484: Hot-Spare Price is Right
26 May 2022The surprisingly difficult processes of replacing passwords, phone batteries, and TVs.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Sick-kid TV
- Follow-up:
- Warnings about PoE splitters from Matias Korhonen
- Pro-fiber propaganda
- Ad-blockers on desktops (via Ryan)
- “Sign in with X” (via Brian Donovan)
- A concert-related Apple Music tip from Jonathan Dechko
- Amber gives us feedback on the Apple Fitness+ control room
- Apple, Google, and Microsoft commit to expanded support of FIDO standard
- Apple’s Self-Repair Program
- Post-show:
- The John Siracusa Podcasting Universe
- John’s headless Mac Studio 😢
- John is preparing the way for a new AV setup (‼️)
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Chapters
- Sick day
- Follow-up: PoE splitters
- Pro-fiber propaganda 🖼️
- Sponsor: New Relic
- Ad-blockers for desktop performance
- Sign In with X
- Concert-listening app
- Safe-area guides on video switchers
- Sponsor: Memberful
- FIDO
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Apple’s phone-repair kit
- Ending theme
- Preparing the Way™
Sick day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we now have purchased as a family our first Apple TV channel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you remember that this was even a thing? I do not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vaguely. So is this where you like sign up for like NBC or something through Apple TV or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So in this case, so our kid was home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sick today with a stomach ache and we said, okay, well, you know, if you’re going to stay home,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not going to just, you know, play video games all day because, you know, you want to make sure that it’s like a real thing, you know. You know, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when just like, you know, it’s oh my stomach hurts. That could be a lot of things or it could be nothing. And so you’re like, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you’re not going to just use this as an excuse to play video games all day. But if you want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can stay home and you can sit on the couch and you can watch The Price is Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the requisite thing to do when you are sick and home from school.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would you pass on this suffering to a new generation? What? What do you mean suffering?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I was I used to be so angry at daytime TV. And yes, Price is Right in particular. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John just there was no internet. This is all you had was you turn on the TV and it was this or soap operas. And just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Price is Right is delightful. Oh, no. Explain why it’s not delightful. I mean, admittedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is an hour long commercial, but explain why it’s not delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just not. I mean, it’s not what I prefer as a 10 year old staying home from school. I’ll tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. That’s the best reason to stay home from school. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sick at 40 years old, I’m watching the Price is Right. In fact, this is not a lie. This is not a lie. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the prior sponsor and absolutely lovely app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called channels, which I believe is get channels.com. I have it record that day’s prices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right every single day and just overwrite the days so that this way don’t listen to hear me out. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this way if one of the kids is homesick or me is homesick, then we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least one price is right available in waiting at all times.
⏹️ ▶️ John So is your hot spare Price is Right. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Ready to go at a moment’s notice. That’s exactly right. I mean, can’t you just
⏹️ ▶️ John watch it on YouTube? Like I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there’s whole
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes of Price is Right, like available on demand anywhere. You don’t need to keep wearing a spot in your
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD re-recording Price is Right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey over and over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s on the Synology. It’s fine. Hold on. Hey, I was going to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I dropped that on you. You weren’t prepared. Yeah, right. But so other than the fact that you’re a monster who does not enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Price is Right. All right, so Adam is staying home to watch The Price is Right as he should.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, here’s the question. When you said that, did Adam, does Adam know what The Price is Right is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He didn’t until today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Uh-huh. And did he love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Well, first, we explained to him, like, first of all, you know, we, you know, mommy and I used to watch this whenever we were homesick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as kids, but, you know, we would only get one episode of it available to us in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that day. It would go from like, what was it, like 11 to 12, I believe? Yep, that’s right. And, you know, you’d have to sit through whatever, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning news crap shows were on before it. And afterwards, you just have to watch soap operas or whatever. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else that was on. You’d only get one. It was full of commercials between the giant commercial that is the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, telling them how great this is anyway. So, you know, we try to find it on Apple TV, do the usual dance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, all right, so first use the Siri search to try to find the prices right. Find out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can only get it through paid services. Check Netflix, go to their search, use the whole done the Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing on the the remote to ask the prices right there. See, it’s not there. Then go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Apple Siri global search to then go back and give up and go pay for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it ends up it’s on whatever Paramount Plus means it’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. There’s a bunch of shows on that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can watch Halo you can watch the Star Trek Strange New Worlds you can watch Star Trek Picard.
⏹️ ▶️ John What else can you do? How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much is really really selling it there, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John The Halo one is worth watching just to watch someone else try to make a show out of a video game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway so for those of you who don’t remember which is almost everybody when Apple launched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV plus that in the same event they also announced something called Apple TV channels or just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple channels or just TV channels or just plus channels I don’t know whatever the heck it’s called it’s called something channels and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is something that Amazon’s been offering for I think a couple years before that and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a very basic like reseller thing where you can subscribe to some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service that doesn’t have its own app, or at least doesn’t need to use its own app. And so it’s displayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the native Apple TV interfaces, but it’s someone else’s content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s what this is. And so it’s free trial. And then you know, 10 bucks a month, whenever I forget to cancel it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a week or a day or whatever the interval is. And there’s a whole bunch of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they launched it at that have been a couple years back and we never heard about it again. That’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true. But it turns out it’s still there and it still seemed to work and with a few clicks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got a free trial to watch as much Price is Right as we want to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not the same as the Bob Barker era but the only things that were weird about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like I was never watching it during the Drew Carey era and I never really knew Drew Carey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff before anyway so he’s like nothing to me but he seemed to do an okay job of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I noticed that the microphone, like he tries, you know, Bob Barker always had a little skinny stick microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was a cabled microphone. He would have this giant long mic cable that he would drag around the stage with him,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as a result the microphone could be very, very slim and very small itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas Drew Carey is holding a big wireless mic pack stuck on the bottom of a stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mic, and it’s really clunky looking. It does not look good. And it’s much, it’s just much more bulbous and clunky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, biggest thing I noticed is that the products that they would have on there, it was all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of like that, like random, like Amazon, no name brand stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really weird. Like there was, there were very few brands I recognized. And most of the products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were kind of weird, like wannabe sharper image kind of things, but from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no name brands. And so it’s like asking how much is this random piece of an Amazon garbage? It’s like, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That could be anywhere from eight to forty five dollars. Who knows? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was it was a little bit odd to see, like, you know, the modern day version of the show that is, you know, definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past its prime. But certainly Adam really enjoyed it. Actually, he said he really liked the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how often we’re going to use it. I think we’re going to save it only for sick days, but and I’m probably not going to spend ten bucks a month on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does he maybe like the first like traditional game show he’s seen so it could be just the novelty of what this is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John a television Show where they play a game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and certainly I think the attitude of the contestants on the prize is right is very fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know that it’s so kind of like whoo party like everyone’s so like over-the-top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Happy to get up there and everything so it I think that part of it’s fun Even though like you know he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t know what things cost because he’s a kid Kids don’t have to buy stuff in grocery stores, so he doesn’t know how much laundry detergent costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was still kind of a fun experience and he really enjoyed it. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin So one of my crowning achievements in life, which should really explain a lot about, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything about me, was I was watching, I think as a young adult, I was watching Price is Right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you do, you shout out your own guesses for everything, for whatever the row of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four, I forget what the term is for that, and particularly when they do the showcases at the end of the show. pure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey circumstance, I had guessed whatever, let’s call it, you know, $18,143 or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Did you win
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both showcases? And the contestant guessed $18,143. What? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll be darned, or whatever, I’m sure it wasn’t that specific, but you know, just for the sake of discussion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you had the same guess of the dollar?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had the same guess of the dollar. It was probably like $18,500 or something like that, whatever. The point is, I had the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess of the dollar, and they won both showcases. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I clearly won both showcases. That is one of my crowning achievements in life. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you deserve the bedroom set and the motorhome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the motorhome and the trip to Paris. All of the above. If you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey permit me, if you gentlemen could open a web browser and type the following URL, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both extremely cool and extremely clunky all at once, the URL is as follows. try.appletvapp.apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Slash channels, which I think is the land, right? Which I think is the landing page for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re talking about. Isn’t that such a weird URL?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t even know dot apple was a TLD. When did that start? Neither did I. I don’t know, but here we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. Can we get dot ATP? Maybe. I’m sure if we paid a billion dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, ATP.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember the dot sucks TLD? Did that ever go anywhere? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you imagine if we had http://join.atp? That would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be pretty cool. I would like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t confuse people with different URLs, Casey. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re behind one arrow here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, fine. httpfm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John said I hadn’t remembered this channel’s things, but I subscribe to a whole bunch of these little circles that are on this page. I just never look at them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never look at them through the TV app. I use their individual apps, which are of varying quality, but
⏹️ ▶️ John at least each time it’s like, you know, rolling the dice, you might get lucky and one of them might have a good interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple TV, it’s kind of a known quantity that still makes me scroll through an extremely long
⏹️ ▶️ John list of languages every time I wanna turn subtitles on and off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is annoying. Not that you’re upset.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So angry. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m watching shows, especially I’m watching Slow Horses now, which is like a British show, people doing British accents and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes you can’t understand because their accent’s real thick. And I just, like I don’t want the subtitles on all the time because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not that type of person, I find it distracting. But when somebody says something, I’m like, oh, and you know, why don’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John just use the remote and say, what do you say? Well, I’m watching on my iPad and there’s no remote and I can’t talk to Siri when I’m bed next
⏹️ ▶️ John to my wife, she’s trying to sleep. So I gotta hit pause, go to the menu, scroll, scroll, scroll,
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll, scroll, English, not English CC and not auto recommended, but English and then tap
⏹️ ▶️ John outside the thing to dismiss the menu, then back five seconds, then play. All right, subtitle, subtitle. Okay, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what he said. Pause, subtitle, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, off.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so bad, I just, I don’t understand. And meanwhile, I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at a giant iPad screen with so much empty space on it for a million controls, and that’s how I have to turn subtitles
⏹️ ▶️ John on and off. Anyway, see previous episodes for that rant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, try channels. It’s actually pretty decent. Like, as you mentioned, it does put it all in the okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV interface, but at least it’s the okay interface you know. That is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying, Slow Horse is an Apple TV Plus show that is in the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. Well. Yeah, so that’s why I tried the other apps. I think maybe some of them have a chance of being better. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John how good are those chances? A lot of them do actually have either a subtitle button, or
⏹️ ▶️ John at the very least, they sort English to the top of the subtitle menu. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s so many things they could do here. Maybe the last language I picked is the one I’m likely to pick again when I enable and disable subtitles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Imagine that. Or maybe the language that the OS is in is the language I’m likely to pick. But no, how about an alphabetical
⏹️ ▶️ John list of every language in the world?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God. Sorry, everyone. I set him off. Well, I’m sorry and you’re welcome.
Follow-up: PoE splitters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had a little bit of feedback from Mattias Kornan, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote with regard to what I call Medusa cables, or I think the official term is Power over Ethernet splitters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mattias writes, improper use can apparently lead to damaged equipment. The important takeaway is that most PoE splitters are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intended to be used with devices like security cameras that don’t have any other gear plugged into them. This is due to the lack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of galvanic, whatever, isolation for the DC output. To be safe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s best to only buy PoE splitters reputable companies that are explicitly advertised as being isolated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Personally, I went for a splitter from the German brand Digitus, but I’m not sure if those are available in the U.S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure you’ll be amused to learn that Digitus is owned by the wonderfully named Assman Group.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very amused to learn this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very amused to learn this because I’m a child.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cats are always funny.
