catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

487: Mid-Life Rally

Aging hosts with aging hardware, passkey recovery, Stage Manager device segmentation, and the design of System Settings.

Episode Description:

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MP3 Header

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. 👴
  2. Hardware deaths
  3. Sponsor: Kolide
  4. Congrats, Alex!
  5. iCloud Shared Photo Library
  6. Copy/Paste Edits in Photos
  7. Safety Check
  8. Passkey transfers, recovery
  9. Sponsor: Linode
  10. M2
  11. Assorted small items
  12. Stage Manager
  13. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  14. System Settings
  15. Mac dialogs
  16. Ending theme
  17. Neutral

👴

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have to start with some housekeeping right away. Happy birthday, Marco. You are 40

⏹️ ▶️ Casey years old in what, like six days? Something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, five. How you feeling?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve heard our friend Merlin always joke about, like, you know, getting older, and he, like, apparently injured his ankle while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sleeping a few weeks ago. And I have now—I was 40 for, like, 72 hours. I woke

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up one morning, like, a half hour before my alarm was supposed to go off. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey thought,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, crap. I convinced myself, all right, let’s go back to sleep. Half hour later. I wake up. I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey so literally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that half hour I Had somehow slept on my neck or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shoulder in some weird way That and like I’m like I do a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like core and flexibility exercises I am usually very healthy in these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas and yet somehow 72 hours after I turned 40

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I slept for 30 minutes and broke myself and like can’t twist my body Like for like two days

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, like it’s slowly getting better, but I’m like, oh my god like I Wow that comes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on quickly

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the warranty doesn’t run out until like the mid 40s. So I’m not sure what this is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know man I I genuinely yeah, this is such a boring thing for three old white guys to whine about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being three old white guys But here we are But no, I feel like once I hit like 35 things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that never ever used to bother me started to occasionally bother me And I didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the planned obsolescence of 40 in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John three days that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have had, but, uh, I definitely will like bend wrong

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and can’t twist my back for a week or whatever the case may be, like all sorts of weird ailments or,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I’ll cough the wrong way and suddenly like my abdomen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hurts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for a day or two.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I also exercise, I’m not saying I exercise more or less than Marco, but I, I exercise every day.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, again, maybe not, maybe not the same way, maybe not as strenuously, but but I exercise every single day.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am probably the healthiest I’ve ever been in my life, or at least certainly the strongest. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet still, if I look at something the wrong way, suddenly an entirely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey opposite end of my body is broken. So, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I don’t understand how this is happening to Marco. Because like I said on Twitter, Marco is, I think, probably also

⏹️ ▶️ John in probably the best shape of his life. He’s got rid of his banana allergy. He’s all

⏹️ ▶️ John trim and buff and doing all these exercises. And like what? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not

⏹️ ▶️ John trim.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trim-er. Yes, well, yeah, I’m very strong in certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. I am not trim. That’s not a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John either way, you’ve definitely sort of had a midlife rally here, but now this whole sleep thing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is really set you back.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, and like, ever since I got more serious about fitness a few years ago and started doing more and more stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having the trainer and everything, like, our trainer’s awesome. Like, we’ll do things that exercise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco muscles that I didn’t even know existed. So like, you know, the problem most people have when they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing fitness stuff on their own, maybe you go to a gym, maybe you have a treadmill or a bike at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco home, whatever it is, usually most people can think of a few top hit muscle groups that you should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work and you don’t think of everything else because you’re not a trainer, you’re not a professional in that area, you know? I love our trainer so much because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we, it’s always a variety of stuff we’re doing and it’s always exercising all sorts of different muscles like your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inner hips or like, you know, weird side bending things or something. It’s like stuff that you would never think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to even know how to exercise on your own, let alone to do it correctly. And so I’m very fortunate to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that, and I’ve been able to avoid, like I don’t have any RSI problems anymore, I’ve been able to avoid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of back problems I used to have, that’s all gone and fixed. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco asterisk, it was. I mean, it was fixed until last weekend when I turned 40.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s just, I’ve put in all, and I guess this is why you put in the work,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Like you put in all that work, You do all the fitness stuff because, yeah, when you’re 19,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re made of rubber, and you can do whatever you want, and you won’t get hurt.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as you approach and then cross 40, these things start adding up. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so glad that I do all that stuff because I can’t imagine, I’d probably be in way worse condition,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like just, I’m sure I’d be hurting constantly if I wasn’t doing all the exercise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that I do. And it’s, oh my God, it’s so disheartening to somehow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sleep wrong for a half hour and be hurting for two days.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, shoulda got MarcoCare+.

Hardware deaths

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Speaking of which, I have unplugged my home pods.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you okay? They just don’t work anymore. Like they’ve,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last couple of weeks, I don’t think I’ve gotten the stereo pairing to work once. It’s been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a roller coaster. They’ve gone up and down, you know, we’ve had good times and bad times and this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, like, it just, they are so broken. Like, they’re so unreliable in so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many different ways. They’re slow, they don’t respond to things, they forget what they’re saying halfway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just everything about them is just broken. They don’t work reliably anymore and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m officially decommissioning them. I unplugged them. I actually, I, this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco embarrassing, I got some stupid thing from B&O. It was supposed to be a really good replacement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it lasted like two seconds on the counter before it was rejected by the historical committee

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but It wasn’t even good enough to keep like if I’m honest like it wasn’t good enough to be worth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stupid price but like so now so what I did now I just plugged in a HomePod mini up there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is not even close to sounding good in in the relatively large

⏹️ ▶️ Marco room it’s placed in because of course it’s a tiny little thing but I just I wish I wish Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would fix the HomePod and release a new big one because whatever they’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the mini it’s and we’ve I don’t want to listen to the ground but whatever they’re doing with the mini It’s clearly running a different software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stack than the big one. It’s certainly a different hardware stack, but I think the software stack is very different as well. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big one just is so much more broken in so many more ways. The small one seems to work pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. We have a few small ones around the house. They seem to work pretty well. The big ones just don’t anymore. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one hand, I feel very burned in the sense that these were expensive and they aren’t that old.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re already like pretty much not for not functioning. Um, so on one hand, I kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of feel burned. On the other hand, I’m looking around the environment and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, I still just want Apple to make a good one. I don’t trust anyone else to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this because I’ve looked around the market and there just isn’t anything good. So I don’t know what to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. That’s gonna be an ongoing thing. I’m also, I’m kind of upset because I also had to just replace my iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard. Oh. Because it died.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, did it just turn 40? It is about four.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s almost four, so that’s… It’s 40 in overpriced accessory years. Right, you multiply it by 10, and yeah. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard, the floaty one or the not floaty one?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The one that came out in 2018, the Folio, without the trackpad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay, because I was going to say, the floaty one came out early on in the pandemic, if I’m not mistaken, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wouldn’t be four years old, but no, I didn’t realize, okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t care for that one on the 11-inch, because, well, either side, just because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that much of an iPad Power user, and it’s so big and bulky and expensive. And the combined

⏹️ ▶️ Marco object you get with the Magic Keyboard, which is what you’re talking about with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey trackpad,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco combined object you get, I did not like. I thought it was clunky. I didn’t like how hard it was to move the hinge,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was very heavy, and it was just like, forget it. But I like the regular keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco folios they’ve been making since the iPad Pro forever ago. I like those, those are great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are like almost $200, like $160, $170 usually. So they’re almost $200.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do die eventually. Like we got one for my father-in-law a few years back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and his just died this past year. I’ve had one other one die before this. Mine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just died again. Like it’s just they, whatever. And it’s, it seems like it’s an electronic thing. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a like key switch failing thing. It’s something with the controller electronics where it just like, it just won’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco appear to the iPad anymore. Like the iPad will just think there’s no keyboard connected and you’ll, you can like pop it off, pop it back on and it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might reconnect. Eventually that stops working like over time that even that doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t seem to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a dirty contacts thing. It’s like try cleaning the contacts like it’s not that so it just seems like these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboards just die so often. So worth pointing out if you’re going to buy a $200 or if you get the Magic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keyboard a like $330 I think dollar iPad keyboard. Yeah, whatever it is, it’s a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be aware they only last a few years, which again I’m not happy about that either and through other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco various this is I don’t want to make this too much of the Marco show, but through other various things that are mostly boring,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last couple of days, I have ordered both a new iPad and a new iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for various reasons and family needs and things like that off cycle. And it feels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really dirty. I’m like, I know new stuff in both of those areas is going to come out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a few months, but I need them now. And so it’s like I’m just, I’m becoming a normal person.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to just buy stuff and not care for these particular roles. well, this thing’s gonna be replaced in a couple of months.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done it plenty of times too, getting kids phones and stuff when they don’t want a hand-me-down or when they break a hand-me-down and they need a

⏹️ ▶️ John new phone now and you know a new one’s coming in two months, they just gotta buy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve been eyeing an M1 iPad Pro because as I’ve said many times, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 2018 iPad Pro, which honestly still runs really well. Like it’s not brand new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the battery is a little eh, but all things considered, this thing is four years old or thereabouts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it runs really well. And I hear what you’re saying about the Magic Keyboard, the floaty keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is heavy and bulky. I disagree about the hinge, but otherwise I agree with everything you said. But I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do really like it. And I like, maybe I’m just easily amused, but I like having a trackpad from time to time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I still really like my iPad, but I’m looking at, you know, the beta and center stage or whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey heck it’s called. No, not center stage, I’m doing the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco same thing. Stage manager.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you, stage manager. And I’m looking at not having an M1 iPad Pro and I’m thinking, oh, should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get an iPad? It’s about time to upgrade, but no, I should wait. shouldn’t I? I should wait. I should definitely wait.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why that’s one of the reasons I upgraded. So I, I haven’t even, I didn’t even have an iPad for most, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even have a TV. I don’t even have an iPad for like for most of the last year because as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my kids, I’ve had was, was breaking and we were awaiting that product to be updated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as that was happening. I lent him mine for a span of like a number of months. So, and I just didn’t have one for a while. I hardly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever used the iPad. However, Now, I have significant reason to have an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for testing because now my app became a lot more resizable on the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have to really make sure that works. And you can do, I think you do some testing in the simulator. But anyway, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the same time as I was, as I was thinking, because again, I, I too have the 2018 11 inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad pro and it’s because, you know, for my uses, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I really, I really do want to point that out one more time. I know I said it a second ago, but this is a four-year-old

⏹️ ▶️ Casey device that for the sorts of things that Marco and I are doing up until now, it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. Like it doesn’t feel slow. It doesn’t feel like a four-year-old device. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually held up stunningly well. And I feel like we should applaud Apple for that. But that being said, somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy me an M1 iPad Pro, please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, that’s the conclusion I came to is like, you know, I wanted a stage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco manager test device and I looked at the Air, I looked at the Pro, and basically the Pro could get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me faster. And separately from that, I also, there’s a new role in my life

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for boring reasons, but I now could use an iPad again, like on a regular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basis, I kind of need like a separate device. I need an iPad. The iPad I currently own,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, and like over on my side of my desk is TIFF’s old 12.9 inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, the previous gen one. So I have the 12.9 and the 11, both from 2018, sitting around not doing anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Meanwhile, I need an M1 version for testing. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey just like, all right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I did the Apple trade-in for both of them and the combined trade-in for both

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them gets me the cheapest M1 iPad. So I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll trade these two in for the one I actually want and spend the $200 on a new keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and call it a day.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what’s the story with the iPhone?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and so that’s a separate thing. So that’s a family member finally has accepted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPhone. And so for various reasons, not my kid, just an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco older family member, finally we’ve been trying to get them on an iPhone for a long time, we finally did. They agreed to take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my old iPhone 12 mini. Currently before that, my main testing iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like testing my app on different Apple IDs and different store configurations, stuff like that, and different OS versions,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my testing setup has been an iPhone 7 and my iPhone 12 mini. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 12 mini just got given away and the iPhone 7 doesn’t run iOS 16.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I’m like, all right, I could really use one more iPhone. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went on Amazon and bought their refurbished, renewed, crap,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used iPhone 13 mini. So that way I will have the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco best mini phone that was ever made, paid almost nothing for it relatively to its

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new price, and that will be a new good test phone because it is both mini,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s cool, and I’ll be happy when I pick it up, And also, I can run all the latest stuff on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by collide a new take on endpoint management

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco to educate them about the security of their laptop. Collide is built by like minded security practitioners

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco them so much they would just throw their hands up and switch to using their personal laptops without telling anyone and of course, everyone loses

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco conversation that starts with the end users installing the endpoint agent on their own through a guided

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, the screen lock is set wrong, to more nuanced and tricky things like asking people to secure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two-factor backup codes that are just sitting in their downloads folder. And because it’s talking directly to employees,

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Congrats, Alex!

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So popping up the stack several levels,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we also need

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go back to our housekeeping and congratulate John’s son Alex, who is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a high school graduate, which is very exciting. Hey! So how we feeling, Dad?

⏹️ ▶️ John Good, I guess. I mean, one thing I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey learned about his high

⏹️ ▶️ John school, and I don’t know if it’s just his high school, it seems like it’d be a trend. When we were in high school,

⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe, I don’t know, I should say when I was in high school and maybe when you two are in high school as well,

⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of tradition was that at graduation the school valedictorian would give

⏹️ ▶️ John a speech, right? Is that a thing that you two experienced?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gave a speech at my high school graduation because I was president of the graduating class, thank you very much. But yes, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey valedictorian, I think the salutatorian gave a speech in me, if memory

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John serves. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John there you go. All right, so they don’t do that as much anymore, I think, And my

⏹️ ▶️ John son’s school also, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t even give like rankings,

⏹️ ▶️ John academic rankings. Oh, interesting. And so instead what they do is everyone in the

⏹️ ▶️ John school votes or something like that to say who should speak. So they had a bunch of student speakers

⏹️ ▶️ John and people voted for them. And they got up to go up there and talk, right? But it’s not based on like

⏹️ ▶️ John academic rank or class president or anything like that. Although I think one of the people that spoke was someone involved

⏹️ ▶️ John in student government. But anyway, I’m not quite sure how it works. But all this is to say is that like, so, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, there’s no, because I asked myself, like, what, what do you think your class rank was? It’s like, oh, they don’t do that. Dad, you’re so

⏹️ ▶️ John old. And so I’m like, well, you know, I can just say that you

⏹️ ▶️ John are the number one in your class. Right. Cause who knows? I mean, you might’ve been, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my class rank was 90 out of one 80.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Nice. I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly the most mediocre student in my class.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s, you know, so the The number like that is like, well, you know, academically, the numbers are what they are. But the numbers

⏹️ ▶️ John are so weird now because they do waiting for like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey honors classes and all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ John of weird stuff. And some people do out of 5.0, some people do out of 4.0. It’s just so confusing. So anyway, I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ John declaring my son probably the valedictorian of his class. Let’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey be honest. I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Were his grades, all kidding aside, were his grades that good?

⏹️ ▶️ John His grades were fantastic. He did better in school than either of his parents.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s awesome. And I’m not asking you to upset the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey privacy clown or whatever it is from Dubai Friday, but he has a college plan or a postgraduate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan or what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have you. He’s off to college.

⏹️ ▶️ John College admissions is rough and college tuition is rough, but you can do what you can. But he did

⏹️ ▶️ John great in high school. I’m very proud of him.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good. And then is he doing any sort of summer work or anything like that or is he just chilling out?

⏹️ ▶️ John No. I don’t know. Really, I mean, this is the thing when you have a kid

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s like academically excellent. You feel bad, like, you know, it’s my wife’s

⏹️ ▶️ John inclination especially to like get on his case about school work. It’s like, look, his grades

⏹️ ▶️ John are perfect. Like, there’s nothing to, there’s nothing, and yeah, sometimes it does seem like he’s slacking or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like, you can’t argue with results, right? Like, there’s no higher

⏹️ ▶️ John grade attainable. There’s no higher scores attainable, like everything. So anyway, so what is he doing for summer?

