island. I’m saying please please don’t say on the mainland.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean actually the more common phrases off island like I’m going off island, but it seems weird to say I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off island to go on to a different island.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but so you decided to make up your own phrase like you live in Hawaii and you’re going back to California, but that’s not what it’s like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they also cut. I mean you hear people talk called the mainland also, but can we go back to John’s cranberry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sauce for a moment on this meals at home picture?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you Are you complaining about it’s the kind from a can?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m, I think the ratio is questionable. That seems like- You think that’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much or not enough? That’s a very large amount of cranberry sauce for not that much meat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Any amount of cranberry sauce is too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John The meat, the problem, I think the meat, you’re misapprehending how much meat there is there. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of stacking involved, but I do agree that I like a lot of cranberry sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, no, no, no cranberry sauce in gravy only once in a while, you monsters.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t even like gravy? I’ve got gravy on the turkey as well, in addition to the cranberry sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yuck. All right, so let’s talk MagSafe battery pack again. I have never had MagSafe anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before. MagSafe battery pack, the TLDR version is, it’s good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version is, the long version is, let me ask you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it impossibly easy to twist a MagSafe connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing? thing because I’m looking at this like magnifying glass looking, you know, top of the MagSafe battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pack where you’ve got the circle of that, that seems to be the area that the Qi charger is within.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you got that like little stump coming off of it. And I don’t know what the situation is, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stump is nowhere near strong enough because if I look at this thing sideways, I can twist the MagSafe battery pack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is preposterously easy to twist. Like pretty much anytime I pick up the phone off the desk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t that time. So maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but many times when I pick the phone up off the desk or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wherever it may be sitting, I will twist the MagSafe battery pack. Now it’s not so egregious that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it stops it from charging, but it’s enough that it’s off kilter and it’s really fricking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frustrating. Is this a thing that you guys experience? John, you don’t have any MagSafe stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the little charger that I charge my AirPods on, but none of us have a battery. I think the key is this is a battery pack
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re expecting to pick up the both of them, right, at the same time, and that’s where you’re getting the twisting, and I think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the only one who’s experiencing that, because neither one of us have accessory that we expect to pick up with the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, right? Well, also, critically, like, all of my MagSafe usage is just my phone against the puck. Now, if you notice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, the MagSafe cases and full-size MagSafe things have not only the circle of magnets, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a little line of magnets below it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I’m talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the point of that line is to help stuff, you know, to prevent stuff from twisting, So it’s possible, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just not super strong. It is only a relatively small number of magnets compared to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire circle that form, well, most of the circle that forms the ring part of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it could just be that there’s not enough magnets there to counteract the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive amount of force that you are somehow unknowingly twisting the battery pack with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I work out every day, man. You don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Speaking of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John Quinn Nelson posted a video of a similar situation where he’s got the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and the mags, he’s demonstrating a problem here, obviously this is not like a real scenario, but saying he’s got the phone with
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery pack on his hand. And he’s saying if you do this, and you don’t think about it, and you go
⏹️ ▶️ John to press, like let’s say you press the power button twice to do Apple Pay
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, if you press the power button on the right side of the phone, and your
⏹️ ▶️ John fingers that are curled under the phone are merely gripping the battery case, you will succeed in just
⏹️ ▶️ John pushing the phone right off the battery case.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not counteracting your, like normally when you press the side button, your fingers are on the other side of the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John which allows you to press the side button while bracing the other side of the phone. But if your fingers are just on the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John pack, you’ll shoot that phone right off. Now I don’t think that’s a big problem because maybe you do that once and break your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and learn, oh, hey, when I press the side button, I have to make sure my hand grips all the way around the battery pack
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other side of the phone. But it’s another demonstration of what Casey was saying. It’s not too hard to twist these suckers
⏹️ ▶️ John off of there. And there’s probably not much they can do about that besides cranking up
⏹️ ▶️ John the magnet straight, which has its own problems, both in terms of weight and also in terms of number
⏹️ ▶️ John of things they can screw up with these very strong, tiny little rare earth magnets inside there. Because the underside
⏹️ ▶️ John of the battery thing, in case you can tell me if it is as it looks, seems to be like grippy
