472: File a Casey Radar
03 Mar 2022Casey’s new app, developer rabbit-holes, and predictions for next week’s Apple event.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: 🇺🇦 ATP Stands with Ukraine 🇺🇦
- Follow-up:
- There definitely is not a “cure” for celiac disease
- Conquering shared contacts with a shared iCloud account
- Several fascinating pieces of accessibility-related feedback
- Casey’s new app, MaskerAid
- Apple’s Spring Event predictions
- Post-show: Marco Christmas!
- Allston Christmas
- Paradigm Atom
- Sony A7 III
- Sony 35mm f/2.8 Lens (SEL35F28Z) (Marco’s most-used lens)
- Sony Sonnar T* FE 55mm f/1.8 ZA Lens (SEL55F18Z) (What John should buy)
- Sony FE 50mm f/1.2 GM Lens (SEL50F12GM) (What John wants instead, but will never buy, therefore preventing him from ever buying anything)
- Sony FE 85mm f/1.8 Lens (SEL85F18/2)
- LensRentals
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- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code atp for 10% off your first order.
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Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Pre-show
- Gut-correction corrections
- Follow-up: Shared contacts
- Sponsor: Linode
- Follow-up: Burned by ARM
- iPadOS accessibility limitations
- AirTags for accessibility
- Sponsor: Kolide
- MaskerAid
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Apple event next week
- Ending theme
- Marco Christmas
Pre-show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last week in the pre-show, I said I had stopped following the news very closely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The next morning, Russia started a war. So, you know, maybe poor timing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn’t laugh. I laugh with respect. I laugh at you, Marco, because, yeah, maybe not the best timing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not at all laughing about what’s going on in Ukraine. It is truly terrible. I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn sure I speak for all three of us in saying we stand with Ukraine. We find this to be an absolutely disgusting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey act of war. And, you know, we are certainly, our hearts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are with Ukraine. I don’t even know what to say right now. It’s just so stupefying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in 2022 this is still a thing that’s happening. And I just don’t even know what to make of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I’ll be the first to admit, I know basically nothing about the politics of the region.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco About you know, like I know there were a lot of things leading up to this. And I had the, you know, privilege
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ignorance of not really paying much attention because there’s a lot of stuff that happens in the world and I don’t have time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay attention to most of it and I’ve never been much of like you know a news junkie or anything like that and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no idea all the stuff led up to this and I you know I’ve been trying to educate myself in the meantime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know war is awful and this is not going to be resolved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably quickly or cleanly and you know lots of people around the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including Putin have have looked at the US and said well look you guys invade stuff all the time and yeah we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have done that and we shouldn’t have done it either. In almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, I think that has proven to have been the wrong move and also has always proven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be way more messy and lengthy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and costly to human life and everything else than we had initially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expected it to be. And I expect this to play out no differently. I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be a mess for a long time. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly large risks, I think, of escalations. And we’ll talk about that a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit. But this is not gonna be some quick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that’s out of the news in a few weeks or even a few months. I think this is gonna take years. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, yeah, it’s awful. Any kind of war is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awful. And it’s not productive to try to compete and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, why didn’t we care about XYZ that happened in the past that was worse or happened to other people?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s just get that right out. I think we can look at this in objective terms and say, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awful. And we all hope it gets resolved sooner rather than later, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though I know that’s unlikely. But best wishes to the people of Ukraine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was wondering, I mean, maybe this is more of a topic once we get to that in a second. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was kind of wondering like what, like are we supposed to do much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from here in terms of like, you know, not only, you know, things like if there’s good places we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco send donations that might actually have an impact, but also stuff like, you know, obviously don’t support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Russia business wise. But like, I was thinking like, you know, I run a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that is server side based. Like, am I supposed to block Russia from accessing that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know. Wouldn’t that just hurt a lot of nerdy Russians who probably don’t have any say over what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their government’s doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s really messy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to think about this stuff. You know, what kind of actions that are even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within our control that we even could take, first of all, that’s a question. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco among those that we could do, what should we do that would actually have an impact or have a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having an impact without also hurting a bunch of people who don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deserve to be hurt necessarily. Like, you know, the US has done a whole bunch of crazy stuff, and it’s had a whole bunch of terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaders over time, and not every American supported what they did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know, it’s a hard thing to navigate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is, it’s so funny you bring this up because I am releasing a new app tomorrow, we’re gonna talk about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later, and not to make this awful situation about me, but apparently here we go. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was wondering, should I not make this available in Russia? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a couple of reasons, that is not the choice I made. First of all, I lived through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the four years that just ended a year ago. So 2016 through 20, I lived through it. And suddenly, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey government was doing a bunch of things that I really didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like. And I’m sure that’s been true most of my life, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco was going to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suddenly. Abundantly. But it was abundantly obvious that my government was going in a wildly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different direction than I wanted. And I was just along for the ride. Like I did what I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stop it and to prevent it, but I was just along for the ride. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it wasn’t for the 2016 through 2020 era, I think I would have had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vastly different and less sympathetic opinion about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what I came down to is, first of all, there are a lot of honest Russians
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are also deeply upset about this. And they’re like, you know, going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the street and protesting and doing things that I don’t do in America, generally speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s mostly safe to do that here. Like, they’re putting themselves at tremendous personal risk to protest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this grotesque war. And so, and because my app could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you look at it in a certain angle, my app could be used to kind of try to prevent them from getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retaliated upon. And so because of that, I thought, you know what, I’m going to make it available in Russia. But I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these same thoughts and many people that are doing independent app development like you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and me, I’ve had these conversations with many of them and none of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have reached the same conclusion or for the same reasons. But it is weird and wild
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you or I, Marco, could even have this discussion. Like it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool in a roundabout way that that you and I have at least enough reach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this is a plausible conversation we had. I’m not saying that there’s more than six users of my app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever, and certainly not in Russia. But you know, this is a conversation that is on the surface a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable conversation to have, which is really weird and kind of a cool thing about 2022. Now, granted, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason we’re having this conversation is again, grotesque and awful, but I don’t know, it’s wild. It’s super weird. John, you’ve been quiet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are your thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think a good rule of thumb for trying to figure out what we as individuals should do is, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously we know no individual is doing anything to affect
⏹️ ▶️ John this on a sort of a geopolitical scale, right? It’s the government and the world governments
⏹️ ▶️ John are doing the big moves. But you’re right that if it’s weird that individual
⏹️ ▶️ John people have international businesses, in decades past, you’d be like, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I run the corner store in my town, but this doesn’t affect me. But now, if you just make a dinky
⏹️ ▶️ John little app, you put it on the app store, you realize, I have customers in Russia, what? It’s kind of weird. And so we do have
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of decision to make. And a good rule of thumb, I feel like, is for individuals,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is helping me see people discuss this, as an individual, you should try to do something that you
⏹️ ▶️ John think will help. So that would fall under the category of figuring out how to send money, or do like, what do you have
⏹️ ▶️ John that can help? You have time and you have money, and you can do that on an individual basis. And if a bunch of individuals
⏹️ ▶️ John do it, can help. So am I doing something to help? If on the other hand, you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at trying to do something punitive, uh, you know, I don’t like Russia, therefore I want to do something
⏹️ ▶️ John punitive that will punish them for their bad invasion. That’s not going to do anything in an individual level.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like punitive actions by individuals are probably going to be misguided, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just in general. Like I feel like that’s not going to, you know, you know, 300 million people
⏹️ ▶️ John doing an individualist punitive thing by saying, well, I’m never buying anything from Russia again, or I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to, you know, remove all of my movies that feature Russia from my collection and never want like
⏹️ ▶️ John anything you can think of it’s be like, I disagree with Russia, therefore, like it’s natural to feel like you want to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something to like fight back against that. But it’s, I think it’s the wrong way to go. So I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, look at the thing you’re thinking of doing and saying, Am I trying to help somebody? Or am I trying to do a thing that is punitive,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think the punitive thing for individuals is extremely misguided. And for nation states, seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John how the world has reacted, this is kind of interesting because, you know, for most of our lives, we’ve had these,
⏹️ ▶️ John we haven’t had, you know, well, we haven’t had World War Three, obviously. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and during my whole childhood, World War Three was a big thing because the Cold War was, you know, a big thing. And then the dissolution
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Soviet Union kind of put that on the back burner for a while. And we had all these smaller wars,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote, smaller wars. It was like, oh, well, they don’t have nuclear weapons. So it’s just a regular war. Just people died the regular way.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s okay. You know, but anyway, uh, and now to see it like, uh, uh, you know, total destruction of
⏹️ ▶️ John the planet is back on the table in a big way. That’s exciting for all us Gen X people. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the way the world has reacted to it is, you know, we have such an interconnected
⏹️ ▶️ John world these days that the whole world basically said, well, we’re not going to deal with you anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and just, I agree that I think it’s silly for anyone to withhold their apps or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John an individual developer, but if the whole world says, well, you can’t use our banking system, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John fly your airplanes over our air, you know, our airspace. We’ll stop selling you parts
⏹️ ▶️ John for all your airplanes because all your airplanes are like Boeing and Airbus. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple stopped selling its products in the country, probably mostly because the ruble was massively devalued. But either way, like
⏹️ ▶️ John basically saying like, you know, Russia, you might not realize how much the world
⏹️ ▶️ John is interconnected. And we’ll show you that by like the whole world turning their back on Russia, the whole world, except for like the six
⏹️ ▶️ John other dictatorships that are buddy buddy with them and China, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated situation. But I think that, like, I don’t think that’s, that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John ever had a situation like that, and I’m not a historian, so I don’t know, but like, where so many
⏹️ ▶️ John other countries have so much power over this country, like non-military
⏹️ ▶️ John power, like, what, you know, what can you do that will like, and it’s part of us,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t wanna isolate them or whatever and, you know, have them sort of turn inward and become even more dangerous. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what the right thing to do is, But how quickly the international banking system and all
⏹️ ▶️ John these large companies, like Exxon. Exxon pulled out of Russia and
⏹️ ▶️ John left behind billions of dollars in assets. Like everybody just saying, nuh-uh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not OK. Essentially, you’re not allowed to invade your neighboring countries. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not, never mind that Russia’s done it multiple times before. But apparently everyone has decided this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the line. You wonder where the line was? This is the line. And so I don’t know how Russia can continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of be a going concern in the long term with the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole world turning its back on them like this. And it’s terrible because, as you pointed out, the people who live in Russia,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t determine their government. Putin is a dictator. They don’t get to vote for him every
⏹️ ▶️ John year. Oh, you won again with 99% of the vote. Well, that’s funny. Imagine that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the people there, they don’t want this, but they don’t. What choice do they have? And so it’s terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John that the people are going to be hurt by this. And that’s why I think it is the correct choice for people like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to say, well, we won’t, well, we won’t sell our products to you anymore, but we will keep the app store open
⏹️ ▶️ John because you might need to ask apps on your phone that lets you securely communicate with other people and so on
⏹️ ▶️ John and so forth. Like you’re trying to draw the line where we don’t want to hurt the Russian people, but we do want
⏹️ ▶️ John Russia to clearly get the message that this is not okay. Um, and also we don’t want to all
⏹️ ▶️ John die in a nuclear, uh, you know, mushroom cloud. So I don’t know how to walk that line.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I don’t run this country or any other country. I hope we do walk it correctly, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John reaction, the sort of international reaction of, you know, I know this is such a stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John analogy, but I’m thinking of like, if you’re ever in kind of some kind of online community and someone does something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not okay for that community and the whole community lets them know that it’s not okay, like that we don’t do that in this community, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, whatever they did and whatever their community is, that’s happening in international level
⏹️ ▶️ John right now, whether or not Putin is open to the idea that what he’s doing is not OK, or if he’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John completely off in his own world is a thing that will keep you up at night. But still, in
⏹️ ▶️ John some ways, it is an interesting moment of unity among the slightly more civilized
⏹️ ▶️ John world, the countries that ostensibly do not have dictators running them, versus
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that definitely do. So I hope everything works out. I hope we’re all still
⏹️ ▶️ John here to keep doing this podcast. And speaking of this podcast, there is an Apple angle on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John aside from Apple just stopping selling stuff or whatever. Jason Snell had a good article in Macworld today
⏹️ ▶️ John speculating about what would happen if China did something like this. Because what did Apple do? Apple said,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we’re not going to sell Apple products in your region anymore. We’ll keep the App Store open. But we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John basically, this is not OK, and this is how we’re expressing that. What if China invaded
⏹️ ▶️ John a neighboring country, which is not too far-fetched, because there’s a neighboring country that China really, really wants to invade and
⏹️ ▶️ John bring back into China, and that’s Taiwan. And you know what else happens in Taiwan? Taiwan’s semiconductor
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturing company.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And you know what happens in
⏹️ ▶️ John China? All of Apple’s products are assembled, except for a handful of other ones. So if China
⏹️ ▶️ John did something terrible, and the whole world said, we’re going to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John China that it’s not okay by kicking them out of the banking system and doing egg and doing wine and doing Z, nevermind that the entirety
⏹️ ▶️ John of the US economy would be crippled because of so much stuff that we have as a manufacturer in China. But Apple specifically,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they said, okay, well, we’re not doing business with China anymore. It’s like, well, I guess there’s no more iPhones this
⏹️ ▶️ John year because where are you gonna build all those, right? Where are you gonna build all your products, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And setting aside-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, not just iPhones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like Macs, everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, and setting aside, as Jason starts the article, like, you know, China is a market where Apple sells
⏹️ ▶️ John like $72 billion worth of stuff. But setting aside selling, that’s the country that makes all this stuff. And that’s why I said, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John so many shows ago that Apple has a China problem and the world has a China problem. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure which one of those is the bigger problem, But like, you know, Apple’s China problem, it could be like existential.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if Apple can no longer do business with China or does not want to do business with China
⏹️ ▶️ John because China did something terrible, does Apple like sort of burn cash
⏹️ ▶️ John for three years to rebuild manufacturing somewhere? Like, I don’t know how they would even recover. And then obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John the world doesn’t want China to be invading other countries either. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this is a fun topic. Unfortunately, there is an Apple angle for it, But
⏹️ ▶️ John this really highlights that this stuff isn’t all necessarily just theoretical. Things like this
⏹️ ▶️ John still happen. Countries run by –
⏹️ ▶️ John countries without even remotely democratically elected leadership can do all sorts of things that
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t make sense to us in the outside world. But nevertheless, they still happen and we have to figure out how to deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So our thoughts, energy, everything is with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ukraine and we hope that everything reaches a peaceful end sooner rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is why, you know, which I was saying about, like, you know, Apple and China and everything, this is why this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff matters. You know, like, to have such a strong dependence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a country whose relationship with the U.S. is tense is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. This is why all the Trump stuff mattered a lot with how cozy he was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Putin. People out there were voting for Trump for a variety of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons, many of which were stupid, and they didn’t see stuff like this, or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were and sometimes still are excusing the Trump-Russia relationship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This stuff matters. This is why electing, throwing away your vote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that is flippant or as a joke or something is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that’s a serious matter. And this kind of stuff matters a lot. And, you know, who we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco elect as world leaders and the countries that we empower or that we let have power over us over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of stuff is all big stakes. And I think we’ve gotten very comfortable because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of us haven’t been in a major war. And we haven’t been alive during times of major world wars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, this is strategically very risky. And this is again, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going back to our tech show, Oh yeah, it’s a tech podcast. This is why I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really am uncomfortable with the level of dependence that, not only Apple, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John said, like as many of us, the world, that we have on China. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, China is the Russia of this century, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of ways. I’m sorry if this is a terribly flawed analogy. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, the major risk to the world here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the pile-on effect. China will probably consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invading Taiwan, this kind of stuff. This is serious business. This is really dark,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible stuff that could happen here, including if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Russia-Ukraine invasion doesn’t resolve itself in some way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon. Well, who else is going to join that fight? And then what will happen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if anyone starts joining that fight, China,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they get involved, is much more likely to be on the Russian side than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone else side. And that’s a big problem for lots of people, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. And this is a big, potentially horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mess. And this could get very, very bad. And this is why, again, this is serious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. We all hope for a faster, cleaner resolution than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is real risky stuff here.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why we talked about China in the past. The dichotomy was like, do you engage with them, which has
⏹️ ▶️ John been what Apple’s been doing. And Tim Cook has said it explicitly, we want to engage with China.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or do you isolate them? Russia right now is being isolated because they’ve crossed the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John But up until that point, we were engaged with China. Exxon was there drilling for gas. We were trading
⏹️ ▶️ John with them freely. They were part of the international banking system, despite the fact that they were run by a dictator
⏹️ ▶️ John who poisoned his enemies and does all sorts of terrible assassinations and invades other countries.