⏹️ ▶️ John you should be pressuring him to do something or whatever. It’s like, eh, I feel like if you do really awesome in high school

⏹️ ▶️ John and your parents never have to bug you about it, one of your rewards is you can probably do whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hell you want between the summer between high

⏹️ ▶️ John school and college. I don’t know, I’m gonna encourage him to do something or other, but who knows if he will. And honestly, he’s earned

⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to just goof off all summer if he wants. Hopefully he doesn’t listen to this podcast, but if he doesn’t, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I hear, John, that success hides failure. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey success hides problems, come on. Oh, that’s what it is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn it. I was trying to be smart, and clearly I’m not as smart as Alex.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s more to life than academic success. That is definitely true. Oh my God, there’s so much more. That is very

⏹️ ▶️ John true. But academic success is nice too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Academic success matters a lot when you’re in it and right after you’re in it. And then it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t matter at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is also true. It matters a lot when you’re trying to get into college, though, just FYI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That qualifies as the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right after you’re in it. As soon as you do the next thing after it, it stops mattering at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if you want to go to graduate school, it kind of helps if you do well as an undergraduate. Yeah, well, then

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next thing after it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John All right. Some people just never just keep doing that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey forever. They just

⏹️ ▶️ John never leave academia.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you, to the extent you’re willing to discuss on this, you’re not feelings program, do you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have plans for him with regard to a computer to go to college and or automobile to go

⏹️ ▶️ John to college? Yeah, I’m already excited about those educational discounts.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, baby. This

⏹️ ▶️ John Friday, I am ordering him a new M2 MacBook Air. He chose the boring

⏹️ ▶️ John color. I tried to push the midnight. but he was just not having it. So he’s picking Space Gray, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s the worst. I like it too. It would be my site. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what he picked, right? I just, it’s his computer, right? With his

⏹️ ▶️ John educational discount, love those savings. But then I am going to take advantage of it. You

⏹️ ▶️ John can go to like the EDU store and like check out to the point, you can’t actually order it, but you can go through the whole like config process and

⏹️ ▶️ John everything. And one of the, you know, when you scroll down, you configure your computer and it’s like, what else do you want? Do you want Final Cut

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro? Do you want Logic? You know, and Apple does that on their sites. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in the EDU store, they said,

⏹️ ▶️ John do you want the student professional something something bundle? I was like, huh, what’s this? For $199, you get Final

⏹️ ▶️ John Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion,

⏹️ ▶️ John and like two other things that I can’t remember. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just

⏹️ ▶️ John like Final Cut Pro itself is like what, 300, $200? I think it’s fewer 300, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Logic is like 100, like there’s a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco savings.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think it’s about a 50% discount, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m gonna get that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bundle. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t beat those savings. Maybe he’ll use them, maybe he won’t, but I want, but see, I want those apps to be mine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I want the computer to be his, but I want those apps to be mine. And so I’m like, when I buy that,

⏹️ ▶️ John are they gonna like give me a promo code that I enter in the app store? Does

⏹️ ▶️ John that mean I have to buy it on my Apple ID, but then will I get the easy you discount? So I got to figure that out,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, Friday in the morning is when the MacBook Air goes on sale and I’m getting him that for

⏹️ ▶️ John school. He already has, he already has an old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John M1 MacBook Air.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the only the 13 inch pro goes on sale this Friday. They haven’t announced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the on-sale date for the Air yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John But as soon as it goes on sale, I’m getting it. And he just wants, you know, the M1 MacBook Air is technically

⏹️ ▶️ John this family’s and this will be actually his computer. So, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. Is he bringing a car to school or anything like that? No, there’s no car for him to bring. Well, there could

⏹️ ▶️ John be. But there’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is why I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco asked the question.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get a renewed refurbished one on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Amazon for not that much money. His

⏹️ ▶️ John tuition costs much more than any car I’ve ever purchased.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll never forget my dad telling me, sitting me down before I went to Virginia Tech. And tech was cheap, even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of state. But he sat me down, and he said, I just want you to know, because he had just like a year or two before

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought himself his second Wrangler of the three that he zoned. And he said, I just want you to know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you going to school is like me driving the Jeep off a cliff and then doing it again next year,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and doing it again next year. Thanks, dad. That makes me feel real great. Thanks so much.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. All right, well, congratulations, Marco, for surviving till 40 in what, two days? And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey congratulations, Alex, for graduating high school. All three of us

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are very proud of the two of you. So very well done.

iCloud Shared Photo Library

⏹️ ▶️ Casey As per tradition, we need to do the follow-up episode, since it was just a big Apple event,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we need to do what will almost surely be an episode, almost entirely a follow-up. And let’s start

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with iCloud Shared Photo Library, which unfortunately, but understandably, is not in any of the betas,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we have news about this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Understandably, I was disappointed not to find it there. I was looking around, like, where is this? How do you do it or whatever? I had to ask, and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh yeah, no, it’s not in the betas. They didn’t say that on the thing. I mean, they just

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey did the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John presentation, got me all excited about this new feature, And they didn’t say, oh, and by the way, this is totally not in the beta. It’ll be in the beta

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, but it’s not in the current beta. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was disappointed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by that. It’s always shady when they do the like, well, if you upgrade this device, everything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey else is screwed, you know? Which I understand why it’s like that, because you’re doing new things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in iCloud and that server side and blah, blah, blah, but it gets a little squishy, so I can understand it.

⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, and this feature is another reason to have testing Apple IDs, which Apple does not make easy

⏹️ ▶️ John to do and has caused me problems in the past, but I still have a couple of them rattling around. then yeah, I’m not letting

⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud shared photo library anywhere near my real Apple ID until it is out and tested by somebody

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s not me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, we, somebody, I guess, John had noticed a tweet from Jason Snell with regard to,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, from Jason with regard to what happens with the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharing allocations. And so Jason wrote, if you’re sharing with someone in the family,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just uses the shared family allotment once, not multiple times. If you share with someone not in a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey family plan with you, I believe the person sharing the images is the one who quote unquote pays

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the storage. And then Jason went on to say, I think this is more of Jason, I didn’t put this in.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not me, this is me clarifying, because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I saw it like,

⏹️ ▶️ John wait a second, you have to pay? Like if I share a shared library with Casey, I

⏹️ ▶️ John have to pay for that storage? So I got a clarification. This is just me interpreting the clarification.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, and so apparently I’m reading for John now. It doesn’t subtract it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just using your storage. So if you share with someone outside the family and you contribute 200 gigabytes and they contribute 200 gigabytes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you each pay for what you contribute, but it’s not double counted.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a worry a lot of people have with any sharing thing, especially since I think Dropbox, I don’t know if they still do it this way, but I think they originally

⏹️ ▶️ John did it the terrible way where it’s like if you do a shared folder in Dropbox, everybody has that storage

⏹️ ▶️ John counted towards their total allotment, which is just terrible because you know that they’re not storing the data 17 times

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But so it seems like the iCloud shared folder library works the way you

⏹️ ▶️ John would want it to, and that you don’t double or triple or quadruple count. The stuff is only stored once.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you have a shared photo library where you contribute some photos and so does somebody else and you’re doing different family things, you

⏹️ ▶️ John just each pay for whatever you’ve contributed. It’s as if it was in just your own regular library.

Copy/Paste Edits in Photos

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Copy-paste edits in photos. According to the iOS 16 preview

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple’s website, you can copy the edits you’ve made to a photo and then paste them onto another photo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a batch of photos. I presume that you’re very excited about this, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is actually a big deal. Like this was something that Lightroom had forever ago. And I remember like that was one of the big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco life-changing moments when I had like a huge set of photos that I just shot and maybe I wanted to like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, adjust the white balance on all of them at once because it was set a little bit wrong or something like that. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really nice to have this kind of feature. Or you tweak your photos a certain way, and maybe you wanna apply

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all to a big batch. It’s a really nice feature to have, and it’s something that pro workflows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect, and have expected for quite some time. So it’s nice to see.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Aperture might have had a similar feature, and one of the things I always remember is from like OmniGraffle, where you

⏹️ ▶️ John could copy subsets of styling, and then paste that styling with a special tool onto other things.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so yeah, this is definitely a useful feature, but, and I, well, I don’t know this for a fact, but I just, so the

⏹️ ▶️ John URL that this page was on is like iOS 16 preview features, right? I checked

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac OS, you know, Ventura preview, whatever thing, and this wasn’t listed there.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s cool that you can do this from the iOS and iPad OS

⏹️ ▶️ John photos application, but you can’t do it from the Mac one. I don’t know that to be true. Again, the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John photos application doesn’t have the shared thing in it yet, so maybe it will be on the Mac too, but I really hope, because I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t spend my time doing photo edits on my phone or my iPad, I do them on my Mac, so I hope this feature

⏹️ ▶️ John comes there as well.

Safety Check

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eric DeRuider has some thoughts on Safety Check, which are really, really useful.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eric writes, Safety Check looks like a great feature, but in the meantime, and for those who can’t or won’t update to iOS 16,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has a guide to do some of these things manually. And there is a personal safety user guide that we will link to,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which discusses how to take care of yourself with regard to your personal safety and your devices, which is pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s exactly why this feature needs to exist, because you read that document and your eyes start to glaze over, and it’s just so much work. And expecting

⏹️ ▶️ John someone to do that at a very difficult time of their life and a limited amount of time and do it carefully and do it perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ John is probably too much to ask, but worst case scenario, you do have some recourse even if

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have iOS 16. Yep,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is excellent.

Passkey transfers, recovery

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about passkeys. JOHN,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a question a lot of people had. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about passkeys. But one of the questions like, how do I share this with somebody

⏹️ ▶️ John that came up in this program? We’re like, well, you know, technologically, there’s nothing stopping you from doing what you can do in one password,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is like put it into a shared family vault or whatever. As far as I can tell, Apple does not have the concept

⏹️ ▶️ John of a shared family iCloud key chain. Now that we’ve got it for photos, it makes me want it everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ John else. I think a past shows I said, Apple should do it with contacts because it’s like so much a small use case

⏹️ ▶️ John shared family contacts, library, whatever, shared iFamily iCloud keychain,

⏹️ ▶️ John all those things should happen, but they don’t yet exist. But Apple’s solution to the idea of sharing a password

⏹️ ▶️ John with somebody, like say you sign up for an account with a with a passkey. And you know, you just send

⏹️ ▶️ John the password to you know, someone in your family if they want to log into how do I do that with a passkey?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, in Apple’s WWDC session about passkeys this year, starting at around six

⏹️ ▶️ John minutes and 14 seconds, you can see their answer. And their answer is is you airdrop it to them, right? So you can go into passwords

⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone and you just airdrop it like you airdrop anything else. And why is it airdrop and not like

⏹️ ▶️ John email or messages or whatever? I assume they want you to be in proximity. So you kind of know who you’re sending it to because

⏹️ ▶️ John airdrop doesn’t work like, you know, over hundreds of miles or whatever. They don’t really talk about that. But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that is the thing that works. You can airdrop a passkey to somebody. And for people who

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, who have some misunderstanding about this, It’s not like you have one passkey

⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s it. Every single account on every single service has its own public private

⏹️ ▶️ John key pair, right? So you can have 50 accounts on mycoolsite.com and

⏹️ ▶️ John they all have separate passkeys and you can pass them around. It’s just like a password, right? Instead of username

⏹️ ▶️ John and password, it’s username and passkey, right? And it’s all the stuff we talked about of how they’re unlocked or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the passkey stuff. But in the end, there is one of them for every single account and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no limitation. It’s not like tied to your Apple ID or tied to your phone and that I can only have one

⏹️ ▶️ John account on this service because it’s tied to my phone. You can have as many as you want and you can

⏹️ ▶️ John pass them around with AirDrop just like any other data.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then how do you recover pass keys if you lose all your devices?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is, Apple has a document about this and it’s an interesting question, like say your house burns down,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it had all your stuff in it and it had all like your backup codes and all your iOS devices,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? We were sponsored this week by Backblaze.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, just kidding. Well, that’s the question. Like, so if you have passwords, you could say, well, I

⏹️ ▶️ John put a text document and I put it in Backblaze or whatever. And so I’ll just like, if I can just restore from Backblaze and I’ll see what my

⏹️ ▶️ John password was and I’ll get back all my stuff. But pass keys, the whole point of them is they don’t leave your device, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Other than apparently how they get airdropped. And I’m not quite sure how to do that in a secure way, but it’s, you know, Apple end to end. So they figure

⏹️ ▶️ John out some way to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but like the private keys are not just sitting in a file somewhere, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re in a secure enclave and they’re in iCloud key chain, which is end to end encrypted. And if you like don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know your, you know, Apple ID, password, like if you lose all the hardware devices

⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t remember stuff, how do you get anything back? And Apple actually has solutions to this. One of them,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a big one and a fairly new one that we talked about in past shows is have a recovery contact where you

⏹️ ▶️ John can have another person be sort of your backstop and say, if all else fails and everything screws up,

⏹️ ▶️ John this person who I better super duper trust can help me get my stuff back. And I actually set that up today.

⏹️ ▶️ John Last time I tried to set it up, I was complaining about like minimum OS versions of devices. You basically have to kick out

⏹️ ▶️ John any devices that have really old OSs. Like I had an iPod that was still listed as belonging to my Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John ID and stuff, or my iPhone 7 was still registered for Apple Pay. Right, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can go to appleid.apple.com and just delete those devices because they’re all in the attic and erased

⏹️ ▶️ John now anyway, so they don’t have anything on them, right? But once you do that, you can set up a recovery contact. You could also

⏹️ ▶️ John have this sort of like fallback recovery code thing that you can do where you call Apple on the

⏹️ ▶️ John phone and they have something escrow for you and you prove who you are. Like read the document, put it

⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes. But the point is, even if you lose everything, you can, there

⏹️ ▶️ John are ways to recover some of your stuff. Some of it might involve you putting a piece of paper in a security deposit

⏹️ ▶️ John box somewhere or giving it to somebody that’s your like if all else fails thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, and it’s a pretty unlikely scenario that you would not only lose every single hardware device

⏹️ ▶️ John you own that is signed into your Apple ID, but also not know any of your passwords? I guess it’s envisioning a world where there

⏹️ ▶️ John are no more passwords, but it’s just passkeys, and what if everything that had that passkey in the secure enclave is gone? Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John has thought of that. It is complicated, but it is not entirely unsolvable. So check out the links in the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanna see what Apple’s thinking is on how to deal with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode my favorite place to run servers visit Linode.com

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco just straight up value. They were the cheapest for what I wanted to do. It’s simple as that. They’re a really great

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco disaster recovery backups, data replication. It’s just great. It’s a great new service from Linode.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frankly, I’m looking at it myself because I’m tired of running my own MySQL databases because it’s a pain in the butt.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very much looking forward to trying this out with Linode because it’s so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such a pain, trust me. So you want to try this out with Linode. It’s just great. So managed database

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is new there. Otherwise, they have, again, great capabilities, great support team if you ever need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and just amazing pricing at Linode. It’s awesome being a Linode customer. They make cloud computing

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP, create a free account, and you get $100 in credit. Once again, linode.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP, create a free account for 100 bucks in credit. Thank you so much to Linode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.

M2

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me

⏹️ ▶️ John about the M2. So we’re wondering what’s the deal with the M2. They told us the stats. Oh, it’s like, you know, X percent faster, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t know anything more about it on last week’s show. Well, now we do know more from

⏹️ ▶️ John this site, Semi Analysis. I read their big analysis of looking at the die

⏹️ ▶️ John shot and what they say seems to hold some weight to me, assuming these die shots are vaguely accurate.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s A15 stuff in there, right? So it’s the A15 power cores and the A15

⏹️ ▶️ John efficiency cores. Right, so if you’re wondering, is it just an A14 with an extra GPU core, or you know, M1

⏹️ ▶️ John with extra GPU core, it’s not. It’s A15 stuff inside there. And the power core

⏹️ ▶️ John is actually bigger than it is. Well, it’s obviously bigger than it is in M1, and it’s also

⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than it is in the A15. It’s 21% bigger than in the M1, and 7% bigger than the A15. And

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of that has to do with like the L2 cache being bigger than it was in the A15. But the core itself, computation-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ John is the A15. The E-Cores look about the same. There is the faster

⏹️ ▶️ John LPDDR6400 memory controller, which apparently costs more money, but that’s how you get the extra memory

⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth. So, you know, it is, like I said last week, it is definitely

⏹️ ▶️ John a worthy successor to the M1. The M1 had A14 stuff in it, the M2 has A15

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in it. It’s a slightly better five nanometer process, which comes with it, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, on its own. Even if you just fabbed the M1 in the, you know, the straight up M1

⏹️ ▶️ John with this new process, it would get a little bit of boost in power, you know, power savings

⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, a computer per watt or whatever. So, M2 is looking pretty good. Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not super duper fantastic, but it is definitely, you know, a reasonable successor

⏹️ ▶️ John to the M1.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing that I do have a little bit of reservation about that I, you know, we’ll have to just see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the machines and use them to really know, but we don’t know yet, you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of alluded to last week, like with the new MacBook Air, again, it’s fanless again, and you know, presumably the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing will apply to all the M2-based iPads that are presumably gonna come out soon, because I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just bought an M1 one, so the M2 ones must be coming out like tomorrow. Actually, it’ll come out, what’s the return

⏹️ ▶️ Marco period? 15 days? It’ll come out 16 days from now. But anyway, is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t really know yet, like it does look like it might have a higher thermal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco load when it’s under full load, because the die

⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself got significantly bigger, and the performance cores got bigger, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a leaked Geekbench result that came out today that looked like they clotted up a little bit too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it wouldn’t surprise me if this might get throttled more than the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 did in fanless enclosures. So again, we will have to see. Hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m wrong about that, because that was one of the best things about the M1, is that it pretty much never throttled unless you were really crushing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco both CPU and GPU. So we’ll see what happens with the M2, but in case you were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco waffling over maybe getting an error or the quote pro, which we’ll get to,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that decision, we don’t really have all the information yet until we learn, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is the trade-off in making the M2 fanless? Does it get a little bit hotter than the M1? Does it have to throttle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point sooner that you might hit where you wouldn’t have hit it on the M1? And the answer is, we just don’t know yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the thing with the, I wish I had the number on this offhand, but like the new five nanometer process, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John comes with it some percentage of better power efficiency. If that percentage

⏹️ ▶️ John is around the same percentage as the sort of area increase and the, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the clocking increase, if those two balance each other out, it should be about the same as the M1, right? Because these numbers

⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t big. It’s, you know, if you look at how much bigger it is than the M1, it’s like, I don’t know, 10, 15% bigger. But if you get 10, 15% more power

⏹️ ▶️ John savings in the new process, it might just be a wash. Well, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll find out from the testing. And also we don’t even know what the cooling solution looks like inside the

⏹️ ▶️ John fanless M2 MacBook Air. You know, you can solve a lot of problems with more heat pipes and more

⏹️ ▶️ John surface area and more little fins and stuff. So we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M2 MacBook Air comes with color matched MagSafe cables, which makes me very jealous.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is unlike my MacBook Pro, which just used a, what is it, silver MagSafe connector.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no matter what color MacBook Pro you get, you get the plain silver MagSafe

⏹️ ▶️ John connector, but the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco color match tables- Which supports

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my assertion that the silver is the best color of MacBook Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the color match, I wish I had a picture of it here, and then I’ll just put, I think they’re like, the cord is colored to match the MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ John or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little metal end. But no, you can actually, you can buy those separately as of whenever these things launch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a separate listing on Apple’s website somewhere where you can actually, so if you want, even though Apple should have given you the color match version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to begin with, with your boring space gray laptop, you can now go buy the Boring Space Gray MagSafe cable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by itself.