Pro-fiber propaganda
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We need to move into the pro-fiber propaganda section of the program.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adam Papamarkos writes, I ran fiber for two main reasons, faster speeds and less interference. Oh, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was right after the joke. Come on. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, to keep you regular, just ask the ass man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh. I’ve just been railroaded right out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. Let me try this again. Okay. So Adam Papamarkos writes, One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John million shot, Doc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re a mess. We’re an absolute mess. I ran fiber for two main reasons. Said Adam, faster speeds and less interference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That, and I wanted this setup to be future-proof. So I only need to open the walls once. Interference was less of a factor, but having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tight groups of cable runs or running gear near electrical lines inside walls can cause interference. I like the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pulses of light running through fiber optics is not susceptible to EMI. In some ways running the fiber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was actually easier than Ethernet. Cat 6A, even the unshielded riser stuff that I got, is pretty thick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By contrast, the fiber is quite small and flexible, isn’t very expensive, and seems to be fairly robust.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Later on, Adam added after a couple emails back and forth, the OM4 fiber cable that I used is advertised as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bend-insensitive, and specifies that a minimum bend radius of 7.5mm or 3 tenths of an inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s also specs for 20D or diameter for dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or under tension as in while it’s being pulled, and 10D for static or after installation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So even using the worst case of 20D for this two millimeter diameter cable, that’s only 40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey millimeters or an inch and a half or 20 millimeters or a little under an inch of bend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after installation. So I think that’s pretty reasonable for 90 degree bend and I didn’t really worry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it at all. So in other words, you can bend fiber a lot more than even I thought you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it turns out, which was surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I just interject here for a moment based on the section in the follow-up I hear, This is the pro-fiber propaganda
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got a few more items to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see an anti-fiber propaganda segment, but I, I mean, I didn’t, maybe I didn’t read all the
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback about this, but I read a lot of it. And I have to say, there was definitely a category
⏹️ ▶️ John of feedback on this topic from people who had lots of experience installing fiber optics that basically said,
⏹️ ▶️ John no way would I ever do this in a house. And I noticed that is not represented in the follow-up. Would you like to comment on that, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So moving right along, Eli, no, I’ll get to you. So here’s the thing. all jokes and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snark aside, I really don’t know what I’m going to end up doing. And what I’d like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do and what I have started doing, and unfortunately, I’ve just had a really busy week, so I haven’t had the time to finish this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey homework assignment. But what I’m going to do, and I don’t think I brought this up last week, is I’m going to build
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically a bill of materials or best case guess of what, literally, what do I need to buy to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a full fiber installation where I’m running fiber all the way to a room? do I need to buy for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hybrid installation where I’m running fiber into the crawl space and into the attic, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe Cat6 or something after that? And then what do I need to buy in order to do just a plain vanilla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cat6 installation, no fiber whatsoever? And I’ve started down this path with the full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fiber, like 10 gigabit where I can, absolutely absurd, Marco-style
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installation. And it’s already getting way more expensive than I’m comfortable with. But I want to come up with an actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number, because as much I’m waving my arms in the air saying, oh, it’s not going to be that expensive. Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you guys are saying, oh, it’s going to be a fortune. You’re ridiculous. Well, which the only way to figure out which one of us is right is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to actually do the homework. And I am working on it, but I haven’t finished it yet. And so hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once WWDC stuff settles down in a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’ll finally find the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. I’ll find, oh God, help me if there’s a Mac Pro. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a month, if there’s no Mac Pro, in 12 months, if there is a Mac Pro, that I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will probably put on Google Sheets. Like, here’s what I think is my bill of materials for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full 10 gig fiber for one gig fiber, where I’m simply future-proofing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not trying to get anything fancy today. And then, what if I do just cat six? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do plan to disclose whatever, even if the answer is that fiber’s 8x. Like, I think that’s useful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know. It’s useful for me to know and it’s useful for listeners to know. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I will come back. I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, maybe it’s just me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, even if I quote unquote lose, I don’t care. Like, then I know, at least I know the answer. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll talk about it on the show when the time comes. And I’ll share the spreadsheets when I’m ready. But I’m nowhere near that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so moving right along, Eli Block writes, take my word for it as someone who runs a network on a 200 acre property,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally what I’m doing on my one third of an acre, who is doing exactly what you’re proposing with Fiber Backbone, go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the fiber wherever possible. Copper 10 gigabit is a abomination. Let’s just leave it at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it comes to heat and power consumption. You want to use coppler absolutely nowheres once you see how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power it consumes and how much heat it throws off. And then back to Adam from before, Adam writes, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was very much in your shoes. I felt this was a good learning experience and I knew very little about fiber going into it. And I just wanted to future-proof
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. At least that’s how I justified it to myself. And then finally, the piece de resistance, Greg writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Marco was allowed to over-specify almost every technology problem, why not you?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco point. Margo doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John over-specify. Is he trying to say Margo buys fancier,
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive stuff than he needs to solve all his tech problems? Is that what over-specify is trying to say?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure Margo didn’t need most of the Mac Pros in your life. You probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t need the XDR. I mean, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John probably don’t need two laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m quibbling with the phrasing over-specify because the spec in when you spec something stands
⏹️ ▶️ John for specifications as in the attributes of the thing that you’re buying, right? And so if the
⏹️ ▶️ John specifications of the stuff that Marco buys are as excessive, like their specifications
⏹️ ▶️ John are too high for what he needs, that kind of makes sense. Sorry, Greg, to pick at your wording here, but
⏹️ ▶️ John over-specify sounds more like Marco knows precisely every fastener
⏹️ ▶️ John and cable tie and cable and product down to
⏹️ ▶️ John the skew that he needs to get for a thing, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also like to point out, In the realm of what Greg meant here, John is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking to you from a Mac Pro. With
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an XDR. With an XDR, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John 10 years of, what do you call
⏹️ ▶️ John it, 10 years of equity in my previous Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Pro. In the defense. It averages out, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John really lumpy. Yell at me again when I replace this thing when it’s three years old, then you’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John a stronger argument.
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Ad-blockers for desktop performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ad blockers on desktops. This is, John, you had made a kind of in passing remark that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run an ad blocker on your desktops because you don’t seem to think it’s really worth it. You don’t need to worry about power savings, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so we got some feedback about this from Ryan. I cut a lot of context, but the short short of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that Ryan’s parents were running like a 2014 Mac mini with a spinning hard disk, which was fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until suddenly their their internet speed increased, and their web pages seemed to get really bloated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now this is Ryan’s words. Since then, I’ve been running ad blockers on all my Macs with similar system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resource usage improvements. And my web experience is so much more pleasant and cooler on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i9 MacBook Pro that it’s hard to describe, other than to say that any time they get turned off or fail in some way, browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the web is like being repeatedly hit in the face with a dead catfish. I’m not opposed to ads in principle. You’ve got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay the bills somehow. But as long as the implementations such power hungry, privacy consuming beasts. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no qualms about blocking everyone that I can. P.S. I have actually been hit in the face with a dead catfish,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m from the South, so I know of once I speak. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John better than being hit in the face with a live catfish. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John extra thrash in the live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey catfish. So anyway, I think that was worth it just for the postscript,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but nevertheless, I thought that was an interesting point. And also I thought it was fascinating, and I don’t think Ryan was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to say this was factual, it was just his anecdota, But to say that suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the internet speed went way up, so did all of the bloat in these web pages. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like that shouldn’t be something that a web server should know. I mean, I haven’t done real web development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a long time, so maybe they do. But I thought that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could time the download to see what the bandwidth you’re getting on the connection and choose which resources to load based
⏹️ ▶️ John on that. But who knows? I mean, a 2014 Mac Mini with a spinning hard disk is a tough situation. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I was saying, I ran an ad blocker on my phone to try to like preserve the scarce resources there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure every phone I’ve had for many years has been faster
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than a 2014 Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ John with a spinning hard drive. So by all means, yes, if you have limited computing and storage
⏹️ ▶️ John resources, an ad blocker is a good way to optimize the usage of those things.
Sign In with X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to sign in with X, you know, sign in with Apple, sign in with Google, whatever, from Brian Donovan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you, I choose email and password for 99% of the time. However, my small employer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommends that for work stuff, we use sign in with Google. This is primarily because we’re required to use 2FA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with our work Google accounts, and that’s likely a stronger protection than whatever the site we’re logging into offers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that was a very interesting point that I hadn’t considered.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, most people just don’t want to have to think of another password or whatever, but, you know, if you’re going to sign
⏹️ ▶️ John in with something, Google has pretty good security on its stuff.
Concert-listening app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to the Bespoke app for listening to concerts, which was an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ask ATP last week, Jonathan Deco writes, in Apple Music on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you get info on the song or concert, there’s a checkbox to remember playback position. This option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey syncs to the phone so you can play another song, such as Baby Shark, and then go back to the concert and pick up where you left off. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try this for myself, but that’s very cool. I did not know that was a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I didn’t mention it on the previous episode. I thought everybody knew about this, but that’s That’s how podcasts work. That’s why podcasts remember
⏹️ ▶️ John their position. And
⏹️ ▶️ John not just because they’re set to media type podcasts or whatever. Remember Playback Position has been
⏹️ ▶️ John a bullying setting in iTunes since it was called iTunes. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like this is not really a solution to the problem as posed last time because as Marco pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t help you when you sit down for work the next day and you launch the music app and it has no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea what you were doing the last time you were running the music app. So yeah, maybe the playback position is remembered
⏹️ ▶️ John within the track you were going, but what track are we listening to? In what album? In what concert? Music doesn’t know and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not telling you. That’s the problem. The problem is not like remembering playback position within a single song, it’s remembering
⏹️ ▶️ John what I was doing, period, like sort of state restoration, big picture, not small picture. And the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll warn about the remember playback position, I mean, maybe if you carefully
⏹️ ▶️ John set it only on the things that are songs and albums, but depending on how savvy the implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John of your player is, you could find yourself skimming around or scrubbing around for things,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you listen to a few seconds of something and skip to the next track, then the next time it plays that previous one, it’s gonna start
⏹️ ▶️ John from five seconds into the song because it’s trying to remember playback position and that might catch you off guard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if it’s a month later, it will still remember that playback position. And so you’re basically
⏹️ ▶️ John leaving a trail of state behind you as you jump through the songs, whether you’re doing it manually or just forgetting to hit
⏹️ ▶️ John next track in the car because you’re distracted by traffic or something, right? that has now saved, oh, you’re three seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John into the song. So the next time that song comes up on Shuffler or something, it starts in three seconds in. I don’t think it’s actually, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there is like a buffer of like, it doesn’t save the player acquisition until you’ve gone a certain distance in, and same thing with being
⏹️ ▶️ John near the end, but it really depends on the smarts of the player app you’re using to
⏹️ ▶️ John implement a feature like that in a way that’s not annoying.
Safe-area guides on video switchers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also got some very interesting feedback from Amber and this was with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard to the Apple Fitness Plus behind-the-scenes videos This is a little bit long But I found this riveting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we actually cut down quite a bit and all of it was riveting But we’re giving you the riveting parts of the riveting parts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here we go Amber writes John was curious about the white markings on a few of the control room screens Yes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some of that appears to be action safe HD TV framing guides Which are closer to the edges and title
⏹️ ▶️ Casey safe that you’d use to contain text and yes it is kind of silly to think about that much overscan on HDTVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Old habits never die. But the interesting one is the two gutters on the right and the left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To my eye, those look like pretty typical 4x3 standard definition action-safe markings. Why would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple have old-school 4x3 markings on a product that is almost exclusively viewed on 16x9 screens?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because Apple doesn’t make multi-view systems, video switchers, and CG systems for live TV. So they had to buy them from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere else. That guide overlay could come from one of two places. Either the switcher itself, as you can see,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the little purple buttons being operated by the technical director or TD, the person in the front row on the far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right at about 40 seconds of the KCAU clip, or from the multi-view system. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most modern video switchers, you can have the option to turn on those overscan guidelines in your preview window to make sure that the upcoming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shot is well framed and any potential graphics are safe. In most switchers I’ve encountered, they’re either all or nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if the switcher manufacturer thinks, we think you’ll need 4x3 safe guides. Then you’re getting 4x3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey safe guides when you turn guides on. The other place that those overlays could come from is a multi-view system which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks like they’re using it Fitness Plus. And yes, you guessed it, most multi-view systems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve worked with also have a stock set of these guide overlays that you can put on any virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen you want. And despite all the customizations elsewhere in the system, you usually can’t customize which specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overlay guides you want. In the multi-view hardware manufacturer, if the multi-view hardware where a manufacturer thinks you need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4x3 in your overlays, your overlays will have 4x3. Also, why would you have a live control room for a show that isn’t even necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live, but always just on demand? Because it massively cuts down on post-production staff time. If they have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good, clean show, they can just trim the beginning and end from the output program recording feed and send it out. If they need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix a mistake, they’re probably recording each camera individually, so an editor can go in with synced time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey codes and fix a technical mistake in a matter of minutes and send it out. The alternative would be recording all the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individually and spending hours, or excuse me, spending hours in an edit room, splicing it all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together with the camera cuts and the graphics and whatnot. That gets expensive quickly, more expensive over the longterm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the initial build costs of the control room. I thought that was absolutely fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even think of the idea that why the heck do they have a control room for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a show that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not live. Obviously, it’s not like Peloton where people are watching. People, if you don’t know how Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Fitness Plus works, it’s not like you’re seeing the person live, they pre-record them and then distribute
⏹️ ▶️ John them that way. but there, you know, it’s as a cost-saving way, technically you think it would cost
⏹️ ▶️ John more to have a room full of people saying, you know, ready one, take one, and doing all the things, and to meet all the control and have all this stuff, but apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s more cost-effective than getting all the raw material and dumping on the head of a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John editors and having them slice things together. Because, you know, I guess it’s like, essentially the skill set of cutting
⏹️ ▶️ John together a live show in real time, which is a skill set that has been developed over many decades for people who
⏹️ ▶️ John do this for a living, for, you know, live events, sports, awards shows, is everything you
⏹️ ▶️ John can possibly imagine in this life, like that skill set that a lot of people have, it’s kind of like, I don’t know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t think of an equivalent, like we think of everything with computers as being like offline, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You get the materials and use the computer to sort of munch them together, but sort of, it’s like doing that as a performance. Those people in this room are,
⏹️ ▶️ John they are doing their own performance or they’re building their performance from the raw materials in real time. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like a, I don’t know, it’s like a high wire act where, yeah, we could wait until later and do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but if we try to do it in real time, It’s, you know, we have people who have been trained to know
⏹️ ▶️ John how to do that, and we can use those skills now, even though this is not like a live sporting event or a live award
⏹️ ▶️ John show. The other thing I thought was funny about this is that Apple is forced to
⏹️ ▶️ John use software that doesn’t have the settings that they want, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because they absolutely don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Fitness is never being viewed on four by three screens. Like it’s not made for that whatsoever, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I guess you can’t. It would be nice if you had a setting to turn that off, wouldn’t it, Apple? But sorry, you get the four by three
⏹️ ▶️ John gutters whether you like it or not.
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FIDO
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about Fido.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a story from, I don’t know, back in early May sometime, and it is actually referencing
⏹️ ▶️ John a technology that was described at WWDC 2001, almost exactly a year
⏹️ ▶️ John ago as we’re recording this. They don’t have session numbers anymore, but the session name was WWDC 2021,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was Move Beyond Passwords. I think we talked about it at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you’re not familiar, you can still find on developer.apple.com. I believe it is freely available to everybody. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think you even have to have a developer account. We’ll put a link in the show notes. I do wonder if the number in the URL,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the session number? It’s developer.apple.com slash WWC21 slash 10106. I think it might be.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey used to be three different numbers. I don’t understand this
⏹️ ▶️ John weird new world. Anyway, it’s about trying to move beyond passwords,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Which is something that people have attempted for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John The presentation kind of goes through it from first principle, saying, you know, well, if you make people pick passwords, they, they can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t think of good passwords or they reuse passwords. So they can use a password manager. Which helps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but now all your passwords are in one basket and you got to make sure the password manager works well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and it’s hard to recover them if you lose your one password to one password, you know, anyway, and then we have
⏹️ ▶️ John passwords plus one time passwords, but a two factor thing, um, and security keys, which probably
⏹️ ▶️ John most people listening I don’t even know what that is, but it’s like a literal hardware device, like a little USB thingy
⏹️ ▶️ John that has some other secret on it. So in addition to you being the person who knows your username
⏹️ ▶️ John and password, you also have this little hardware dongle that you shove in and it does a thing. And then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing they’re proposing here, which they called in the session, pass keys in iCloud Keychain.