⏹️ ▶️ John But eventually, there was a line. And China, the main thing that’s protecting all of us is that,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we get all our stuff from China, and China gets all our money. And so there is this relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John between the US and China and China and lots of other countries, that goes both ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would be destroyed without China. China gets a lot of money from Apple. The US would
⏹️ ▶️ John lose tons of products that are all manufactured in China, and China would lose all the money that we pay for those products. Having an interdependent
⏹️ ▶️ John world where we all trade with each other, even when we’re trading in an uneasy way, we’re like, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really like your system of government and the way you do things. And honestly, they could say the same thing about us, and I know
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the same. They always throw their back in our face. Well, you do bad things too. We do, but this is a matter
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And also, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a valid counter-argument. The thing you do can be bad, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I do bad things. That’s not related.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re like, it’s an uneasy relationship in both directions. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it is mutually beneficial for us to continue to have this relationship. And that is, I feel like, the main thing
⏹️ ▶️ John protecting us all from annihilation is that the people,
⏹️ ▶️ John the leaders in China don’t want to screw up their country, I hope, don’t want to screw up their
⏹️ ▶️ John country by becoming isolated from the rest of the world, and vice versa.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the policy of engaging with China and both of us trying to use our leverage to make the other do more of what we
⏹️ ▶️ John want them to do. Ben Thompson’s talked about this a lot, where we always felt like by engaging with China, we would
⏹️ ▶️ John spread democratic ideals to China. But rather, instead of that, by engaging with China, it looks like China
⏹️ ▶️ John is exporting fascist ideas to us by making, oh, Apple, if you want to work here, the
⏹️ ▶️ John government has to have access to your data centers and stuff, and Apple’s like, oh, I guess so.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure how that balance is being met, but I do know that I actually feel a little bit safer with the world
⏹️ ▶️ John entangled with China than if they were isolated. Because you don’t want a country to be isolated, run
⏹️ ▶️ John by dictators, and have nuclear weapons. Like, that’s bad. It’s better to be engaged, run by dictators,
⏹️ ▶️ John and have nuclear weapons. You wouldn’t want either one of them, really, but the engagement, I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like, is a thing. And that’s why the world turning its back on Russia is effective.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if Russia was not part of the international community, then
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone turning their back would be like, so what? You haven’t been helping us already anyway. But it’s not true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their billionaires have apartments in New York City. Their yachts are parked on the
⏹️ ▶️ John shores of the French Riviera. The people who run that, the oligarchs that run
⏹️ ▶️ John that country, engage with the rest of the world. and are in
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the world. And they don’t want that world to become a cinder.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t want it to be irradiated either. So I hope there’s enough mutual interest and not
⏹️ ▶️ John just destroying the planet because, you know, it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John with Putin and people who seem disconnected from reality. It’s hard to know how things actually, what’s actually going
⏹️ ▶️ John on in their head. But I hope there’s enough people who realize that none of this is worth
⏹️ ▶️ John destroying the planet over and maybe we could just all go back into our corners and stop invading other countries.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco If only, I hope so.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now that America is done invading everybody, let’s all stop.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s the obvious thing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, invading other countries and taking their territory. That’s how America was formed. To Marco’s point,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was wrong then, it’s also wrong now. It was wrong both times. Yeah, oh yeah. But we can’t do anything else about the
⏹️ ▶️ John past. We’re trying to make progress and say, now we find it much less
⏹️ ▶️ John acceptable to invade the neighboring country, kill the people and take it over.
Gut-correction corrections
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of invading things, what’s going on with your intestines, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, well, nothing new to report. I’ve started the avocado testing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s too early to say. Bananas continue to be a food
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my lineup, and I’m very happy with them because it turns out they’re delicious and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey useful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the funny thing is, apparently they used to be much, much, much more delicious, and then that species died
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off, and now we’re stuck with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then we got the Cavendish and yeah, because they’re all clones of each other and then the Cavendish might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extinct at some point too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a whole thing. Anyway, so yeah, I did want to quickly give some follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did it on Twitter and the show notes as well. So I had mentioned with my like, you know, hey, it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out I took some colostrum and it fixed my banana stomach intolerance thing. And I had mentioned that I’d heard of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that from some quote celiacs in my life who had taken it and it had fixed them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we got a lot of feedback from people who know a lot more about celiac disease.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turns out that celiac disease, like the actual celiac disease with that name,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tested and verified that it is that thing. And apparently you need like a blood test and biopsy to even verify that it definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that thing. Apparently that cannot be cured. And so basically the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my life who describe themselves as celiacs were probably just wheat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intolerant in other ways. Like there’s other situations that could be going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your gut that could make you gluten intolerant that aren’t necessarily celiac disease. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if, and also if you have celiac disease, you actually really should not try this because not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can it not be cured, apparently even testing it by having a small amount of wheat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is potentially harmful. So please don’t do that. And yeah, sorry for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error. And apparently these people who describe themselves as celiacs, they were really just describing gluten intolerances that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they were not confirmed as exactly this particular thing. So once again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doctors, go talk to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not us. Hey, talk to them before you buy pills on Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along.
Follow-up: Shared contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had an Ask ATP question last week about shared contacts, and a handful of people wrote in to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, the obvious fix for this, which maybe wasn’t so obvious to us anyway, is to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make another iCloud account that everyone in your family shares, and the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing you use that for is contacts. So there’s a six-year-old article by Lena Shore that describes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this approach in pretty significant detail that we will link in the show notes. But basically the idea is, let’s say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin and me. So Erin has her iCloud account, I have my iCloud account. we both log into a shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud account whose purpose is simply to get contacts between the two of us. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we discussed this very solution, maybe it was six years ago. I think Tava Ziri was one of the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote in to tell us the solution they did. And it’s not great, like for, for multiple reasons. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird to do that. But also if you ever have to deal with like Apple support or dealing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just like Apple doesn’t, Apple expects Apple IDs to be one person, one an Apple ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like obviously you can have more than one Apple ID, all of us do, right? But Apple software
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple support and everything about Apple is kind of like, oh, well, you know, you are the owner of this Apple ID and the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have an Apple ID that is shared amongst people because you’re using it as a backdoor
⏹️ ▶️ John to share contacts is not going to be something that is potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John well supported by other software or certainly not by Apple itself if you ever have a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. And it’s just a hassle, like what do you call the third Apple ID and you know, eventually if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John adds this feature, you gotta like get rid of that Apple ID or just, it just, it’s weird. I would never
⏹️ ▶️ John suggest, this is good for someone who listens to a tech podcast, if you wanna do this, go for it, but like I would never
⏹️ ▶️ John suggest this to a regular person because it’s just so weird. Like this is something that people
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t have to deal with. They shouldn’t be like, oh, of course, if you spend all this money on Apple devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be so happy, everything will work great together, but if you wanna have a shared library, let’s, now we’re gonna make a fake
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID and we have to give it an email address and it has to be the contacts sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John for the family thing, but no, don’t send email to it, but it’s just for, I don’t wanna have to explain that
⏹️ ▶️ John to anybody. It’s just awkward and strange, but if you wanna do it, this is one way. The other way is you could
⏹️ ▶️ John just use a different system for your contacts. People are all on board with Google or whatever. I think there’s some sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing for that, but the real way to fix this is Apple needs to implement this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John in their contacts database and application and API, and maybe we only have a decade or
⏹️ ▶️ John two left and they’ll get it done.
Sponsor: Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Visit linode.com slash ATP to see for yourself. Linode is a fantastic
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco own Docker container or running test servers or build servers or game servers. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many reasons that nerds like me like to run servers and I’ve been with a lot web hosts over the years, trust me
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s it’s just fantastic. You don’t have to trust just me on it. It’s been voted the top infrastructure as a service provider by both G2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trust radius. But you know, just look at what they offer. And you’ll see for yourself why I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it so much and why so many people love it so much. So first of all, you’re gonna look at their offerings, and you’re gonna see, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a lot of stuff. So every level of resources that you might need from very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like high value, or to all the way up to like, you know, high resource usage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe specialty needs like high memory or high CPU or GPU compute plans. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all of that available in the node, they have block storage available, Kubernetes support,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and upcoming bare metal release support for tools like terraform. It’s they have so much at Linode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then what will get you there is wow, they ever get they are very good value.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what that’s So that’s what got me there. I’ll be honest, it was really inexpensive to get what I wanted there. And so that’s why I started there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then what will keep you at Linode is they are just an incredible host. Their capabilities will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grow with you over time if you need them to. They also have an incredible control panel and an incredible API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of great documentation and great support if you ever need it. So see for yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Linode.com slash ATP. See why I love it so much. You can create a free account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and you get $100 in credit. again, Linode.com slash ATP create a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free account to get $100 in credit. Thank you so much to Linode for hosting my servers and sponsoring
Follow-up: Burned by ARM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, we got a fair bit of feedback that we will probably be reading for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part because it was all very interesting. Last week I made a somewhat offhanded comment about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how I didn’t really hear much complaining or anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who were kind of burned by the Intel to Apple Silicon transition. And Andrus Kiss wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, I was listening to this week’s episode and heard Casey say he hasn’t heard of anyone having issues with with 8664 to ARM transition,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the lack of ability to natively run Windows. I will say that one group I know, because I’m one of them, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanical slash electrical slash aerospace engineers, or engineering students have to run CAD. I’m always keeping my eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out for reports of how well our CAD software of choice, which happens to be SolidWorks, works using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey virtualization of ARM Windows in Parallels Desktop. Unfortunately, thus far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the stories have essentially been, quote, it doesn’t work, quote. If that continues to be the story, in a few years when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I may need to replace my work computer, I might be facing no other choice but a switch to PC for work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I were an engineering student starting today, it would be a very tough choice because while the Mac today can do 90% of what I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during my studies, that last 10% is now impossible where it was once possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That really stinks. I’m not sure this is a market that Apple cares about, to be honest, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would hope that the people writing this software, like SolidWorks, for example, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to be cross-platform, than they would be, or if their users want them to become
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cross-platform, then you should tell them that. But it still stinks, and it is an example somebody really getting burned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by this transition.
iPadOS accessibility limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, we got a couple of pieces of feedback with regard to accessibility. Todd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cheresky wrote in with regard to the consequences of iPadOS limitations. Todd writes, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree iPadOS is lagging the hardware it’s running on. It’s not only affecting advanced users,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s also affecting the physically disabled community as well. For example, because iPadOS doesn’t allow concurrent use of the microphone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physically disabled users like myself who have no movement in their limbs and operate their iPads solely by voice using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accessibility’s voice control can’t attend Zoom meetings because after joining the meeting, voice control no longer functions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This prevents the user from unmuting the microphone or even leaving the meeting early if they need to. This is ridiculous. A key accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey component like voice control should always work, even if another application is using the microphone. We don’t have this issue on macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should not have this issue on iPadOS. I am not 100% sure this is a iPadOS issue and rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Zoom issue, but no matter where the fault lies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s really crummy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m assuming that Ettad is saying that using Zoom on the Mac doesn’t have this problem. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it could just be that Zoom, their iPad version isn’t as good as their Mac version with regards to
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but it’s, you know, maybe they’ll say, well, it’s harder to do that on the iPad, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we did it on the Mac first or whatever, but yeah, that’s definitely a shame. And it’s adding to the impression
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, there are things I can do on my Mac, why can’t I do them on my iPad that have literally the same
⏹️ ▶️ John processor, right? There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to do them than the reason people can attribute it to the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS so they could attribute it to the app APIs or just the app developers paying less
⏹️ ▶️ John attention to the iPad. But it’s just one more pebble in the pile
⏹️ ▶️ John for the iPad feeling a bit like handcuffs sometimes.