Assorted small items

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, good to know. Also, the M2 MacBook Air has a 500-nit P3 screen. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John last week, Marco mistakenly said that it didn’t have P3 and that the M2 MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro also didn’t have P3. They both have P3. So, they’re 100-nits brighter, well, the MacBook Air is 100-nits brighter than

⏹️ ▶️ John it was, and they are both P3.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, my bad. Desk view. What is the situation with cameras and desk view?

⏹️ ▶️ John We were talking last week about how it’s using the wide-angle camera to get a view of you and a view of your desk

⏹️ ▶️ John surface, your physical desktop. Well, apparently if you are using it and you

⏹️ ▶️ John use the regular camera to see your face, it will then also simultaneously

⏹️ ▶️ John use the wide camera to see your physical desktop. So we’ll use two cameras at once. And one of them is just using

⏹️ ▶️ John to look at your fingers or whatever you have on your desk, and the other is looking at your face. So it’s nice that you’re not limited to using the

⏹️ ▶️ John probably pretty bad, potentially center stage powered, super ultra wide camera for your face. You can

⏹️ ▶️ John use the regular camera for that and just use the super ultra wide one to be able to

⏹️ ▶️ John see your desktop.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then with regards to messages, according to Tobias, you can finally scroll through long messages from the normal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey UI, no more long press, et cetera. And also audio recording has been moved to the iMessage app area,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey woo!

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s exciting. I didn’t confirm any of this, but I assume, like, cause I don’t have, do either one of you have the beta on anything

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey look at this and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming what this means is no more accidentally hitting that little thing that lets you record an audio message cause it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a message field

⏹️ ▶️ John anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did have the beta before I gave away my 12 mini. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whoopsie-dipsies. How was that, by the way, running it on your carry phone?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s the thing, it wasn’t on my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey carry phone. Oh, it was on the 12 mini, I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually asked on Twitter yesterday, like, you know, hey, how’s the beta 1 on your carry phones? And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds like it’s a moderately rough beta 1, from what people are saying. And people, it’s funny, people frame

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this differently. Some people say, it’s pretty rough, you know, I only got half the battery life.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people say, it’s not that bad. I’m only going to have the battery life. It depends on your perspective on like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what you’re willing to give up. But it seems like there’s a number of problems. Um, you know, things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people say like Apple pay didn’t work and yeah, half the battery life and apparently Microsoft teams,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app doesn’t work, which I don’t use, but you know, that’s good to know. Like, so it’s, it seems like, yeah, it’s beta one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you’re probably better off still not putting it on your carry phones. But to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honest, I’m probably gonna jump in on beta too.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. But yeah, and the other thing is, I didn’t have this happen often, but it was absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey infuriating when you got a very long message in messages and you had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like long press or whatever the case may be in order to read it. And so apparently that’s not a problem anymore, which is exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know what we need? We need desktop class iPhone apps. And you know why? So we can get the stupid attach

⏹️ ▶️ John a photo back to not be buried under the message area thing, right? So we got rid of the audio thing in the text

⏹️ ▶️ John field. Now there’s room for another icon there. Wouldn’t it be great if you could pick which icon is the one that’s not buried

⏹️ ▶️ John in the application thing? And the one I would pick is attach picture from your photo library, cause I do that all the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Yeah, that’s the one that I think people do the most, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and I guess people just leave that little app bar visible for people. Don’t know, you can hold

⏹️ ▶️ John down on whatever button you press and it will hide and show that app bar. I don’t leave it visible cause I don’t need to see it there all the time. I just

⏹️ ▶️ John want one thing to be accessible and I don’t want that one thing not to be record audio message. So I really wish

⏹️ ▶️ John they would add a one-slot customizable toolbar to the iPhone messages

⏹️ ▶️ John app. Think about it, Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You run with it. You’re just the idea guy. All right. Alright.

Stage Manager

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about stage manager, please. One

⏹️ ▶️ John quick tip for this, for people who don’t know and don’t like the little side thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that shows all the little window groups on an angle in stage manager, in iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John OS apparently, James Thompson says you can turn off that sidebar if you long press on the

⏹️ ▶️ John stage manager mode thing in control center. So you don’t have to see that all the time. I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think you can also hide

⏹️ ▶️ John it on the Mac too. I’m not entirely sure. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Ventura, though I did install it. So I just wanted to give that quick

⏹️ ▶️ John tip for people who think, I’m not gonna run stage manager. I don’t want those icons clogging things up. Also, I think on the iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you make the app or one of the app windows wide enough, I think that it will also

⏹️ ▶️ John hide that thing. I have not installed iPadOS 16 on any devices, so I don’t know for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ John Harvey, the one of you done that?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did. Had to restore that one too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, some more experimentation there, but that’s, we’ll talk more about stage manager as

⏹️ ▶️ John one or both of us or all three of us brave enough to put it on our iPad. I’ll probably put it on mine because I do have an M1 iPad. I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John put it on mine eventually, just maybe not beta one. But before we dive too much more into that in future

⏹️ ▶️ John weeks, it’s time to talk about the controversies surrounding Stage Manager.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s start with the talk show live, which they did in the Apple Developer Center thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John John Gruber’s live talk show that had Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak

⏹️ ▶️ John as guests. And here are just a couple of short quotes about what Federighi

⏹️ ▶️ John said about stage manager, how to think about it. And this is mostly in the context of

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, right? It was on the last show I talked about how on the Mac, there’s tons of different ways to manage windows. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John has done lots of different things over the years and pretty much all of them are still there, right? You’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ John expose, you’ve got the dock, you’ve got minimization, you’ve got tiling windows, you’ve got zooming, you’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ John plain old resizing, you’ve got spaces, and now also you have a stage manager.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I probably forgot something in there. All those things are all in there at the same time. So Greg Federighi

⏹️ ▶️ John said, we’re not telling you that you’re doing it wrong, implying like, if you use one of those features, we’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John saying, hey, you shouldn’t use minimizing to the dock. You shouldn’t use tiling. You know, all of that is fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not telling you whatever it is that you’re doing is wrong. And then regarding why stage manager

⏹️ ▶️ John is a useful thing to have on the Mac, is another quote from Federighi. There’s a sense that the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John experience is messy by default. That gets into the janitor quote from Steve Jobs, right? That

⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t do anything, like the default experience in the Mac is eventually just windows appear everywhere and that feels messy

⏹️ ▶️ John to people. He continues, you’re constantly either living in the mess or you’re cleaning

⏹️ ▶️ John up after yourself constantly as you go. So that’s like the impression that some people have about using the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you’re used to a phone or an iPad where, you know, especially in the past, your options are much

⏹️ ▶️ John more limited and you didn’t have to deal with that visual clutter. So that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ John Center Stage, Center Stage, God, I’m doing it, everyone’s doing it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s why Stage Manager

⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense on the Mac. And I think we talked about it last week, we’ll put a link in the show notes to

⏹️ ▶️ John the purple window widget from Mac OS X developer preview three

⏹️ ▶️ John in the year 2000. The

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey idea behind that was similar. In the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John year 2000. Yeah, the idea behind that

⏹️ ▶️ John was similar, it was Steve Jobs, I should have put the link, Someone had a tweet where they clipped out the little thing from the Steve Jobs segment.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re like, Steve Jobs seemed to feel the same way. That, you know, if you’re using a Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you feel like a janitor cleaning up all these windows. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could concentrate on one thing at a time? Steve Jobs, the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John was truly Steve Jobs’

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey dream

⏹️ ▶️ John computer because it just did everything that he wanted the Mac to do, but it never quite could, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John In terms of simplicity and elegance or whatever. Anyway, in

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John OS X Developer Preview 3, there was another window widget that was purple. You had the stoplights, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John red, yellow, and green. And then you had a purple widget. They were coal and candy colored at that point. And if

⏹️ ▶️ John you hit the purple one, it went into what they called single window mode, where all the other windows, except for

⏹️ ▶️ John the one you were looking at, would hide themselves. And you just see that one window. And if you switch to another

⏹️ ▶️ John one, the window you were working on would disappear and the other window would come in, right? You can see how that would be limiting. And

⏹️ ▶️ John you can see why maybe that didn’t make it to release, because that’s so limiting, like one window at a time. And

⏹️ ▶️ John anytime I switched to anything else, the window I was working on, it’s like the whole point of having a big screen on a Mac is so you can do two

⏹️ ▶️ John things at once and maybe drag things between windows and see them both at the same time. So single window mode

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t quite make it. But that idea of like, I wish the computer would just, I wish the Mac would

⏹️ ▶️ John just show me what I’m working on now and hide everything else, that is sort of, you can see

⏹️ ▶️ John that underlying stage manager. And I think a lot of people talked about it, I listened

⏹️ ▶️ John to all the podcasts talking about WWDC, including us, like how stage manager, and we saw that like that looks like a feature that

⏹️ ▶️ John would be appropriate for an iPad, because the iPad already does kind of do one thing at once with limited amounts of multitasking, and Stage

⏹️ ▶️ John Manager is a slightly fancier, slightly more flexible way to do that. It’s still trying to say, you’re concentrating

⏹️ ▶️ John on one small set of things at once, and then you switch to a different small set of things,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the other, you know, you’ve got the Stage Manager thing where they’re along the side or whatever, but the stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re working on goes off into its little home and a new set of stuff comes out. So it’s like the Purple Window

⏹️ ▶️ John widget. It’s like Single Window Mode from 2000, but handful of window mode.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s different sets of handful of windows, right? And so when a lot of people saw Stage Manager,

⏹️ ▶️ John they thought that looks like an iPad feature and they just happened to bring it to the Mac because you know they’re trying to bring everything to all their platforms

⏹️ ▶️ John at once. Well, it turns out some people in the know, some people who worked on this

⏹️ ▶️ John back in what, 2006-ish or whatever, said that Stage Manager is actually

⏹️ ▶️ John an incarnation of an idea called Shrinky Dink from way back in the day. This is,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put a link in the show notes to someone, something written by someone who’s known as Cricket.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they were working on the Shrinky Dink feature when Apple was transitioning to Intel back

⏹️ ▶️ John in 2006. They included a screenshot. It looks a lot like Stage Manager,

⏹️ ▶️ John right down to the little angled groups of windows on the side. And it never quite shipped, because they didn’t quite

⏹️ ▶️ John get it to the point where they wanted to have it, but it shows that good ideas don’t necessarily die, that even if they

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t ship, maybe wait 10, 15 more years, and they might see the light of day. So I highly recommend

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone reading that. So basically what that shows is, this is not a feature that was made for the iPad and eventually brought to the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was a feature that was made for the Mac, didn’t make it to the Mac, and got resurrected probably because of

⏹️ ▶️ John its applicability to the iPad and then also appeared on the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should note that this site, or this blog post seems to have been taken down, but we will put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link in the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in case. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s sad. Global security must have gotten to them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But one way or another, the screenshot that was there, that John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was nice enough to put in the show notes, it looks really similar. It looks really, really similar.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m assuming that got taken down because this screenshot must have been of an internal Apple-only build that never saw

⏹️ ▶️ John the light of day. Yeah. I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so what’s the controversy here?

⏹️ ▶️ John So the controversy is why is, I got to scroll up, why is Stage Manager, I almost said Center

⏹️ ▶️ John Staging, why is Stage Manager only available on M1 iPads? Last week we talked about it right after the keynote.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re like, well, you know, they did add a virtual memory swap support

⏹️ ▶️ John and that might be required to have all these applications in memory at the same time, because if you’re gonna be showing

⏹️ ▶️ John four different applications on two different screens, the iPads

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t come with a lot of RAM and if you don’t have enough RAM to hold that amount of applications, what can you do? It’s not like you can

⏹️ ▶️ John just sort of put a checkerboard pattern

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey over some of the

⏹️ ▶️ John applications and say, sorry, this application’s not in memory and we don’t have swap. So if you tap

⏹️ ▶️ John on it, basically wait for it to relaunch and then we’ll rip one of your other apps out of memory. So we’re like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s M1 only because the M1 iPads have more RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of people seem to be angry that stage manager is M1 only because like you two were just talking about, what if I have like

⏹️ ▶️ John a, what I think is a fairly recent iPad that I think is perfectly fine, the performance of it’s great, like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad Pro maybe even, and you’re telling me I can’t do stage manager? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but just for the record, just for the record, I am not upset that my four-year-old iPad cannot do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stage 100. I’m only upset because I’m cheap, not because I think it should.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the only reason I was upset, look, you know I will jump at any chance to upgrade my hardware. Any excuse,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I can’t run, you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey can only run four

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows instead of five, like, I have to upgrade my hardware. The only reason I felt bad about doing this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco particular upgrade is that I don’t really end up using my iPad very much outside of testing situations.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was frustrating. Like my kid and my wife both have M1 iPads. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, cause they both use their iPads very heavily all the time. So it made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense for them to upgrade when they were ready. For me, it didn’t make a lot of sense and I’m not excited about the upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s the only reason I even resisted this a little bit. But to also be clear, I think it’s totally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable that my four-year-old iPad Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey does not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco run this cutting edge feature. because, and I think the reasons they give are valid, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at what stage manager has to do, it clearly requires

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge jump in RAM to keep way more apps running invisible than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were ever running invisible before. That’s why they had to adverse memory swap, that’s why this is such a big deal. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you think about swapping, like, you know, the old hardware, when they were designing the, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe I’m running an A12Z or X, one of those, I think X,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know. Anyway, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey running- It just sounds like me at an eye appointment.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco RSTLNY,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe? I think

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re on Wheel of Fortune.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. You’re right, you’re right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but anyway, like, you know, when they were designing my iPad four years ago, they probably,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this feature of having swap probably was either not on their radar yet or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only in very early consideration. And so to, you know, to add something that dramatically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes how the memory needs are, how the storage infrastructure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is accessed, what kind of flash, what rating of storage controller you can put in there, like how much wear and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tear the flash is designed to take. Those are all significant hardware constraints that the older hardware has.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it makes total sense that only hardware that was designed to be a laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as in the M1, that is equipped to do this because laptops always have swap.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it made sense like that hardware was made to have swap, it was designed to have that kind of bandwidth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and SSDs and everything like that, and memory in the first place to avoid needing to swap earlier, whereas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the four-year-old hardware wasn’t. It’s simple as that.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see. We’ll see if it’s that simple. Let’s go through the complaints. So what I was getting at with Casey saying was like, people’s

⏹️ ▶️ John impression is that their computers, their iPads don’t feel slow. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard for them to understand why they can’t support this feature, because as old as it may be, it doesn’t feel slow. So

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing started, people were from planning the internet. Early on, Apple gave a statement to Rene Ritchie

⏹️ ▶️ John that said, quoting from a portion of it, delivering this experience, meaning center,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stage

⏹️ ▶️ John manager. Stage manager. Hi,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey every time. Delivering

⏹️ ▶️ John this experience with the immediacy users expect from iPad’s touchless experience requires large internal memory,

⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly fast storage, and flexible external display IO, all of which are delivered by iPads with M1 chips, okay?