⏹️ ▶️ John We all know passwords suck. Like everyone, we talked about even on the show, picking username sucks, picking password
⏹️ ▶️ John sucks. So it’s why we use password managers. If you’re good with password hygiene, and you know not to use the same password in multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John places, but it’s hard to pick good passwords. And if you pick really good passwords, there’s no way you’re gonna remember them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John now you need a password manager, but you gotta be careful with that. It’s a hassle and it’s terrible. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just too many things to sign up for, too many places to use passwords. And so Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to use one password in iCloud Keychain at the same time. I kind of have a bit of a problem because I’m using Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John and Safari everywhere, at least on my Macs. And of course, Safari does everything in iCloud Keychain, but Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John has its own thing. So now I have to remember, you know, at first I certainly don’t know any of my
⏹️ ▶️ John passwords, right? So when I sign into something, I have to remember, did I originally sign into that in Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John or in Safari? So since passwords suck, what can we do that is better than
⏹️ ▶️ John passwords? And a lot of people have had ideas, but most of those ideas have
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem in that like, like passwords for all their faults work pretty much everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re on your phone, you’re on somebody else’s phone, you’re on your computer, you’re on someone else’s computer. We can put a text box
⏹️ ▶️ John on a web page. We can put a text box in an app. You can type in an email address and a password
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can get in. And they push all the details of that under the covers of the user, right? It’s like, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John just type stuff in these text boxes. Problem solved, it works everywhere. It’s completely cross-platform. Okay, but what do I type
⏹️ ▶️ John in the password box? Oh, you type your password there. And it’s like, then we’re back to where we were before. Oh, but picking passwords is hard and I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if I have a good password. I can’t remember it and there’s too many to memorize anyways. And now I need a password manager. So this whole like,
⏹️ ▶️ John passwords work everywhere. So nothing can ever displace them. Not really true because if
⏹️ ▶️ John you use them the right way, passwords don’t work everywhere because if you don’t have access to your one password stuff, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John over someone’s house and, I mean, I suppose if you don’t have your phone with you or if you’re in any other situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where you don’t have access to your passwords, it’s hard to be able to log in, right? So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John try to just match that, like say, okay, let’s not just assume that we have to be the type of thing where you can log in
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere because that hasn’t been true in ages. Like maybe that was true back when we had three accounts and we all had those three passwords
⏹️ ▶️ John memorized, but it’s no longer true. If we just need to be able to log in where we have access to one of our devices, the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John gets a little bit easier. So the FIDO thing, and this pass keys in iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John keychain, the FIDO thing is just an alliance of other companies to try to be interoperable.
⏹️ ▶️ John The idea is basically the same. If you know anything about public key encryption, it’s very similar to that. So rather than you typing your password in
⏹️ ▶️ John a text box and hitting a button and it’s sending that password across the internet, you know, over
⏹️ ▶️ John a TLS connection or whatever, but still, sending that password over the internet to a server, which then you hope does something
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable with it to see if it’s the correct password, you have a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where with these public encryption, you never have to send your secret anywhere. So your secret is safe on your local computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and you send your public key over the internet and you give the server your public key
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you sign something with your private key and the way private public key encryption works is you can sign something with your private key
⏹️ ▶️ John and anybody with your public key can cryptographically prove whether or not it was signed with your private key, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John none of them know your private key. That’s not new technology, that’s what PGP is based on ages ago or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is sort of taking that technology that’s been around for a long time and baking it into the operating system and taking
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage of all the things that our Apple devices specifically have to make this very secure,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So if we take the system where we’re not gonna send passwords to anybody, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just gonna have a private key and it’s literally never going to leave our device. How can we
⏹️ ▶️ John make that even more secure? Well, pretty much at this point, all of our devices, if you buy like a current generation
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple product and even for several years back, have really, really secure ways to store stuff only
⏹️ ▶️ John on your device, the secure enclave, right? Where no programs can get it out. In theory, it’s very secure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s inside there. That’s where all the stuff is kept for the decryption of your SSDs and iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John key chain and all sorts of other unlocking things. Like the secure enclave is very secure. We have biometrics
⏹️ ▶️ John to get into it and we have passwords. We have all these ways, you know, face ID, touch ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff is tied into the secure enclave and tied into the security of our individual devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John We can use that existing security infrastructure and all the authentication methods that we decide to use for
⏹️ ▶️ John that, whether you decide to configure face ID with or without masks, with or without attention, touch ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John passcode. It’s like whatever we decide is the security setup for
⏹️ ▶️ John our device, that can also be the thing that logs us in everywhere. And from there, we’ll just use public
⏹️ ▶️ John encryption where the private key will be in the secure enclave protected by all those normal things that we protect our
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff with. And the public key will be used to send over the internet to services, which will then
⏹️ ▶️ John verify that we’re allowed to log in, all that stuff. Never have to pick a password, never have to, hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ John pick a username or anything like that. It’s all just completely secure.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you may be thinking, well, when I send my password over the internet, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John that end is getting hashed anyway. It’s not like they’re storing my password. They’re just hashing it and then comparing it to a hash they have or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But you are literally sending your password over the internet to the server,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you will be shocked, or maybe not shocked, depending on how much you’ve been involved in this, how many servers decide
⏹️ ▶️ John to just take your password and store it in plain text in a database, which then gets breached. And now someone has
⏹️ ▶️ John thousands and thousands of passwords, and you would think, well, maybe, you know, fly-by-night websites have
⏹️ ▶️ John plain text passwords saved, but surely nothing important or secure like a bank or a healthcare
⏹️ ▶️ John company, and you’d be wrong about that because some of those have the worst security. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they’re not supposed to, and often there are laws dictating that they shouldn’t, but look at the history of data
⏹️ ▶️ John breaches where you’ll just be incredibly shocked that a cybersecurity
⏹️ ▶️ John company or something has plain text passwords stored. It’s still a problem. The
⏹️ ▶️ John WDC video does a good job of going to this. Having a system where trust is between
⏹️ ▶️ John you and your hardware device, and your trust is never between you and any random server is way better, because
⏹️ ▶️ John there still has to be a trust relationship. Like you trust Apple to securely implement all the things that they implement on their devices and you
⏹️ ▶️ John trust them to defend their hardware and software against hacks and bugs and so on and so forth. But that’s way better than
⏹️ ▶️ John having a trust relationship with every single server that you log into and just hoping that none of them
⏹️ ▶️ John get breached. And while it’s nice that all of our web browsers now have a thing that lets you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, there was a security breach and we found one of your passwords in it. I’m sure a lot of people here have gotten that message
⏹️ ▶️ John in either Safari or Chrome, right? where it’ll tell you when there’s been a data breach, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of like closing the barn door after the horse has left. Well, you gave your passwords to 1,000 websites
⏹️ ▶️ John and some percentage of them were breached and some percentage of them held their passwords in plain text and you reused the password
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple times because you were lazy and now just to let you know, FYI, all these accounts are compromised,
⏹️ ▶️ John so go in them and set up new passwords for them. That’s not a great experience. It would be much better
⏹️ ▶️ John if we just had sort of one, I’m not gonna say one password, but one secure way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do things, which is unlocking your phone or signing into your Mac or whatever, as protected
⏹️ ▶️ John to the degree that we feel comfortable with, again, deciding which one of the authentication methods you wanna use and how secure
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna get. Do you wanna have a four digit passcode? Or do you wanna have a 20 digit passphrase? Do you wanna use
⏹️ ▶️ John face ID or not? Do you wanna use touch ID or not? All that stuff. Have that
⏹️ ▶️ John be sort of the linchpin of security and have it work everywhere, right? So your Macs can do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, your phones can do that, your iPad can do that. Yes, you have to have one of those devices with you then to sign
⏹️ ▶️ John in, but it is, that’s, like I said, that’s the same thing with our modern,
⏹️ ▶️ John with best practices and modern passwords. It’s not like you have memorized the extremely complicated password
⏹️ ▶️ John to all the thousand sites you log into. You probably only have one or two passwords memorized, if that,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on how good you are with password hygiene, right? And so in the WC video, they show a little demo
⏹️ ▶️ John of what this looks like with a demonstration app. And it’s basically, it looks very similar like signing with Apple, only
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that. You sign in by giving them like an email address or username or whatever you wanna pick,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s it. There’s no other step. You’re like, great, you’re signed in. Because the device does
⏹️ ▶️ John the web auth, public key passing back and forth and
⏹️ ▶️ John authentication and all that other stuff. When this session was made, one of the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John of it was like, okay, well, that’s great for you, but does that mean each individual device needs to sort of register itself with the site?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that used to be true. And part of this Fido announcement from earlier in May was like, Oh, they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John add a system to the specification that allows your credentials to be synced among devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so once you sign in with one device, you, you’re signing with all devices, sort of like what Apple does with like, like key chain
⏹️ ▶️ John syncing, you know, and this is a consortium with Apple, Google and Microsoft, which I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably sufficient to make this technology spread across most of the web. Because with those three
⏹️ ▶️ John companies behind it, uh, Everyone else will probably follow along. And I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so sign in with Apple’s great. If you trust Apple, if you’re super into Google, sign in with Google
⏹️ ▶️ John is great. No one should ever sign in with Facebook. But anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ John in with services, I think people prefer those just because it’s like, oh, I don’t have to remember another password. But as we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about last time, now you’re putting all your, putting all your trust on this other party that might not even care
⏹️ ▶️ John about you and your accounts. Or, you know, like it’s, it’s a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a second party in the trust relationship. Just having it be between you and your device, and that’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ John trust relationship, well, you and your device and the device vendor, is a lot simpler, and you’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John chosen that relationship by buying your device. You don’t have to then enter into another arrangement and remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John like we talked about in the Ask ADP question, when I signed up for this service, did I use Sign-In with Apple, did I use Sign-In
⏹️ ▶️ John with Google, or did I use a username and password, right? I think you’ll probably still, might still
⏹️ ▶️ John have to remember this, but I think it’ll probably try the web auth thing if it exists at all, and then if not, to ask
⏹️ ▶️ John you for username and password. Anyway, I would love for this to be a real thing because I hate
⏹️ ▶️ John managing passwords. Everybody hates managing passwords. The security of this seems
⏹️ ▶️ John probably about equal to best practices now. Like I’m not gonna say it’s like tons
⏹️ ▶️ John more secure. I think the session goes a little bit overboard in pitching on how much more secure this
⏹️ ▶️ John is. It depends. Like it is equally secure as
⏹️ ▶️ John someone using all of the best practices of password hygiene, but nobody does that for every site.