AirTags for accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we had some feedback with regard to air tags and accessibility. So before I read this feedback, which is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fascinating, and I really think does a good job of riding the line between, you know, I want this for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I understand it’s not for everyone. This is one of those scenarios where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any one of you, the listener, can what about this whole conversation. Please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just understand, we’re trying to have a conversation here. I’m not saying that, and Kai Russell, who wrote this feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t saying that any of these ideas are the best idea. just presenting an alternative point of view. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please consider that this is all in the spirit of presenting an alternative point of view. So Kai
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Russell writes, I’d like to highlight my experience as someone that heavily uses AirTags as an assistive technology. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legally blind. I am not completely without sight. Rather, my vision is severely limited. I tend to lose things a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I do, it’s very hard for me to find them. I bought heavily into the tile, et cetera, category of products
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as soon as they came out. They were a big help. Eventually, these products started getting unreliable for reasons that I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be at least partially Apple’s quote-unquote fault. As you can imagine, I was very excited when AirTags were announced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirTags are a game-changer for me, just as Tile was when it first came out. The features that are unique to AirTags, like being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shown the relative direction and distance of any of your AirTags, and yes, the Find My network, make AirTags
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an even more valuable piece of assistive technology. I say this all to make the point that AirTags are not a luxury or convenience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey item for all of their users. Not to sound too much like an Apple marketing video, but AirTags significantly improved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my life. Unless you have experienced it firsthand, you cannot truly understand the severity of the feelings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of frustration, helplessness, and defeat. Once one experiences defeat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one experiences when they cannot function independently, especially within their own home with no end in sight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, air tags mitigate that. I am not attempting to state that my use case negates or otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delegitimizes concerns around personal safety. Those concerns are certainly valid. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly not saying that my use case justifies the continued existence of air tags in the current form.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is not for me to decide. However, in the age of fast-paced internet PR storms, where people fixate on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single issue at the expense of all others, I feel that it would be remiss of me not to provide my experience for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other side of the scale. I am really impressed with how well-written this was. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really glad that, Kai, you wrote in to tell us about this, because this was something I did not consider and is utterly fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just like the general accessibility angle of new tech. Like, if you have any accessibility needs, anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John a new technology comes out, you’re gonna look at it and say, how can this help me? What can this do? What is now
⏹️ ▶️ John possible that wasn’t before? Even if it wasn’t the intent of the person selling the product, like I’m not sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John AirTags, when their meetings, they said, this will be great for low vision people.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But I don’t think that
⏹️ ▶️ John was on their list because maybe they just don’t even have that, understand where the person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John coming from. Losing things inside your house, they feel like, ah, I can’t find my keys or whatever. But losing them because
⏹️ ▶️ John you literally can’t see them well enough to find them, and you just had it five minutes ago and how frustrating that
⏹️ ▶️ John is. It’s, you know, and so it’s like, like any of us with tech, we see a new tech product and we
⏹️ ▶️ John say, let me think of the ways that this can, you know, how can this change my life? Or what could this do in my life
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be different? And everybody has a different point of view of depending on what their life is and what their needs
⏹️ ▶️ John are. And anytime there’s a product that has some kind of problem like the safety issues with air tags, or has like
⏹️ ▶️ John a, you know, a nefarious use and that the product designer has to
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with that nefarious use, you’re always going to end up hurting the legitimate users
⏹️ ▶️ John who are helped by that technology. And it’s a difficult balance to strike. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to be open to the idea that maybe this product has more downsides than upsides, but you also have to be open to the
⏹️ ▶️ John opposite, that all products have some way they can be misused, but maybe the upsides outweigh
Sponsor: Kolide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by collide collide is a new take
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco your employees devices without really considering their needs or even attempting to educate them about the security
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw just how much MDM was disrupting their end users often frustrating them so much they
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much to collide for sponsoring our show.
MaskerAid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have something to discuss, two somethings to discuss. We have an Apple event that’s coming up, but we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different event that’s happening beforehand. As you are listening to this, I have a new app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John which is exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That doesn’t happen all that terribly often. But starting at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we record this, so 10 o’clock Thursday morning, Masquerade, my new iOS app, will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be available. And so what’s going on here? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as my kids got older, I felt less and less comfortable. And this is just for me. I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone else feels the same way. This is just for me. But I felt less and less comfortable with splashing my kids’
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faces across the internet. And I do from time to time. It does happen from time to time. But generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I try to avoid it. And what I’ve decided to do, and I decided to do a few years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, is generally speaking, I will put an emoji on top of like Declan or Michaela’s head in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a picture. So you can see their body, but you can’t see their face. This is just my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point of view. I’m not trying to say it’s right or wrong, but that’s what I like to do. I was doing this not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often, but often enough that I was like, man, this is pain in the ass, and there’s got to be a better way for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It occurred to me, I just had an epiphany all of a sudden that, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a way to do this. Apple has an API for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember exactly when it was, but a few years ago, Apple came out with VisionKit and one of the APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t have the actual name in front of me, but one of the APIs is basically give me a rectangle or a series of rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an image for all the faces in that image. I realized, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holy crap, I can use that API to figure out where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faces are in an image, because goodness knows I know almost nothing about machine learning and me trying to work this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out would not end well. So I could use the Apple API to do that, and then I can just let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you slap an emoji on top of, you’ll put emoji where the rectangles are, easy peasy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was in September and it’s now March and the app is out. So six months later, here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the idea behind Masquerade is to make all of this easier. So the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is when you load an image into Masquerade, which by the way is a pun if you will, It’s M-A-S-K-E-R-A-I-D,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Masker Aid. And that’s because you’re being aided in masking your kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the original name? The original name, which was a Casey special and truly an utterly terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I’m going to regret saying out loud because now it’ll be the feet from Fast Text. I’m never gonna hear the end of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the original name was Face Splash, which the thought was, and just hear me out for a second. The thought was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had like the image of Splatoon in my head, right? where there’s those little splats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of paint. And even though I was using emoji, it’s sort of kind of in that spirit, right? And you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey splat or splash an emoji on somebody’s face. It was later that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was brought to my attention, I think by one of you, actually, potentially. It was brought to my attention that there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other connotations that one could use for that, and especially when this is an app designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hide children’s faces.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Wait, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where people went with that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, eventually. I didn’t go there at first. I mean, people just thought it was a dumb name. It wasn’t me either. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of us for this. Oh, then my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apologies. I don’t remember who it was. But I didn’t go there. I would not
⏹️ ▶️ John have thought of that. I mean, I will say that FaceSplash didn’t make sense to me with the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go on. Well, and that’s totally fair. I mean, again, the name was terrible. And I think you can see it peak out in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the somewhere. It might be the apps reverse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey domain thingamabob, or I’m drawing a blank on the name of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco The bundle ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you are. Thank you. But anyways, yeah, so FaceBlush was a terrible name. And my friend, Steve, who came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with the icon, he did the icons for all my apps so far, he came up with Masquerade, and I freaking love that name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so the idea of Masquerade, on the surface anyway, is to load an image,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll put emoji on all of the faces it can detect, or that really Apple’s code can detect in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that image, and then you can share it to like Instagram or what have you. But after a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it occurred to me, and I think it was Mike who said this first, that, wait a second, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t really limited just to hiding faces. I mean, that’s what I wrote it for, but it’s more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And what you can really use it for is just annotating an image with an emoji. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suddenly that makes it a much more useful tool for really anyone, whereas previously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was writing it basically for the perspective of parents. And you can do all sorts of silly and ridiculous things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that that could be a very fun use of this very app. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve recorded an episode of Analog that won’t be out until Sunday where we discussed Masquerade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and watching the RelayFM members’ Discord going nuts, trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put in ridiculous emoji annotations on things or stickers, so to speak, on things. It was quite funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John did the Relay Discord come up with Faceless as an alternate name for the zap
⏹️ ▶️ John like the ATP chat room just did? Or Faceless.
⏹️ ▶️ John Facelist, yeah, Facelist by Corrupt Pixel in the chat room. That’s my winner for
⏹️ ▶️ John most, best list pun name for this app.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And obviously you- No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going with Wofft, who said Facelist. That’s, oh actually, no, ThomasB19
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Facelist, come on. Anyway, these names you would never
⏹️ ▶️ John use. For the chat room, I know, we’re just coming up with names, but you’d never use these because the people who buy this app don’t know who Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And that’s actually one of the interesting things. So I don’t know where you guys want to go with this. We can talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the development. We can talk about some interesting pieces behind it. But one of the very weird things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me has been marketing this, because I feel like I’m going to get some pretty good coverage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tomorrow within our little world. And I don’t know if that’s because I’m me. That sounds so gross to say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But obviously, in our little world, people tend to know who I am. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if it’s because I’m me. I don’t know if it’s because the app is genuinely good, or maybe it’s a train wreck and I just don’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But what’s really difficult about the app is I feel like this is a more broadly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appealing app, not unlike Widget Smith, for example. Now, I’m not saying to that level, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a similar spirit of Widget Smith, where it’s more than just, you know, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little audience. Again, I feel kind of gross saying that, but you know what I mean. And what I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey struggling with in trying to do is figure out how can I get this in front of like parent bloggers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example. So, like, the Scary Mommies of the World, which, if you’re not familiar, is a really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clever Twitter account and blog where they kind of make fun of, but also give funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tongue-in-cheek parenting advice. And I’ve emailed their press catch-all link or email address, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure nothing will come of that, but I’m not a marketer. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John else to do. I’m not a marketer. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do. You can buy an ad on their podcast. Yeah, well, that’s a fair point. And actually, the next question is, how much money do I want to throw at paid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marketing for this? And I’ve put it in front of a local mom who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really awesome at sharing things that you can do locally here in Richmond. I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard anything from her one way or the other. I’ve sent it to a couple of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess they’re internet acquaintances at best, but there’s a couple who did a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of home renovations here in Richmond. They go by Young House Love. And actually, Erin knew the husband
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the couple back in college. And I put it in front of them and said, hey, I know you do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vaguely similar when you post pictures of your children, so I thought this might be useful to you. But I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what to make of this app in a happy sense, because I feel like if the stars align just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, like they absolutely did with Widget Smith, I think I could get some decent traction. Not Widget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Smith traction, but decent traction out of this. But if they don’t align
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just perfectly, then it’s going to be like any other app. Like Peek-a-view, you know, it made okay money all told, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it makes gas money at best now, which is, you know, that’s the way of the world, this way of the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But- I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John checked gas prices lately because I might not be sure anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true, actually. It’s under $4 here and we’re an all premium family, but it’s under $4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still, but not by a whole heck of a lot. I know in California, it’s like five plus, which is just bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, I don’t know where this is gonna go. And I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both the episode and the app, But I’m pretty proud of it. I feel like the app is pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, it’s a casey app in that it does one thing and does it at least reasonably all right, hopefully pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But- And there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and a lot of apologetic text, right? But no, it’s a very casey app, but I’m pretty proud of it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks better than any other app I’ve written so far, which is a low bar if I’m honest, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks really good, all told. And I’m pretty proud of it. I think it works pretty well. So we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take this wherever you want, gentlemen, and we can just move on, we can talk about how it was developed, or we can tear it apart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and tell me everything I’ve done wrong. Pick your poison.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, on the tearing apart front, I would like to apologize as your friend for giving almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no feedback and doing almost no testing during this process. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fine. Because that’s the tradition,
⏹️ ▶️ John is we wait until on the podcast and then we give our suggestions, because it’s much easier just to give it in person than to try
⏹️ ▶️ John a casey radar or something. Title. There you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. No, but I mean, there are obviously, I mean, I would have tons of suggestions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this if you actually want them, but it’s kind of late now. I mean, I could go through every screen and be like, all right, I would change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, this, and this. I would make this work this way. I would change this wording to this wording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. You didn’t do your patented cut every, two out of every three words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the entire app, because you did a really good job of that with, I think it was Peak of, he was in the app, but I thought it was Peak of You, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you found ways that, you know, Captain Verbose over here, just, I could not fathom how to cut text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of the app. and you have a genuine talent for figuring out how to use two words when it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes to app development anyway. How to use two words when I would normally turn to 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, maybe you and I can do a pass on that another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, I mostly just want to apologize for not having done that because I have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so underwater with my own stuff that I would get the test flight email every time you did a new build and I’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah, I gotta check that out, I gotta check that out. and then I would instantly move on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to other stuff. And so, I’m sorry, I’ve been a bad developer friend for this app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, so overall, I think you’ve done a pretty good job. I think marketing-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the challenge you’re going to have is that this is an app that even though you did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broaden it to be more about just put emoji over any photo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an app that has a narrow appeal in the sense that, you know, it’s very specialized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the people who want to perform these tasks, you did a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But how you find those people, that’s, as you mentioned, that’s tricky,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s not gonna be that broad of an audience. It’s not gonna be something that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, when you see it on your phone, you show all your friends, hey, look at what I can do. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna be that broad. You know, it’s gonna have to be much more specialized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think to some degree, you’re gonna have social benefits here. In the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense that many people might not want to show their kids’ faces in photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but might not have thought to put emoji on top of them. And so maybe, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, this is the kind of thing where like you see someone else’s photo that has an emoji on their kid’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face, and you’re like, hey, how’d you make that? Is there like, you know, you got a quick app to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the other, I guess, competition you have is using no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps to do this, and either just not caring about posting photos of your kid, which is gonna be a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, or people who use the built-in image editor on Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically, or just type an emoji as text, and stick that over whatever they wanna block
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. So that’s your main competition, and that’s gonna be your main marketing challenge. is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you did a good job with the task that you solved, but you have to find people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who want that task solved and or find people who might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a need but might not have thought to look for this particular solution to that need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a challenge. And I don’t, unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of advice on how exactly you find these people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than just hope for some social recognition and word of mouth there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know, you mentioned like buying ads. I wonder how I wonder if search ads would actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be useful for this. I think one of the challenges you’d have is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are people searching for that might be relevant search terms to this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco There’s so much I don’t know. Like photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redaction? I don’t know. Do people use these words?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, hide faces in photos, you know, that kind of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you hear people talking about software of like, you know, I want to make an app, what should I do? And we do it ourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talk about like, oh, make an app to scratch your own itch. This is the other side of making an app to scratch your own itch
⏹️ ▶️ John that people don’t talk about as much, which is if you make an app to scratch your own itch, what if no one else
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s the reason we say to do it is like you’ll be enthusiastic about it. You’re a subject matter expert because like
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s doing this manually all the time. So he has the need for it or whatever. It’s it’s a you know, it’s a great idea
⏹️ ▶️ John has lots of upsides. The downsides are you know, not that you’re going to be the only one because you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to introduce people to the concept of it. And if you start seeing these around, maybe it’ll catch on. But if it really
⏹️ ▶️ John is just your itch, and there’s just, you know, dozens of you, that’s, that’s the downside, right? And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John downside doesn’t matter. It’s like, Oh, you know, maybe I’m just doing this because I wanted to learn how to program. So I made an app
⏹️ ▶️ John to scratch my own itch or whatever. If you’re trying to do it as a commercial venture, like you might have to make
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever underscores think 63 apps that you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is absolutely all
⏹️ ▶️ John scratches on itches. He’s scratching everybody. He’s looking for anyone, any itch that he can possibly scratch. But But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think at this point he’s scratching far more people than we can ever hope to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like the one that did it though, like what about the 62 other ones? Like, well, they weren’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was garbage? No, it’s just, you never know what’s going to actually have mass appeal
⏹️ ▶️ John versus what’s not going to. And so this is kind of like a single serving app does one job,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it well. The question is, does anyone else wanna do this job or is it just Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I don’t have a good read on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, there’s so much text in this app.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the text. See, Marco, you wanna make it an app like how you would make it, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John look at this app and I see Casey, for better or for worse, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do, yeah, and there’s so many Casey-isms in this app, and I mean this in the warmest way possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s almost apologetic about its own
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very helpful. It’s very helpful. It tells you how to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey energy there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very apologetic that like, you know, hey, sometime you might have to pay me money for something.