⏹️ ▶️ John Later, Federighi did an interview with TechCrunch where he said building the M1 was critical as well. From the start,

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad has always maintained extremely high standard for responsiveness and interactivity. That directness of interaction

⏹️ ▶️ John and that every app can respond to every touch instantaneously as if you were touching the real thing underneath the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it’s hard sometimes for people to appreciate the technical constraints involved in achieving that. This gets to what I was saying before of like,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have anywhere else to put that memory, and there’s not enough memory to have all

⏹️ ▶️ John those apps in memory at the same time, how is it gonna be responding instantly to your touch if you basically need to be relaunching the app

⏹️ ▶️ John behind the scenes, right? That’s why people think, oh, a swap is necessary, right? So Federighi continues, as

⏹️ ▶️ John you add multiple apps into play and large amounts of screen real estate, you have to make sure that any of those apps

⏹️ ▶️ John can respond instantly to your touch in a way that you don’t have to have the expectation with a desktop app.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would argue you should have that same expectation with a desktop app as well, but anyway. Indirect manipulation gives you some slack

⏹️ ▶️ John there, so it’s a different set of constraints.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure it’s that different. And then Stephen Hackett, who was commentating on this post says, Federighi

⏹️ ▶️ John also mentions that older iPads don’t have the horsepower to push external displays in the way Apple wants, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s Apple’s side of the story. Needs to be responsive, takes lots of RAM, external displays or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the pushback from that, from the community. So first people were pushing back against the M1 requirement

⏹️ ▶️ John saying, well look, the Apple Silicon DTK was a Mac mini with an A12Z in it. And an A12Z is

⏹️ ▶️ John not an M1. And the A12Z ran macOS, which can

⏹️ ▶️ John have more than four windows on the screen. I’m not sure if you’re aware. And I put more than four windows on the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen of the DTK and it was fine. So it doesn’t require an M1 it seems like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but

⏹️ ▶️ John the DTK had 16 gigs of RAM. So it wasn’t an A12Z

⏹️ ▶️ John with four gigs of RAM, it had 16 gigs of RAM. I don’t actually know if the DTK ran swap and obviously I don’t have mine

⏹️ ▶️ John anymore to check, but so there’s that consideration, right? And then from,

⏹️ ▶️ John this bit is from Apple’s iPadOS 16 preview page. It talks about virtual memory

⏹️ ▶️ John swap and it says, iPad storage can be used to expand the available memory for all apps to deliver up to 16 gigabytes

⏹️ ▶️ John of memory for the most demanding apps. And then it has a little footnote, footnote number 19. And if you scroll

⏹️ ▶️ John down the page and see what is footnote number 19, it says, regarding virtual memory swap, that

⏹️ ▶️ John it is available on iPad Air fifth generation with a minimum of 256 gigabyte storage.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then it lists a bunch of other iPads it works on, right? So the iPad Air fifth generation

⏹️ ▶️ John also comes in a 64 gig storage model. And they’re saying, if you get an iPad Air fifth

⏹️ ▶️ John generation. Wait, this is the current model? Yeah, with 64 gigs of storage, it won’t

⏹️ ▶️ John use swap. Presumably because it doesn’t wanna hog any more of the storage space with swap, because swap files can get

⏹️ ▶️ John big, right? But the iPad Air fifth generation runs

⏹️ ▶️ John Stage Manager. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has an M1, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as Steve Stratton Smith said, Stage Manager works on the iPad Air at all storage sizes, but

⏹️ ▶️ John swap only works on 256 gig things. So obviously swap is not, according to Apple’s own

⏹️ ▶️ John specifications, swap is not technically required for a stage manager because the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John Air can apparently run it without swap. So that’s a little bit confusing. Then you look, okay, but what about the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John Air? So it’s got an M1, right? It’s also got eight gigs of RAM. So maybe that’s what it is. Maybe, okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John if, you know, even without swap, if you have eight gigs of RAM, they feel like Sage Manager will be able to fit in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the iPad Pro 3rd Gen that I think Casey has also has eight gigs

⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM. And in fact, they made a 16 gig RAM version of that, but that one can’t run center stage.

⏹️ ▶️ John So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s not swap. It’s a stage manager. You just did it again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Okay, it’s impossible. It’s absolutely impossible. It can’t be done. It’s can’t be done.

⏹️ ▶️ John Rename your features, Apple. We’ll just call it Trinky Dink.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, but hold on though, but my iPad Pro, and I think I might be jumping ahead here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has really crummy external display support because I have a USBC port, not a Thunderbolt port.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the iPad Air also, The iPad Air with M1 also only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has USB-C, not Thunderbolt.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John swap is not required because Apple’s own specs say that you can run this without, you can run

⏹️ ▶️ John Stage Manager without swap, right? And it’s not RAM

⏹️ ▶️ John because one of the iPads that can run Stage Manager has the same amount of RAM

⏹️ ▶️ John as iPads that can’t, right? And so maybe it’s external display report. So one other thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that Craig Federighi said is that Stage Manager is, quote, a total experience that involves

⏹️ ▶️ John external display connectivity. You can imagine like being able to drive a big

⏹️ ▶️ John external display and having sort of the, you know, the video guts or GPU guts

⏹️ ▶️ John or hardware to do that or whatever might be a feature that only exists on the M1 because the M1s are designed

⏹️ ▶️ John to run at least one external display. And maybe like an A12Z wasn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? or maybe that brings over the RAM limit, right? But that is

⏹️ ▶️ John very different from the idea that like, look, you can only run this in M1 for a bunch of really good reasons. And it seems more like

⏹️ ▶️ John to get every single feature that’s part of Stage Manager probably requires

⏹️ ▶️ John an M1. But people might be saying, well, I don’t care about external display. I don’t even have an external display connected to my iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to sit on the couch with my iPad and be able to use Stage Manager. And so we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John see what happens in this controversy. may be able to just stick to its guns and say, nah, we’d

⏹️ ▶️ John rather just give you the whole stage manager experience and even though you don’t have an external display, tough luck or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John it could be that there are other things we don’t know about because the M1 is not just an A14X with like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got a bunch of stuff that was added to it basically so it could be a Mac chip. And maybe there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John parts of that that have to do with variable page size, for example, is another thing the M1 has that

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the other A series chips don’t because it’s an expectation of macOS. You know, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of other things that the M1 could have that these things don’t, but so far Apple hasn’t cited them specifically. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still a little bit of a mystery. It may be they just wanna have a unified experience.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure why people are raring to have stage manager so much. And maybe they just feel like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John my iPad is newish and never feels slow to me. And what stage manager

⏹️ ▶️ John is doing doesn’t seem like it’s asking the iPad to do much. Like, oh, you mean I can see four

⏹️ ▶️ John different apps on the screen at the same time? I can almost do that with like, you know, split screen and slide over. Like what’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John big deal? Like, are you telling me my amazingly powerful iPad can’t handle a couple of windows on an

⏹️ ▶️ John angle when this shrinky dink thing in the year 2006 was able to

⏹️ ▶️ John do it on a machine with like 1 15th the power of like an A12 Z

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, right? Cause that’s what you have to remember. Like, it was like Mac OS has been having millions of windows on the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John and expose and all this stuff for years with less RAM than an iPad, with slower CPUs than an iPad. and granted it had

⏹️ ▶️ John swap during that time, but like, what’s the hangup?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it swapped like crazy. I mean, you know, people forget nowadays, you might forget

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the experience of using a desktop computer in the early 2000s, it was a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco swapping onto hard drives. But no, I mean, you know, it’s not the, I’m sure that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the older iPad hardware has no problem compositing the windows on the screen. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping all the apps in memory. That’s the challenge, because what the apps are doing is very, very different.

⏹️ ▶️ John but Macs had less RAM than that back then. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps used less RAM back then. I mean, now everything’s these crazy RAM bloat hogs. And everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have the higher resolution screens now, all the image assets are bigger, all the video RAM needs are bigger, you have higher data

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assets being stored, images loading and everything, all that stuff is just bigger these days. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps take up hundreds of megs of RAM routinely now, whereas back then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was significantly less common. So that’s the big difference is like, yes, the old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers that did this, Yeah, they could do it just fine. They can composite the windows on screen. Today,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GPUs have no problem throwing those windows around on screen, but it’s the massive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM footprint of these apps. That’s the limiting factor, iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but the apps that are on iPad, like I said, are apps that have grown up in an environment where swap is not

⏹️ ▶️ John available. So they are actually pretty stingy with RAM. Right, when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you

⏹️ ▶️ John have one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you can already get, like, you can already get, I think, at least two, plus two slide overs?

⏹️ ▶️ John Two plus one slide overs? Like, oh, center stage.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Stage Manager is limited

⏹️ ▶️ John to four apps, right? Or four windows, right? So it’s not unlimited. You know, it’s not like there’s, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John without bound. There is a limitation on it. And I think even without Stage Manager, you can get almost that many

⏹️ ▶️ John different apps visible on an iPad screen at the same time now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s eight if you plug in an external monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, well, that’s what gets to the monitor thing. It’s like, okay, but what if I don’t have an external monitor? Let me use Stage

⏹️ ▶️ John Manager, and I promise I wanna connect a monitor, and if I do, it will be disabled. But it could be that Apple says, well, we don’t wanna,

⏹️ ▶️ John we just wanna give the whole experience. we don’t want to have the special mode where it’s like, well, if you buy this iPad, you can get stage manager, but

⏹️ ▶️ John then as soon as you plug in an external display, you can’t have it anymore or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also, I mean, I think, I think a big part of the reason is these technical realities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sure. I think a smaller part of the reason is market segmentation. Apple wants

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad pro to be pushed higher market and they want people to pay for pro features. You know, there’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of features where like, if you look at the iPhone hardware throughout history, You know, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some new feature to iOS would come out, maybe it’s a new camera feature, whatever, where the older hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be capable of it, but Apple restricts it to the new hardware for market segmentation and to give people a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason to upgrade. You know, they do a pretty good job of making it available to old hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when possible most of the time, but not all of the time. And sometimes they just do it for that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason. And, you know, that’s their prerogative. You know, when you bought your iPad in 2018,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you didn’t know about this feature and you didn’t buy this feature. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I don’t fault them too much for restricting this to only the newest stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when there is some, if not much, hardware justification for doing it in addition

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this also pretty substantial segmentation reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the thing, that’s the underlying thing in this is that people are angry because they feel like Apple is saying like, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John real reason for you to do this. You’re just doing this to make me buy another iPad, which is the conspiracy theory that

⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t feel good, right? But in many cases, like the boring explanation

⏹️ ▶️ John of basically like from Apple saying, we implemented this, we tried it on the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re complaining can’t do this, and the experience wasn’t good. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if you know, you could say, oh, I don’t believe you or whatever, but that’s entirely plausible because every time anyone implements anything,

⏹️ ▶️ John the experience starts off as not being good. And it’s a question of how much time does Apple wanna spend

⏹️ ▶️ John optimizing stage manager to make sure it works on an A12Z or whatever. Like at a certain point

⏹️ ▶️ John you could say, like, do we have to spend the time to say, I gotta, we know these can’t handle external displays, but

⏹️ ▶️ John these can, or it runs fine on the M1s, but it’s not running, it feels like kind of,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, stuttery and janky on the A12Z iPads. So how much time do you wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John spend optimizing it to get it to work on the A12Z iPads, even though we know going forward, everything’s gonna be as fast as the

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 or better, right? Those are the type of decisions that, you can’t really come out and explain that and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John basically we made a business decision not to spend our time optimizing this, so it works well, but you have to start

⏹️ ▶️ John from the premise that you believe them when they say we tried it and it wasn’t that great on these older

⏹️ ▶️ John iPads. Now, Apple is responsive to customer complaints and this is beta one, so it could be

⏹️ ▶️ John that they hear people complaining and what Apple decides to do is, okay, let’s spend some time seeing if we can get

⏹️ ▶️ John this to work on non M1 iPads, right? And so they put some engineering resources into that, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John they put it on those and they say, well, you can’t use external displays because they just don’t have the

⏹️ ▶️ John extra RAM capacity to push all those extra pixels or whatever, but at least you can do it locally, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But that would be Apple choosing to spend the effort to address that customer feedback.

⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, when you bought your iPad, you didn’t know center stage would appear, but

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple customers in particular have an expectation that when they buy hardware, it will continue to get updates

⏹️ ▶️ John after a certain period of time. And it’s like, yeah, but if it’s old and slow, and I feel like it’s out of date, then I can’t get the newest stuff. But people

⏹️ ▶️ John look at this and they feel like their iPad Pro from 2018, quote unquote, should be able to

⏹️ ▶️ John do this. And I have no doubt that Apple could make it work on those iPads, it just may be

⏹️ ▶️ John way more difficult than they think it was worth the effort to do. Because again, something is missing from the A12Z that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John in the M1 or something like that that we don’t know about, there’s some esoteric detail. The performance was a little hitchy, the

⏹️ ▶️ John SSD controller is a little bit slower, like it’s on the ragged edge of what’s possible because of some things we don’t understand.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll see what develops in this, with the next show. I mean, the people who are mad about it, they’ll probably

⏹️ ▶️ John get over it. And honestly, maybe they’ll use Stage Manager and be like, I don’t even like it anyway, so who cares?

⏹️ ▶️ John But if they remain Apple customers, presumably eventually they’ll buy another iPad and Apple will support it,

⏹️ ▶️ John so this will take care of itself with time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I really think it’s a combination of everything that you guys had said. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey predominantly some legitimate problems that, not problems,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but constraints that this old hardware has. And I suspect

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in a lot of cases, you know, maybe my iPad would work with it, but you couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use an external display or you were only limited to six apps open at once or whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey case may be. And I certainly don’t think Apple marketing, whether or not the technical side of Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think Apple marketing has any interest in saying, well, stage manager works on iPads

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long as and if and and well, maybe asterisk, staggered, double-decker, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s just not tenable. It’s just not, not for a company like the size

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Apple. And so I really would guess that it’s a combination

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of there are legitimate constraints on older pieces of hardware, but they don’t want to muddy the waters

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, well, if you have a 2018, you can do this. And if you have a 2019, you can also do this. You have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 2020, you can also do this. Like if that were the case, we’d be raking them over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the coals for just not making it consistent across everything, maybe, but I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all the things for all the gross and slimy things Apple can has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and will do, I don’t think this is on that list for me. And I know that makes us

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just another show for Apple, blah, blah, blah. But I really honestly, I think anyone who’s listened to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show for more than four minutes knows that we will call out Apple when we see them doing something gross.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t think this is one of those times.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, it feels like it’s plausible that they could hear this feedback and say, all right, we’re going to spend some extra resources

⏹️ ▶️ John during this beta cycle to to get it to work in a limited fashion, unless they’re iPads. Cause I think it’s totally technically

⏹️ ▶️ John plausible. It’s just a question of how much time do you want to spend doing that? And their original judgment was, let’s not waste any time and let’s just concentrate

⏹️ ▶️ John on making good on the M1. They can reconsider that opinion between now and the many months,

⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, it could be a point update, 16.1, 16.2. Like they’ve done a lot of big things in point updates. So I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John totally rule it out that Apple won’t do some limited form of this in the future if the feedback continues

⏹️ ▶️ John to be a thing. It could just be like, oh, this has to be something people are angry about after WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ John and this will fade, but we’ll see how it goes. Oh, and one more final tidbit. This is from an anonymous source.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently the virtual memory swap feature on iPad OS

⏹️ ▶️ John is something the engineering team is very proud of. In particular, one of the neat things they did is that

⏹️ ▶️ John none of the system daemons or any part of the OS are ever swapped out. Only apps go to

⏹️ ▶️ John swap, which

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John is not the way it works on macOS. And macOS, you know, any piece of memory could potentially be swapped

⏹️ ▶️ John out. There is a concept in Mac OS, and I think most versions of Unix or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can have a page of memory that is quote unquote wired, which basically means

⏹️ ▶️ John this page, this piece of memory is not allowed to ever be swapped out. In particular, lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of parts of the kernel use wired memory because as you can imagine, if the part of the kernel that deals

⏹️ ▶️ John with virtual memory swap gets swapped out,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’ve got a real

⏹️ ▶️ John problem on your hands. Most parts of the kernel, you probably don’t want to swap out. So I do wonder

⏹️ ▶️ John how they implemented this. I don’t think they’re wiring every single page for every app that’s not, if every

⏹️ ▶️ John app that’s part of the OS is not a regular app, so they probably did something special for this. But anyway, it just goes to show the lengths

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing to try to still sort of eke out the, as Federico was saying, the sort of the

⏹️ ▶️ John responsiveness that people expect from iPads, right? Where, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t entirely buy that indirect, quote unquote, indirect manipulation. It still grinds my gears when

⏹️ ▶️ John they say that, but I don’t know what they mean. indirect manipulation with a cursor, you can put up a beach

⏹️ ▶️ John ball cursor, we don’t love that, but that’s part of the experience when something like that happens. But there is no equivalent

⏹️ ▶️ John of that with touch, right? If you touch something and it doesn’t react to your touch, it feels broken

⏹️ ▶️ John immediately. It’s not an expected part of the iPad experience to put your finger on the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen and try to do something, whether you’re dragging or tapping or whatever, and nothing moves,

⏹️ ▶️ John you think your iPad is broken, right? That is not, that’s not an expectation, right? So,

⏹️ ▶️ John not having swap was one way to do that, because hey, swap takes a big variable out of the equation. You

⏹️ ▶️ John know what your memory access times are, you know how much RAM you have, you have this thing going around killing applications if

⏹️ ▶️ John they use too much memory, so you stay within the memory, right? It’s much more predictable, right? Once you involve swap,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s this huge unpredictable performance cliff that you may fall off of, right? So to try to hold

⏹️ ▶️ John on to the essential iPadness, to say, well, let’s not ever let any part of the

⏹️ ▶️ John system be swapped out. So that is everything that runs presumably like the dock, the Windows server,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, any OS processes that are in the background, the camera, like all, you know, all the demons that run

⏹️ ▶️ John all the various things, talking to iCloud, like who knows? Any part of the OS or any part of those demons,

⏹️ ▶️ John they do not get swapped. What does get swapped is one of your, you know, umpteen apps that you’re running, right? One

⏹️ ▶️ John of your four apps that’s being shown in Stage Manager. God, every time

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I say that, I have to pause now. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s neat. I’d love to know more technical details on that. If anyone knows, feel free to tell us.

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System Settings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so I hear some really, really positive things about system preference as system

⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings in Ventura. So can you tell me all the good news about that, please?