⏹️ ▶️ John So in practice, it’s more secure because you don’t have to do anything to get these benefits. You just use it
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s no way not to get all of these benefits. And you also get to use all
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of password recovery flow stuff that’s built
⏹️ ▶️ John into like your device and your Apple ID and all that. That stuff just has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be implemented once essentially by your platform vendor. And Apple’s already implemented all of that. Like there’s so much stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John around, you know, your Apple ID password and I forgot.apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ John and backup codes and multi-factor authentication and biometrics and all that stuff that already
⏹️ ▶️ John exists and to be able to just leverage that to say, once I’ve done that once, I can now sign up for,
⏹️ ▶️ John sign into any service anywhere on the entire web and the entire internet without ever having to pick
⏹️ ▶️ John another password. That is the world I wanna live in. So I am totally rooting for this thing. And I like the fact that there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a multi-company alliance trying to make this happen. And I really hope this year, WWDC 2022, there is
⏹️ ▶️ John another session about this. In the move beyond password session, they
⏹️ ▶️ John said at the end that this is the first step in a multi-year effort to move
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond passwords. And it was basically like, here’s a bunch of APIs, but they’re all prototypes. Maybe this year we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have a more concrete set of APIs that you’re allowed to use in production. And then maybe the year after that, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of start rolling out the applications. And then maybe the year after that, we’ll all be signing in everywhere without ever having
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick another password?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope so. I mean, as somebody who has tried to get rid of passwords on numerous occasions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John different ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time I’ve done it, I have learned about some shortcoming of my system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just having passwords would solve. Because we all think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this is one of those areas where everyone thinks they have some idea to get rid of passwords,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it always contains the word just. Why don’t we just blank?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s a wonderful phrase that usually suggests that the person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not understand the full complexity of the problem. And in reality, passwords,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you were saying earlier, John, passwords actually have a lot of benefits compared to a lot of the systems. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, once you get into the realm of having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple people who might need access to the password for something. Many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these systems become much more complicated or break down. Whereas some, you know, like one password is great. Like earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, you know, as within our family, we’re multiple people who often needs to share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passwords for something. And there was something that our kid had a password for that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had set up, like just on my phone one day, I’d set it up and so it was only in my one password,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, vault, which is like their, you know, data silo. And I was able, and Tiff was asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it, And I was able to just go on my phone and open up one password and move it to our shared family vault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds later, Tiff had it on her phone and she could help Adam set up his thing. And then, you know, once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s old enough to manage all this stuff himself, we’ll be able to just like move all that stuff over to him. And that’s that becomes very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy. And, you know, when you have families or businesses, any, any situation where multiple people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to share a credential or you need to send it to somebody, you look, I mean, the three of us host on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there, we have some shared, you know, social media accounts accounts and stuff that we all can log into.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the way we’ve done that is we just, you know, one of us generates a crazy password and our password manager,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we just send it to the others in some secure way. And then we can all log in then for services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t support, you know, multiple user accounts for the same access thing or whatever. So that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that’s one of the many things where passwords actually really help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. And passwordless systems or you know, systems move on, you know, beyond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passwords, make a lot of that stuff more difficult. And because of that, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passwords are going to stick around for longer than we think. Because there’s a reason they’ve stuck around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this long. And it’s not because they’re great. It’s because they’re really versatile. And they enable a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of use cases and and kind of fail safes that we end up actually using quite a lot in
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the thing you described of putting into a shared vault, if Apple got its acts together and realize how families
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can imagine iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John keychain working exactly the same way. There would be a family iCloud keychain because, hey, Apple already has
⏹️ ▶️ John an organization called a family that has multiple members. Apple knows about that. It is a thing that exists. It would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like it makes sense for them to eventually expand iCloud keychain to
⏹️ ▶️ John be family aware, family savvy. I was you’d say back in the system seven days. I hope they do photos
⏹️ ▶️ John first. But still, this is definitely a solvable problem, because like in the end, Like if you if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at this from a programmer’s perspective, what’s actually happening here is like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John 80s night when was PGP the 80s, the 90s, this is not super advanced technology, public key encryption
⏹️ ▶️ John has existed forever. It’s a great example of how somebody did some clever math
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time ago and came up with the system and it is very clever and has very good security and sort of security
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can scale to your level of comfort. It’s really neat, right? So why don’t we use it everywhere? the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not used everywhere are the non-technical aspects. How do I implement this in my operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system in a secure way across all my devices? How do I get it implemented across the entire industry? How do I make all the websites
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever that I’m signing into implement this system? And building up the standards around this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’m not gonna say very basic math, but building up the standards around this well understood thing, public key encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ John building that up and building the infrastructure and making the web authentic API and making a JavaScript API for it and building it into
⏹️ ▶️ John web browsers and building it into the OS and having a secure enclave and everything, it’s taken us so long
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the point where we can assume that modern hardware, phones, MPCs, will have something
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, whether it’s the TPM module, a secure enclave, will have some way on it to securely
⏹️ ▶️ John store private credentials that’s not just like a file on a disk or something. Like we have a way to do that in devices
⏹️ ▶️ John finally. And it seems like we’re finally getting to the point where we’re gonna have the plumbing in the operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John and the support for it in the web browsers. And then it’s just a matter of getting the websites on board. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think websites will wanna get on board with this in the same way they’ve got on board with the sign in with this, because they’re all about
⏹️ ▶️ John reducing friction. If they can make it easier for you to sign up for an account at their website that makes fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John people run away screaming when they, oh, I have to make an account, oh, nevermind, right? If they don’t have to go through that
⏹️ ▶️ John process, if it’s just literally like one click with an auto-filled email address or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna wanna use it too. So I feel like we’re kind of finally getting to a critical mass. But that
⏹️ ▶️ John last little bit of like, What about the weird use cases like a family
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple? What are we going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey then passwords might be
⏹️ ▶️ John passwords might be superior. Then it’s like, just please just do the obvious thing and make iCloud keychain,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, work with families and have a family keychain and share their credentials. Because what are you sharing? There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John private keys and there’s public keys. And those are just little bits of information. You can put them in text files.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, you know, as long as we have a secure place to store them, you can have the private key be shared among all
⏹️ ▶️ John members of a family. And it’s problem solved. Like it’s not rocket science. It’s not a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of data. It’s not gigs and gigs of data. It’s not an unknowable, unsolvable problem. But if they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, you’re right, Mark. I was gonna be like, oh, well, I don’t, well, I signed up for this. Like imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John if Netflix used this, you know, Fido, you know, Pesky’s and iCloud Keychain. You sign up for Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like, your wife’s like, oh, I wanna sign into Netflix. Like, oh, well, I guess you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John sign out of your account on your laptop and sign into my account on your laptop. So you’ll be signed in with my Apple ID and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use my passkey. And she’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why don’t you just give me the password? Well, there’s not passwords anywhere. What do you mean there’s not passwords? Yeah, they use a different,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t wanna have to have this conversation. It’s terrible, right? And I know Netflix doesn’t want you to share passwords anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Netflix loves this. But either way, like if they just implement iCloud keychain a
⏹️ ▶️ John family shared iCloud keychain, you don’t have to have this conversation. You’ll do exactly what you do with one password, which is you drag
⏹️ ▶️ John it from your individual one into the shared family one, done and done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and that’s if it works. I mean, I think the password sharing example is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good window into the potential pitfalls of this in reality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We often design technology in a way that is quickly defeated by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Post-it notes and emailing files to ourselves and other low-tech hacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that tons of people end up doing because the cool, complicated thing that we developed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t work well enough or is too hard or has some kind of use case where it falls over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the post-it note wins. And when trying to do something as lofty as replacing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passwords, we’re gonna have to really make sure it works really well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is really easy and is really versatile. And that’s hard to do while maintaining
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s why I think this multi-company alliance gives it hope because it’s a standard that, it’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple devices, it’s not just Microsoft devices. Apple, Google, Microsoft all do it. People will get
⏹️ ▶️ John in line because they own, well, what is Microsoft on these? Anyway, Apple and Google own the
⏹️ ▶️ John two most important platforms, right? iOS and Android. And Apple and Microsoft own the two
⏹️ ▶️ John most important desktop platforms. And that pretty much covers all of your bases. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John implement all of this stuff, it’s only a matter of time and polishing to get it to work. And because it has to work across
⏹️ ▶️ John all these different platforms, it doesn’t mean there’s no room for innovation. So if you look at the Apple things, like they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs and the various OSs that do this, and Apple chose to make the APIs such that you like, basically
⏹️ ▶️ John throw up an authentication thing and you give it a list of possible authentication methods that you wanna support, and it still
⏹️ ▶️ John gives the user the choice. Do you wanna do the passkey sign-in thing? Do you wanna use a username and password?
⏹️ ▶️ John In which case all your autofill stuff works, right? Do you wanna sign in with Apple? Like maybe it’s annoying that there’s this big list of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a cascade and a hierarchy that as someone writing, I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John a website, but certainly if you’re writing an iOS app or a Mac app, you can present the authentication,
⏹️ ▶️ John kick off the authentication flow, and you don’t have to write any of that. Apple’s got an API that does it all. You just tell it what methods
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to support and what their priority order is, and it will put up a UI and deal with all that stuff. And that is another
⏹️ ▶️ John great way to let Apple be Apple and make like a better user experience and make it easy
⏹️ ▶️ John for developers to implement this so you don’t have to write all this code yourself and also make it more secure.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if under the covers, it’s the same exact standard that’s supported in Google and Microsoft, and Google usually does a good job of these APIs too,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially on the web, then you can be sure that anywhere you go, you’ll be able to use this system
⏹️ ▶️ John to log in as long as you have with you a thing that has your private key in it, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s usually been the pushback, like, oh, what if I don’t have my phone, or what if I don’t have access to my Mac, or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or, you know, I can just type in my password. But like, I really hope that’s not the case for people, because if you feel like you can sit down in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of any computer with nothing but the clothes on your back and sign into any of your accounts, your passwords are not good.
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Apple’s phone-repair kit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so do you think Apple really wants us repairing our own phones?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of this. Like when I’m in a grumpy mood,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like, oh, Apple’s just a big pile of jerks and they hate everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m in a more happy mood, I’m like, well, you know, Apple’s just trying to make sure people do the best job they can repairing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything themselves. So what am I talking about? A friend of the show, Quinn Nelson, a RelayFM alumni,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think at this point, and a prolific YouTuber, he put out a couple of videos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where he got the tools and parts and whatnot in order to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, I believe it was an iPhone mini screen and battery replacement, if memory serves. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple sent him all of the tools he needs to do this and the parts. I don’t remember how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much parts costs, but I think he needed to pay between $1,500 deposit to rent the tools, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rent the tools. And he came or he got shipped something like 80
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pounds worth of tools, two humongous Pelican cases with 80 pounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of tools in order to do the, to do these repairs and, you know, the cynical take, which is what the verge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put up. I don’t know. Oh yeah, we do have a link. We’ll put in the show notes. Uh, the cynical take is Apple’s just making this difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everyone. they’re doing this to be jerks because they’re jerks. They’re jerks from the top to the bottom. They’re jerk, jerk, jerky,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jerk, jerks. And that is a take. That is a take for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that’s what this is, but maybe, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m being, maybe I’m grading on too much of a curve here. So what do you fellows think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was 97 pounds, not 80 pounds because he, because he did the screen and the battery, so you get more tools
⏹️ ▶️ John based on what you do, um, if you recall from past programs, when we talked about this, that Apple is going to come up with this self-repair
⏹️ ▶️ John program so that anybody could get to could do
⏹️ ▶️ John repair to their phone which previously Apple didn’t let people that you’ve been authorized Apple repair or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or you can go to an Apple store but it’s like hey Joe Schmall off the street you want to replace
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery on your phone well feel free and the way you know and they have this plan to do it and you’re gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John genuine Apple parts and blah blah right but now that the program is actually actually here people like Quinn have done it
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know it’s it’s not I guess what people expected I guess you know like this
⏹️ ▶️ John article that Sean Hollister wrote in the verge He kind of expected to get in the mail like a little baggie with a battery
⏹️ ▶️ John in it And then so like some tools like I fix it toolkit or something You know just like a
⏹️ ▶️ John something to pry open your iPhone and like some screwdrivers with the weird tips on them And and that’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John it right, but no that’s not what they send you They send you the same tools
⏹️ ▶️ John that they use in Apple stores to do these repairs And tools are big, tools are heavy,
⏹️ ▶️ John the tools are weird. In fact, Quinn has a second video where he, he says breaking into
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s tools, where he opens up Apple’s tools. They all have these security labels on them that tell you that makes it so you can’t open them
⏹️ ▶️ John up, but he does open them all up to see what these tools are like on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John And all right, so the Apple or Jerks side of this, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think has a little bit of merit to it, but part of it is also like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so if you want to replace the battery in your phone, this is how Apple does it, right? It’s like, I don’t want to pay Apple to do it, I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do it myself, right? And Apple is saying, okay, well, if you want to do it yourself, we’ll let
⏹️ ▶️ John you do it the same way we do it because we think, I mean, this is the way to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you gave it to us, this is what we would do. So if you’re gonna do it yourself, you should do it the same way, only now you get to do it instead of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here you go. And that involves a bunch of these tools. And it kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, part of what I think it makes you realize if you’re on the receiving end of this is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t repair iPhones for a living as your job,
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably don’t need these tools, but if you don’t repair iPhones for a living as your job, should
⏹️ ▶️ John you be repairing iPhones? Should
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this? Like it’s kind of like the difference between like, do it yourself mechanically.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna change my oil, I’m gonna change my brake pads. versus I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John change the timing belt on my car. As your car repairs get more invasive,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to replace the head gasket or whatever, you start needing more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John and very expensive tools. Like eventually you might need a lift for your car. Lifts are
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. Are you gonna do everything on jack stands? Probably not. You’re probably not gonna drop the engine out of your car with jack
⏹️ ▶️ John stands. So now all of a sudden you need a lift and you need all these special tools. And especially if you have a BMW where there’s a special tool to remove every
⏹️ ▶️ John single piece of the freaking thing, which BMW will sell you for a million dollars because you can’t use regular wrenches.
⏹️ ▶️ John too soon, John, too soon. You see, they have a tool for everything. It’s like, oh, the belt tension loosener
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy. Well, BMW sells a tool for that for $300, but you can also try to use this wrench. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do simple repairs to your car with simple tools, but as the repairs get
⏹️ ▶️ John more invasive, you can’t, you have to buy more expensive tools, and the tools get very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is setting aside the weird DRME stuff of like you need a weird computer thing to interface to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying like purely mechanical repairs. Think of even cars before the age of computers in cars. Eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you needed expensive tools. As it turns out, a lot of the things that you have to replace in phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fairly invasive because they’re pretty well sealed and they’re really small and miniaturized and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tightly packed. And so to do almost anything, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no equivalent of changing the oil on your phone. It’s not, there’s no easy job. There’s no changing the
⏹️ ▶️ John brake pads on the phone. You have to crack the thing open and they’re not put together in a straightforward way, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s ones, because they’re made as small as they could possibly be and they’re made to be waterproof and all this other stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like these super expensive, big, heavy tools is telling you, this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not a thing you should be doing because this is the way to do it. Like it’s telling you, like you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John try to do this with just like a flathead screwdriver and you know, some sweat, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the wrong way to do it. You’ll break something. It won’t work well, like just, you probably
⏹️ ▶️ John could pull it off, but here’s the right way to do it. And by the way, as you can see, Quinn, when he uses these tools,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s kind of like a mechanic. If we give you a hojillion dollar snap-on set of tools,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, and a lift, and all sorts of, and you know, an impact driver, and all the things,
⏹️ ▶️ John just we give you a full garage filled with like $70,000 worth of tools. Now can you repair the car?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re like, well, I’ve never used these tools before. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It takes skill
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the tools. If we give you the same tools that Apple uses to repair your batteries, it doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly you know how to use them. It doesn’t mean suddenly you have the experience to know exactly how, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ John happens if you put it in the little heater thing and it still doesn’t want to come apart because it’s wintertime and the phone was a little bit colder than you
⏹️ ▶️ John thought and how much you can put it back in and how hard you have to pull on this connector to disconnect it, but without like
⏹️ ▶️ John ripping it and where you have to be careful to pull vertically up or where it’s not in it. Like that comes from experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John The same way it comes from experience knowing how to rebuild an engine or something or do an invasive repair on a car,
⏹️ ▶️ John just because you have the professional expensive tools doesn’t mean you know how to do that. Again, sending the message,
⏹️ ▶️ John are you sure this is a thing you want to be doing? Now, and so you could say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s being a jerk because they should just sell me the battery and say good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they should just sell me the battery and a $20 iFixit toolkit with a couple of plastic spudgers in it and say
⏹️ ▶️ John good luck. That’s all I want from Apple. and they’re being jerks by requiring me to rent these tools for $50.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want these tools. I can replace my head gasket with just a flathead screwdriver
⏹️ ▶️ John and 10 millimeter wrench. I don’t need all this fancy stuff, right? I can drop the engine by just putting
⏹️ ▶️ John logs under my car. I don’t need an engine lift. I don’t need anything. Just sell me the
⏹️ ▶️ John genuine Apple battery and give me permission to do it and I’ll figure it out myself. And Apple doesn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want to give you the official tool. So that’s the only way I can look at this and say that Apple is not giving people what
⏹️ ▶️ John they want for the people who wanted to just say, look, just give me the official Apple part and I’ll figure it out on my own.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think those people would be very unsuccessful and sad. They’re also probably gonna be unsuccessful with the fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John tools, but in both cases, I feel like if it’s not a thing that you do for a living over
⏹️ ▶️ John and over and over again, it’s probably not something you should try to do. But on the flip side of that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s giving you the tools that it uses to do itself, and it’s giving them to you at
⏹️ ▶️ John what must be a loss. Because the $50 you pay to rent these tools surely doesn’t even cover the shipping.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s like in Quinn’s case, it was 97 pounds of tools in these giant Pelican cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John which themselves probably cost $500, right? And then who knows how much the tools cost. It’s not like the tools
⏹️ ▶️ John are particularly fancy, but they’re all custom. It’s not like you can buy one of these tools anywhere. It’s something that was built just for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the exact specifications of whatever specific phone you’re repairing. So if you say I’m repairing an iPhone mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will send you tools with little sleds and pieces exactly sized to the iPad mini, down
⏹️ ▶️ John to every nuance of where the antenna lines are on the outside of it, where all the buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John are. Like the tools are accustomed to the specific thing you’re repairing. There is no way
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is not losing money allowing you to rent these tools for $50 for seven days or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. And they put like a $1,200 hold on your credit card for the tools. There is no way that $1,200 covers the tools.