⏹️ ▶️ John The request a refund thing in settings is the case. The part of this. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you gotta be. You gotta be kidding me with this. But then he does advertise
⏹️ ▶️ John his other app. So it balances out. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve also I’ve never seen an app use its own name so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much in its text. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John with different capitalizations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each time. Almost every label includes the word masquerade
⏹️ ▶️ John Why does the watermark not have a capital M? I don’t understand that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I just like the look of it all lowercase. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John monospace? It’s like Mac OS, tvOS, iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I just like, for the watermark, I just like the look of it all lowercase.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I felt like it was less, you know, it’s here again, it’s huge casey energy, right? It was less shouty about what it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John energy being completely inexplicable and indefensible, but nevertheless, it’s your app, so you get to do what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, like, there are yeah, there are definitely things about this that I would that I would say, like, hey, tweet this, tweet this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweet this. But ultimately, I am a little bit concerned that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this took you like six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s fair. That’s absolutely fair. Now consider the holidays were in the midst of that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the functionality worked in the first beta when it was called face splash. It’s like done ship it, but you can’t ship it because he
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t happy with the UI. And he did a lot of iteration on the two or three screens that are here, which I can relate
⏹️ ▶️ John to. But it’s not like it took him six months to implement the app, it took him six months to make 75 passes over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which, and admittedly, that does take a ton of time. I know from experience. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, this is going to be a pretty specialized app. If you’re looking at it as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a business venture, as John was saying, you know, the difference between like, writing it for lots of other reasons versus writing it to make money,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re gonna have a hard time making six months worth of app income from this app, because it’s too narrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an appeal. And so that’s certainly worth, like, you know, if you wanna have that discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, prioritizing, you know, different developing needs and like, having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that like, doesn’t justify like a super long amount of time, then how do you kind of rein yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and, you know, set limits and everything, because that’s a very hard problem that most people, myself included, are not very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at. But like, it is, again, it does actually serve the job very well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a lot better than it was. Like, it’s a vast improvement over the original beta. Every past
⏹️ ▶️ John did actually improve this. And it depends on what you want to use the app for, right? So if this was an app to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to hone my app development skills by learning how to really polish a UI to get it to the point that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way better than where it started, success, you did that, right? But if it was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna try to be a business venture for you, your hourly rate for making this app is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but I don’t know. I take a little bit of issue with what you guys are saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a couple of very unique to Casey reasons. First of all, to be completely frank,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like if this doesn’t make money, that would be unfortunate, but it’s okay, because this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the way in which I make money for the family. You know what I mean? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I have- Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I was saying. Like maybe the purpose of the app was, you know, cause I feel like you’ve improved your app development
⏹️ ▶️ John skills during the course of making this and you learn new APIs and stuff that you hadn’t used before, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I think in that sense, in keeping that set of my skills sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not having them completely atrophy, I think is also very, very important. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if suddenly Spotify gets its way and podcasting’s ruined forever, I need to have a backup plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the best backup plan that I can think of right now, anyway, is to-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Please say Bitcoin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please say Bitcoin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, God, no, goodness, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco The best backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan that I can think of right now is to be like a Marco or an underscore, where I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or more independently written apps that can sustain the family.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s the best possible backup. But the second best possible backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is being able to say to a potential employer, yes, I would like this job as an iOS developer, please. Here’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. And you can see in the app store right now. And I was writing this not two, three, four, five, seven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago. I was writing this two, three, four, five, seven months ago. Like this is all still current. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey muscles have not atrophied. But also I think, Although I certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was pretty focused on one particular use case for the app, I really do think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there was ever a time that any person would desire to put an emoji
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an image and then share that image with someone, you know, this app does that very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, granted, it starts from the perspective of hiding faces, and I think I might actually in a future version, like flip that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a setting to flip that off. So it won’t automatically detect faces, and it’ll just let you add emoji as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you see fit. But I feel like this could be broadly appealing. I mean, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny would it be to take a picture of somebody’s profile and put the little, I forget the actual term for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the emoji, but basically the little fart emoji behind them, you know? Like you can use it for silly things like that. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a protest, and this is what I was alluding to earlier. Oh my God, do they have butt detection? No, but that would be very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. But they do have body detection, I
⏹️ ▶️ John You can train a model to get butt detection. It’s a good WWDC session. You just need a corpus of butt images, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure you can find on the internet. And then you just train that model and you embed it in your app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you could make like, you know, fart array that would just automatically put the little fart thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on people’s butts.
⏹️ ▶️ John They did hot dog detection, but you know, butts, it’s all in the same area. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, focus gentlemen. So, but another use case, and this is what I was alluding to really in the beginning of the show is, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, what if you take a picture of a protest and you want to not let,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to obscure all these faces, you know, that does involve face detection, but this would be a really great and easy way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do that. And maybe that’s a dumb idea, but I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways in which this could be useful beyond just hiding pictures of your kids. And I feel like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible that it could be. But the problem is, how do I convince people that this is a problem that they need solving?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think you said that earlier, Marco, and how do I convince them that my app is the way to do it? So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think, and part of the reason that it took six months other than me just iterating,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that even for a admittedly fairly simple app like this, there is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot that goes around it in modern app development.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s the whole in-app purchase flow, which Apple just released a new API for that. There’s everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in settings, there’s how do you manage things in settings. If you’re doing any analytics, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usage tracking, you have to think about a way to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the very interesting things that I tried to solve for, I like to think I’ve successfully solved four. We’ll see in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week or two, is what happens when there’s a new batch of emoji that comes out? How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I handle that? Do I need to release a new binary? And sitting here today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, and I’ve tested as best I can, I think I do not have to release a new binary. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m actually doing is using a tip from Guy Rambeau, where you can make a shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud database that everyone in the app, everyone that has the app is using a shared database
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that only has literally like one or two rows in it. And that’s where it will check for new emoji
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and see, okay, do I have a new batch that I should suck in? And then obviously, whenever I update the binary, then it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update the list of emoji that’s caked into it. But that was a whole rigmarole.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, there’s all these little things that, yes, like John’s right. It took me from late
⏹️ ▶️ Casey September till late February, really, to get this shipped.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it wasn’t the first 24 to 48 hours that that I had a working version that showed rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on faces. But there’s so much more than just that. Like even something as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey silly as the drawer. So when you tap on an emoji, there’s like a little single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey row of face emoji that you can use to swap, what emoji you would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the image. But then you can drag that up, kind of like in maps, you can drag that up and then you get like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this multi-row, something more vaguely similar to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stock picker. That drawer took me a couple of days to write. Now, part of that is because I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great at SwiftUI, this was new to me. But part of that is because there’s no out-of-the-box drawer for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SwiftUI. So it continues to surprise me, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if someone who thinks he does this for a living, how much just administrivia and other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is necessary, even for a fairly simple iOS app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much less something that’s as involved as Overcast, for example. So yeah, I agree with you. It probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t have taken me six months. Part of that is because I’m slow and part of that is because I’m not working eight hours a day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, exactly. But nevertheless, there is more to even the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most simple app you can imagine than meets the eye. I don’t need to tell you that, Marco. But for people listening,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even a simple app, you’d be surprised how much work has to go into that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that, believe me, that I definitely understand. By
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, I’m gonna send you a quick little Swift function here that dumps all emoji from the Apple Core
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color emoji font in the system. I had to write this for, here, I’ll paste it in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Slack. I don’t know if it’s shareable to everyone else, but here, that’s how to dump every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emoji symbol and name. Anyway, so this is part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my crazy exploration for things that take way too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually you bring up a great example, like how do I get access to all the emoji? Because I can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throw out, it’s not easy to just throw up the stock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system emoji picker because basically you need a place where you’re entering text to do that. And that’s not really what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted for this app. So then I’ve got to figure out, okay, how do I get all of the emoji? And I have a mechanism for doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and I’ll check out, absolutely check out what you just sent. Thank you. But I have a mechanism for doing that. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, well, what do you do? So I got to figure out what are all the emoji. And then I got to figure out, well, some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them are represented in odd ways on Apple. Like, if you look at the actual Unicode list of emoji, which is what I was working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from, a lot of them are represented in kind of odd ways on Apple platforms, at least right now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you’ve got to like cull that list. And how do you present that list? And if there was a simple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey API where Apple said, OK, we’ll throw up an emoji, like basically a keyboard, we’ll throw up an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emoji picker for you. Like that would have saved quite a lot of time, but that doesn’t exist. So now I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to reinvent the wheel. And it’s silly stuff like that. As you’re working on an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, it adds up. It adds up surprisingly quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, believe me, I know. I mean, so I’ll tell you, I don’t think I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shared much of this publicly yet, but it’s in beta, so anyone in the beta can see. So one of the features of the Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update that’s currently in beta is that I allow you to choose, icons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for playlists to show like on the list screen. What you know, this is why I wrote this emoji
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dumper. So first of all, like, well, what if I want people to be able to choose emoji to be the icon? How do I get a list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all emojis so that they could like search for them by keywords? I’m like, how do I get all those Unicode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco descriptions of like, you know, person with hair? Like, you know, how do I? Is there a list of those? How can I get an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API with that? And I had the same concern user? What if they add to emoji if there’s some way I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dump this from the system dynamically, rather than like hard-coding a list somewhere or having a list on my server that I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep updated, that’s obviously better. So I went through all that and then I realized, actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would look better is SF Symbols. For those of you who don’t know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like Apple’s standard icon set. They launched it a few years ago and they’ve been adding to it every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a huge library of, I think about 3,800 of them right now, of basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock icons that there’s a lot of good reasons to use them. actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole under the radar episode that we talked about, we’ll link to that in the show notes. Anyway, I decided, let me let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me see if I can make an SF symbol picker in the app. Now, there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app called SF symbols that Apple makes. But there’s no API to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it’s a symbols does for like, because it’s not made for users to choose their own icons. It’s made for developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to choose icons, and then, you know, hard code the values that we’re using. So there is is no like index
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS that is like a list of all SF symbols. So I had to build that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that took a stupidly long time. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably spent two weeks on that, like just just the index of SF symbols. Because not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I want to be able to know that I can list them all and actually actually know that I have them all. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also I want to have like, well, how do you search for them? You have to type in keywords? Well, where do those keywords
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come from? How do you know what keywords associate with which symbols? And then do you do things like synonyms or dictionary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lookups to like, you know, if, if there’s a symbol called computer, do you also want to match PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mac? And like, how do you, how do you get these lists? And how do you like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I even, I looked up dictionary, like there’s an AP, there’s dictionary API on Mac iOS, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iOS. And so I was like, okay, what if I build the index statically and build it into the binary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use, I’ll the Mac API, dump the dictionary. And then I did that I tried, I actually built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that realized the dictionary was cluttering it up with way too many words that were not relevant as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the definitions and everything. I tried thesaurus that didn’t work very well either. Like I built all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I tried using different linguistic stemmers to build the search index, then I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know how much I’m a stickler for file size in my app. So I’m like, I’m not gonna embed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this like 400 kilobyte index. What, how do I make this smaller?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I started playing with
⏹️ ▶️ John schemes like that. I think I- That’s why you need someone helping you develop.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because when you say, I’m not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John embed 400 kilobytes, what decade is this? Just stick it in, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think I ended up getting it down to like 30k. Did you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would be, speaking of huge casing energy, that’s huge Marco energy.
⏹️ ▶️ John could just use zip but I don’t want it so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true it didn’t quite get that bad but but certainly it’s it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I spent again I spent two weeks on this like just just making a searchable index
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of SF symbols and then I spent another two weeks trying to get Swift UI to do it to render them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a useful way on the screen that wasn’t loading all 3000 at once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there’s that too but this is such a great example of some little thing that doesn’t seem that complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like there’s a list of something that exists somewhere on your iPhone. Because all these-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 44K, that’s what the final size, 44K, sorry. Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s a list of all these SF symbols that exist somewhere, but you didn’t have access to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And what’s also interesting with SF symbols is certain symbols are, there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, I don’t know, what’s the less gross way of saying gentleman’s agreement? But there’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person’s agreement that you can’t use like the iMessage looking symbol for anything except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage-related stuff. So even though it’s like just a speech bubble, you’re not allowed to use that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for anything except iMessage-specific-related things. And so then you’ve got- Not allowed as in App
⏹️ ▶️ John Review will reject you if you try to?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Correct. Yeah, seriously, I’m really serious.