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of controversies that happen after you receive people need something to get mad about this is,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for a different group of people who are mad about this, but a lot of people are mad about it. And I would put myself kind of in that category.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So I mean, I think we

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco complained about

⏹️ ▶️ John crappy. I think we talked about it in the last show. the time we were talking about the last show we hadn’t seen

⏹️ ▶️ John because it hadn’t been released yet the live talk show with Federico and Joss.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did you did you see that live Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did. Yeah, it was great. Actually, and frankly, I think it was a very, very good live talk show. You know, I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all of them. I really, really enjoyed all of them. But this was this was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much up there as one of the best ones because, you know, sometimes depending on you know, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s announced and you know, what what kind of who he has up there, and what kind of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what their moods are, maybe certain years, you get more little tidbits out of the Apple guests

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than than other years. This was one of the good good years where like you really got a lot out of them. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a lot of explanation for certain things that that, you know, clarified certain things. So it was actually, I really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoyed this one. It was very good.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so we didn’t have all these I didn’t have those explanations. I had heard about them secondhand. But of course, I didn’t get to hear

⏹️ ▶️ John them actually said so this, you know, you will put a link in the show. It’s his YouTube video you can watch the whole thing right

⏹️ ▶️ John so regarding system settings which we complained about a little bit on the last show and this is system settings

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac previously called system preferences people have been complaining about the interface because it has

⏹️ ▶️ John been totally redone to look a little bit more like settings on iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John OS and iOS and more to the point it looks nothing like it used to

⏹️ ▶️ John you know any preference pane if you go into system preferences on your Mac right now that’s not running Ventura

⏹️ ▶️ John none of those preference panes look like that anymore at all. Like no pixel is shared whatsoever

⏹️ ▶️ John and the app itself doesn’t look like it used to, right? And people have been complaining about it. So Craig Federi

⏹️ ▶️ John starting it, we’ll put a timestamp link at 43 minutes and 11 seconds gives an explanation of

⏹️ ▶️ John why they decided to overhaul system preferences and why it looks like it does. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John and aside from the obvious reasons, which doesn’t really go into it as like, well, you know, there’s consistency across the platforms. People know

⏹️ ▶️ John what settings look like on their phone. They know what it looks like on their iPad. Why does it look so weird on the Mac, mostly for historical reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Wouldn’t it be great if they all kind of look the same and with SwiftUI you can actually use the same code for

⏹️ ▶️ John them, yada, yada, like platform unification. But that’s not what he says in this section here. What he mostly talks about

⏹️ ▶️ John is let’s think about system preferences and why it looks the way it did.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ll be the first to tell you, the system preferences has never been super great. Like if you wander

⏹️ ▶️ John through system preferences on your pre-Ventura Mac right now, you’ll see some preference panes that look pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John good. Some of them don’t look that good. A lot of them look very different from each other. The organization

⏹️ ▶️ John on some of them is not great. It’s kind of like a tour of like old controls,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, they did a custom control for this. So like I can date them by looking at them and say, I remember when they did that. That used to look

⏹️ ▶️ John new in 2008, but now it doesn’t anymore. And this one was more recent, and this one uses a web

⏹️ ▶️ John view behind the scenes and it looks kind of janky for different reasons, right? Not like system preferences was awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ John And, but, you know, that’s not even what Craig says about them. is that it was made in a world

⏹️ ▶️ John where the expectation was that you could put your settings in a single window. System

⏹️ ▶️ John Preferences is a small window and it does grow, but it mostly just grows vertically, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think. Anyway, it doesn’t grow that much. But the main point is there’s no scrolling, right? It harkens

⏹️ ▶️ John all the way back to the control panel on the original Mac, which if you went to Apple menu control panel on the original

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, it brought up a single window in which you had every single control that was part of

⏹️ ▶️ John the control panel, right? in just that one window, right? It wasn’t until later they started branching

⏹️ ▶️ John out into different sub settings, one for your mouse, one for displays or whatever. The original Mac was very simple, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But system preferences in Mac OS X and Mac OS and all that stuff has always just

⏹️ ▶️ John been a single window. There’s no scrolling, right? If you have more settings that can fit on a single window, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can add tabs, right? Some of the preference panes have a sidebar, like the relatively new security

⏹️ ▶️ John and privacy one has a sidebar where you can scroll through a bunch of sub items and you click a sub item and it changes what’s in the detail

⏹️ ▶️ John for you, right? But it’s not, if I were to re-describe them as sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ John hand-created bento boxes. If you’ve seen one of those bento box lunches, like a Japanese lunch

⏹️ ▶️ John box, where you have all the little compartments, carefully arranged food that just barely fits in this little box and it’s very cute.

⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of, I would say some of the best system preferences, preference panes, have been carefully

⏹️ ▶️ John hand laid out to jam in all the stuff that need to fit in there. And some of them, it just

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t fit. and there’s like seven tabs and within each tab there’s sub-scrolling panes or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the whole point is the window itself doesn’t scroll, there’s just sub-regions and sub-regions.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it was overwhelmed, right? And it shows that the system-purpose interfaces doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John really scale, like if you, and I feel this pain, because I’m gonna talk about this in a little bit, but my dinky little

⏹️ ▶️ John app, the road I went down with my dinky little app is, oh, I love settings, I’ll keep adding settings or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John but one of the features of my app is that it lets, you know, it lets you change how it appears on each

⏹️ ▶️ John attached screen. And since I didn’t have a secondary display readily available using sidecar with my iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the iPad’s not that big. And so I would bring up my preference window while using sidecar

⏹️ ▶️ John and the preference would fill the iPad screen from top to bottom. It’s like, I can’t add any more preferences

⏹️ ▶️ John because my preference window, like system preferences doesn’t scroll. If I add one more check box,

⏹️ ▶️ John now my window doesn’t fit on the screen. And one of the controls you want to get at is, you know, it’s too big. And so that’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of the situation system preferences in was like, well, we don’t have any more room for more controls

⏹️ ▶️ John on this preference pane. It should go here. It’s part of like displays or whatever, but I can’t make it any

⏹️ ▶️ John bigger. So let’s add a subscreen or let’s add a tab or whatever. And so it doesn’t really scale.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t support scrolling. And every one of these things is a beautiful hand created little

⏹️ ▶️ John jeweled box or whatever, right? So that was Federi’s explanation of like, that’s why we need

⏹️ ▶️ John an interface. that’s more like it is on the iPhone and the iPad, because in those environments and in the modern

⏹️ ▶️ John world, we have an expectation that it’s okay for a thing to scroll vertically. Certainly settings

⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone scrolls vertically. That’s all it does is scroll vertically. In fact, there’s a search thing at the top of them because it scrolls

⏹️ ▶️ John vertically so far that you can never find anything, right? And iPad OS has the sidebar that also scrolls

⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. And so that was the explanation, right? That explanation

⏹️ ▶️ John makes some sense to me. As I think I’ve, you know, hinted at in describing this,

⏹️ ▶️ John the beautiful hand curated bento box of controls It’s kind of nice

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes actually. It means somebody sweated over where every single little thing is In that

⏹️ ▶️ John interface. Like the screenshots, one of the screenshots we got up in our notes here shows the dock preference pane

⏹️ ▶️ John next to its incarnation in Ventura one of the things that stands out to me is that that

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing where you pick the position on screen of your dock, your choices are left side of the screen, right side of the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen or the bottom, it’s done as three widely separated radio buttons. The left one is on

⏹️ ▶️ John the left, the bottom one is in the middle and the right one is on the right. You could do that as a pop-up

⏹️ ▶️ John menu. In fact, there are other pop-up menus in this form. You could have a pop-up menu where you pick left, bottom or right.

⏹️ ▶️ John But seeing all three options vaguely arranged geometrically like they are on your screen

⏹️ ▶️ John is, I think, a little bit nicer. It’s kind of like how in my, in the app that I’ll keep referring

⏹️ ▶️ John to for reasons that will come slightly more clear later, in my dinky little app Switch Glass, you can put it on all different edges of the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen. And to show that, instead of just having a pop-up menu

⏹️ ▶️ John where you pick North, Northeast, East, Southeast, like you can pick all the cardinal directions, instead of

⏹️ ▶️ John having those options in a pop-up menu, which I can do, I put a little picture of the screen, and then I

⏹️ ▶️ John put little radio buttons all around the screen at all the different cardinal directions. Because it’s just easier graphically

⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to just click where on the screen you want. Oh, I see that’s supposed to be my screen because I see my desktop picture. Oh, I want it in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ John of the right side. So I just clicked the little thing that’s in the middle of the right side. I don’t have to go to a pop-up menu, I don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ John read text. You just click where you want it to be. Carefully laying out all

⏹️ ▶️ John of the controls and the text to just barely fit in this window and to be nice. There’s an

⏹️ ▶️ John art to that. And I think it makes, when done well, it

⏹️ ▶️ John is part of what makes Mac apps great. When done poorly, it looks terrible. And everyone hates

⏹️ ▶️ John it and when you don’t have room for any more controls, then you add subpains and it gets frustrating, right? so there’s a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John of something being lost there, but The main complaint that I have and other people have different complaints

⏹️ ▶️ John But the main complaint that I have about the new system settings app aside from the name which we’ll get to in a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John Is not so much that they’ve decided to overhaul this interface and not so much that like, you know

⏹️ ▶️ John Settings on the phone is crappy or whatever But that this this style of interface with little

⏹️ ▶️ John switches and stuff that you see on your phone it looks worse on the Mac than it does anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ John else. In fact, Apple even has a screenshot, that’s from like one of their WWC things or whatever, where they’re saying, look, you can write the

⏹️ ▶️ John same code and it can manifest itself

⏹️ ▶️ John on iPhone, iPad, and on the Mac, the same code in all those different places. And in each place, it will

⏹️ ▶️ John look appropriate for the platform and do the thing. And there’s a screenshot here in our notes document that

⏹️ ▶️ John has a phone screen, an iPad screen, and a Mac screen showing

⏹️ ▶️ John similar type of UI. And it just plain looks worse on

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac. And when I say it looks worse, I don’t mean like it’s not pretty or whatever. Oh, it’s not pretty.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is not, yeah. That is a thing, but that’s subjective. You’re like, well, what’s pretty? You know, if you look at an old thing with the

⏹️ ▶️ John pinstripes, maybe it doesn’t look great, but we thought it looked cool then or whatever. But like, from a user interface perspective, you can say,

⏹️ ▶️ John is the text legible? Is it clear which control goes with which text? Is it clear which things are controls

⏹️ ▶️ John and what I can click on? like basic usability stuff. And the Mac incarnation

⏹️ ▶️ John of this standard control, I forget what they call it, it’s like a standard control, like an inset control or something or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John as deployed on the Mac, it just looks worse. There’s not a lot of contrast, it’s not a lot of visual hierarchy.

⏹️ ▶️ John The controls seem like they’re smaller than they are on the iPhone and the iPad, but you can say, well, that makes sense, because on the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John and the iPad, you’re using your big meaty finger, and on the Mac, you have a very precise pointing device like a mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think that’s the reason to make the control smaller. Like why not make them at least the same size as they are on the iPad?

⏹️ ▶️ John No one complained that a control was too big, there’s just so much room. And then finally, sort of the uniformity,

⏹️ ▶️ John which some people like, say oh it’s so much easier to scan. But having everything to be left justified label, right justified

⏹️ ▶️ John control, sometimes the label is very widely separated from the control such that you feel like you need like one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John straight edges that some people read with to like put on your screen to say does this switch go with that

⏹️ ▶️ John item? But you have to like scan back and forth. It’s, it doesn’t, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think the usability is as good as it is on the iPad or

⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone. And furthermore, if you look in Apple’s user interface, like human interface guidelines,

⏹️ ▶️ John they have a whole section on when you should use these little toggle switches versus when you should use check boxes. And arguably,

⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple’s own interface guidelines, they say you should probably not have a screen full of these toggle switches. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John granted, settings is just a screen full of toggle switches, so obviously they’ve been violating that supposed guideline

⏹️ ▶️ John forever. But if you look at system preferences, when you have a list of things with checkboxes, the

⏹️ ▶️ John checkbox is always right next to the label, because you’ve got the checkbox label right next to it. You know, no matter

⏹️ ▶️ John how long the label is, you can make the window wide and the labels can go long and the labels can wrap and everything, but the

⏹️ ▶️ John label is always right next to it. And by the way, if you click on the label in a good Mac app, it will activate and deactivate

⏹️ ▶️ John the checkbox. All these things are not true. Oh, granted, this is just beta one. All these things are not true

⏹️ ▶️ John of this stuff in system settings. And I think the main root problem is the default

⏹️ ▶️ John standard controls for this stuff in SwiftUI, like whatever this is called, I should’ve looked up the name, but I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John called like inset form control or whatever. That control has poor usability

⏹️ ▶️ John and is ugly. And that is not a problem with like, oh, you shouldn’t have redesigned

⏹️ ▶️ John the settings interface. That’s a problem with the control. Like we talked about this back in the very olden days of the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone. What if you made an iPhone app that just used standard iPhone controls back in like 2007, 2008?

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any custom controls. It was just straight up table views, toggle switches, navigation

⏹️ ▶️ John bars, like you just use the default iOS wasn’t even called iOS then default iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John controls and you didn’t do anything fancy. You’d still have an app that had good usability

⏹️ ▶️ John and looked okay. Right? It wouldn’t be fancy, no one would be wowed by it. But it would work well.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it would look okay. That’s the job of sort of the OS widgets. If you say here’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John you should use for a table view. Here’s what you should use for like switches. here’s what you should use for the equivalent

⏹️ ▶️ John of pop-up menus. That stuff needs to look good and have good usability. I,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, both of those things. And if you make an app with just those standard controls,

⏹️ ▶️ John it should be okay. That’s not true of this Swift UI set of controls

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac. On the phone, I think it’s fine. You look at it on the phone. Yeah. Settings is probably too long and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s done that they have the search field and the organization is crappy, but it’s okay. We get by right on the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ John you get a sidebar, it’s similar, it’s all right. On the Mac, it’s worse than both of those. The controls

⏹️ ▶️ John have poor usability and they are ugly. And that’s not really the fault of the team writing the system

⏹️ ▶️ John settings app. It’s the fault of the team writing these controls in SwiftUI, not thinking about how

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to look and how usable they’re going to be on the Mac. Maybe the system settings team should think about, is this

⏹️ ▶️ John the right control if the label is literally four inches from the tiny little switch that supposedly is associated

⏹️ ▶️ John with it and there’s nothing except for a slightly darker gray line tracing along underneath it, you

⏹️ ▶️ John have to follow with your eyeballs to find out which level goes with which switch. So I’m still

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of upset about this redesign because I feel like- Are you?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John every single one of those redesign preference panes or whatever the hell we’re calling them now is worse than the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing it replaces. And not necessarily because it’s like the wrong direction to be going

⏹️ ▶️ John in, but just because it’s being failed by the standard system controls. And beyond that, some of

⏹️ ▶️ John those little beautiful bento boxes, they were really nice. One of them that a lot of people were highlighting

⏹️ ▶️ John that I also tweeted about is the trackpad control, which had the cool video and everything. And Craig Federer, he said, oh, don’t worry,

⏹️ ▶️ John those videos stuff are coming back. We have an even better idea. It’s gonna look awesome or whatever, right? So that’s just, you know, again, it’s beta one. Everything’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not done yet. This will be revised, right? But it’s not just the fact that there were little videos

⏹️ ▶️ John showing you the trackpad gestures that makes that preference paint awesome. Look at the visual hierarchy in it. Look

⏹️ ▶️ John how clear everything is. Look how beautifully it’s laid out, right? It’s, there is an art to

⏹️ ▶️ John that. And that art is 100% absent from beta one of the Ventura system

⏹️ ▶️ John settings app. So I really hope, I really hope someone does sweat over these individual controls. I hope someone does

⏹️ ▶️ John sweat over the organization of the things in the sidebar and maybe gives us options. And I hope someone really does

⏹️ ▶️ John think long and hard about whether a long vertical list of short labels widely separated

⏹️ ▶️ John by white space with right justified toggle switches is the right interface to literally every single setting on the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I am with you. I mean, when you look at screenshots,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve made these great comparisons, you look at the screenshots of the same screen, old versus new,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few things are very clear to me. Number one, you are absolutely right, surprise, you are absolutely right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s like the default control style that was designed for iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first and they ported it to Mac with this SwiftUI cross-platform stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t look good on the Mac. like the all these controls look wrong. The proportions are wrong, the way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen flows is wrong, having everything, you know, label on the left, huge gap thing on the right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is wrong. The colors

⏹️ ▶️ John are wrong, the contrast is wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like, and it’s very, very clear that the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of these Swift UI controls is absolutely not a high priority