⏹️ ▶️ John It probably barely covers the Pelican cases, right? So in one respect,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey where like, Apple is letting you do
⏹️ ▶️ John this and people will get in the cost of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, at this cost, I pay this much for the battery and I pay this much for the tool rental, right? And of course
⏹️ ▶️ John the labor is free, cause I do that myself. But at that rate, it’s practically the same price as bringing it to an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John store. And then Apple will be like, yes. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey then if you do
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple store, people who change your battery in your phone or people who have changed a hundred phone batteries, how
⏹️ ▶️ John many phone batteries have you changed? How successful do you think you will be changing your
⏹️ ▶️ John very first iPhone battery on your iPhone with the same tools Apple has as the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s changed a hundred of them. I’d probably rather the person who changed a hundred of them change my
⏹️ ▶️ John battery rather than trying to do it myself because the people do it themselves. Like I’m gonna save money and time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not gonna really save money and I don’t think you’re gonna save time either. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John again, if they just sold you the battery and gave you a flathead screwdriver and said, go nuts, you’re just gonna break your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just what’s gonna happen. And so I don’t know what else Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John could have done here. Like, if Apple just sold you the part and said, we
⏹️ ▶️ John want no part of this, but you can buy an official battery from us, it seems like that’s the type of thing that could be abused.
⏹️ ▶️ John But within the bounds of the way we know Apple wants to act,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they want everything to be good and proper, I think they did the best they possibly could with this program.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the end, the program is basically like a teaching tool to teach people this is not something you want to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think both sides are right in in certain ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is very clear that Apple wants you. If you’re going to tackle a self service repair, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want you to do it using the best tools that you can and using their tools. And, you know, they’re basically treating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like a, you know, temporary authorized service provider just for yourself, you know. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the other hand, it is very clear that they are trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some level to make this look like as ridiculous a process as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s necessarily 100% malicious. It’s also not 0% malicious. But I think the most likely explanation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for how incredibly over the top this situation is where they’re mailing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you 80 pounds of gear, clearly, as John said, clearly at a loss. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no way they’re making money from any part of this. clearly losing money each time they do this. What I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably the case is that when they designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the all these phones that are out there that that are being able to be serviced by this program. I don’t think most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them were designed with a self service program in mind. Now, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they created the self service program or when they decided to do it, or if it was in response to certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threats of legislation or whatever it might have been.
⏹️ ▶️ John It almost seems like it’s something that you would implement to be compliant with like a lawsuit settlement. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have to have a program like this. Therefore you could say,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, we have one. Yeah. No one should use it, but it exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. I think that is very likely. It’s very likely that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was created for some reason other than we designed this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the start to be an economical thing that we could have people do in their homes by having us send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them a kit or whatever. Now, I think it’s a very reasonable thing to expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you should be able to self-service certain things because yes, while this kit demonstrates you should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably just bring it to an Apple store and have them do it for 60 bucks or whatever, that’s assuming you’re in a place where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily get to an Apple store. And so I think the main value of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be in places or situations where you can’t get to an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple store or any authorized reseller. And there’s lots of places around the world where that’s the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but in those places, like you’re still stuck with getting a very big shipment that may be a pain for you
⏹️ ▶️ John to ship back. So that’s one thing. And the second thing is you’re still then stuck with a bunch of tools that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to use. Again, with the big fancy garage scenario, if you give me a hundred thousand dollars for the tools,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t suddenly repair a car. I’ve never used these tools. They’re complicated tools. I don’t know what to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John them exactly. And even with the best instructions, fumbling through my very first, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John invasive surgery on a phone or a car is not gonna go well. So I like, no matter how far you are from an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple store, like mail the phone out. But the, put the phone in the mail is easier than putting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey two giant Pelican cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yes, but if you have one and only phone, what are you gonna do? Put the phone in the mail for a week?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re just gonna break your one and only phone when you get the tools, and then what are you gonna do? You won’t even be able to call Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey tell them you broke
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone with it. I mean, this gets it back to what Mark was saying with like, okay, so these phones are clearly not designed,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the self-repair, not designed with, I don’t think the emperor had Chewie’s in mind when she designed her.
⏹️ ▶️ John I messed up that line.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Just watch the
⏹️ ▶️ John movie. Don’t think the emperor had Wookiee’s in mind when they designed her? I think that’s pretty close. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John these phones weren’t designed for self-repair. And famously, Apple has been
⏹️ ▶️ John making its products less and less, let’s say less and less modular over time. I mean, it
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of started, it came to public consciousness with I think the 17-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John PowerBook. Was that the first one that did not have, first Apple laptop that did not have a replaceable battery?
⏹️ ▶️ John As in like you could take it out and put another one in. Not like replaceable as in you open up the guts, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John a, I don’t know, a removable battery. The battery was just sealed up inside
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was quite a bit of outrage about that. What if I’m on a long plane flight and I need a second battery? I can’t, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a dead battery in here, I can’t take it out and put in a fresh battery. It used to be I could buy three batteries and keep them in my
⏹️ ▶️ John carry-on bag and when one battery died, I would take out that battery and slap in another one, I’d be good to go. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve just destroyed that, made these laptops much worse, right? Fast forward many years,
⏹️ ▶️ John and all of Apple’s laptops have sealed in batteries. And of course, Apple’s phones have sealed in batteries, which wasn’t always the case before.
⏹️ ▶️ John You used to be able to get like a feature phone or a dumb phone or whatever we call them these days, you usually be able to swap
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery. Sometimes you had to open up the whole back of the case, but you could take out a battery and put in a fresh one. Yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John at home, it was pretty easy to do, right? And so there have been a couple of projects to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t it be cool if a modern smartphone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was like that? I had to look
⏹️ ▶️ John to Google for a bunch of these because I didn’t remember how
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey long ago they
⏹️ ▶️ John were or what they were called. There’s a bunch of them. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a CNET article that actually
⏹️ ▶️ John has a roundup of seven modular phones. Apparently a lot of people have made a run at this idea
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s an intriguing idea. Imagine, you know, picture an iPhone, but imagine like it was modular
⏹️ ▶️ John where the back was a bunch of little Lego pieces and you could pick which camera you want and how much SSD space
⏹️ ▶️ John and how big the battery is and a bunch of different modules that you can slap on the back. So you could, A,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could sort of build your own phone like you build your own PC. Well, I care a lot about the camera, so I’m gonna be expensive one, but I’m willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to sacrifice storage. So I’ll buy a small storage module, but I want a really big battery. So I’m gonna buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the big battery module. You know, Apple used to do this on his laptop. So you could get a laptop where you could either, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John have two removable slots and you could either put two batteries in, one battery on the left, one battery on the right,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you could just put a battery on the left and the floppy drive on the right, depending if you needed a floppy drive or not, like a modular
⏹️ ▶️ John smartphone. The one people may remember is Project Ara from Google that was
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2014, I never would have picked that. I thought it was more recent than that, but apparently it was a while ago. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you haven’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ John of most of these is because I don’t think any of them shipped. I may be wrong. I know someone did ship a modular
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, and I forget the name of that one, but I’m not sure any of these modular phones shipped.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this idea is it’s very attractive because then you wouldn’t need a self-repair kit. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you could just snap the battery out like a little Lego piece off the back of your phone, A, you could change batteries real easily during the
⏹️ ▶️ John day which would be a game changer for people with giant battery cases and backup batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John and recharging their phone every for every moment. But if you could just like slap off a little piece of your phone and slap on another
⏹️ ▶️ John one, that would be amazing. And B, it really would let people sort of customize and hot rod
⏹️ ▶️ John their phones and specify them according to their priorities. If
⏹️ ▶️ John someone, all they care about is battery, they’d fill the whole back of their thing with battery. And, you know, even take the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John slot thing and it’s like, I don’t need a camera, I just need battery all day because I’m on a construction site or whatever. You know, like you could really
⏹️ ▶️ John customize these things to the extent allowed by the size of the form factor, obviously, but then people could choose to have a really thick phone or
⏹️ ▶️ John a really thin phone and so on and so forth. But of course, the reason this doesn’t exist is because doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is kind of a naked robotic core thing. Every time you put like little cases around each one of these components,
⏹️ ▶️ John Each one of the Lego bricks has to have its own little case. And then the cases have to have little connectors and
⏹️ ▶️ John the connectors have to have little places where the connectors connect. And then those have to be seated into something that needs to be a super structure.
⏹️ ▶️ John That adds layers and layers and layers and millimeters and millimeters and millimeters to the phone. And it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John thicker, heavier, more complicated, probably delicate because these connectors need to be small
⏹️ ▶️ John just because it has to fit in a smartphone and problem prone, hard to make, waterproof. Now you get Dorito
⏹️ ▶️ John crumbs underneath the little thing you try to slap in your SSD and the Dorito Chrome gets in the way and it short something out and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just way more complicated than a completely sealed thing like our smartphones, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But hey, it would get rid of this whole self-repair thing. So this hasn’t worked. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was either dithering or the talk show, one of those Gruber vehicles where they were discussing these
⏹️ ▶️ John projects and saying, yeah, that’s never gonna happen. So people keep trying, it sounds like a good idea, but it’s just not gonna happen. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John when someone says never, what happens? The ghost of infinite timeline comes
⏹️ ▶️ John and says, Did you say never? Ooh, you know, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say never, never say never. What it made me think of is this. So yeah, we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the tech to do this now. It’s a cool idea. People have tried, kudos for trying, but we’re not quite there
⏹️ ▶️ John yet. We just, we don’t have the tech for it, right? But phones are
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to, phones as a thing, like you hold it in your hand and it’s got a screen on it and you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at it and stuff. There are limits on phones. A phone
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of, you know, like the head of a pen is useless. You can’t see anything, the screen’s too small.
⏹️ ▶️ John A phone the size of a dinner menu, not particularly useful, even if it folds, right? There is a limit
⏹️ ▶️ John to handheld phone size things. So to the extent that we continue to have things that we hold
⏹️ ▶️ John in our hands, the size and form factor of phone has reasonable limits.