⏹️ ▶️ John remember seeing stories about this and it just didn’t make any sense to
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember when Apple used to reject you if you put like a rounded rectangle that had the same dimensions as an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in your app? I sure do. It was supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to look like a phone? Like, it looks too much like an iPhone. Well, what do you mean? well, the proportions are exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John that of one particular iPhone we made. Or like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure I actually got that on Instapaper because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my tilt scrolling icon. I tried using like a phone. I’m pretty sure I got rejected for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, but the point I’m driving at is, you know, this data seems to exist somewhere and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in a perfect world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should in a perfect world be able to just say, I would like that list, please. And but because there it isn’t accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you, you spent two weeks going through now, maybe some of that was getting a little crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the compression stuff. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent a long time just getting the actual stuff, the effort squared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away such that it was functional. And that it seems so dumb. And it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why would that take so long, Marco, what’s wrong with you? But this is just the way app development works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t say that to necessarily complain, even though I think I think that’s how it’s coming across. But just to say, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much here. FastText, which admittedly was a garbage app, but it was an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app and it was, I don’t know, a couple of 100 lines of code or something like that. I haven’t done a clock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on masquerade, maybe I can do that while we’re talking, but it is not just a couple of 100 lines of code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is more than that. Granted, it perhaps shouldn’t have taken me as long as it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did, but this is app development these days. This is just how it works, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it takes a while to make something that’s decent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I mean, I can’t even tell you how many of these dumb little things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve run into. I mean, this is just, you’re right, this isn’t just any one particular app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or project or task in an app. This is just the job. I run into this dumb stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every day where I will, I’ll have some days where I just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing productivity in getting stuff done. I’ll be able to check off a bunch of stuff off my list,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ll be able to ship out a new build, and everyone’s like, Well, I can’t believe you filled this in here. And then I’ll have other days where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I spend the entire day like I started out doing some checklist item that I wanted to get done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I realized, Oh, no, this is not working the way I expected it to work. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this, I need to do something else, which needs to do something else, which needs to do something else like, Oh, wait a minute. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole thing is expanding in scope, because to actually achieve this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some of it was stupid stuff like for instance that list of restricted symbols
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and SF symbols that is gettable information the way the first way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found to do I have since found a simpler way but the first way I found to do it was I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticed that like if you open up font book if you load the SF pro fonts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and font book they have as part of their license text a list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the symbol name and then it says this symbol may not be modified you know blah blah blah and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I figured out what the heck is the CT the core text API call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to get that license from the font file and then parse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that text for this and I I did eventually figure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and that probably took me two hours like that. It’s there’s so much like little stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that I run into all the time. You know just yesterday I’m like I wanted to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m moving my notification type from background update pushes to actual live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alerts for many reasons. Basically background pushes are much less reliable than I would like them to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people keep complaining that they’re missing their notifications and so I’m just moving to live alerts when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the upside will be will be that they are much, much, much more reliable. The downside will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the app will no longer necessarily wake up every single time in the background to start the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco download. So that’s starting the download is going to be more dependent on background refresh intervals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or actions that you take as the user, rather than me being able to tell the system, hey, there’s content available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, it’s content available. Hey, it’s content available. So anyway, but to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to change the way notifications are are generated because before my servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when a new episode would come out, my servers would send a content available push notification to the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone would download the data for the new episode from the server and responds in a background task,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then would post a local notification with the episode info once it got that info
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the server. So you know, this multi step thing, but key thing was it was it was the server was triggering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app to background launch. But again, the problem with that is the is that iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will often just say, Nope, don’t want to do that. For whatever reason, we went, you know, maybe I’m low on power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or my internet connection isn’t very good, or the user has put me in low power mode, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve been forced quit quote out of the app launcher. And that used to prevent those. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there’s all sorts of things that prevent those. And so anyway, now, I had to switch to the live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push that you get, like when somebody messages you or something like you get the alert push that they they are pretty much always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent through, you know, up user settings of course, but they’re pretty much always sent and delivered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you can’t include things like the artwork image in them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the limit for how much text can go in there is 4k. So you can’t even like really cram it in. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to change my server side support for things like first I had to build a system where all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APNs tokens that I store, well now I have to store an app build version with those, because I’m going to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the app in two different ways depending on which version of the app it is. If it’s a version before this build I have to use the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way and if it’s a version after this build then I get to use the new way. So first I have to alter the server stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to support all this like distinction on the you know on the on the APNs sending side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Add new support for the new types of pushes I’m trying to send then go back to the app side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things. Add a notification service extension so that it can intercept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the alert notification on the way in. download the image it needs to download, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modify the notification payload for then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further display in the other notification extension, the notification content extension. So like there’s, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was all to, you know, to quote, make notifications more reliable. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was the check mark item. It was basically like, you know, fix notifications. And that like, it involved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole day of jumping between server stuff and app stuff making a whole new extension and all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other. And you know, in any one of those steps, if I temporarily screwed it up, that add another hour, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why is this not working? Oh, I didn’t change this key over here. Like, you know, it’s, and that’s, yeah, that’s just the job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I, I totally get why this took six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That makes total sense to me. And especially all of the UI, you know, iteration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you did. That’s the worst, UI stuff, not only does it take a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprisingly long amount of time to build a UI because you run into weird things with SwiftUI or UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or your own ineptitude and stuff like that. So not only does that take a long time, but then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually you have to build something to see if it really works. And oftentimes get it out there to people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then fix the bugs that they report. And then, oh, by the way, this whole UI, this doesn’t work. Oh, throw it all away, start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. Or change this whole screen around, rebuild, tear out half of this, move it around. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly time consuming. I mean, this is why I’ve been working on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically what an overcast is basically one screen. Like this first version of my redesign,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s some stuff, like font and spacing changes that are kind of, impact every screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a large amount of work. But mostly I’m redesigning like one to one and a half screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this build. And that’s taken me six months. So I totally get it. I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t say it to complain, it’s just a goodness. I mean, if you had told me after day one or two where I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a very basic proof of concept that it would still take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me many months until it was released, I would have been like, really? There’s not that much here, come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. But no, there’s a lot here. I used Clock on Masquerade and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit less than 5,000 lines of code. Couple of quick fun facts just because a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of developers listen. There are 29 closed pull requests, all from me to me, which I think is funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You make pull requests to yourself?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m doing a major feature like the drawer, for example, then I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do all of that stuff in that branch so I can do whatever and not have to worry about mucking things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Then as a final step before that gets merged back into main,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll actually issue a pull request because I I really do love GitHub in so many ways, but I love that GitHub’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pull request UI does a really good job of showing diffs. I know there are other ways to do this. Like I know I could do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Kaleidoscope or any number of other tools, but I really like doing it on GitHub. It lets me walk through all the files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and see these diffs. Almost every time, almost every single time, I catch something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, mind you, before I check in, I always look at it in Tower and look at the diffs in Tower,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make sure everything looks good. But almost every time when I issue a pull request from me to me, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost every time I find something that I’m like, oh crap, left in a print statement I didn’t want to, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh crap, I hard-coded something I didn’t want to, and so I go back and have to change something before I accept the pull request. So yeah, 29
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pull requests, 64 closed GitHub issues, and 12 open ones, some of which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are kind of administrivious stuff. It is using async await in a handful of places.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does use combine here and there, but more async await when possible. It is almost exclusively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SwiftUI, it is exclusively Swift. First commit was 21 December, 2021. And the build that went to the App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is as you hear this released, that was built this past Friday. So at the very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very end of February. But yeah, go check it out. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love it if you take a look. Oh, I don’t think I actually talked about the revenue model. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the like very, very basic smiley face for free. If you would like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use any other emoji under the sun, then you need to pay a one time as we record this $3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in-app purchase, which will give you access to basically all the other emoji. I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conquered skin tone. I don’t know if I’m going to offer that or not, because it’s a very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UI problem to solve. But you get basically all the other emoji for one time $3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, even if you’re listening to this and you think I’m all right, just go download it and buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the in-app purchase just to be nice. Consider it a tip. But tell your friends, tell your family,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell parents, tell people who want to put fart clouds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on bots, whatever you want to do, tell people and check it out. I’d really appreciate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My favorite thing about this app is that the title bar of the in-app purchase screen is titled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Yeah, that’s fair. They could use the word Smith here or there. I didn’t get the Marco treatment like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did with the Peak of You, I think it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John you do a lines of code?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, it’s a little under 5,000. All
⏹️ ▶️ John Smaller than Switch Class.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I was just running the same thing. That’s why I must have missed the number. Yeah. Yep, there you go. Switch Class
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s a surprising amount of code.
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Apple event next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s move along. We have an Apple Ed breaking news.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple event on Tuesday the 8th. It is Tuesday, right? I’m not making that up. It is March 8th, one way or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other, or 8th of March, as I should probably say. Peak Performance. And it’s spelled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like peak of you, thank you very much. P-E-E-K, Peak Performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Are you getting Sherlocked?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently. So I got to get a new app out there quick because the old one’s getting Sherlocked apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so peak performance, what are we getting a peek at? Are we getting your beloved Mac Pro? Or are we getting something
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s weird that they put peak in there. I mean, I guess they give you a peek at some things you can’t order immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John So technically, it’s not, you know, but like, a lot of people are seeing the word peak and saying, Oh, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna show us the Mac Pro. But even though the Mac Pro won’t be ready, they’ll show us just how amazing it is. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and this will be ready later this year. I suppose they could do that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mean, maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ John actually is ready but supply chain stuff make it so they can’t ship it for a long time and they just want to brag but that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple thing to do it’s like they’ll show it to us not it’s not that they wait until you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the day out but they wait until it’s closer for sure so if this is something that’s supposed to ship in December I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to be seeing it now like what would be the point of that but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco uh well also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s more of a WBC kind of announcement like if like think about the audience of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the event like typically the spring event does does not contain a lot of pro hardware. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things might be different this time in, you know, with the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on the Mac side at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least. Yeah, well, first of all, yeah, everything’s pro, but like on the Mac side, it does seem like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are likely to see any remaining products that use the M1 Pro and Max chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the biggest holes in the lineup that will most likely use those are a larger iMac and a higher end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac mini. And so, you know, it wouldn’t surprise us if we see those at this event.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be nice. Those are two, especially the large iMac, that’s a pretty big hole in the lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it was any other normal time, I would say that yeah, this will be the remaining M1,
⏹️ ▶️ John But because everything is weird with supply chain stuff, it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be that if they had access to all the parts that they expect to have access to, that this would be the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it could be they have to make some hard choices about which one of these products is more important because we only have enough
⏹️ ▶️ John power inverters to make either the iMac or the Mac mini. And so we can only announce one of them. That
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a shame, but that’s just par for the course now. Lots of times you just, you know, the limiting factors,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t get enough of some part that’s essential for all the computers that we essentially have finished.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re like, we’re done, they’re designed, they’re, everything is ready about them. The packaging is ready to go, they’re tested.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just can’t put this product up for sale because if more than 10 people buy it, we run out
⏹️ ▶️ John of this one part. I hope that’s not the case, but we never know. So yeah, Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John and big iMac for sure are on the table, and it would make sense
⏹️ ▶️ John for them to be released. But this is like a new factor in our whole, what is Apple going to announce? There’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ John factors that go into already, and now all of a sudden it is, what if Apple would like to announce this but can’t? And that hasn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing for, basically since the Tim Cook era, not when he was CEO, but when he was a COO, when he was
⏹️ ▶️ John doing inventory management. It used to be that Apple was not particularly good at manufacturing and
⏹️ ▶️ John had a long lead time between when something was made and when someone actually bought it. And Tim Cook added,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, more modern discipline to that and not having tons of channel inventory and not stuffing the channel to boost
⏹️ ▶️ John sales numbers. You guys missed this era in Apple’s history, but one of the things they used to do is, it was called stuffing the channel
⏹️ ▶️ John where, if the quarter is ending and Apple wants to say, we sold X number of Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would say how many they sold, quote unquote, into the channel, like into the place where distributors get them from.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they would just sell them into the distributors that would distribute them to the physical stores
⏹️ ▶️ John and count those as sales, even though no person bought those Macs. And then those things
⏹️ ▶️ John would just sit in the distribution channel for months, slowly draining out into like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what it was like, you know, Egghead or Best Buy or independent Mac sellers. And during that time,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can’t sell anything more into the channel because it was full and it was just, it was a nightmare, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But those days are long gone. And now we think, okay, well, this Apple, they’re great at manufacturing things and they
⏹️ ▶️ John can get the best, they get the best parts, they get the best chips, they get the best manufacturing stuff, they paid all
⏹️ ▶️ John this money for these amazing factories. That shouldn’t be a problem anymore, but then COVID
⏹️ ▶️ John and now nobody can get anything. So I really hope that doesn’t squash any of these computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if all the parts are available, this would be the time for the Mac mini and the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John big iMac to make the debut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I gotta say like, you know, throughout all of COVID and the, you know, subsequent supply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chain problems we’ve had. Apple has done a very good job of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hiding us from any problems that they might be having, you know, getting supply or getting things made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or getting things shipped. Like, you know, almost everyone else around the world who makes or sells things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has made those problems very noticeable to their customers because they had to. Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, through logistical magic and expertise and good deals and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priority and good planning or whatever it is, maybe just not talking about it too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has really kept a lot of this out of our, out of public view. I like to be an Apple customer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now and to be able to just, you know, for the most part, go to Apple and just order what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need or buy what you need and be able to get it pretty in a pretty reasonable amount of time for almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this entire pandemic, um, that’s really saying something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s style of communication where they don’t tell you about things ahead of time. Really helps here
⏹️ ▶️ John because like, for example, the big iMac, that was actually rumored for 2021. And then the rumors were it got delayed because
⏹️ ▶️ John supply chain stuff, but we don’t like that Apple never said anything about that. There’s no reason we should have expected it in 2021.
⏹️ ▶️ John Except that we saw a rumor about it. But Apple’s is like, why, you know, it’s not late, because we never told you when it was coming,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. And so any delays are completely hidden from us, you know, in that respect, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John an advantage of their, you know, communication strategy. But I would hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that the way they build things also, you you know, factors into this. Like you said, having
⏹️ ▶️ John preferential treatment that we paid for your factory, we get first choice on all of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re putting the same chip in a lot of our computers, which helps so we don’t have to have 17 different chips being made and deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John the inventory. Just make as many M1s as you can, because we’re gonna ship a whole line of computers that have M1s in
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And now with the M1 Pro Max, you know, make as many as those as you can, because we got like three or four different computers
⏹️ ▶️ John that are gonna use them. And the fact that the M chips work in all these different contexts, that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not shoehorning that chip into a computer that shouldn’t have it. It’s great in all those contexts,
⏹️ ▶️ John that certainly helps as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But yeah, so as for what we’re likely to see, I mean, honestly, as part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same reason why I haven’t looked much at Masquerade, sorry again, I also haven’t been paying much attention to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tech rumors and everything this time around. And, but I think just looking at the lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and looking at what still has to come out and what’s likely to happen, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say this still feels a bit early to have any of the like multi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip or multi die M1 Macs products. So probably not the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably not like there were there were always some ideas floating around that maybe a high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end iMac or you know slash iMac Pro might have like a dual M1 Macs design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that’s to come, which honestly would surprise me, but if that’s to come, I don’t think it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come at this event. It feels too early to do those. I’m guessing this event is the computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that historically have had the guts of the MacBook Pro, you know, in some version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or other, and that would be the large iMac and the high-end Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and just to do a quick recap of the, we’ve talked about all these machines on past shows and the various rumors around
⏹️ ▶️ John them, but the Mac Mini, the rumor is that it’s thinner, that it has a glass top, that it’s got the magnetic power
⏹️ ▶️ John connector for reasons that that we could not really make sense of back when we discussed this rumor, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John it would come with M1 Pro or M1 Max. And the big iMac, keep calling it that just because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got the bigger screen than the current 24 inch one. For a while we thought it might be 30 inch, but now the rumors have
⏹️ ▶️ John really solidified that it’s just gonna be 27 inch. M1 Pro, M1 Max as the rumored CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John with the possibility of an M1 Max Duo, the double thing. And the reason we’re calling
⏹️ ▶️ John this big iMac is because is it just gonna be called iMac? is it gonna be called iMac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the iMac Pro just the one that has the double M1 Macs in it? These are all kind of marketing decisions
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not clear what Apple will do here because it’s kind of a big reset on this whole product line. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the big iMac, the rumor is that it’s thicker, won’t come in colors, will have 120 Hertz screen and mini
⏹️ ▶️ John LED and all that. And then the other products, there’s lots of other products that are rumored just because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple files for whatever, know, the equivalent of the
⏹️ ▶️ John underwriters, whatever, like, I don’t know, like FCC, in various countries you have to file to say I’m going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John shipping a product that’s going to do radio stuff in your country and here’s the code number for it and people figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out what that is. Anyway, there’s a lot of products that are in the pipeline that in theory might also be announced.