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the design team, or they just suck at designing them. And I’m assuming that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco given that they work for the best design company in the world, generally speaking, like I’m assuming that it’s the former, um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hope for their sake, it’s the former, um, because it just seems like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when you, when you look at the old UI, it does look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dated to a degree. And I understand why the software designers are trying to,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, quote, move things forward. You know, whether it’s actually forward is not always the case, but they’re trying to move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things in a different direction just because the previous way is dated and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco concerns that Federighi brought up on the talk show about things like you know like scaling and adding more preferences intervening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are valid concerns. Also the previous system preferences app is not perfect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple has had a very hard time seemingly in recent years adding things to it in a way that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that functions reliably and doesn’t suck like look at the process for approving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know apps for security preferences where you have like oh give the grant this app access to you know record the screen or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like the process of doing that when the little lock in the corner that you have to somehow see and click and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weird button that appears that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t and it got a reboot sometimes like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The whole the old system preferences app is is not perfect and the old design it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dated however the new design direction of Mac OS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more severely than iOS is very strongly in the direction of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stripping out every design element that makes things usable,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. Like, what they’re going for is very much like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this layout looks clean, like a clean magazine spread or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what they’re, you know, that’s clearly the aesthetic that they’re going for, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just doesn’t work on the Mac the way they’ve designed it right now. And unfortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what we’ve seen, like notifications, is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when something on the Mac is redesigned, that’s not Safari.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even then, I think, like last year’s Safari design hoopla, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it was only on the Mac, I think it would have shipped. And the only reason we got that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco changed was that it was on the iPhone and that was angering the public. But what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we see on the Mac under the current design administration is that they dictate what they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think is right, and then never touch it. And so, I actually don’t think this is going to get better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, what Federighi said was not that the design of the widgets was going to get better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the beta process goes. It was that, like, you know, some of the content of these panels was going to be more fleshed out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more polished or whatever. That’s very different. The actual design of the widgets, I think we’re stuck with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for God knows how long. Because what we also, you know, look, the notification

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design since Big Sur sucks, it’s still very much here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Monterey and appears to be unchanged in Ventura as well. Why? You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the design and the usability of these things on the Mac was being well cared for, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t have made it out of the Big Sur beta. But here we are, two releases later, it’s still like untouched

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and modified.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It got a little better. Oh, it did? Look at the show notes, man. Yeah, Mac dialogue, style chosen automatically, display

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time based on content. So if you have a-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You’re jumping

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead. That’s dialogue, not notifications. But anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. Relevant

⏹️ ▶️ John to notifications, let me hoist up a thing from way down in the show notes. Speaking of notifications

⏹️ ▶️ John that haven’t changed that people are complaining about, you may think, what are people complaining about? It’s a little rounded rectangle, it’s in the corner. What’s bad

⏹️ ▶️ John about the Mac notifications? Well, the two things people were complaining about, which apparently were not important enough for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John to change was one, they hid all the controls for a supposedly cleaner look, and you only see them

⏹️ ▶️ John when they mouse over, and two, and this is the one that kills me, all right, so it’s mystery mouse over

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Nobody likes that, but yeah, in the end, it’s not that bad, right? There are still bugs that have been there since

⏹️ ▶️ John Big Sur. Please click on Dave Nadean’s tweet where he managed to capture a video of a bug

⏹️ ▶️ John that I encounter all the time and drives me up a wall, and it has been there for two major releases of macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re going to make a mystery meat navigation thing where you have a window

⏹️ ▶️ John with no controls on it, and the controls appear when you bring your mouse over it for some reason, because you want that cleaner

⏹️ ▶️ John look, when I mouse over it, I have to be able to use the controls. and what happens to me and what you’ll see in this video

⏹️ ▶️ John is you mouse over the notification and you see the little X to close it and you see the button that

⏹️ ▶️ John lets you do things like mark a task as completed or reminder or whatever or snooze it or do one of those things.

⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, they took out some snooze options too, just to annoy you even more. Or click on the button, right? And you go to click

⏹️ ▶️ John the button and when you bring your mouse over there, the button disappears. It’s a sick little game that notifications

⏹️ ▶️ John plays with on the Mac. Two major versions of Mac OS, this bug has existed. And this is not a minor bug.

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t do the thing that you’re supposed to be able to do from the notification if it won’t let you click on that button,

⏹️ ▶️ John because when you mouse over it to it, the button disappears. Two major versions of macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John So when we say, oh, the notifications on Mac are crappy and they need to be done, it’s not just because we think they’re ugly.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just because we don’t like that they hid text until you mouse over it. It’s like they don’t work, they don’t fulfill

⏹️ ▶️ John the job they’re supposed to fulfill. It’s like, let me mark the reminder as complete. Let me snooze

⏹️ ▶️ John this task. Let me click the settings button. It’s like, ha ha, it’s the, I mean, I’ve come up with workarounds

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can figure out a series of mousing gestures that will let you get to the button before it disappears, but come

⏹️ ▶️ John on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, as much as I love what they’re doing with the Mac hardware recently, the Mac software still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a lot of issues like this. And I think what we see over and over again from Apple is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just not putting the resources into the Mac software to really keep it great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the Mac software, it moves forward in certain ways but it also moves back in others and it seems like it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just never has the quality in both bugs and also… I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, even… Honestly, I think the bug side has actually gotten pretty well improved over the last few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases, but the design side is getting worse now. But I think ultimately though, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives me some hope here, Apple has shown that they have not really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been trying very hard with the old way of the Mac doing things. Like the old way, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using AppKit and using old Cocoa controls and native stuff and old, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the old design styles where things were much more, you know, clear and decorated and indicated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco visually and usable. However, for Apple to fix all the bugs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we had in those old previous releases, we have to hop on the new train. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I said, like the System Settings app is full of bugs in previous releases. There’s so many problems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it and limitations, things that are unintuitive. And so by moving to this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new, you know, more unified Swift UI based design.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t love the design at all. I think the design is a hideous step backwards, and I think anybody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who designed it, whose title includes the word usability should probably be fired. However,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s also the path that Apple’s actually actively working on. On the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac, the path to Mac happiness as a user is to stay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the path they’re actively working on because everything else is just gonna be a train wreck of deterioration

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bugs and everything else. So if this helps them actively work on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and better and with higher quality, that’s the price we have to pay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be great if we could have both. If we could have, like back when the Mac was their only major

⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform, if we could have the Mac being like the thing that got a lot of attention and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was good and was moving forward and was pretty you know stable and high quality that’d be great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we can get all of that. Unfortunately Apple has shown that we can’t get all of that right now and that’s their fault

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a hundred percent you know that’s on them because there’s no reason why things need to be that way but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the reality. So as long as they are working on the Mac and continuing to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move this stuff forward If the only way we can get them to keep doing that reliably is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use these terrible new designs that can help them use more cross-platform code,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just the cost of being a Mac user right now in software, and it sucks that we have to pay that cost, but we do.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so system preferences, like as it previously existed, like I said, it’s kind of like a museum

⏹️ ▶️ John of UI. Like you can go through it and say, oh, this room was created in 1857. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John different preference panes are dated by like when someone created them. And a lot of them were clearly created

⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day when maybe there weren’t any designers assigned to that preference pane and someone just threw something

⏹️ ▶️ John together as a developer and it’s good enough, right? And that’s, you know, the modern one is like, this preference

⏹️ ▶️ John pane is really a web view in disguise because this came about at the time, it’s iCloud related

⏹️ ▶️ John and we had web interfaces for it. So we didn’t bother re-implementing this. So really it’s just a big web view and you don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ John to know that, but that’s why it looks totally different than this one. And this one was made before we had a standard control for lists where you can add or remove

⏹️ ▶️ John items. So they wrote a custom control for it and it’s been there for 15 years now. And like, I’m not holding

⏹️ ▶️ John it up as this paragon of usability, but there are gems in there. And those gems were beautiful hand polished things

⏹️ ▶️ John in the old way of Mac user interfaces that had a lot of good qualities. And the new way, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, a bunch of standard controls, the standard controls aren’t up to snuff yet. But like, I think a lot of it might

⏹️ ▶️ John just come down to disagreements, kind of like the notification thing. If you ask them like, why can’t I see any controls on the notifications?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it looks better with no controls. The controls appear just when you need them. So you mouse over them, but why should the controls be cluttering

⏹️ ▶️ John up the interface when you just want to look at them with your eyeballs? The controls will appear when you mouse over them and then I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John show them the bug and get angry at them. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so an example of a disagreement, Craig Hockenberry has a tweet showing he was trying to change the name of his computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is in the sharing preference pane. Again, I don’t know what the hell we call these in a world where it’s not called system preferences. The

⏹️ ▶️ John file name extension is probably still.preferencepane. I haven’t actually checked, but anyway, I’m gonna continue calling preferencepane. So he

⏹️ ▶️ John goes into sharing and as he said in his tweet, It took me forever to figure out how to change my computer

⏹️ ▶️ John name. And then he has a screenshot which shows the sharing preference pane with two vaguely different

⏹️ ▶️ John gray colors. Like there’s a gray background and a slightly, very slightly darker, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John testing like the color calibration of your monitor, very slightly darker gray inset area with

⏹️ ▶️ John very, very slightly darker hairline gray lines on the border separating items. And on

⏹️ ▶️ John the very left side of the screen it says computer name. Then there’s three inches of white space. And then it says Craig’s MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. It’s just text, it’s just black text on a slightly darker gray background and a slightly

⏹️ ▶️ John lighter gray background within a slightly lighter gray window, right? And so he says, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John the edit button because there is an edit button right below Craig’s MacBook Pro, but that edit button does not

⏹️ ▶️ John let you edit the computer name because there’s that hairline dividing it telling you, see this edit button is not for that. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John text field doesn’t highlight until something else in the panel gets focused, except the edit

⏹️ ▶️ John button. So if you click the edit button and it gets focused, that thing, like, what I’m saying is, This is a

⏹️ ▶️ John text field, but it does not look like editable text, it looks exactly the same as the label.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t click computer name, that’s the label. You can’t change the label in the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you can change the text, Craig’s MacBook Pro, but you don’t know that until you highlight some other control

⏹️ ▶️ John in the thing. Like, this is not rocket science, we’re asking for a text field with a label.

⏹️ ▶️ John We should have that technology, the standard controls for SwiftUI for macOS

⏹️ ▶️ John have to be better than this. I’m not saying they have to look exactly like the old ones that work exactly like the old ones, but for crying

⏹️ ▶️ John out loud, you should be like, the label shouldn’t be three inches from the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John it controls, and the thing it controls, if it’s a text field, should look like a text field. It shouldn’t require me

⏹️ ▶️ John to focus something else. It shouldn’t require me to mouse over it. Am I gonna mouse over every piece of text to see if it’s editable? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is not discoverable. This is poor usability. And on top of all of that, it’s aesthetically ugly.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it looks nice. It’s got nothing going for it, other than the fact that underneath it, it’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John same Swift UI code that would run everywhere, which is great, I endorse that. But there’s no reason like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s ugly because it’s cross platform. There’s no reason cross platform code has to be this ugly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Each platform, the whole point of this cross platform code is that each platform can choose to implement

⏹️ ▶️ John this declarative UI in a way that looks appropriate for the platform. The iPhone one looks great, the iPad one looks

⏹️ ▶️ John okay, the Mac one looks like garbage. So that’s what they need to work on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think at this point, again, I don’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep harping on their poor software design, but for all the great stuff they’ve been doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in hardware recently, and in some of the cross-platform apps and services and APIs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, those have all been pretty great, but I don’t think Apple’s able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to design good Mac interfaces anymore, and that’s not even a very recent thing. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we’ve been heading down that path for a while. We can no longer rely on Apple to design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good Mac apps and good Mac UIs and good Mac software. They are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great at the frameworks, they are amazing at that, they are great at the hardware, again, amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that, but they just don’t design good apps anymore. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that reason of a thing, but it’s, and it’s also not turning around at all. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s occasional bright spots of bright light, but that’s not the norm. For the most part, they’re not good at Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design. They’re not good at Mac app design and Mac UI design. And we have to rely on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco community for that. You know, Windows, the basic Windows design was always crap,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Microsoft Windows, it was always crap. And as a result, the ecosystem was mostly crap. But you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have occasional bright spots of light in the ecosystem. That’s what the Mac is now. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has lost the will and the prioritization and the ability to make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great Mac apps and great Mac UI designs. And so we’re gonna have to rely on the community

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that and greatly lower our expectations of what’s coming out of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those areas, which is a shame. Again, it doesn’t need to be this way. Like there’s nothing stopping them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from getting better people in there and prioritizing this better. And there’s a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great people in the company who know how to do this right. They’re not being enabled. They’re not winning the arguments.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there are people there who have been there a long time who really have great sensibilities in these areas.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason we harp on it from the outside so much is to hopefully help them win some arguments on the inside.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it just seems like we’re down a really rough path in those areas. And we just can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple’s no longer a leader in UI design, as simple as that. They gave it up, they walked right away

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from it, and whoever is leading the charge there can’t do it, or chooses not to,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially at the Mac. But again, they have great strengths in all these other areas, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not one of them anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John I pulled myself off on a tangent getting angry about this computer name thing, but the point I was trying to make is that I,

⏹️ ▶️ John about it being a disagreement is, same idea with the notifications. Why should Craig’s MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, why should it look like an always visible text box? Like a big white box with like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, with your text inside it. Like when I’m not editing it, shouldn’t it just look like text?

⏹️ ▶️ John And then when I edit it, that’s when, you know, the text controls will be and a focus ring will be around

⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever. Like that’s the thinking, the same thinking with the notifications. It shouldn’t have any of this visual clutter. I don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ John to see those buttons. I just need the information notification. Only when I mouse over it does it appear. And that

⏹️ ▶️ John philosophy brought to so many parts of the Mac. You’re just very interested in closing this. Leads to a situation where you have a label and

⏹️ ▶️ John a text field which look identical to each other that you just have to know, oh, that’s not just telling you what your computer

⏹️ ▶️ John name is, that’s editable. And by the way, don’t click the edit button below that because that’s not the thing to edit. You have to mouse over

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing and then suddenly what looked like text on a background becomes text field. And that’s the sort of the,

⏹️ ▶️ John they would say, well, we just disagree. It’s not bad UI, we just disagree. I think visual clutter is the worst sin in

⏹️ ▶️ John the world. And you think, you know, I should have all these ugly controls and everything everywhere so

⏹️ ▶️ John I know which things are buttons and so I know which things are editable. We had this argument with iOS 7, right? Should buttons

⏹️ ▶️ John look like buttons? How can I tell what I can click on or whatever? And I feel like we’re having all those same arguments over again,

⏹️ ▶️ John like we’ve got all this screen space. Visually distinguish the elements.

⏹️ ▶️ John Show me what is a text field, what is a button? Don’t put everything in a pop-up menu. Speaking of pop-up menus,

⏹️ ▶️ John the pop-up menus don’t look like pop-up menus anymore. It looks like text on a background with a little up

⏹️ ▶️ John and down caret, like a V and an upside down V next to it. You just have to know, by the way, that if you click that

⏹️ ▶️ John up and down V thing, that the whole thing is, you know, they look like actually the, what are

⏹️ ▶️ John they called? Like the controls where you can go, like there’s a number in a text field and you can hit the up arrow and down arrow to change the number.

⏹️ ▶️ John A stepper? Stepper, exactly. That’s what they look like, but it’s not a stepper. That whole thing is a pop-up menu. It looks nothing like

⏹️ ▶️ John a pop-up menu, right? I’m not saying the controls need to look the way they used to. The controls have changed a lot over the years,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But it needs to be clear what’s a control. The controls need to have an appearance

⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it obvious what they are. And it seems like this thing, like it’s like a golf contest.

⏹️ ▶️ John How few lines can I draw on the screen? Like, I just want like, and you win

⏹️ ▶️ John by just saying gray pixels. I have gray pixels and I have text. How many colors of gray do you have? I only got two colors of gray.

⏹️ ▶️ John Ooh, you’re winning. Do you have any lines? Very few and they’re hardly visible, right? It’s like, that’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, all right. I need to stop yelling about this. Move on to the tangentially

⏹️ ▶️ John related topic, which we talked about this a little bit last week. So this used to be called system preferences and now it’s called

⏹️ ▶️ John system settings, right? There is a companion to go with that, which is that preferences,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is command comma as the keyboard shortcut traditionally on the Mac, that preferences menu

⏹️ ▶️ John item that is in the application menu. So if you go text edit, go to the menu that’s called text edit, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John an item in there called preferences by convention on the Mac. that menu item is now being

⏹️ ▶️ John renamed to settings. There’s some been rumbling about like, if you build against the new SDK, your preferences menu item

⏹️ ▶️ John will just be automatically called settings, but then you’ll have to wander through all your help document and everything like that and change

⏹️ ▶️ John it to settings. This, you know, for the same reason, system preferences was changed to settings, unification

⏹️ ▶️ John with iPad, OS and iOS, like it makes some sense, but boy, this is gonna be a short-term headache

⏹️ ▶️ John for people dealing with, okay, well, if you’re on Ventura or later, go to settings

⏹️ ▶️ John menu item, but if you’re writing like documentation on your website or something, but if you’re on a previous OS, that

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is not gonna be called Settings because it’s in real preferences, or maybe you’ll make it called Settings Everywhere. Anyway, a naming

⏹️ ▶️ John unification, right? But last week I was saying, why is the application that

⏹️ ▶️ John was called System Preferences called System Settings, right? It’s just called Settings on your

⏹️ ▶️ John phone. It’s just called Settings on your iPad, but on the Mac it’s called System Settings. One of the

⏹️ ▶️ John attempts to explain this was, okay, well, if you launch like TextEdit on Ventura, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John There is a menu item in the TextEdit menu called settings. It used to be called preferences, but now

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s called settings. But if you go one menu over to the Apple menu, in the Apple menu, there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John menu item called system settings that will bring up the app formerly known as system preferences. So you’ve got settings

⏹️ ▶️ John and system settings, and it’s clear the settings menu would be the settings for TextEdit, and the one in the Apple menu

⏹️ ▶️ John is the system settings, which makes a little bit of sense, except when you say, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the menu is called TextEdit. So if I go into a menu called TextEdit and there’s an item called Settings, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty clear these are the settings for TextEdit. The literal name of the menu item is TextEdit, right? Whereas when I

⏹️ ▶️ John go into the Apple menu, you could make the menu item say System Settings, but the

⏹️ ▶️ John app that it launches could just be called Settings, just like it is on your phone and just like it is in your iPad. So

⏹️ ▶️ John the renaming, yeah, renaming is annoying or whatever. You’ll get used to it. But I would suggest to Apple, perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ John call the app settings, make the menu item called system settings,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then everyone will be slightly more happy. This is, again, this is the least of the problems of

⏹️ ▶️ John everything coming to the system settings. And I mostly endorse the renaming because system preferences, why was

⏹️ ▶️ John it ever called that? No one knows what it is. Everyone just knows setting on their phone. It makes sense, it makes perfect sense. Everyone knows the phone, nobody knows

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac. Like I understand why they’re doing it. Makes some sense. But this, you know, I think it could just

⏹️ ▶️ John be called settings And now the thing that I have a

⏹️ ▶️ John personal connection to is, again, my dinky little app, Switch Glass.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got one sort of settings slash preferences window that kind of grew

⏹️ ▶️ John to the point where I can’t make it any bigger because it doesn’t fit

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on an

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad screen. That’s my bad, right? I knew I was doing it, but I’m like, ah, it’s a dinky app. I don’t need to have separate windows.