⏹️ ▶️ John At a certain point, kind of like we always talk about with like audio and to a lesser extent video,
⏹️ ▶️ John We get to the point where technology is sufficient to max out the form factor. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we can make audio and distribute audio over the internet that is good enough for everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John human ears. Human ears are not changing particularly quickly. Technology has caught up with
⏹️ ▶️ John them. If you want to, you can stream lossless, extremely high bitrate, totally
⏹️ ▶️ John saturates the ability of any human ear over the internet in real time. We
⏹️ ▶️ John can do that. did it right everything else after that there’s no point in
⏹️ ▶️ John making that any better right if that fits within a particular constraint
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine right at a certain point the technology to make a phone size
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with sufficient computing and display prowess to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a phone size thing will have enough head room to support crap like
⏹️ ▶️ John this to support a superstructure a little shell around everything, all the little connectors,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the parts of the phone will have gotten small enough that we have that access
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity to do that. This has already happened with existing phones, with
⏹️ ▶️ John us having the access capacity to, you know, make the batteries bigger because the computer parts are smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you look at like the original iPhone or any or like a Palm device or whatever, it used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be that the computer parts of it were way bigger compared to the rest of it. But now if you open up an iPhone, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John basically a battery in there and like the tiniest little logic board you could ever possibly imagine. And that trend
⏹️ ▶️ John continues over time, right? So at a certain point, you will be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a compromised phone where you sacrifice absolute maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John computing power or whatever, because you can always make a better phone without all this crap, but you will be able to sacrifice
⏹️ ▶️ John it and still have an okay, decent phone while being modular. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ John day will eventually come. I’m not saying it’ll come where it’s like you have infinite computing, you don’t have to worry about. You always
⏹️ ▶️ John have to worry about it. There will always be a trade-off, but eventually the trade-off becomes so small that no one cares anymore. Because what you’re constrained by is
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone-sized thing. This gets back to the blog post I did a while ago about making the iMac thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and people were all pissy about it. Little did they know that we would get the 24-inch iMac that’s so insanely
⏹️ ▶️ John thin. Anyway, they were complaining, like, what’s the point of making the edges thinner? You got rid of my optical drive. People don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember. This was a controversy. But anyway, people were mad that they got rid of the optical drive and in exchange the edge of the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John was a little bit thinner. It’s like, who cares about that I never see the edge why not make it thicker and put the optical drive in there people got
⏹️ ▶️ John over it but in that article I was writing about it it’s like you think you don’t care about thinner but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s because you’re thinking about from one generation to the next but if you don’t say like
⏹️ ▶️ John well I don’t care that this iMac is a little bit thinner but instead fast forward 10 or 15 years
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know I use the phone example like I don’t care about the iPhones getting thinner it’s done dumb make them thicker
⏹️ ▶️ John so the battery lasts longer as okay, fine. But if you don’t continue to pursue making your
⏹️ ▶️ John phones thinner, you’ll never get to the next sort of step change, which is imagine that your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone was as thin as a credit card. Now, I mean, you may say that that sounds incredibly uncomfortable. I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hold that. But if you drop a credit card on the ground, are you afraid it’s gonna crack? No, of course not. It flutters
⏹️ ▶️ John to the ground like a leaf. It does not crack when it hits the ground. Can you imagine a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could drop with the same confidence that it’s not going to break that you can drop a credit card, but you will never get
⏹️ ▶️ John to a phone that thin if you don’t pursue thinness ever. If you just say this is as thick as it has to be, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So same thing with the modular phone. If you say, well, we’re never going to be able to do that, right? At a certain point,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can make that credit card thin phone, then you can make a iPhone 13 thickness thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that is modular. And that may seem like a clunky battleship where you’re sacrificing all
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, I like my credit card thin phone. Why would I want that big battleship? Ah, but it’s modular. Like at a certain point you have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough overhead because you’re, you know, as thin as you can make it, you’re not gonna make
⏹️ ▶️ John it the size of a pinky nail because that’s a useless phone, right? The phone size
⏹️ ▶️ John stays, you know, whatever size we decide is okay for phones, that’s going to stay more or less constant
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as we hold things in our hands because too small is crappy and too big is crappy. And within
⏹️ ▶️ John that size, if all the components continue to shrink, we will have sort of a piece dividend to spend.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would love to see that piece of dividends spent on making a modular phone sometime in the next few
⏹️ ▶️ John decades when we can do this, because a modular phone solves a lot of problems for customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it solves a lot of problems for manufacturers, because if you could swap parts that easily too, Apple can
⏹️ ▶️ John sell you parts, Apple can sell you parts upgrades, you can customize them. Like, I mean, leave it to Apple to find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John make this more expensive instead of less, because consumers are like, great, now I’ll be able to save money by only buying the parts I want. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s like, great, now I’ll be able to upcharge for every little part of this thing. Like I believe in Apple’s ability. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the Mac pro it’s not, they made a modular Mac and is it the cheapest one where you can customize the parts? No, it’s the opposite,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I don’t think this will hurt Apple’s ability to make money, but boy, it will be so much easier
⏹️ ▶️ John for everyone involved. If you could swap pieces out really easily. And we’re not going to be able to do that until we
⏹️ ▶️ John have, until the guts of a phone size device are so small that we have so much room
⏹️ ▶️ John left, we don’t know what to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. This whole modular phone idea, it sounds very clever and interesting, but yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in reality, I can see 1001 ways why it would be no fun, at least today, not on an infinite time. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, obviously, we’ll probably all be dead. But maybe like, maybe your grandchildren, when they have their hyper podcast, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be talking about the latest modular phone. Like a hollow podcast, sorry, not hyper
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast, hollow podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, memberful collide and new relic. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join at p.fm slash join. We will talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Accidental, tech
Preparing the Way™
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I would like to posit that or propose that there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some very special episodes in the John Syracuse of podcasting universe and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracuse of podcasting. One of them is the video game controllers on back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I almost said I’m back to work my goodness on hypercritical. One of them is the windows of Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey County on this very program. But The most recent was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preparing the way for your refrigerator on Reconcilable Differences. We are not going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those episodes today. I’m not trying to say that. But you are preparing the way once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, and I am on pins and needles. I want to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are you up to, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really preparing the way, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you sure? Yeah, I’ll explain why. I mean, what I’m doing is a weird thing that I haven’t ever really done
⏹️ ▶️ John before, but I’ll I’ll explain why. But anyway, before I jump to that, I first wanna do a brief bit of Casey style whining about my
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Patented TM Casey style whining.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did order a Mac Studio at some point in the past. I waited too long to order it. I was punished
⏹️ ▶️ John by having to wait a long time for it to arrive. Poor me, right? So my
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio did arrive recently. It’s sitting in a box at my feet right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John My keyboard that came with it, a little Touch ID extended keyboard. That came real quick. I just put that
⏹️ ▶️ John aside because I don’t really have any computers I can use it with. And then the Mac Studio finally came.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, and this is gonna, remember this is gonna be my wife’s replacement computer. She’s replacing her 5K iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I haven’t even opened the Mac Studio box yet. I probably should just to make sure that what I expect to be in
⏹️ ▶️ John there is in there. Yeah, and to make sure it works. Yeah, well, so here’s the problem. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have a monitor to hook it up to, like for her to use, right? Obviously I
⏹️ ▶️ John have old monitors in the attic. I have my PlayStation monitor that I could use just test to see that it boots
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, which I should probably do, right? But we don’t, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t, she can’t set it up and use it as her computer because we don’t have, I mean, we could,
⏹️ ▶️ John but she would be downgrading. I could give her a non-Retina 27 inch monitor. I have one of those. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s really her only choice. Don’t think I have a lot of other monitor options
⏹️ ▶️ John for her, but I don’t think she would like that. And she certainly wouldn’t like, even if she could have my PlayStation 5 monitor, which she
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t because I use it to play games, she wouldn’t want to downgrade to 4K. Like it’s a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, right? So she just continues to use her 5K iMac, which is protesting by making noises, right? Because it knows
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going out. But in theory, the Apple Studio Display that was supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to come with this was gonna, you know, follow it shortly behind by maybe a week. But then I got a message from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, first I got an email from Apple that said, I forget what it said. It was like a bunch of our friends got it. It was like apologizing for the delay, something.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like something noncommittal, just saying like, hey, we’re sorry about the delay. We’ll let
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what the deal with your thing is ASAP. And that was followed a couple days later by,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, by the way, remember that thing that you ordered that we said was coming in this date? Well, now it’s really coming in this date. So what they did was they moved
⏹️ ▶️ John my studio display shipping date from the very large range of May 9th through the 23rd,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they said, yeah, forget about that. Actually, it’s gonna be June 22nd through the 29th,
⏹️ ▶️ John which if Apple hits its window, will be approximately three and a half months after
⏹️ ▶️ John I ordered it, which I think is a record for anything I’ve ever ordered from Apple. Not pre-ordered, I didn’t pre-order
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Studio Display. I ordered the Apple Studio Display, ostensibly a product that Apple was then selling
⏹️ ▶️ John to customers at the time. And I ordered it and now it’s gonna come three and a half months
⏹️ ▶️ John after I did that. So that’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this the first time that an Apple product, like where you were given a date
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it said it would definitely arrive in this range and then later on that date was pushed back. I’ve never seen that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it happens rarely, but I think this is the longest date I’ve ever personally gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, from the time that you order, then it said this is when it will arrive. That’s a big gap. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I could probably pull a Marco here and like go to an Apple store and like, you know, stalk them and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John can I get a studio display? Do you have any in stock or whatever? Because there’s no options on that display. It’s just, it is what it is. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wanted to, you know, let people know that I do have a Mac studio and yeah, I should probably just
⏹️ ▶️ John open it up and make sure it works and boot it or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug it into your TV or something, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John just plug it into something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so what else I have with this, I have the same thing that Stephen Hecht got, a 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John printed sort of cage or sling where you can attach
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac Studio to the underside of your desk. Did you see his pictures of his setup?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, it looks really good actually. Yeah, it was basically like a big bracket that you stick it below your desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s made, it’s like, there’s a bunch, I mentioned on the past thing where you could buy a, like a thing from
⏹️ ▶️ John OWC or something that was really made to hold two Mac minis, but it actually perfectly fit a Mac Studio as well because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t have any new ideas how to make computers. It’s just a series of rounded rectangles at various
⏹️ ▶️ John heights. But this one is custom made exactly for the Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it exactly fits it. And so if the fan annoys me, I’m ready to bolt that thing to the bottom of my wife’s desk and give her
⏹️ ▶️ John more desk space back. So we’ll see how that goes. So I have those pieces here. Speaking of preparing the way it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got this computer set up. My original intention was, let the boxes build
⏹️ ▶️ John up until they all arrive, and then, ta-da, here’s your new setup, right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John start with it on the desk, and if the fan is too annoying, put it underneath, right? But now it seems like I’ll have to open up
⏹️ ▶️ John the studio and hook it up to the 4K monitor, and make sure it boots, and then just shut it down, and put it back in the box, and wait
⏹️ ▶️ John some, anyway. So there’s that, that’s not ideal, but at some point, I will be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to give some kind of judgment on the Mac Studio fans, but not this week, because it’s still in the
⏹️ ▶️ John box. But what Casey was referring to, another form of like sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John things arriving in my house and me getting ready to do stuff with them, is the long
⏹️ ▶️ John awaited replacement of my television. Maybe not that long awaited in this program, but I wrecked this. Merlin has
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey haranguing me for many years now that
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to get a new TV before I die. For those who don’t know my long TV history,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m super into TV tech, I talk about it on the show a lot. Always waiting for the right time
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy a TV. The last television I bought was one of the very best
⏹️ ▶️ John plasma TVs you could buy right before they stopped making plasma TVs entirely, and that TV
⏹️ ▶️ John is 1080p. So that’s how old my TV is, I have a 1080p plasma television. It was and
⏹️ ▶️ John is a very good 1080p plasma television, but it is 1080p plasma television
⏹️ ▶️ John nonetheless. No HDR, no 4K, you know, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is what it is. Doesn’t have any blooming though, that’s nice. So I was waiting for a better
⏹️ ▶️ John TV tech to come and then OLED came, but then OLED had a bunch of problems and it had burn-in and brightness wasn’t that great and
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just waiting for the next leap in panel tech and they came out with like the fancier panels that get a little bit brighter and
⏹️ ▶️ John some people put a heat sink on the back of them, like, eh, I don’t know about that. And then they came out with the Quantum Dot OLEDs
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, this seems like the tech that I’m waiting for. It has fewer compromises, assuming they’re pretty good and not too expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna get one. So that remains my plan. The embargo just lifted, I think like two days ago
⏹️ ▶️ John on the TV I wanna buy, the Sony A95K. So people have reviews out of it now and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m watching the reviews. Still can’t order it. It’s supposed to go on sale in June. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the Mac Studio, who knows when I’ll actually be able to get one delivered to my home because
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, again, I wouldn’t say this, but like the Mac Studio business and the studio display, and all this is all COVID
⏹️ ▶️ John supply chain stuff, I’m sure, because Apple is very good at building products and shipping them to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not like they’re selling 700 million Mac studios. It’s just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to make new products and ship them to people. I assume that will also be true
⏹️ ▶️ John of this new fancy television. But in theory, when this TV comes out, you’re not gonna buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why am I talking about it now? Well, so the refrigerator preparing the way is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I have to do a bunch of stuff to my home to get ready for the refrigerator that I ordered to be able to arrive and be placed into
⏹️ ▶️ John my home. Which sounds like it’s not that involved, but feel free to listen to that episode to see exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John how involved it is. But that’s not what the deal is with the TV. The TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the part of the project that Casey’s doing now with Fiber, like the researching part of the project, which,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as the story goes, which I’ve been continuously doing since like 2013
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and I got my last plasma TV, right? I’m always
⏹️ ▶️ John that part of the project. That is an ongoing project. I have a running tally of, If I had to buy things today,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what I would buy. All right. The depressing thing about that part of the project, the research part,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that over the past year or two, it hasn’t changed. I did one last pass
⏹️ ▶️ John like a couple of weeks ago to say, let me revisit this because I have all the things I
⏹️ ▶️ John need to get. And I need to get a lot of things because yeah, you gotta get the TV, right? But nothing in my setup works with 4K. My
⏹️ ▶️ John receiver doesn’t work with 4K. I don’t know a 4K Blu-ray player. Like just, there’s no, you know, my HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John cables are not rated to spec high enough to be able to support HDMI 2.1, like I need all new stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I gotta research all that. And I looked at it again, and I’m like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been months since I looked at this. Is there anything better? I think I, what did I complain about the Blu-ray players? Was it on here or on Rectifs,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget. Rectifs. All right, but anyway, if you don’t know, Blu-ray players, like as in things