⏹️ ▶️ John A new iPad Air, just sort of spec bumping that so it’s not so embarrassingly worse than the new iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John mini. a new low-end iPad that finally ditches the
⏹️ ▶️ John old thing and gets the flat sides like the Air, and the iPhone SE, the new
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone SE, which again would just look like the current iPhone SE, but it’d have an A15 and it didn’t have 5G. Lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John those are products that are probably in the pipeline, but I don’t think it makes for a coherent
⏹️ ▶️ John presentation, especially when performance is highlighted in the invitation. It just seems like the whole event
⏹️ ▶️ John could be Macs that are faster than previous ones, which shouldn’t be hard
⏹️ ▶️ John All the Macs they introduce are either low-end Macs or laptop Macs. And now it’s time for Macs that are not low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John and or are not laptops. And they should be fast. And that’ll be exciting. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the event that I am most looking forward to so far this year. Obviously, the most I’d be looking forward to is
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro one. If the Mac Pro comes out today, this is what I’m going to say about like expectations.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t know how they’re doing on manufacturing these chips, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have any, Intel would talk about their things. And on Intel, we’d see like PCs would always ship
⏹️ ▶️ John with the thing first or whatever. Even if Apple got the chip first, we knew it was coming. We have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple is even building. We just have these vague rumors, or what the timelines are. When the M1 Pro and Max came out,
⏹️ ▶️ John was that earlier than people thought? Later than people thought? We have no yardstick for judging like, how long does
⏹️ ▶️ John it take to make this stuff happen? So it could be they come out on stage and here’s the new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro with 40 cores or something. The only reason we doubt that is just because It usually takes them a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time and that’s usually the last one to come. But I don’t know, like maybe things are different
⏹️ ▶️ John now that they’re making their own chips. Maybe the M1 Pro and Max machines were not shipping
⏹️ ▶️ John because of some part that has nothing to do with this amount of chip and that shortage. It’s just, it’s so hard to predict.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do like the fact that this says performance and so we’re getting into the good stuff now. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the mass market computers, the ones that people actually buy, shipped first. Good job Apple, shipped the computers that people
⏹️ ▶️ John actually buy. And now we’re getting into the ones that I’m the most interested in, which are the ones that nobody buys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Including you for most years, or most decades, I
⏹️ ▶️ John should say. Well, I’m getting this big iMac, because I was saying that my wife’s got a 2015 5K iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John that I just today, I guess we’ll talk about this in the next show, but just today I was fighting with her
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac and some issue or whatever. And I was like, I can solve this problem with hardware. And I was about to do it. And I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John nope, I’m not buying anything else for this computer. It’s a 2015 computer. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John the new, she’s got a big iMac. She likes it. She thinks there’s nothing wrong with her computer. I think there are things wrong with it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not spending any more money on that computer. And as soon as they announced that big iMac, that’s what I’m getting. And it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I said, you won’t even, if you don’t care, if you think your computer is fine, the only thing you’ll notice is that there’ll be a
⏹️ ▶️ John skinnier border around the screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there won’t be an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple logo facing you. And other than that, it will be a thousand times faster and will anger me less.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m getting that one, and I really hope that’s announced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I hear you. Do you think there’ll be displays? Because now I feel like my display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situation, I’m actually pretty happy with it. So now is the time that Apple’s gonna finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come out and make me spend more money on stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t even seen any rumors about that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey feel like I’m getting greedy. Nor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have I. I mean, hey man, you never know what’ll happen. It would be kind of cool. You could take a peek at that display.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve only heard like wish lists. People want there to be displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen nothing to suggest that there will be.
⏹️ ▶️ John – Well, there’s rumors that they’re working on them, but not that they’re imminent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. Based on the state of the rumors, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the current positioning of the rumors, it still feels like they’re a half a year to a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So let’s, let’s look at it this way. So John, selfishly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sounds like you’re most interested in a 27 inch iMac. What do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the single most important product for Apple to announce on Tuesday?
⏹️ ▶️ John It probably is the big iMac because who buys a Mac mini? That’s a very narrow interest product. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMacs were well received, I feel like, and just to have a slightly bigger model to
⏹️ ▶️ John bring people up market and to make a little bit more money and to give people a little bigger screen. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John is by far the most important, well, it’s the most important Mac product. Depending on how the iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John go, if they do actually come out with a new low-end iPad, like the cheapest possible
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, and it’s got the flat side, that’s probably the most important product in terms of how many people are gonna buy it, because I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John sell a lot of those super low-end iPads. But I don’t know, that’s like a late-breaking rumor. Who knows if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John any basis in fact at all to, I mean, why would they show that at a peak performance thing? You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s like that’s the opposite of peak performance. The lowest performing iPad you can buy, it would be weird
⏹️ ▶️ John to announce it on stage. It could still be announced by press release or something or whatever, but yeah, on stage,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the big iMac. I feel like that’s gonna be the star of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Marco, what do you think is the most important? What are you personally most interested in?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I am hoping for is the new iPad Air because my son is due for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an upgrade and his birthday’s coming up soon and that could be a good answer to that question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What would be the most important, you know, to my overall other interests?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably a big iMac. Not that I would want to get one because frankly, I’m incredibly happy with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current setup of ridiculous XDR and desktop laptop. Like I love this setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is fantastic. This is so fantastic that it’s actually going to be a question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether I get the next Mac Pro or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I actually, I don’t think we necessarily have time for today, but I would like to explore that with you because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also am in a really good computing place right now. And even though I had, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, what, five, six, six, seven years of, of 27 inch iMacs, and I loved that time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my life. I really did. But being able to take my best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer and move it wherever I want is so freaking magical.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so cool. And we, we don’t need to belabor it right now, but it is so great. So yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have very big interest in the 27-inch iMac in terms of, and I think it is probably, in my opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s the most important product for Apple at this event. But I don’t know if I would want it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I feel like I’m back on the laptop train. But anyway, I digress, I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s roughly where I feel. Like I’m really, because like right now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am very rarely wanting more performance out of my computer now. Like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, like ever since, I mean, the M one was already almost there. The The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason I really wanted to expand past the M one was a little more a little more high CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core for parallel stuff, but mainly like stuff like disk space and RAM. That’s what I like the RAM was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holding me back a lot on the M one. Now like with the M one max and the ability to have like high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM and bigger disks and higher core counts like I am fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I am even even doing big compilations of my app. Like I’m not waiting very long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that kind of stuff. Like everything is very, very fast now. And so when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro comes out, I might not get it. Or at least, you know, right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I’m still in my like mobile lifestyle for the next probably two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years or so. Maybe after that, things might change. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I’m very happy where I am. So anyway, this is an event where I am mostly excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products that other people want. Like I’m excited for them. And in that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very excited to see the new Big iMac because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for the most part for a long time now, we really haven’t had a good recommendation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for developers or power users who wanted a good desktop setup except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the Big iMac. because Apple has been so weird slash negligent on the on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the monitor front. But the IMAX have always been great monitors and, you know, for most of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iterations, pretty great computers as well. So, you know, and you know, now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we had the the small iMac with the M one get updated, and that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly a pretty big success, and people seem to like that machine a lot. And now the question was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, you know, what’s good? What’s the big one going to be? And if this event answers that question, I think that’s a really big step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the for the lineup. You know, nerd nerd wise, the Mac Mini is certainly interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I personally don’t have a use for a high end Mac Mini right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, it’s funny you say that because I don’t think I do either. Like I’m rocking a circa 2012
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Mini as my Plex server, and it does a handful of other minor things, including and former sponsor channels, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it never seems to really complain about any of it because I’m really not asking that much of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s the one I am selfishly most, well, on display if it actually shows up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I agree with you guys, it would be pretty surprising if it did, but if not a display, I’m curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a Mac mini because even though I don’t particularly need one, I think that might be the next thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I buy, computer-wise, obviously I’ll buy phone or whatever, but in terms of a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like a less than a decade old Mac mini. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since you sold yours to Apple, you big jerk, then I’m curious to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s announced. And I don’t think I need the Super Bowler Mega Mac mini. I think, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a base Mac mini would probably be sufficient for my needs, but I’m still curious to see what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is they announce if they do so.
⏹️ ▶️ John A wild card here is M2 stuff. Again, getting back to how little visibility we have in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon process. other than the fact that M2 will eventually come,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the schedule on that? We talked about this, or how does it overlap with the M1 type stuff? Because remember the M1 is based
⏹️ ▶️ John on the A14 cores, it might not, A15 cores, right? No, A14, A14 cores. A14, yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, A14 cores, sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of, like it’s not exact, right? And then the M1 Pro and M1 Max have lots of variations,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s still essentially the same core designs for the CPU cores in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John close to the same anyway, they’re tweaked a little bit. We all assume based on our past conversations that the big giant
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro one will also be M1-ish cores, just because that’s the way we discussed on a past show. The way it usually goes, you make
⏹️ ▶️ John the smaller, simpler chips and you make them bigger and bigger and bigger. You don’t come right out the gate with a big one. But that
⏹️ ▶️ John means that the M2, which we all think is gonna be in the new, very skinny
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop that may or may not be called MacBook Air the M2 based color flat, you know, the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John for that are pretty strong. That has been projected out to be, well, that’s not gonna be in this event cause it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a performance computer. It’s just sort of like, you know, it’s a low end, low power, probably fanless computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that probably is gonna have an M2 in it, right? But if the M2 is ready now,
⏹️ ▶️ John would they come out with some kind of MacBook non-pro with an M2? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it seems like the timing is all wrong because they just came, didn’t just, they quote unquote just came out with
⏹️ ▶️ John a new M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros, and those are their high performance
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops. And the initial M2 machine is not going to be high performance. It’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 non-max, the M2 non-pro, just the plain old M2. But
⏹️ ▶️ John would the plain old M2 be faster than the M1 Pro and M1 Max in certain operations? And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s just, I feel it’ll feel much better once we get through all, we get through
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the max going to ARM, and then we get through the first iteration of like M2 to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John how this is supposed to go. Although when we do that, actually, we probably won’t even be able to extrapolate, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll say, well, that was all weird is it was COVID times and here we are, hopefully someday,
⏹️ ▶️ John not as crippled by supply chain things in COVID. And maybe we’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John a normal iteration, but it’s all just a complete mystery because Apple doesn’t have to tell anyone about what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing and what the timelines are. And so we know that there are machines like this in the works
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly, but we don’t actually know when they might be scheduled. And so the M2 is supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John based on A15 course. The A15 has been out for a while now. It’s not like we’re expecting,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, M2, that’s not gonna come out, it’s too soon for that, it’s too cutting edge. The time is
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, 2022 is a reasonable time for an M2-based computer to ship. Maybe not in March 2022,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the rumor is floating around out there, and potentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, let’s say it was just, it was ready. They had the M2-based, really thin,
⏹️ ▶️ John low-power, MacBook Air replacement-y kind of machine coming out. They could fit that into
⏹️ ▶️ John a peak performance thing, as they would say, look at the existing M1 MacBook Air. Everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John loves it, it’s a great computer, it’s super awesome, but now we can do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but with even higher performance and even better battery life, and it comes in colors.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would fit in the event, I just don’t think it’s probably ready yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that would actually be a shame, because I’d actually forgotten about the M2 MacBook Air, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has been rumored to be a this spring release for like the last six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s been a while. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, but does it get pushed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like everything else? Yeah, and it certainly does seem like the rumors to that effect have dried up recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have kind of been like, oh, maybe later in the
⏹️ ▶️ John year. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And it might
⏹️ ▶️ John not even be a MacBook Air. I feel like there’s been waffling on that of like, well, they don’t have to call it the Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could just call it the MacBook. Like branding and naming
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is always weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I mean, ultimately like there has been this M2 redesigned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air that’s been rumored for a while that sounds awesome. Like people talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the colors of the new small iMac and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a design more reminiscent of that and of current laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have no more taper and more like flat sided edges and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. The rumors of that, and I believe it’s rumored to have a white keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have the light colors on top, that sounds really cool. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the existing M1 MacBook Air is so incredibly good that to take that same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing forward with a new industrial design that could be really awesome and really breathe some new aesthetic life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it, that’s fantastic. That’s gonna be a great thing if that comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the iMacification of the laptop, which I think this was slightly before both of your times as well, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMacification of the laptop, the first time that happened? Do you remember the original iBook, the toilet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, the big translucent blue everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John the big poster I got from Mac World Expo in New York, it said iMac to go. It was literally like, take the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John and slam it into our laptop line. You get the iBook, right? Toilet seat iBook with
⏹️ ▶️ John a handle and it came in fun colors. These rumors of this M2 laptop is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John take the 24 inch iMac and slam that into the laptop line. Again, it’s like history
⏹️ ▶️ John repeating itself. And granted the colors are more muted now and the design is very different, but it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John what if that iMac but laptop? That’s what all the rumor things look like.