⏹️ ▶️ John But one of the sins I committed with the UI of my app is that I combine global

⏹️ ▶️ John settings that affect the entire application with settings just for that display, because I have separate

⏹️ ▶️ John per display settings or whatever. And you can get away with it, it makes some sense, the sections are clearly

⏹️ ▶️ John labeled or whatever, but it really should split it into two things. And when I was thinking about splitting it into two things, I was like, well, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John one menu item will bring up the global things for the app, right? And that would be in the old world called

⏹️ ▶️ John preferences. And it would be command comma if my app had keyboard shortcuts, but it doesn’t because it’s in the menu bar. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the other menu item would be called settings, because it’s the settings for the app

⏹️ ▶️ John switcher on that screen. But now that settings has been renamed preferences, what am I gonna have, two menu items called

⏹️ ▶️ John settings? Is one gonna be called global settings, regular settings, app switcher

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey settings?

⏹️ ▶️ John Do I have to look through the thesaurus for different words

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for settings?

⏹️ ▶️ John This has really thrown a monkey wrench into my planned 2.0 revision of the UI

⏹️ ▶️ John where I’m going to finally split the global settings from the app palette settings, because now I can’t use the word preferences

⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere because that’s just not a thing anymore. Ventura and future. So I have to rethink all of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and related to the renaming, by the way, I didn’t check this, but somebody said it and I’m inclined to believe it, but this

⏹️ ▶️ John is just gonna drive people more crazy. In system settings, the thing that was previously called

⏹️ ▶️ John the preference pane, whatever we’re calling it, it was previously called security ampersand privacy, is now called

⏹️ ▶️ John privacy ampersand security.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Come on, now you’re just trolling us.

⏹️ ▶️ John Can you imagine trying to write documentation and explain to people, go to security and privacy. I don’t see anything called

⏹️ ▶️ John security and privacy. Of course you do. I see something called privacy and security.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Ugh. What are you doing, Apple? What are you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing? You just need to be put in charge of this, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if I was put in charge of this, I would say, I already said what I would say with the

⏹️ ▶️ John settings renaming thing, but like, I feel for the team that’s working on system settings, because they

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t control the whole entire SwiftUI framework. They’re just, they got the edict. You’re going to make this with SwiftUI,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is a reasonable edict, which we may or may not get to later in the show. Probably not at this rate.

⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been given. I feel like this needs to be a team

⏹️ ▶️ John effort to make this whole thing better. Starting with, as Marco pointed out, maybe starting all the way down with the design

⏹️ ▶️ John team who has notions that are not in keeping. Good. Yeah, there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ John Thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Honestly, I think that might be our show. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we might be good.

Mac dialogs

⏹️ ▶️ John We need to talk about Mac dialogues, as you mentioned it before, and I think it’s worth.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey throw it in.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yes, you’re right, I’m sorry. I completely forgot about that. Yeah, so the dialogues are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever so slightly less bananas now in certain circumstances. So apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are different styles for NSAlerts, and there’s now ExpandedAlerts,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which basically instead of centering everything, it makes it look like prose, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey left aligned and pretty much what you would expect. and it doesn’t look utterly stupid,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is great.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, what is it? Was it Big Sur when they did this? They changed

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John dialog boxes to look like they do on iPad, OS and iOS, basically being center

⏹️ ▶️ John aligned, a big, long, skinny, vertical window. And they just did that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John system control. You just say, give me a, you know, a window modal or app modal dialog box. And

⏹️ ▶️ John you just tell it, here’s the content of the dialog box, here’s what the button should be. Back in the old days, it would be okay and cancel,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, like a dialog box, right? Like, are you sure you wanna do this operation? You know, are you sure you wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John delete this thing? Delete or cancel or whatever, right? And that’s for people that don’t know, from the program perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the API you do. You just say, put up a dialogue, here’s the content, here’s what the button

⏹️ ▶️ John should be called, here’s the callbacks for them. You don’t like, for the most part, if you’re doing a good job using standard controls, you don’t draw that

⏹️ ▶️ John window yourself. So when Apple decides, hey, dialogue boxes are gonna look different. Now, instead of them being

⏹️ ▶️ John landscape, sort of landscape-oriented rectangles with text and buttons, Now they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be portrait orientation because that looks kind of like they do on the iPad and the phone. And they made this change and

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people grumbled and the text was centered and it looked awkward, but most importantly, usability wise,

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes people had so much text that it didn’t fit in the dinky iPad size

⏹️ ▶️ John portrait window anymore because now the text is wrapping more because the window is narrow or whatever. So then they would make

⏹️ ▶️ John a scrollable region. You’d have to know it was scrollable because if you didn’t have scroll

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bars

⏹️ ▶️ John visible, if you’re lucky, one piece of text would be cut off by the invisible gray like margin at the bottom.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re unlucky, you know, there would be like a line of text and then empty space,

⏹️ ▶️ John like a paragraph break. And you wouldn’t know that there’s more text. You’d have to know if you go over there and like swipe on your mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John or scroll on your mouse wheel that you’d see more text. It was a terrible system. And by the way, look, oh, you can center a line

⏹️ ▶️ John text who wants to read that or whatever. Everybody can complain. So, and Ventura, did they

⏹️ ▶️ John change it back to the way Mac dialog boxes have looked since 1984? No, they did not. But what they did do is

⏹️ ▶️ John say, Well, if you put a lot of text in a dialogue, what we’ll do is instead

⏹️ ▶️ John of showing the iOS, iPadOS style, vertical portrait mode ones with the scrolly thing, we’ll show a normal

⏹️ ▶️ John looking Mac dialogue box. But for every other one, we’re going to the other one because the designers are saying, we’re actually, we’re right. Those

⏹️ ▶️ John other ones do look better, but when there’s a lot of text, we’ll show the Mac style one. And it’s like, what are you doing? Because

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re doing this for consistency, now you’ve thrown consistency out the window because half of dialogue boxes are gonna be this way and half are

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be that way depending on the content of the dialogue box. That’s not gonna make any sense to users. They’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna know why is this one landscape or why is this one portrait? Just make them all landscape again. No one was confused by landscape

⏹️ ▶️ John dialog boxes. It fit everyone’s apps better. It works better for the Mac. Very frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this started as a positive item. Like, yay, they have some concessions on the

⏹️ ▶️ John usability of alerts. But the more I think about it, it’s like, why is this a concession? Like, why are you holding

⏹️ ▶️ John on to the old style? No one is confused by Mac dialog boxes. Just make them use the format

⏹️ ▶️ John where there were fewer layout concerns and the text was more readable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the thing. Like that’s it, like the design team cannot accept that their new design from Big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sur is actually worse. Like they won’t accept that. And so instead of,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, reverting back to or changing to a different design where things are, you know, wider again and left

⏹️ ▶️ Marco align text or whatever, all the, you know, the old style doing things, they’re insisting, oh no, no, no, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only gonna do that when we need to. But other than that, our awesome new, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco centered bold text iOS design, that’s totally great. Like that’s, this is why I don’t have high hopes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this changing. Like it’s this, exactly this kind of thing that tells me that whatever design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco elements you don’t like in the beta are not going to be fixed by the time this is released because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the design team is misguided right now. And also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t think they are. And that’s, that’s the issue. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the rub. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode and Collide.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our members also who support us directly. You can join and become a member at atp.fm.com. We

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will talk to you next week.

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

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, tech podcasts so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long.

Neutral

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, uh, last week I went on a little bit of an adventure, which I didn’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tell you two about because I thought it would be fun to just kind of drop it on you. Uh, tonight,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, I would like you to look at the chat room and click the link that I just pasted there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because last week. Why are you standing on a white Rivian?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because it turned well, first of all, the white just happened and it really did. But second

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all, that is not my Rivian. I do not have that kind of money. But as it turns

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, there’s a Rivian dealer in Richmond. They have dealers? Yes, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know either. But yes, there is a Rivian dealer in Richmond

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a very kind listener, Shaheen, put me in contact with the local people,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey including most particularly my new friend Peebles who works at Rivian and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Peebles took me around and showed me the dealership as it is today, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not a whole lot, but apparently it was previously owned by some other company that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the building was and Rivian had like an office area and little else. But then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the previous company left and so Rivian is now taking over the rest of the building and and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey building it out and so on and so forth. And so I got to spend about half an hour, maybe 40 minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey touring the building as they’re doing construction and so on and so forth. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spent about 20 minutes driving a Rivian.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, how was it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like pickup trucks. I really don’t like pickup trucks.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco one of these so fricking bad, I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even tell you. It is so cool. It is so freaking cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved it. Now, again, I was predisposed to enjoy this because I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was getting a little bit of like, uh, not early access in, in the strictest sense, but you know, not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people can just roll up to a dealer and get this kind of treatment. It was very kind of, of Shaheen and Peebles to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this for me, but, um, but I loved it and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t, I felt like I was so overwhelmed by the whole experience. I mean, it was just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, it was a guy showing me around. He was super awesome, but it was a guy showing me around. Like there was nothing that should have been overwhelming,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I was just bowled over by the whole thing. And when it got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the part of the tour where, you know, I was looking at the truck and messing with it. It is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so cool and so well thought out. Now, again, I don’t really care for pickups. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re silly in most circumstances. There are definitely people that use them and actually put things in the bed from time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to time. But so many times I feel like pickup trucks are more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, look at me and my sweet truck, than they are, I need a utility vehicle with which to transport

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things in the bed of this truck. You know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, it’s very much a, I want a large thing to show off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my largeness kind of.

⏹️ ▶️ John Far be it for me to complain about someone buying a thing just because they like it, because that defines my entire computer

⏹️ ▶️ John hobby, right? But that is why the vast, vast,

⏹️ ▶️ John vast majority of pickup trucks are purchased in the United States. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. You want a pickup truck?

⏹️ ▶️ John We have them and we’ll sell them to you. And there’s no reason you need to justify that other than saying, I like pickup trucks. Why

⏹️ ▶️ John do I have a stupid computer? I like big, fancy computers. That’s the only reason. I

⏹️ ▶️ John get a little bit angry when someone says, oh, I got this pickup truck because it’s really practical. And it’s like, no, come on, just say

⏹️ ▶️ John you like trucks. Like, it’s fine. You’re like, there’s nothing wrong with liking trucks. Like, other than the fact that, you know, they’re killing pedestrians

⏹️ ▶️ John They keep getting taller and taller. Like, that is wrong. You should think about that. And Rivian is probably destroying the roads

⏹️ ▶️ John because it weighs 6,000 pounds or whatever. But no CO2 emissions. So give a thumbs up there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or fewer CO2

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey emissions. Anyway. Relocated CO2

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco emissions. Right, exactly. But

⏹️ ▶️ John reduced overall, net-net. But if people don’t understand, if you’re coming

⏹️ ▶️ John from like, if you’re listening to us in Europe or maybe in Canada, you don’t understand. Like, the Ford F-150 has at various

⏹️ ▶️ John times been the best-selling vehicle in America for consumers. So many people buy pickup trucks

⏹️ ▶️ John here. And there’s lots of weird cultural reasons for doing that and people just like trucks or whatever, but practically

⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, just like my stupid Mac Pro is not practical in any sense of the world and is worse than if I had gotten

⏹️ ▶️ John a computer that is more appropriate to my needs, people buy pickup trucks and then try to use them like minivans.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so you end up with these monstrous vehicles that are incredibly impractical and inconvenient

⏹️ ▶️ John and they have this huge amount of car before this tiny little stupid bed at the end

⏹️ ▶️ John and they jack the thing up and it’s just like, this doesn’t make any practical sense whatsoever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But again, aside from the pedestrian killing and the gas mileage and the road damage,

⏹️ ▶️ John people

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just like trucks. And so like,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you think, oh, well, you know, it’s a pickup truck, but only a few people buy them. It’s the default car in America, essentially.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just like the default car in many European cities is like a small, you know, a tiny little hatchback that Americans can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even fit inside. The default vehicle in many places in America is a pickup truck. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s why Rivian is relevant. That’s why we’re even talking about this because it is not an obscure side show. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John pickup trucks are the show in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco America. And also like this is a major market segment that is to date

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unserved by electric vehicles. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s why like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such, I know there’s some coming out and or whatever, but like. The

⏹️ ▶️ John Ford Lightning is the other big one in the conversation here, which is, you know, no joke. Is that the Ford F-150, the Ford Lightning,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, Ford is selling as many of those as they can make.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But the reason this is a big deal is like, you know, we’re trying to get electrification of vehicles

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as we can. And there’s, you know, there’s been these segments where like people will say like, well, like I can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, quote, I can’t buy electric, uh, because I have need X, Y, and Z. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you get good electric pickups, that solves a lot of those previously unsolved

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs. And that gets us closer to major vehicle electrification. And, and that’s a very, very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I spent a little time walking around, you know, the outside of the vehicle, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with guidance. So, you know, press this, look at this, check this out, etc., etc. So the picture that’s in the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’ve shown Marco and John is me standing on the, what do they call

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco gear tunnel.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So the gear tunnel, if you’re sitting in the back seat, well, behind your back, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically empty space. And so with the Rivian, with the R1T, which is the actual name

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this model, there’s a door on either side and you can store

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of gear, whatever it may be, or luggage or what have you, in this tunnel, this gear tunnel. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the doors that flop down when you open them up, they support like 250 pounds of weight in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and of themselves. Now you wouldn’t drive down the road this way because that’d be extremely dangerous. It’s way outside

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the edge of the body of the truck. But to just as a step, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfectly legitimate. And so again, the super nice guy who was showing me around, his name is Peebles.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he said, OK, here, stand here. Give me your phone. I’m going to take a picture of you. I was like, yes, yes, let’s do that. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the picture that I’m showing you. But so much about the Rivian, it did

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not strike me as a beta test kind of vehicle. Like so many things were really,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really well thought out. Like the button to release the tailgate, which is to say, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that closes up in the back of the truck, it’s a very subtle button

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s on the, like, I guess the top side rail

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the bed of the truck in our little super secret private channel. I’ve just dropped a few more pictures for you guys

⏹️ ▶️ Casey privately. And you can see the button very, very faintly on the left-hand side of that picture

⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind like a little tie-down mount. And you press that, and then the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tailgate lowers. And then the way they’ve set up the tailgate is such that there’s another panel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that slides down that kind of lands in between the main bed and the tailgate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kind of bridge the gap. So if you have a piece of lumber or what have you that’s longer than the very,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very short bed, then it’ll sit cleanly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the area between the bed, well, that in-between area and the tailgate itself. That’s a very hard thing to describe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey verbally, but hopefully that makes some amount of

⏹️ ▶️ John sense. And by the way, you mentioned the very, very short bed. Why is the bed very, very short? Well, because Rivian knows

⏹️ ▶️ John that despite the fact that people want a truck, what they need is a car. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing has four doors, a front seat, and a back seat big enough for big people. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not too much room left for a bed. And yeah, they could put a full-size bed in there, but now the vehicle would be

⏹️ ▶️ John so long that people wouldn’t be able to park it anywhere. And so they have to do what everyone has done, which is basically

⏹️ ▶️ John make a gigantic, jacked up luxury sedan for $80,000 and put a thing on the back that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John big enough so that people see it’s recognizable than a truck and distract them from the tiny little

⏹️ ▶️ John bed in the back by putting a huge grill on the front and knobby tires and making the thing be 70

⏹️ ▶️ John feet off the ground and don’t bother looking at that bed that’s only four feet long. Hey, you can lower the tailgate

⏹️ ▶️ John and now you can fit a four bay piece of plywood in it as long as you don’t mind the fact that it’s sticking four feet out of the back

⏹️ ▶️ John of your truck.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say all of that stuff does serve purposes, though, that are just specialized. Like for instance, my Beech