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy that you stick a plastic disc into, everyone’s just decided they’re not making them anymore. Not that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not making them, you can go buy one in a store. In fact, they’re incredibly inexpensive, but they’re not making new ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John like we have a Blu-ray player, we, the last, like the last Blu-ray player we made was in 2017. We’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna sell that 2017 model basically forever cause it’s done, right? There’s nothing new we need to
⏹️ ▶️ John add for it. And so if you look at like the very fanciest, best Blu-ray player from Panasonic
⏹️ ▶️ John or Sony or whatever, it’s the same one they were selling a couple of years ago. Cause like, yeah, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t need to make a new one. And that doesn’t happen with computers or for that matter, televisions. Every year new televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John come out. They may look similar to the old ones and use a similar panel, but every year they make a new one that’s slightly better than the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but Blu-ray players, no, we don’t do that anymore. So when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco researching Blu-ray players, it’s like- I should send you mine. I have this incredible Oppo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDR Blu-ray player.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oppo doesn’t even make Blu-ray players.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but it’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ John nice one. They stopped making them, because it’s like, you know what, it’s not even worth our time to make. They
⏹️ ▶️ John were one of the best makers. They had all these fancy features and stuff like that, so they just stopped making them. And the problem with that is, since they
⏹️ ▶️ John stopped making them, new standards came out. Like, your thing doesn’t do HDR 10 plus probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John because HDR10 Plus didn’t exist when it was made.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it does HDR, but it probably does whatever the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John version of that was. It
⏹️ ▶️ John probably does HDR10, right? Or like, or you’re gonna find one that does HDR10, HDR10 Plus, and
⏹️ ▶️ John also Dolby Vision, right? Like, it’s hard to find ones that work with all the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John specs because people just stopped making them a couple years ago because there’s no, I guess they decided it’s not a big enough market.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now you can find a Blu-ray player for like $75. Like, they’re so cheap, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But they don’t support all these fancy standards. And if they don’t make new ones and a new standard comes out, they’re not gonna support it
⏹️ ▶️ John because this is the same model from, anyway. So yeah, Blu-ray player I found. I said, is there
⏹️ ▶️ John a better Blu-ray player available? No, there’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So the research is like stabilized,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Receiver, I need a receiver that does 4K, right? That does HDMI 2.1, 4K, 120 Hertz. Like there was this
⏹️ ▶️ John bug in the firmware of the first round of ones that supported this and they all couldn’t do 4K 120, which was sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like, well, the next year’s model, they’ll fix that. But there basically was no next year’s model. This is like
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly because of COVID. Like I was waiting for them to fix this in the next year’s model. And next year came and they just kept selling the same
⏹️ ▶️ John ones with the same bugs in them. It’s like, what the hell? They’re not gonna make new receivers anymore? A couple of receiver companies went
⏹️ ▶️ John bankrupt and their businesses were bought by other people or whatever. So yeah, so when I did my receiver research, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the last round of this I did several months ago, I had two possibilities. The leading
⏹️ ▶️ John contender was out of stock then. And I’m like, well, I’m not gonna buy now any, probably like six
⏹️ ▶️ John months from now it’ll be in stock. Nope, still out of stock. Six months ago, I was looking for a thing and it was not
⏹️ ▶️ John available anywhere. Today, still not available. This is the current model of a thing. Like you just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t buy it. Again, it’s probably supply chain. Also that model turned out it had a really big fan in it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a backup choice that didn’t have a fan that had similar features
⏹️ ▶️ John and I did research on that. Is there anything better available? Nope. What you researched a couple of minutes ago, exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same, right? And then TV stand. Why do I need a TV stand? This is a
⏹️ ▶️ John long, sad story, but basically I have a very narrow piece of furniture that I need to put my televisions on. If the television has
⏹️ ▶️ John a central stand, fine. If the television has little feeties that way at the edges of the TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John does not work for me because the edges of my TV are wider than the piece of furniture. And for
⏹️ ▶️ John years, decades, who knows how long, HDTVs had central stands. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as I was in the market to buy a television, they all said, nope, we’re putting the feet at the edges. And so the new fancy Sony one that I want,
⏹️ ▶️ John feet that span the entire thing. In fact, they even put a picture in a manual that says, Don’t put this television
⏹️ ▶️ John on a piece of furniture that’s not as wide as a TV because it will fall down and break. And it’s got this hilarious picture of the TV falling
⏹️ ▶️ John over and like lighting bolts coming for whatever, right? So I have to buy a third-party stand, right? You can,
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things are like arm mountable or whatever, and you can buy just a stand that has the same mounting hardware on
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever. So that’s all the stuff that I need. And I’ve done all the research
⏹️ ▶️ John for it and the TV’s probably coming out soon. And the normal thing for me to do would be wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for the reviews to come out to actually confirm for my trusted reviewers that this TV as advertised
⏹️ ▶️ John actually is worth buying and is actually really good, right? And then after I see the reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John order all the stuff, have it all arrive, tear off my old setup, put in my new one. But the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t employ that strategy this time is I’m making, I thought I was just making another pass
⏹️ ▶️ John on my stuff, let me just make another pass on all my things, let me do, catch up on the research and get depressed that nothing has changed, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I did that pass, I’m like, The main thing was like my main receiver choice not being available. I’m like, really?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s still out of stock? And what I thought to myself is, all the old rules don’t apply.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t assume that if something’s out of stock, it’ll be in stock later. Don’t assume if you can buy something today, you’ll be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy it next month. So I said, this other receiver, like my backup choice,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should just buy that now. Because what if I wait until June when the TV is available,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they say, oh, sorry, out of stock, and they’re all gone. That’s a good call. And they’re never, like, and then it’s like, when are they
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make another one? It’s like, I don’t know, wait till next year or something. So I just started buying things. I’m buying things
⏹️ ▶️ John for a TV I don’t have. I bought the TV stand. Not that I really love this TV stand, but I spent a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at a million different crappy TV stands and I got the least crappy one, which is still crappy,
⏹️ ▶️ John mind you. I wish I could have a central stand. My central stand in my house is beautiful. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so I got my crappy stand, I got my receiver and my Blu-ray player. And
⏹️ ▶️ John my receiver is from like a year, two years ago. my Blu-ray players like three or four years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I ordered these things and they’re sitting in my house. I half assembled the TV stand because I can’t assemble
⏹️ ▶️ John the other part of it because it attaches to the back of the TV. The receiver is sitting in the box. The Blu-ray player is
⏹️ ▶️ John not sitting in the box where I got to in a second. But I don’t even have a TV yet. But for all
⏹️ ▶️ John the people complaining that I’m never gonna buy a TV or whatever, well now I bought all this stuff for the TV so now I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m pretty committed. I feel like I’m gonna buy a TV. Otherwise, I mean, this stuff’s probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be outside its return window by the time I decide to buy a TV or not. So that is
⏹️ ▶️ John happening. And the other sort of side project I had on this, aside from the research project, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey part of the project where I just do the research, that part, and like I said, Casey, when you were talking about you doing the spreadsheet
⏹️ ▶️ John with the different prices of the various setups, I feel like this is the project. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco making these spreadsheets and doing
⏹️ ▶️ John comparisons, you can make some graphs and you can do a presentation, and I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s the project. You don’t actually have to buy anything. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey house is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It may end up being that that’s the case. You may be
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds like it’s gonna be more work than the installation and certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey more time. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and if you want, and same thing with me, if you add up the time I’ve cumulatively spent watching reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John of televisions and researching stuff, it is way more time than the time it’s gonna take to install this stuff, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things I learned in my research is this Blu-ray player that, you know, the one I decided
⏹️ ▶️ John to get that had the least worst set of features and the least worst
⏹️ ▶️ John age of, you know, all the other stuff. I did, by the way. So Oppo’s gone, right? But there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John like this French company that people say is kind of like the new Oppo and they have this weird, I don’t even know what the brand
⏹️ ▶️ John is. It’s all super expensive stuff and it looks kind of like Oppo. Maybe they bought some of the assets of Oppo, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John its interface was so janky looking, I just couldn’t do it. And I don’t know. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought a Panasonic Blu-ray player just because it’s, you know, it’s fine. But everyone said that
⏹️ ▶️ John they got it. Like, oh, the fan is super loud and annoying, right? And you know me and fans, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, at first my receiver has a fan in it, which just, I was lucky the backup receiver didn’t, so, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the one with the fan wasn’t in stock, so I bought the one without a fan, so I’m fine. I like the Blu-ray player as a fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John And granted, I use my PlayStation 3 as my Blu-ray player now, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco loud. Yeah, right. Surely
⏹️ ▶️ John this is gonna be quieter than that, but still, like, I’ll get an all new setup, I want it to be all, you know, smooth and sound.
⏹️ ▶️ John But luckily, in my research of like, you know, I always wanna see the inside of these devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John see what the guts look like, You find these forums where people are cracking their hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John open either to solve a problem or to update something or whatever. And in this case, I found
⏹️ ▶️ John a picture of the inside of the Panasonic Blu-ray player showing the fan because someone had a little project where they
⏹️ ▶️ John replaced the fan with one of those quiet PC fans, right? By a little,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I forget the brand. Not to a?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that was the brand, but it was a similar PC enthusiast brand. And so somebody did this project,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they posted it on a web bulletin board, one of the greatest things on the internet that everyone should continue to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the AV nerds are on literal web bulletin boards, just like you remember, right? And they
⏹️ ▶️ John said, here’s what I did. And it’s a bunch of pictures, like here are the parts I bought. Here’s the process. I opened
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing up. I took this thing out. I bought this little connector and with, you know, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John with like links to go buy the same things. And if not links, then with part numbers that I could find. So
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe like three or four months ago, I ordered all those parts. Again, thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, these parts are cheap and I don’t know if these links are still gonna be good and I don’t know if these SKUs are still gonna exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I purchased all the parts that were listed just to have them, and they were sitting on a shelf for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s mostly like the fan, the connector needed to connect that fan to the motherboard
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Blu-ray player, which is different than the connector the thing comes with. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And so now I have the Blu-ray player, and so while I’m waiting for the TV to be available to
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase, I’m like, oh, now here’s a fun little electronics project. I can take this brand new Panasonic Blu-ray player
⏹️ ▶️ John that just arrived and immediately crack the thing open, yank out the fan and put in the new one. And so I did that
⏹️ ▶️ John project this weekend. You know, I did open the thing up, which was a bit of a challenge. Like I’m opening it up and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, oh, it’s got just plain old Phillips head screws. How hard could it be to open a Blu-ray player? But of course everything has to be put together
⏹️ ▶️ John in a weird way these days. But luckily, and I should have done this before, luckily the person who wrote the web Bolton board
⏹️ ▶️ John post had a little sentence or two about how to take it apart. I’m like, thank you. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you for saving me from trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to figure it out. Because you undo the screws and then it still doesn’t come apart. and you’re like, does this slide
⏹️ ▶️ John out? Or is that part of this or whatever? Anyway, eventually figured it out. Open the thing up without breaking anything, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a good start. I removed the existing fan. I did, but actually before I did this, I plugged it into the wall
⏹️ ▶️ John to hear what the fan sounded like. Like, is this actually noisy or should I just not even bother with this? Right, so I plugged it
⏹️ ▶️ John in, turned it on, put a disc in, it did all the things. As soon as you plug it in, it does that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where it cranks it. It probably does this just to start the fan, but it cranks this fan up to like max speed for a second, goes, vrooom,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, right? and then it settles back down to its idle speed. And when it does that, vroooom,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can hear that if this fan was going anywhere sort of above, like, the midpoint
⏹️ ▶️ John of its speed, it would be not just, not particularly loud, but, like, annoying, because it’s a very small fan, small
⏹️ ▶️ John diameter fans. This is probably the problem with the Max Studio as well. Small diameter fans make an annoying noise
⏹️ ▶️ John faster to move the same amount of air. And this is a small fan, because as you can imagine, a Blu-Ray player is very sort of slim,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s got a very small diameter fan. I don’t know how many millimeters, but it’s small. All right, and so I heard what it sounded like.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, okay, I can see how someone who has a very quiet setup could hear this fan and it would be annoying. Still way
⏹️ ▶️ John quieter than my PS3, but I can hear how it would be annoying. So I’m like, okay, I’m gonna do this project. And the good thing about this project
⏹️ ▶️ John is you take the old fan out and it’s not damaged. It has a connector on the motherboard. It’s got a little like two or three pin connector.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just take it out. So worst case scenario, if I botch this project, assuming I don’t destroy the blue repair, I can just put the
⏹️ ▶️ John original fan back in. So I take the fan out, but the new fan that I have to put in, it’s like a PC fan and it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John with a PC connector, but then I bought the other connector separately. So now I have to cut off the PC
⏹️ ▶️ John connector and then sort of connect the new connector by soldering together the wires. So I got
⏹️ ▶️ John like, believe it or not, I did not have a functioning soldering iron in the house because my dad’s ancient
⏹️ ▶️ John one, I don’t even know where it is and it’s probably broken by now anyway. So I bought myself like the world’s cheapest soldering iron.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God. And I bought what I hoped would be lead-free solder, but it wasn’t. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I, you know, got to reuse my soldering skills. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was thinking about this when I was looking into all like the, you know, instructions that come with it or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess people didn’t think about lead when we were kids. Another thing I saw recently, like the Gen X is the most lead poisoning
⏹️ ▶️ John generation. You know how much soldering I did with lead-filled solder as a kid?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Inhaling the
⏹️ ▶️ John lead fumes from it? I just, that couldn’t have helped me at all. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how many IQ points I left from doing soldering.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait, if anybody knows, I’m curious, because my wife works with a lot of solder for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stained glass creation. And I raised this point of like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is breathing in all of this lead a bit of a problem? And she did some research, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe the conclusion, I’d love to hear if anybody knows for sure, I believe the conclusion was actually that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lead is not being vaporized. The temperature is not enough to actually make the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lead become airborne. but please let me know if that is
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, as I say in the chat room, the fluxes that you use with the lead is not that great, but the main problem is you’re handling it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s getting all over your fingers and everything. Right? And so you have to wash your hands and make sure you’re not touching food that you then eat, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, like, and she’s really, she knows she wears gloves and she’s working in like under this ventilation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan thing. So like, you know, all that’s pretty well covered, but yeah, I certainly, I would love to know what the risks actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are if anybody knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we talked about that when, with like Apple getting lead-free solder and all its things, and the challenge is lead-free solder
⏹️ ▶️ John is not as good in terms of performing the job that solder is supposed to perform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she tried it and found the same thing out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so Apple did do this. They’re like, it’s gonna suck for
⏹️ ▶️ John us, but we’re gonna figure out a way to, without making our products unreliable, to use lead-free solder.