⏹️ ▶️ John like you could take it to 24 inch iMac and fold it in half and shrink it down and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. So I would actually, I hope that that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out at this event, but because the rumors have been so hesitant on it coming out soon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like recently, I’m a little hesitant too whether that’s ready yet, but that would be exciting. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as for M2 versus M1 stuff, I think we’ve already seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this plays out on the phone side with these same cores. And so we can extrapolate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly what that’s going to be like on the Mac side. You know, on the phone side, A14 to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A15 was a fairly minor update. It was still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. It was more in the area of power efficiency than in performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what this means on the Mac side, that’s not a small thing, that’s still an important thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I wouldn’t expect this to be like embarrassing the M1 products in any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benchmark or anything like that. It’s probably just going to be like, Hey, everything got like, you know, five or 10% faster and you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 10 or 15% better battery life. That’s, that’s a great improvement, but I don’t think anything’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make the M1 look bad so soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure. Cause I feel like the thing I don’t have a good handle on is how much is
⏹️ ▶️ John tweaked. Right. If just for the, for the M1 versus what would have been the A14X, how different
⏹️ ▶️ John are those two things from each other? Probably not that different. I mean they use the M1 and the iPad, we’re crying out loud, right? But the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Pro and Max, the more I hear about them, the more I hear about the things that are different in those
⏹️ ▶️ John chips than just, oh, it’s an M1 but with just more cores. Like the Pro and the Max have other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Possibly one of those things being multi-chip interconnect for the Duo and Quad thing or whatever, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John just the internal guts and how it’s laid out in the execution units, the cache hierarchy, all that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU, the way it’s designed. So I do wonder How different
⏹️ ▶️ John the m2 might be like that maybe the m1 is very much like an a14x But the
⏹️ ▶️ John m2 is less like an a15x. You know what I mean? Like again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have a precedent for How much variation Apple is willing to do how much
⏹️ ▶️ John customization they’re willing to do and how much they’re willing to lean into You know the
⏹️ ▶️ John the power potential of the M line of chips You know a little bit with the pro and the max because those are pretty pretty gargantuan
⏹️ ▶️ John chips with a huge number of transistors and they do lots of amazing stuff. But for the
⏹️ ▶️ John M2, like I feel like the first one, the M1, as amazing as it was, Apple’s target, they even
⏹️ ▶️ John said to the stuff like they said, their funny line in the introduction said we, we might have overshot, like they weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John aiming for something as phenomenal as as turned out, right? I think they just would have been happy if it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John A14X that can run Mac stuff, but it was just fantastic. And maybe the M2,
⏹️ ▶️ John they actually are aiming higher and maybe they’ll achieve that, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited. I feel like there have been rumors, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that this is a known quantity. And I don’t know, I should go back and listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past pre-event shows and see if I’ve been saying this for the last six events running. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, I feel like Apple’s done a pretty good job of keeping most of this close to the vest. And I’m excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I find it much more fun to go in kind of not really knowing what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to expect than knowing exactly what’s coming. And probably next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll talk about like the rumors of the hole punch front sensors on the iPhone 14 and we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like renderings of it and that’s fine and all. But I don’t know, I kind of like being just shocked and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just being completely surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to be shocked because I think we’ve had individual episodes looking at the renders
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of all of these different products and discussing them in
⏹️ ▶️ John length. So I don’t think they’re gonna, I mean, the big iMac, does anyone think it’s going to be anything other than
⏹️ ▶️ John a scaled up version of the 24 inch iMac that might be a little thicker and comes in gray? Like in terms of physical appearance, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be very surprised if it’s anything but that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, that’s an interesting question though. Probably it’s gonna be positioned as a pro product. And so I would assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only is it going to be available in gray, I would assume it’s only available in shades of gray. That is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, a very likely direction. Honestly, I think that’s a sad and boring direction to go in, but that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, very likely. But also, do you think they would do things like have the external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power supply? Is there going to be an Ethernet port internal to the Mac, or is it going to be on the brick like the 13-inch? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 13-inch makes a bunch of compromises because it’s a lower-end machine where aesthetics are more important. The bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I think customers would say aesthetics are significantly less important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, I think, would say they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John more important than their customers, I think. They’re still a factor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Right. You know, to include the, you know, the number of ports on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Big iMac has always been pretty high and that’s a pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of its utility. And to have all those ports, and especially to have all those port types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Big iMac will require it to have significantly greater thickness than the smaller one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s also a question of like, what if they don’t use the chin design? If they’re going for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thicker that maybe looks a little more like an XDR, but like a little bit smaller and a little bit thinner than that. But if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going for a more XDR-like design, or an XDR-influenced design at least, what if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just make it thin bezels all around and just make the back of it a little bit thicker to have all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John components? I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the chin is still gonna be there because I think that’s where they’re gonna put the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s gonna be thicker
⏹️ ▶️ John probably, but it’s not gonna be so much thicker that they can get rid of the chin. And for the
⏹️ ▶️ John external power supply, I honestly don’t know. When I say it’s gonna be thicker, it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be thick enough to fit an ethernet plug, but maybe not. And it’s not like they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John ship this thing without ethernet. So I feel like I’m leaning towards the stupid external, but it’s not stupid. The external
⏹️ ▶️ John power supply, I don’t think it’s that ridiculous. Cause we talked about this one, then 24 inch iMac count. It actually is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of convenient to plug in the ethernet cable down with the stupid brick. The brick itself is not convenient. The
⏹️ ▶️ John brick is annoying, but if you’ve got the brick, I’d rather plug ethernet into the brick than fish it up
⏹️ ▶️ John to my desk and to through the little thing into the back of the computer. Because the more things you plug
⏹️ ▶️ John into the back, Like the iMac, you know, the 5K iMac, it’s got a lot of ports back there. And I have things plugged into almost
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them, and it’s a lot of cables sneaking out the back of your computer. So if one of those could be on the
⏹️ ▶️ John floor, that does kind of clean things up, and we know how Apple likes to keep things cleaned up. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit thicker, but not a lot thicker. Like I don’t expect an XDR type thing. And a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of this also depends on, again, we keep calling this the big iMac. Will there be an iMac Pro or will there
⏹️ ▶️ John not? Is this the iMac Pro or is it just called iMac, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s an interesting question. I meant to talk to you about this. I personally do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we’re gonna see another iMac Pro. And I would love to be wrong, I really would, because gosh, did I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my iMac Pro that I just got rid of a couple of months back. But I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, or how about maybe a different way to approach this? What makes, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume that there is an iMac Pro, what makes it better than the best 27-inch iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I guess the obvious answer is like an M1 Max Duo, but then you’re potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trampling on Mac Pro, aren’t you? Or do you think that that would be quad only?
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, it’s an all-in-one. It’s just like the iMac Pro. Like you read that it’s weird, because like the iMac Pro, as we’ve discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John many times, was supposed to be the pro solution before they had decided they’re gonna make the Mac Pro again. And
⏹️ ▶️ John once they’ve made the Mac Pro again, do you still need to have an iMac Pro? I would say yes, because maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John some pros want an all-in-one computer. Why don’t you make that for them? But you can make different choices
⏹️ ▶️ John for that computer. Like the existence of the iMac Pro would allow the big iMac that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a pro to be just what we described, a scale of 24 inch and so on and so forth. The big iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac Pro could be thicker still, could be thick enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John have ethernet ports on it, could have 10 gig ethernet on the power brick through a different connector. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac Pro would, I would expect it to be just as pro as the previous iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, otherwise why even have that product? But if branding says, we’re just gonna call the
⏹️ ▶️ John big iMac the iMac Pro. That’s just what we’re gonna do. That doesn’t convince
⏹️ ▶️ John me that they’re going to be approaching that computer with the same mindset as they approached the original iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing that there is no, you know, two different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models of the 27-inch anymore. There’s gonna be one 27-inch. They might call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it iMac Pro, but there’s only gonna be one model, and if we get one on the 8th, it’s gonna be that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model. Like I am not expecting them to have a like, you know, semi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro, like, you know, like a mini Mac Pro version of the iMac. I think it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s gonna be the 24 inch that we see now, and that uses the, you know, M1 class of chips and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever that line is going forward. And there’s gonna be the 27 inch version of it that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might call iMac Pro, although they might not, I’ll get to that in a second, but that’s gonna use the MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, X version of these chips. and that’s gonna be it for the iMac line. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no Duo in the iMac in that case. Yeah, I’m saying no Duo in the iMac. But if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website now, in the header and in the titles of these pages, these computers are officially called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac 24-inch and the current, hopefully soon to be outbound Intel version is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called iMac 27-inch. So it’s just iMac 24 and iMac 27. And I think those are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty good, that’s a pretty good naming scheme. It makes it much more like laptops. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they keep it like that, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, I think the more likely outcome is that they call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Big One iMac Pro. Because I think it will have many of the distinctions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the MacBook Pro has. I think it’s gonna have the mini LED screen, and of course, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro and Max options on the chips. It’ll have the higher resources of those chips and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think it’s very likely that’s called iMac Pro because it matches MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many feature distinctions from the model that’s below it. But if they just keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it called iMac 27, that wouldn’t surprise me that much either.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of, I would say, you know, if the Duo was a real thing, and it would be kind of a shame if they never put it in an all-in-one
⏹️ ▶️ John computer, you know, because like, even, I understand like if they come up with a design,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, the design doesn’t really allow for that type of cooling, and the Duo is kind of a pro product anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we’ve been spoiled by the iMac Pro, but even some of the 5K iMacs, at various times the 5K iMacs had the
⏹️ ▶️ John highest single, you know, single-threaded CPU performance of any Mac, right? Usually, at most times, they
⏹️ ▶️ John did. Because they had fewer cores, right? And, but they had also had the cooling capacity to run them at higher clock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speeds. Well, and they would get the consumer grade chips, so they’d be updated faster from Intel, and they would be updated more often by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. So it was always, it was all those factors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John going in. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like a performance iMac is not unprecedented, and it would kind of be a shame to have this
⏹️ ▶️ John Duo thing, and it’s like, well, that would be, I think an M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro slash Max Duo is an appropriate chip for a high-end iMac. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a shame if they chose a big iMac design that didn’t allow for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that bad, because you could still get the Mac Pro, like it’s not the end of the world, but I kind of got used to the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that a high-performance iMac is not a contradiction in terms. Even before
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac Pro, I got used to that, but certainly the iMac Pro, that showed that that style of computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all in one, you get everything you need, but also it’s really, really fast and has big cooling capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John to have powerful stuff. That’s a cool product, and I hope someday they make that again. Not instead of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, but in addition to it. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Linode. And thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join, and we’ll talk to you
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, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ 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
Marco Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s talking about Marco Christmas now, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was gonna say this is another example of the random thing in the show notes that I do not
⏹️ ▶️ John not random. It’s Marco Christmas. Did your Marco Christmas come?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you’re talking about the boxes I sent you for my clean outs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes. Oh, I misunderstood. Yes, I did get Marco Christmas. And Marco and I had a conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over text message about this. My Marco Christmas was a legitimate Christmas. It wasn’t, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, the school supply holiday, it was a legitimately good Christmas. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found a large box on my front stoop and I was very confused by it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I looked at it and I realized, oh, this is Marco Christmas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was very large and very heavy. And so I lift it up and I bring it into the house and I open it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there’s, you know, just oodles and oodles of random packing material. And then the first thing I saw,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to try to do a little foley work here. The first thing thing I saw was this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a baggie of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven SSDs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of which appear to be intended for internal use. And I do not have a enclosure just hanging around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seven random SSDs of sizes that I didn’t even bother looking at because I have no friggin idea what I’m going to do with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I can tell you the sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them is 160 gigs. That’s the very first SSD I I ever had from Intel. Four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them are, or maybe five, are one terabyte. And I think one of them is two
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s actually not that bad. Oh, you should send me the two terabyte one. I can use that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the hardware that I almost bought for our iMac because she’s got the photo library on an external
⏹️ ▶️ John drive and it’s one terabyte and it’s full now. Like, oh, two terabyte would get room for that. And so I started doing some
⏹️ ▶️ John research and I’m like, no, stop, don’t buy anything. You’re just going to buy a four terabyte big
⏹️ ▶️ John stop. So, yep, I didn’t buy anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco Christmas was already off to a good start, but that was not the majority of the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the box. And so I was like, well, what the hell is the rest of this stuff? So all Kindles for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you would think. I genuinely was expecting a bunch of Kindles and I know that’s usually your Christmas present, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco wasn’t sure. Yeah, I sent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to John. Yeah, I wasn’t sure if I would get some. And, uh, I went rifling through the packing material and I see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large, like, not boxes, but like rectangles that are, or, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, rectangular solids or whatever that are in the, that are in the box. I’m very confused. I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, oh, these are speakers. And then I look closer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’re the, what are these called again?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adam. There you go. The paradigm speakers, which appear to be very, very nice. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the listeners don’t know is that a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago, I had said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one of the private slacks that Marco and you and me all are a part of, that I want a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pair of computer speakers that in a perfect world would be self-powered, but I know that’s not normally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much of a thing unless they’re like truly garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco speakers. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a big thing. I have never found a good one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wanted a set of speakers, preferably self-powered, but I understand that’s probably not going to work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can use for my computer. And supreme audio fidelity is not particularly important.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just want something that’s better than the mostly trash speakers that are in this LG 5K.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do have the decent speakers on the MacBook Pro, but not only is that physically to the left side of me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s more often than not clamshelled. And so, yeah, I mean, I could still hear it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but it sounds like garbage. Please don’t use those for music at your desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did briefly when I didn’t have the LG 5K, which had at least, well, I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say passable, I’m not even sure they’re passable speakers, but it had some sort of, or it has some sort of speakers in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. So yeah, so Marco sent me these two speakers. And again, I don’t have an amp just laying around, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll absolutely take a pair of really good speakers and where I have to supply my own amp.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, what was me? I’m gonna have to spend like 50 to $100 on an amp for these like God knows how much, how expensive they were speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my Marco Christmas was fantastic. A++++++++
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would receive unsolicited mail again. John, it sounds like you did not win the lottery like
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I totally did. I had an awesome Marco Christmas. And by the way, the reason I call this Marker Christmas is it reminds
⏹️ ▶️ John me of Alston Christmas. I’ll put a link in the show notes for people who know what Alston Christmas is, but it’s basically when all the
⏹️ ▶️ John students have to move and they take all their junk furniture that they don’t want to move with and they just put it on the street and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can just go through Alston, which is an area of Boston, and wander around. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want a used, unfinished wooden desk, you can get one at Alston Christmas.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want a really crappy computer chair, you can get one at Alston Christmas. Anyway, Marker
⏹️ ▶️ John Christmas is way better than that. You get much better stuff. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when I clean out my closet, I don’t want to bother with selling things. Like, selling things is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pain in the butt. And so if there’s somebody in my life who can use it, then great. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much rather just give it to the person who can use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So last Marker Christmas, I did get a big pile of Kindles, which were used as packing material for the
⏹️ ▶️ John other items. This time, I just, because they’re good, you can wedge them between things. This time, I
⏹️ ▶️ John just got one Kindle, but it’s a really cool, fancy Kindle. So it’s a Kindle Oasis in a cool,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s the Amazon case, cool magnetic case thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is actually the first Kindle Oasis. They updated it shortly afterwards and they made it like bigger and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bulkier and worse. This is the very first Oasis before they made it big. So it’s actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I were still ever reading anything on a Kindle, I would have kept it because it’s a great device for that, but I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used it in like four years. And I even, I tried turning it on to like, you know, reset it and clear it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off and everything. And I think it was having trouble even connecting to Amazon servers. So maybe it was like, you know, an expired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certificate somewhere in the chain. It’s a problem. I don’t know. But this is your problem now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the disappointing part is that I thought it would be funny if I could, you know, surround whatever I was sending you with Kindles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. And I can only find this one. And then literally, like, I dropped it off at the post office the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day. And an hour after I dropped it off at the post office, I found two more Kindles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just like cockroaches, the Kindles you see are just nothing compared to the Kindles you don’t see. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I don’t read that much on Kindles. I don’t read that much period, but we are a Kindle household, everyone else,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was using them, but I did claim this one for myself. My wife’s got a fancier Oasis. Hers is actually nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John than, newer than this one anyway. But I like this one. It’s got physical buttons. I couldn’t figure out the
⏹️ ▶️ John interface at first. I had to ask my wife, because I opened up, it does work. I logged into my thing. I downloaded a bunch of books.