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sand driving vehicle needs, this would be amazing because it has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ground clearance and way better off-roading capabilities than almost every vehicle out there.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you would get the R1S. Like they make an SUV version of this, which doesn’t even pretend it’s a SUV,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, make is generous. They advertise the ability to make one. I don’t know how many have actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten into customer’s hands.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the great thing about it is that the R1S is basically the R1T without pretending to be a pickup. So the

⏹️ ▶️ John part that is the bed, it’s like, why don’t we just make that the rest of the inside of it? Like it’s the same platform, and the platform

⏹️ ▶️ John is so much better suited to being an SUV, because it’s clearly not particularly

⏹️ ▶️ John well suited to being a pickup truck, but people don’t really want a pickup truck. They just want to save their own one, but they want a sedan that’s really jacked.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, like again, I’m not faulting people for this. I’m just saying that it’s like, it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ John interesting to watch the bed portion of pickup trucks shrink and shrink and shrink to

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the car where

⏹️ ▶️ John it is just barely big enough so you can make sure that people still know it’s a pickup truck.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s true. And the R1S, according to people’s is getting delivered but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a ton of them at this point. As far as I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. I might have that wrong. But coming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to the experience I had with it. So in the bed on the left-hand side, if you’re looking at the back of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the car, you’re standing behind the car, you’re looking at the back of it on the left-hand side, there’s a panel that has like an air pump

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you can inflate and deflate not only the tires on the truck itself, But if you had a motorcycle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or bicycle or something like that, you can inflate or deflate the tires with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the onboard air pump, which also has a pressure gauge on it, which is super cool. And then again, I haven’t put this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat room. I probably won’t bother putting this in the show notes. But for the two of you guys, if you look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey underneath the air pump, it’s hard to see, but there’s like two round-wrecked areas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, if you look very closely, have little padlock logos on them. And what those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, and there’s matching ones on the other side, they give you these special cables,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like really, really strong cables, like bike lock kind of cables. And you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put, and they have like special ends on them, and you stick the ends into these little portholes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that have these padlock logos on them. And when the truck locks, it locks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey those cables in place. And when the truck unlocks, you can yank those cables right out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and remove your bicycle, motorcycle, whatever the case, or whatever it is you have locked in the back. And it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a satisfying feeling, you know, the little chink to put it in and take it

⏹️ ▶️ John out. The Kensington lock, if you remember those, the Kensington lock, remember when like all Macs used to come with this little thing, like what is

⏹️ ▶️ John this all for? That’s for the Kensington lock.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It’s much fancier, but yeah, it’s the same basic idea. On the other side, I didn’t send you this picture, but on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other side, I had two, you know, standard US house outlets, you know, 120 volt outlets just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hanging out. On the inside, it has, as it’s been publicized, It has a Bluetooth speaker

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that lives under the center console. It has a flashlight that you can actually see in the picture that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shared with everyone. There’s a flashlight in the side of the driver’s side door that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I recall correctly, is made out of an individual cell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the main battery unit, which is pretty neat. The inside, honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my only regrets in the time I spent with the car is I didn’t really mess with the infotainment at all. Like, I could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you the stereo sounded really good to me. But I didn’t spend any time pointing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and clicking and scrolling and whatnot, which I regret. I should have done that to see if the lag was real bad. But I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really wanted to spend time driving a car. If you’ll notice, again, for the two of you guys, that I put a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture of the dashboard, which to my eyes, very, very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey big Tesla energy in terms of the, oh, there’s a car over here, there’s a car over there, et cetera. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks very, very similar to me. But what’s cool about this is it has different ride heights and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different modes, and so you can lower and raise the truck while you’re in the truck, which is kind of neat.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know the number as to how many bazillion pounds this thing weighs, but I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s about 11 trillion pounds. Did you know—I think I’m mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking to Marco here—did you know that electric vehicles can kind of overcome the fact that they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weigh more than the entire planet Earth? And can even electric vehicles this large can actually be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey relatively sprightly? Paul

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Madfield I, in fact, did know that. Corey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Ponder Did you? Paul

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Madfield It turns out I’ve been driving around a giant heavy brick of batteries for the last five years,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve also greatly enjoyed it. Corey Ponder

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the funny thing is, so obviously it’s not automatic as almost every electric vehicle is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there were a couple times I did a standing start, and I would stand on the brake,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and And then I would move my right foot over to the gas and floor it. And it’s like getting shot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of a cannon. I don’t care how many times—and I’ve driven electric cars, I don’t know, 15, 20 times in my life.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like this is not the first time I’ve driven an electric car. It’s the first time I’ve driven a Rivian, but not the first time that I’ve driven

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an electric car. And I’ve not just driven Teslas, although I’ve driven many Teslas. It’s still just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey intoxicating every time. And doing it in a truck that weighs more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than my house, like it is—it’s bending the laws of physics

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how fast this thing is. But at one point right before we were done, people said, no, okay, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just trust me on this one. This time I want you to use your left foot on the brake, stand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the brake, stand on the gas, and then pop your left foot off the brake. You know, I think we would call this power braking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back in the day if I’m not mistaken, but basically you stand on both pedals and then pop your left foot off the brake.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got shot out of a cannon, my dudes. I thought just sidestepping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto the gas was fast. Oh no, I got shot out of a fricking cannon in this 80

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gazillion pound pickup truck. It was unreal how fast this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thing was. Do you

⏹️ ▶️ John want to guess at the weight by the way? I looked it up because I was wrong in my humorous estimate when I was prattling out

⏹️ ▶️ John about this thing before. 7,000 pounds. Yeah, it’s 7,148 pounds according to Wikipedia. Oh, look at me. That was pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Another

⏹️ ▶️ John article that said it’s like 8,000 because it’s got a huge battery pack in there. I think it’s 180

⏹️ ▶️ John kilowatt hours for the big battery. That’s, I mean, that’s like almost twice as big as Marco’s battery. I mean, because, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a truck. It’s supposed to be able to haul big things. It itself is heavy. And I think the 0-60 is four

⏹️ ▶️ John seconds-ish. So that’s what you were feeling there, Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was bananas. And also, you know, I took it on an interstate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or highway or freeway, whatever your local parlance is. And I didn’t, I wasn’t being ridiculous, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, on the off ramp or the on ramp, this thing handled surprisingly well. And yes, I know it’s got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a huge ass amount of weight, way low in the car. Like I get that, but I, if I’m not mistaken, they do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some like really aggressive auto leveling with the suspension to keep it from feeling like you’re about to roll over.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was stunning how well this thing handled again, given the fact that it’s a pickup,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m grading on a curve. I’ll tell you right now I’m grading on a curve, but you know, it’s a pickup truck. It’s in the air. It’s it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weighs 11 zillion pounds. It’s, it’s stunning that this thing handled or it went

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as quickly as it did. The stereo sounded great. I mean, I’m not an audiophile really, but it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounded surprisingly good because, you know, I’m still COVID paranoid. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we were riding around, I insisted on having the windows open and even still the stereo sounded great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s quiet, I mean, because it’s an electric, like this thing was so nice. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many really nice touches that were clearly well-designed, like all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, The way the buttons for the tailgate and things are hidden, and they’re satisfying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to click, and the way the tailgate flops down, you have that little intermediary

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that comes down automatically. So much of it was so well done. I would absolutely buy one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these tomorrow if I was looking to get rid of my car and had way more money to spend on a car than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually do. And they were available, which none of those things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco are true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you could actually get it tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Nobody can.

⏹️ ▶️ John Quinn Nelson got his. It’s possible if you pre-ordered it back in the day.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I mean, it’s possible.

⏹️ ▶️ John Predictably, I’ve seen about a bazillion. I watch car review videos all the time. So I’ve seen a bazillion reviews. Previews,

⏹️ ▶️ John reviews, everything you can imagine on the site. I know like almost every inch of it. But one of the new videos that came out

⏹️ ▶️ John recently that I think is actually relevant to wondering what the deal is with Rivian is from the, what is it called, the Monroe

⏹️ ▶️ John channel. They take apart cars and talk about how much they cost to manufacture and

⏹️ ▶️ John what techniques they use. They spend a lot of time on Tesla, because Tesla obviously does lots of things very differently than traditional car makers.

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s fascinating for these veterans of the car industry to look at how Tesla does things and scratch their head and be

⏹️ ▶️ John impressed by some things and horrified by other. Anyway, they took apart the instrument panel of the Rivian

⏹️ ▶️ John R1T recently in a video, we’ll put a link in the show notes. And it’s fun looking at,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a new car company, Rivian, with its very first car. Yes, it’s electric,

⏹️ ▶️ John but we’re looking at the instrument panel here. So it’s not, it shouldn’t be that much different. It’s got a screen on it and stuff, but we’re not looking at the drivetrain,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? What is, and how does, what does the instrument panel look like? And they constantly reference Tesla, is their other oddball,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is like a brand new car company doing cars in an unconventional way. The most interesting thing that I found was

⏹️ ▶️ John when they were pulling it apart, they were comparing it to how Tesla constructed stuff. Obviously, they’re talking about, oh, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John they probably use some expensive materials here. They’re probably losing money on this. They got a little bit fancy or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But one of the things I talked about is the like the top of the instrument panel. Like if you put your hand right on the dashboard,

⏹️ ▶️ John that piece, right, they peel that piece off. Um, and I say, uh, so there’s an industry

⏹️ ▶️ John standard for most things in the auto industry that you have to have a fastener every 150

⏹️ ▶️ John millimeters or something for, for panels like this. And, but like on the, on

⏹️ ▶️ John the Tesla, on the model S there’s like five screws for that entire piece. Right. And

⏹️ ▶️ John what the theory was of the people were taking this part is that Rivian hired a lot of people from the traditional automotive

⏹️ ▶️ John industry, like poached people from, you know, Ford, Chrysler, all the other, you know, Honda, whatever, like like

⏹️ ▶️ John people in the industry and said, hey, you come to this company, we’re gonna make a new cool electric pickup truck.

⏹️ ▶️ John And those people, because they’ve been in the industry so long, we’re just gonna be like, oh yeah, fastener every 150 million years. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John how you build a car without really questioning it. Whereas Tesla was not burdened by that

⏹️ ▶️ John and said, but why do you need a fastener every 150 million years for this piece, like the top of your dashboard, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s not a structural member. Why do we need to have so many things? So the Rivian has- As for NVH?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, what they were saying is like, if you dig into this and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John who came up with that rule? Why is that there? You just keep asking down the chain, down the chain, and eventually you realize no one actually either knows

⏹️ ▶️ John or remembers why that’s there. It just becomes part of the, you know, the lore of being a parts

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey manufacturer for the auto

⏹️ ▶️ John industry. That it’s like, I don’t know if you really need it. And they were saying like, when you’re a parts maker,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of annoying because you’ll push back and say, do we need to do this? And say, oh yeah, it’s part of

⏹️ ▶️ John the spec. And you’ll say, but like, but why? and they’re like, I don’t have a reason, it’s just part of the spec. But then you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John be like, well, that part’s gonna be too expensive then, so you’ll just willfully ignore the spec and do it in a more sane way

⏹️ ▶️ John and just not say anything, and they will silently accept your non-spec

⏹️ ▶️ John compliant thing until and unless there’s a problem, then they’ll say, oh, you just didn’t follow the spec. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla chose not to put those screws in there, and it’s probably fine, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John you can tell based on how the thing is constructed and the review that there are more people from the traditional audio

⏹️ ▶️ John and auto industry in this company because of things like how closely spaced the fasteners

⏹️ ▶️ John are, because that’s just the way you do things. I don’t know which one of those things is better or worse, but it’s fascinating

⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to sort of read the signature of the makers by tearing it apart and looking

⏹️ ▶️ John at how it was constructed. And in both cases, in both, especially early Tesla and also these Rivians,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a little bit of a kind of a handcrafted nature to it, like I know what the inside of a lot of Hondas look like,

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, Honda’s and Toyota’s, it’s like, how, you know, how inexpensive,

⏹️ ▶️ John how few pieces, how reliable, like it’s just honed down to the bare essence of like,

⏹️ ▶️ John if I can do something with one piece of plastic instead of two, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna refine this arrangement

⏹️ ▶️ John over the course of 50 years to try to get it to be 3 cents cheaper, right? Or 5% stiffer or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, just so ruthlessly minimal. And these things, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an $80,000 electric truck. I’m not quite sure how to do it, but just let’s just throw materials at it. Let’s use this

⏹️ ▶️ John expensive exotic material. Let’s put these things on it. Let’s put these five screws. Let’s do this thing. And in other places they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John end up saying, oh, we didn’t know how to do this. So like we have these four air ducts. How do we hold them together? How about we just drill a hole

⏹️ ▶️ John in them, put a wing nut on there and just twist it together. Yeah, that’ll do it. Ship it, right? There’s so much of that mixed

⏹️ ▶️ John in. Like the Rivian, the inside of the Rivian and the inside of Tesla’s do not look like the inside of

⏹️ ▶️ John like established car brands. And especially they don’t look at the inside of cars that cost, you know, $20,000, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John because in the end, these are very expensive vehicles. And part of that expense is, yeah, they use exotic parts and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a big battery in there. But also part of that expense is, we didn’t have the time or the research

⏹️ ▶️ John budget to figure out how to make this car economically. So we’re gonna sell it to you for 80 grand. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the company would have gone out of business if we had spent the next 20 years figuring out how to manufacture this car for $10,000 less. So

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not, and we’ll just pass the cost onto you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that being said, and I think this particular example was something like 80

⏹️ ▶️ Casey grand. There is no way this truck should cost 80 grand. It should cost easily 100 to 110 from what I could tell.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I’m just, I’ve been price reset

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Tesla.

⏹️ ▶️ John It might cost that much. Did you ask someone how many options were on the car that you were looking at?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked him how much is this one. And I am pretty sure he said 80-ish. Maybe even a little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit less.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you really can’t get it in time soon. Well, I’ll tell you what, though. I have good news for you, Casey. If you want the review to cost more,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go try to buy one now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey because here, I’ll send

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you a link. Here’s one right in Richmond, right near you, Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It’s only $141,000 for a used R1T.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey Dunn

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My goodness. I mean, honestly, I think this thing should cost closer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to that, although I wouldn’t go quite that far. But no, it was amazing. Like the frunk was huge.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It had a drain spigot or spout or whatever so you could, you know, make it a cooler and then just drain it at the end

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the day. Like a lot of this stuff, it was just really well thought out. It was very comfortable on the inside.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some of the stuff was a little bit silly, like, you know, you can’t just twist the air vents. You have to go into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, you know, computer and ask it where, you know, oh, I want to point it right here and then

⏹️ ▶️ John it— Because they want them to be controlled by the touchscreen, but if they can be controlled by the touchscreen, you can’t have manual stateful controls.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, and so that’s like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the stuff like that is a little bit whatever. But by and large, I freaking love

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing. If I had my druthers, I would have already put in a deposit for an R1S for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to replace Aaron’s Volvo one day. But I don’t know that she would be quite as keen on this idea as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am. But I loved it. Like, again, I only spent like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 20 minutes with it, but I can think of no reservations. Like I if I was spending somebody else’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey money, I would do it tomorrow. Like, again, you can’t get them. You know, it’s impossible to get them. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t get a white one. There’s a couple of blues that were really lovely. There was like a deep, deep gray. I want to say it was called like granite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something that was really, really nice. They had a bunch of them there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MARK

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MIRCHANDANI Ooh, there’s a yellow one. MARK DEMINEY Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there is a yellow one. MARK MIRCHANDANI I can get it right now for only $135,000 in Connecticut. MARK DEMINEY

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey There you go. MARK

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MIRCHANDANI Slightly used. MARK DEMINEY I’m telling you, Marco, you would really, really like this thing. Like it was amazing. And apparently they’re getting,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I asked the, I asked Peebles and the two guys that he was working with at the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other two I think were more on the delivery side of things. And they said they’re getting trucks like every day and they’re delivering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them to North Carolina, to Virginia, I think as far up as Maryland. Of course,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re flatbedding them on internal combustion flatbeds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re going to like North Carolina and stuff. And they don’t want to just drive the truck because then you’re getting a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey truck with like 300 miles on the clock. But But no, they’re getting them daily from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I understand. And it was such a cool experience and it was so kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them to spend an hour with me, who nobody cares who I am. But nevertheless,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they spent an hour with me and never were upset about it, never checked their watches wondering when it would be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. It was such a lovely experience and the truck was so nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would absolutely buy one tomorrow if I thought I could get away with it. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so great.

⏹️ ▶️ John Looking at their configurator, it’s kind of like when you add RAM to the Mac. So you go to the configurator, and it comes

⏹️ ▶️ John with 8 gigs of RAM. 16 gigs of RAM, add $400. 24 gigs of RAM, add $600, or whatever. Well, so you go to the Rivi,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so you’ve got the standard battery pack. And then if you want the large pack, it’s add $6,000. And if you want the max pack, it’s add $16,000.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re wondering

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey why these cars cost so

⏹️ ▶️ John much money, it’s not because they’re using exotic materials and fancy stuff on the inside. It’s because

⏹️ ▶️ John they have a huge battery in it, and those batteries are really expensive. So yeah, add $16,000. that’s a hell of an

⏹️ ▶️ John option. Still not Porsche option because probably $16,000 gets you like the cool black paint on the Porsche, But, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John different strokes.