⏹️ ▶️ John rubber. So they’re trying to do as much as they can with the sandwich closing force and make a friction surface so it doesn’t slide.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like how tacky is that surface, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not that tacky. It’s considerably less tacky than the like, what is it, the plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey official Apple, like plasticky iPhone cases. You know what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the term for those? Yes, thank you. Those are way tackier than this. It feels vaguely similar, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not nearly as tacky. And then the exterior portion is even less tacky still.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so that’s a little frustrating. Coincidentally, when I first got it, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not done the compulsory update to my iPhone. And so when I plugged it, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn’t say plugged it in, when I stuck it to the back of my iPhone, it did show up as like a second thing in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, you know, whatever, an additional thing in the battery widget, but comically, it didn’t show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up as the MagSafe battery pack. The iconography was a lightning connector. And I was like, wow, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really weird. I thought it showed MagSafe there. And then I did the software update on my phone and sure enough, it worked as expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I found that very funny that that was what it fell back to. In terms of like in the pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s fine. I mean, I have dude pockets, so it’s, you know, they’re much more spacious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than your average women’s cut clothing. I don’t have a big problem with it. The weight, like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insignificant, but it’s not terrible. I think, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had it on my phone for day-to-day use for the last few days, just to kind of get used to it and have something to talk about tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see myself using this really very often at all if I’m not traveling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t yet tried using this as a bedside Qi charger, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is something that I use. I use a standard Qi charger at home, not MagSafe, but a standard Qi charger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my bedside table at home. But when I travel, I use one of those, I think it’s an Anker 5 USB-A port dinguses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I have a bunch of lightning and an Apple Watch cables hanging off of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t love that. And so if I connected this to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Inker Dingus and then just set my phone on there to charge overnight, I might like that. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I haven’t had the chance to confirm how the behavior is when it’s plugged in, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the phone, excuse me, when the MagSafe charger is just free ball and it’s not plugged into the wall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it says that it will not charge the phone past 80%, or excuse me, 90%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m curious if I use this as like a de facto bedside charger,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would it go to the full 100% or would it still cap itself at 90? And I’ll have to follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up next week on that. But assuming it will charge to 100%, you know, when it’s plugged into the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on and so forth, then I could see this being really useful for travel for sure. It definitely depletes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the MagSafe battery depletes faster than I would have expected. But all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in all, I do like it. I don’t know that I would generally have spent $100 on this thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the future world, maybe one day, eventually, when we can travel again, have I mentioned, get your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vaccine please and thank you. When we can all travel again, I can see this being super nice, but until that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to our sponsors this week, Fastmail and sanity.io. And thank you to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can support us by going to atp.fm slash join. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcasts so
Mini-Neutral: GM’s new batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of batteries and only charging to 80% I read an interesting article in Car and Driver
⏹️ ▶️ John about GM’s new battery tech, the pitches that, you know, they found a way to make batteries cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that they can try to make electric vehicles profitable at lower prices, yada yada, typical GM approach, like they’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Tesla model of making premium vehicles, they want something cheaper. And the battery pack that
⏹️ ▶️ John they come up with, you can see how it would be cheaper to build because it uses fewer cells that are bigger and all this other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But one thing they say about it is that they’re, unlike pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much every other carmaker, they’re not going to recommend that you avoid charging it to 100%. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John most cars, like most Macs now do the battery optimization thing where they say it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t charge your battery to like full full capacity. And it’s also better if you don’t like discharge it all the way to
⏹️ ▶️ John zero, like try to stay in that middle band for better battery life. And GM says we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have that problem with our batteries, you can charge them to 100% the time and it will be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, and it’ll go 250,000 miles or something like that. This could be bluster, these things don’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ John in the real world yet. I think the first vehicle they’re out is the new giant, like five bajillion pound electric
⏹️ ▶️ John Hummer that they’re coming out with. But it certainly is interesting. I would love for that to be on my laptop because
⏹️ ▶️ John now that I have laptops in the house that do that, I leave it turned on because I you know, like, well, this will extend
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life, but I feel kind of bad about it. Knowing that my laptops are all like only at 80%
⏹️ ▶️ John battery, it just feels like I don’t know, I wish they would just lie to me, like some cars do, and tell you it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John at 100%, and really it’s at 80%, just to sort of preserve battery life that way. Which doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel good, So I hope battery technology gets better soon.