⏹️ ▶️ John I opened up the current book that I’m reading. And I couldn’t figure out how to get off of the book reading screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like, I tapped the middle, you know, left and right, We’d go page left, page right. I tapped the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ John The one place I didn’t tap was where you do it. You gotta tap on the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s cool. So I got that. And then I found these other two boxes that like, but these long, skinny,
⏹️ ▶️ John heavy things. There’s so much packing material in there. They’re long, skinny, heavy things. And I opened them up and they were identical.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was two of them. They were like, I don’t know, 10 inches long by two inches thick by
⏹️ ▶️ John three inches wide. And they were heavy and they were like little Velcro things. And I open them up and it’s like a Velcro
⏹️ ▶️ John top and I open it up and there’s like a flash looking at me. like an external flash, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John big, like not the really giant ones, but like an external flash you put on a hot shoe
⏹️ ▶️ John on the top of like a big DSLR and like, you know, rotate and bend, you know, it has like a
⏹️ ▶️ John hinge in the middle so you can aim at different spots. And there was two of them. I’m like, what the hell, you need two flashes?
⏹️ ▶️ John Then I saw they come with little stands where you can like mount them. Like, oh, I guess you could, if you wanted to have
⏹️ ▶️ John two flashes, like, you know, when you go to a professional photographer, they have multiple lights flashing at you at the same time. You don’t just want one flash
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t want it to be on the camera. You could put one on the left and one on the right. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Off-camera flashes are way, way better than on-camera flashes if you are in a situation where you
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it’s not like the big umbrella-sized things. It’s still a hot shoe type thing, but it came with its own little foot
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could put the thing on. I’m like, well, what the hell am I gonna do with this? I don’t even have anything to communicate with them. And as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is nothing that communicates with them. It’s just two random flashes. I’m like, well, Marco’s getting rid of his junk. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I saw the final thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John the final thing in the box, and it was very exciting. It was my best Marco Christmas ever. although kind of like Casey, who was
⏹️ ▶️ John given speakers but no amplifier. The gift that I got is an
⏹️ ▶️ John invitation, a very dangerous invitation for me to spend way more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Way more money. So he sent me a camera that I didn’t even know he had, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony a7 III, which I don’t, when did you get this and why? Did you get this for video?
⏹️ ▶️ John I got that for my YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that must’ve been, I’m like, why did you ever have this? I know you had a bunch of series of a7R whatevers and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I didn’t even know you had an a7 III. Now I have an a7 III. And it came with the kit lens, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why this is dangerous to me. This is my very first full frame camera. I was super excited to get it. It’s a terrible lens. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want that lens. Yeah, well, that’s exactly it. And it’s like, okay, but now my eyes are filling
⏹️ ▶️ John with stars. I’m like, I know so much about Sony lenses. Like I have notes documents
⏹️ ▶️ John filled with potential lenses, right, just going down. I’m like, now I have a full frame camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was like, okay, keep it under control because the A3 doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have as fancy of like subject detection and tracking stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John as my newer A6600. It doesn’t do pet eye
⏹️ ▶️ John detection, it can’t keep up with fast action, and it can’t take as many pictures per second. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, I’m telling my A6600, don’t feel bad, you still have important purposes here, and I have a lot of cool, great
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses for you. And so what I’m trying to do with this one is say, do
⏹️ ▶️ John not buy a full complement of lenses to this camera because you will bankrupt yourself because the full frame lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John are so much more expensive and so much bigger and so much heavier. And so I’m trying to confine myself to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m gonna do with this camera is I’m gonna do what this camera is good at. It’s got a big sensor, it’s got big fat pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John that can gather a lot of light. So I’m going to get a fast prime lens and use
⏹️ ▶️ John this for my indoor, I can’t use any other camera because I need a big sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John lens because it’s too dim in here thing. And that’s it, I’m not gonna buy a long zoom for it. I’m not gonna buy like an
⏹️ ▶️ John everyday walking around zoom because this camera is big and heavy. I’m just gonna buy one prime lens for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I go to my document where I had kept track of these and I’m like, new things have come out since then. I did some more research and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John found the lens that I probably think I wanted and it’s $2,000 and now I need to think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my good grief. Which one? So for your intended purpose here, what I would look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at having not paid attention to anything they’ve launched in the last couple of years is the one that I actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m keeping because I like it so much, the 55 1.8 prime. It was one of the very first FE lenses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really good. And it’s very fast, it’s extremely sharp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 55 is a fantastic length on a full frame.
⏹️ ▶️ John do you have the Zeiss one? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John is Sony co-branded. They make two of them. Maybe the other one I’m thinking was 50. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, is your lens cylindrical shaped or does it taper?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here, it’s a perfect cylinder. I just pasted it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in the link. It’s about a thousand bucks. This is a nice one. Yep. Yeah, the Sony A55 1.8.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, people love that lens, but since that lens came out many years ago, Sony’s
⏹️ ▶️ John newer lenses have better focusing motors in them and they also sell a 1.2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This lens is very compact and light. I would expect a 1.2 would be neither of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but again, for the purpose of my one lens that I’m gonna buy for this camera, I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care about size. this is not going to be my portable walking around camera. I have a much smaller camera for that and
⏹️ ▶️ John that has a good do everything lens. Anyway, I haven’t bought anything yet. I’m not buying anything now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say for whatever it’s worth, the lens that I have used most often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Sony cameras is the 35 millimeter 2.8, because it’s very small. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another thing I started looking into. The problem with the full frame is I don’t, all my sense of like
⏹️ ▶️ John what I like to use is calibrated for APS-C cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like 35 millimeter, because I went in that direction, and like, but there’s a bunch of good 35 millimeter primes too, but I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like my, my intuition about what sizes mean and how they work in a camera
⏹️ ▶️ John are totally screwed up because it’s like, and there’s all these converters that say like, oh, if you want to see what is it,
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, this lens on an APS-C equals this lens on, you know, the conversions never go the other way
⏹️ ▶️ John because why would anyone go the other way? But for me, like, I don’t know if I like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a 50 millimeter 1.8, it’s my favorite lens for my APS-C cameras, right? then you wanna get
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because the 50 millimeter on APS-C is zoomed, it’s more like a 70,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, it’s like 85. 76.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, I went backwards. Yeah, it’s like 85.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, but I thought, well, if I get a 55, I can always just crop in, but then like 35, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John never been a fan of 35. I feel like it’s too far out for a prime
⏹️ ▶️ John for the type of pictures I take of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 35 will look a lot like an iPhone 1X camera. It’s not quite the same, but that’s more like a 28,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s like, it’s in the ballpark.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the other lens I’m looking at going the other direction, there’s actually really good Sony 85 millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John prime, which is not the same as the 76, which is sort of the equivalent of my 50s, but it’s a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ John than that. But I’m like, but indoors, I think that’s too much and I have to get too far away from people. So I’m still leaning towards the 50s and
⏹️ ▶️ John 55s. But the point is, this is incredibly dangerous because I love lenses and I love
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey reading about them and watching
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews, and I have a bunch of them already. I did actually put a bunch of my APS-C lenses on here just to see how it would go
⏹️ ▶️ John with the crop sensor, but you know, you don’t want to go that route. But it does work, like if I needed
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I could just bring this into my existing lenses. Like they are physically compatible, you just don’t expose the whole sensor,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a shame, because it’s only a 24 megapixel sensor and doing an APS-C sized
⏹️ ▶️ John chunk of that is not great. But yeah, so I’m just putting this aside. This
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you have landed in my house will eventually cost me a lot of money, but for now,
⏹️ ▶️ John I am in research mode. I have other things that I’m researching that’ll cost me a lot of money sooner than the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I would honestly say this would be a good opportunity to use lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rental or something, to just rent three of these primes for a weekend and just get a feel for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what you actually want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you could probably get three of them for a weekend for a few hundred bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that could possibly affect what you spend 500 to $2,000 on. There is a cheap 1.8 for 500
⏹️ ▶️ John that I could just, there’s a 50, to just to see if I like a 50, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’ve just, I spent a lot of the time with a lot of tabs open. I just went around and around and around
⏹️ ▶️ John and just like keep coming back to it. Don’t, just let it stew for a while. Don’t buy anything now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if you’re gonna be in that range, I’m telling you that 55 1.8 is so good. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know, but there’s newer ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John The newer one they have, I don’t care about the bulk of the newer one. I don’t even care about the 1.2. That’s not what I care about. I care about the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s optically even better and has faster focusing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You will care about the bulk when it’s on the camera. Yeah, we’ll see. Because these cameras, compared to SLRs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even a full-frame mirrorless is a pretty small and light camera. And when you put a giant 1.2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens on the front of it, it becomes kind of weird to handle. It’s a very lopsided handling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Whereas the lightweight 1.8 primes are significantly better balanced.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and that’s the other thing I have to remember is that 1.8 and full-frame is not the same as that the converters will do this conversion to you. It’s not the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as 1.8 and APS-C. you have to do sort of that conversion of like, under what conditions can I take a decent picture
⏹️ ▶️ John with this camera and how fast can the subject be moving? I have to redo all of that math in my head because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s different on these things. So we’ll see, I’ll do something. I’m gonna save it, probably won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything until the summer, right? So I go on vacation, I’m gonna take both these cameras with me now. And it’ll be nice because
⏹️ ▶️ John when I would take my first camera, my first summer, this past summer with the 6600 on the beach, I
⏹️ ▶️ John had to change lenses a lot because I have the big giant zoom for when people are out in the
⏹️ ▶️ John waves, but then when you’re back on the beach towel, that’s not the right lens for the job. So now I gotta switch, and I don’t wanna switch
⏹️ ▶️ John too much because you can imagine how fraught the experience of switching lenses is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey me on a sandy beach.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m able to do it, but it is a stressful experience, so I try to minimize the number of times I do that. But if I
⏹️ ▶️ John just had two cameras, one with the prime for the beach things and one with the zoom for the waves
⏹️ ▶️ John and the action and the bazillion frames per second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. And plus, you wouldn’t want a full-frame giant zoom because that would be so expensive and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and so heavy. Yeah, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget it. It’d need a tripod. It’d need to be those, the white lenses that they take pictures of
⏹️ ▶️ John the servers with. But no, I’m not doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and really, I would strongly suggest try the 55 1.8 because, you know, so this 1.2, the 51.2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you, like, I’ve had, I’ve shot with 51.2 before because Tiff has one for the Canon system she got forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. And actually, Gruber got it first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we tried his at South by Southwest a million years ago, and then as soon as we came home, Tiff’s like, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have that lens. So I’ve shot with it a few times. First of all, the 1.2s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by being so much bigger and heavier, usually, I haven’t done the research on these, usually they focus more slowly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they have much more glass to move, and it’s this much bigger thing. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, the handling is pretty rough. but like you never actually shoot at 1.2. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you’re trying to do some special, you know, blur thing for like, you know, maybe a wedding portrait, maybe you might do it for then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if that’s what you’re doing, you wouldn’t use 50 millimeter. Like you would use this further zoomed in one to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I, whenever I have a really fast lens like this, I almost never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shoot it wide open or even anywhere close to wide open. Usually like that 55 does great at like 2.2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 2.8. to 2.8, I would almost never run it below that, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because then you get into the situation where the person’s eyes are in focus, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their nose isn’t, or something like that. Like, you’re not even getting the whole subject in focus, let alone, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nailing it or whatever. So, I would say this is a really good candidate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a rental. Like, you should rent the giant 50 millimeter lens, and then you should also rent the small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one I’m telling you to get, and see which one you actually end up liking the handling and stuff more. because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet it won’t be what you expect. And if it is, then at least you can come back and say that you told me so.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the focusing speed that I’m worried about. And also I do kind of like the aperture ring on the big G1 as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s the fact that I don’t have to use the, I always find it weird to use the aperture controls with
⏹️ ▶️ John the dials on the camera and having it actually on the lens and having the lens override what the camera does and having it
⏹️ ▶️ John be clicky and everything is kind of appealing to
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe rental, maybe I’ll just talk myself out of ever buying a lens this expensive for my purposes,
⏹️ ▶️ John just pointless anyway. But then again, I do have this Mac Pro here, so we’ll see how that goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even then, like what you said, that’s worth considering. If your alternative is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just having the kit lens for a whole summer and missing out on a summer of good pictures with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m never gonna use this kit
⏹️ ▶️ John lens. Right, you shouldn’t. I mean, I’ve taken a bunch of pictures around the house to try out the camera, but it has convinced me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garbage, they always are.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not bad for a kit lens. It’s actually a pretty good kit lens, but all my other lenses are designed to
⏹️ ▶️ John not be this. Even my zoom lens is specifically like a zoom lens that actually isn’t completely horrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trust me, get a nice light prime for it. you will be very happy with it.