⏹️ ▶️ John So kudos for Apple for doing that. I was hoping that I was gonna get lead-free solder because I’m just soldering three wires together, so who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I didn’t, I got the lead kind, and anyway. So I did some soldering. I soldered together
⏹️ ▶️ John these wires that the, well they didn’t mention in the person who did this, like that the connector has
⏹️ ▶️ John a much thinner wire than the fan, so I’m, you know, the connector wires
⏹️ ▶️ John are like little tiny angel hairs. I don’t know what gauge they were, but they were very thin. So I’m soldering these very thin multi-strand
⏹️ ▶️ John wires to these slightly thicker multi-strand wires, very delicately soldering them together. The cute
⏹️ ▶️ John little soldering kit that I got, extremely inexpensive, this is one of those no-name, like brand Amazon crap
⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever. It’s just, it’s hilarious what they give you. Like they give you like a little stand to put the siren in and they give you a
⏹️ ▶️ John little sponge to like dampen it off. And the sponge is like the thinnest, most insubstantial
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that could technically be called a sponge. It’s like, who manufactures this? It was like as thin as a piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John paper. I kid you not. Like imagine a sponge as thin as a piece of paper when it’s dry. Hilarious,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it was like a doll set. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t believe like how, sorry for the brief derail here, but like we had, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this like one of those leaky shower wands. because I guess when the plumbers put it back, it’s the outdoor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shower, and so in the winter, you gotta take the whole thing down so it doesn’t freeze and break.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the plumbers, when they put it back, or when they took it down, at some point, lost the little gasket that goes into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So getting a plumber to come to your house out here is not easy or fast, and certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not inexpensive when it does happen. And so Tiff decided, let me try to fix this myself. And so she goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Amazon and orders, you can’t just get a gasket for the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and you also can’t tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. So she ended up getting this case of a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assortment of rubber gaskets for like $11. And I have no idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much super cheap stuff on Amazon and in one way it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that if you need some kind of special tool to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some kind of home repair or something, you no longer have to rely on some professional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who’s a gatekeeper to all the special tools. You can just go on Amazon and order your own special tool for no money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, and it’ll be at your house in a couple of days. On the other hand, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want high quality tools, they’re increasingly difficult to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they decreasingly exist. Like it’s very, like the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle and upper end of the market has been gutted because everyone just goes on Amazon or whatever and buys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever’s cheapest when they need something. And so there’s very little market for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high quality anything anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to know the right brand. Like for hand tools, you have to, I mean, I mentioned Snap-on before. There’s a couple of like
⏹️ ▶️ John German brands you have to know. For scissors, you have to know the weird Japanese brands that like make
⏹️ ▶️ John the good scissors and they’re out there. But for, you know, I’m sure there’s an equivalent for soldering iron, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. I got the cheap one. And the nice thing about the cheap one is, so it’s this little adorable
⏹️ ▶️ John kit that comes with all sorts of stuff. It came with a little tiny baggie of shrink tubing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, that’s nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stuff or whatever. So I don’t have to buy that separately as well. You know, it came with like a, it came with this hilarious
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that they call a wire stripper that honestly I don’t know what it really is. Luckily I had wire strippers, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John tries to give you everything you’ll need. But I was happy to get the little baggie of heat shrink tubing because I didn’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John order a separate, because to your point, it’s not like you can order like three pieces of that. You have to order a bag of 5,000, right? Right. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I had that experience. I was trying to, for one of my son’s electronic projects, buying like a bunch of electronics components.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I needed like a 555 timer, but you can’t get one of those. You gotta buy, you know, seven of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we had to buy a breadboard, and you can’t buy one of those. You have to get a pack of four breadboards. And I wanted to buy a bunch of little wires. You can’t get one
⏹️ ▶️ John wire, you gotta get a giant package. I needed like two capacitors. Well, here’s a set of 500 capacitors in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all different sizes. So we have a lot of excess electronic components.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I did this surgery, connected everything together. Beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John solder joints, heat shrink tubing. I didn’t have a heat gun, and it didn’t come with one, but I just used like a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John butane lighter to do that, like the old days. use a match or whatever. Beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John job, I plug it in, hook it up, bring it over to the outlet to plug it in to
⏹️ ▶️ John see how it goes. It gets plugged in, I turn it on, and the fan
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t spin. Oh no. What did I do? Well, my first mistake, my first mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John was, and this is what happens when you do, you have a project that you’ve looked at too long, right? I
⏹️ ▶️ John found this blog post like a year ago, and then like a few months after that, I bought all the pieces, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was going to do it today, It’s like, well, I’ve seen this post a million times. I bought the pieces. I know exactly what I’m doing. I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John to reread the instructions, right? But as soon as I saw that fan not spin, suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John my brain said, hey dummy, remember when you read the instructions for the 17th time and you noted for the 17th time that
⏹️ ▶️ John there was an instruction that pins one and three were switched?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, you didn’t do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John did you? I just connected the red wire to the red wire, the white wire to the white wire, and the black wire
⏹️ ▶️ John to the black wire. And that should work because that pins one and three are switched on this. I’m like, oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna have to undo these solders. I did spend all this time making them all precious and delicate and beautiful, but then,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this is, we’re having a tiny bit of experience dealing with electronic connectors coming. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John well, pins, you know, connectors that go into like little, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic clip-on things that go onto motherboards, you know how those work. It’s a piece of plastic, and there’s a bunch of bent
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces of metal that slide into them. You can usually remove the pins and move them around and stick them
⏹️ ▶️ John back in without breaking the connector. So I did that with some very pointy, very, very pointy
⏹️ ▶️ John tweezers that came with the stupid soldering kit Lifted a little piece of plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John Slid out pin one Lifted the other little piece of plastic slid out pin three swap them
⏹️ ▶️ John shove them back in pins one and three swap no resoldering needed I was so excited. I’m like, I’ve solved my
⏹️ ▶️ John problem didn’t have to resolder It was my own stupid fault. But anyway, so then I plug it back in
⏹️ ▶️ John plug it back into the wall. Turn it on a The fan kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John look too good. I looked at the voltage on it and the amps and everything was the same as existing fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I had tried the fan with like a nine ball battery beforehand and it was super quiet, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s feebly spinning and you know what else? It’s making a terrible noise. Oh God. What the hell?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re the quiet fan. I tried you before outside of the box. You weren’t making noise.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was like, well, maybe the problem was that like when I screwed it in, am I bending the case on the fan and it’s rubbing on the
⏹️ ▶️ John edges or something? So I unscrewed it and it’s just like, at very low speeds
⏹️ ▶️ John and at certain orientations, this fan makes a terrible noise and I feel like it’s just not getting enough voltage because there’s probably variable
⏹️ ▶️ John voltage going to the thing. And though the fan is, there’s like a start voltage and a regular voltage,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, you know, I think the start voltage was the same as the existing fan, but either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever stuff was coming through the wires that the Blu-ray player was putting out was putting this fan into a
⏹️ ▶️ John speed where it was kind of like noisy and crappy. But the worst thing is, if you stop the fan
⏹️ ▶️ John with your finger, because I still have the whole case open, if you stop the fan with your finger, it does not start again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s bad. Yep. Yeah. And so I’m thinking that the person who did this post,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, kudos to them, thanks for the instructions and everything, but I’m wondering if they’re saying, it’s so much quieter now. It’s like, maybe it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John your fan isn’t spinning. It’s really quiet when the fan doesn’t spin at all, I bet.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that was very disappointing. I was reminded of the phrase, uh, you know, the medical,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, cliche, the surgery was a success, but the patient died. I feel like that’s what happened here. The surgery
⏹️ ▶️ John was a success. I accomplished what I intended to do going in there, but the patient died.
⏹️ ▶️ John So out came the supposedly quiet fan and back went the old fan. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I will just live with the fact that it is slightly noisier than apparently the whole Internet wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for as far as I’m concerned, it’s way quieter than the PS3 was. So I think I’ll be fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, and now I’ve heard everything back in the box. So am I preparing the way? Not really. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of boxes with crap in it. Ready to go. Still no monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I have no
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have no TV. I have a half
⏹️ ▶️ John built. I have a half built stand. I have a receiver in a box. I have a Blu-ray player in a box. I have a keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a bunch of HDMI cables, a bunch of fancy HDMI 2.1, 48 gigabits, blah, blah, blah, blah. By
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, buying those on Amazon is quite an adventure. Trying to find ones that are not scams or whatever. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s this whole certification program where you can scan this little QR code with an app that will tell you if it’s really certified, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. But I feel like it’s kind of like extroverted and all of well or what it says on the package doesn’t really matter because who knows what you’re getting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll let you know how that goes once I get everything hooked up. But I’m aided by the fact that I don’t plan to connect
⏹️ ▶️ John my PS5 to this TV. So honestly, 4K 120 Hertz doesn’t really matter that much. But I do wanna have a setup
⏹️ ▶️ John that in theory could support it if I ever decided to do that. Like if I wanted to carry my PS5 over there
⏹️ ▶️ John or when the PS5 slim comes out, I put the big PS5 in that room and use it for like the next
⏹️ ▶️ John Uncharted style game that comes out which I do want which I would want to play on a TV But but yeah, I’m kind of on the
⏹️ ▶️ John in-between phase When the time does come I should probably take pictures of it just to show you the nightmare
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s going to be removing all My AV equipment and putting in new stuff, but for now, it’s all in boxes
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting patiently. Hopefully not growing mold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adventure John this is one heck of an adventure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited about it. I’m excited about all this new equipment I’m just sad that I can’t use any of it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, there’s nothing stopping you from plugging in the Blu-ray player or the receiver,
⏹️ ▶️ John a 4K Blu-ray player. I don’t have a 4K TV. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sample. I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any 4K Blu-rays. Well, fair. I mean, you could start buying those now though. I
⏹️ ▶️ John will. Like I have a bunch of, as you can imagine, I have a list of ones. Actually, no, it’s not true. I
⏹️ ▶️ John do have the 4K Godfather, whatever thing that came out. I did pre-buy that, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don’t know how many times I bought the Godfather, But yeah, whatever the most recent cool 4k
⏹️ ▶️ John blu-ray thing There’s only certain movies that I care enough to get on blu-ray because a lot of most of the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John I own in streaming Versions or whatever but you know streaming is not as high bitrate as blu-ray
⏹️ ▶️ John So the handful of movies that I really really really care about I want to have on plastic discs at
⏹️ ▶️ John the highest possible quality The Godfather definitely qualifies as do a handful of other movies, so I will
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually get them I mostly just wanted to have a Blu-ray player that’s not a PS3 so I can use my
⏹️ ▶️ John non-4K Blu-rays and all that other good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then- I honestly don’t understand why you wouldn’t go ahead and plug in the receiver and the Blu-ray player. Get used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Live, you’ll use what you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey got, man. See,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the thing. Plugging in the receiver, like, you don’t understand, like, doing that process of
⏹️ ▶️ John taking my existing receiver out and putting this new one in, that’s like heart surgery.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, I’m not going to do that for
⏹️ ▶️ John funsies. Like, I need to, what I need to do is tear everything to the ground, remove everything, go back there, find
⏹️ ▶️ John like in Merlin’s, what Merlin always says, find all the cables behind my TV that have not been connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to anything for several years,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Pull them all out, start over.
⏹️ ▶️ John Get all that stuff out of there. Vacuum, clean everything out, remove all of the cable ties
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the routing and everything, and just start fresh. And I wanna do that when I
⏹️ ▶️ John have all the pieces. I don’t wanna do like piecemeal, because really, boy, pulling that receiver out would be a nightmare, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since a lot of my speaker cables, they don’t, they’re sized to fit, Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say there is little coils of slack. I did get myself whatever they call it, like a little coil of extra slack or whatever, but that coil
⏹️ ▶️ John of slack is neatly coiled with ties around it. So really
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there isn’t, is there slack? Yeah, then there’s no slack.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s so hard to get behind there, yeah. So I don’t even wanna think about touching that setup until I have all the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John available. I just really hope that the TV is what it’s supposed to be, like the reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John so far so good, but I wanna see the final reviews from my trusted reviewers who bring it through all the testing
⏹️ ▶️ John things and if it looks good, and then I can actually order it and it will arrive and it’s not like this
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Studio display where it’s gonna arrive in three months or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm. Struggle is real. Oh my God. This is why you don’t replace your stuff for 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I am excited about it because this TV is gonna be pretty sweet. The stand’s gonna be pretty ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll definitely send you pictures of it. The only one good thing about the stand is it’s like a vertical
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of metal. Like I try to get the simplest possible. This is a big vertical piece of metal, but it’s wide enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that I can hide cables behind it. My current stand on my Panasonic Plasma is this beautiful, shiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John solid piece of forged aluminum in a V shape. I’ve complained about this before. And it’s like a V
⏹️ ▶️ John of aluminum, and you have to hide all the HDMI cables along the little
⏹️ ▶️ John edges of the V, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There’s no thing blocking the cable, so you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just be like, ah, the tables come down from the TV, you don’t have to see them. Every cable needs to be like, like in a cartoon where a cartoon character
⏹️ ▶️ John will hide behind a rake or a shovel or something, they’ll contort their body to fit the exact shape of the
⏹️ ▶️ John skinny thing. All of my cables are pinned to the legs of this V.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some cable’s coming down one side of the V, some cable’s coming down the other, and then quickly snaking behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV so they’re not visible. It’ll be nice to have something to actually block the cable so I can just stick a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of them on the back of a piece of metal and you’ll never see them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or you could just not care about cable management.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not possible. And speaking of cable management, I almost, this is the thing I almost did like
⏹️ ▶️ John this weekend. I was like, when the shipping delay came, why don’t I, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is getting into Casey’s own, why don’t I just get a 4K monitor to tide me over? I’ll get a 4K monitor, here’s my thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll get a 4K monitor, my wife can use the 4K monitor on her desk with her new Mac Studio and she’ll grumble a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit, but she’ll know that her 5K Apple Studio display is coming soon and the whole deal would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get a fancy 4K monitor for my PlayStation 5. I’d move my existing 4K monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John on my PlayStation 5 to be my wife’s 4K monitor. And then when the Apple Studio came, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John take the lesser 4K monitor and let my son use it with the PS4 Pro upstairs and swap out his PS4 for a PS4
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. So I have this whole plan about like how I can excuse getting a 4K monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I refresh my 4K monitor research and realize the choices have not changed since like last year.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s no good HDR 4K monitor available for a reasonable amount of money. And the non-HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John ones are only so-so. and my top pick had a very skinny aluminum stand that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t hide cables behind. The Eve Spectrum has this really elegant Apple-like
⏹️ ▶️ John stand that’s a single vertical skinny stick. It is like the thickness of a pencil made of like solid
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum. Very elegant looking. It’s like, where am I supposed to put the cables? There’s a power cable and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an HDMI cable. I can’t fit, like they would have to be like stacked behind each other exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s no clips or anything for it either. So in every review, it’s like this beautiful, elegant stand There’s two giant
⏹️ ▶️ John thick scraggly wires just randomly coming down from behind the screen. Poorly thought
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Always give people a place to hide their cables.