490: Tiny Pictures of Knobs

07 Jul 2022

The imminent MacBook Air, Lockdown Mode, improvements in Ventura beta 3, and finally jumping into SwiftUI.

Episode Description:

Pre-show: Some thoughts on who should have agency over womens’ bodies
Follow-up:
- Using a M1 Mac mini as a Plex server
  - Other video transcoding
- M2 MacBook Air available to order Friday at 8 AM OTTZ
- Quick Pi-hole tip from Tod Weitzel
- Advantages for Apple getting into Buy Now, Pay Later
- A possible motive for bitcode deprecation
  - LLVM
- Why passkeys will be simpler and more secure than passwords
- Janis Peukert asks some questions about passkeys
  - appleid.apple.com
  - App-specific Passwords
- On stateful hardware controls
  - Dancing faders (via Jordan McEwen)
  - Guitar amplifiers (via Samuel Cohen)
  - AirFrance Flight 447 (via Dave Rowenhorst)
  - Anton Yelchin’s odd death back in 2016
    - ZF 8HP transmission
Apple announces Lockdown Mode
M2 MacBook Pro thermal throttling issues
- MaxTech’s video (timestamp link)
- Gary from The Everyday Dad can’t reproduce the issue
- Hardware Unboxed: Apple M2 Review
Some notes on macOS Ventura Beta 3
- System Settings
- iCloud Shared Photo Library
Post-show: Marco is diving into SwiftUI
- Carbon
- .if()

Chapters

The awful state of US politics
Plex vs. WebM
M2 Air orders opening up
Pi-Hole tip for Safari
Sponsor: Work Check
Pay Later risk for Apple
Bitcode deprecation
Passkeys and passwords
Hardware vs. software controls
Sponsor: Instabug
Lockdown Mode
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
M2 MBP thermals
System Settings: Beta 3 🖼️
Shared Photo Libraries
Ending theme
Been doin’ SwiftUI

The awful state of US politics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, we should at least briefly talk about something that all three of us intended

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to talk about last week. And because we’re idiots, it just completely slipped our mind to say anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I wanted to at least briefly talk about the really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really crummy and, I would argue, despicable events in America of last week, specifically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey around the Supreme Court saying that Roe versus Wade is no longer a thing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that any of the protections that Roe versus Wade gave people, particularly women,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with regard to the right to have agency over their own bodies, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is no longer a thing. And I don’t necessarily want to go too deep into this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey other than to say that I think I speak for all three of us in saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it is my slash our belief that women should have agency over their own bodies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and what happens to their bodies. I would not find it funny if I was compelled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do things with or to my body without my permission.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would not be, I would not find it funny if I couldn’t get healthcare that I needed simply

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because some other people found it to be taboo. I don’t think it’s fair that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, that other people can decide whether or not it’s okay for, I don’t know, like, let’s say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me to get a vasectomy, for example, like, I don’t think that’s anyone’s business, but mine and Aaron’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I find it really disgusting that a bunch of old people seem to think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that they know better for Erin, for example, than Erin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey does herself. And I really find it quite gross. As someone who has lived through infertility,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we did not have to do in vitro fertilization, but we were very, very close to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And depending on how you read the rulings and the laws of the land

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as they exist today, you could make a very strong legal argument that in vitro fertilization is now illegal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I find that to be absolutely disgusting because here it is, you know, so many couples

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and so many families want desperately to have a child and they would do anything, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey paying absolutely egregious sums of money for the privilege of having a child.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And because this gets swept up in something that some people find taboo,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s now questionably legal. And I find this whole thing to be disgusting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really think it is inappropriate for me to specify what should happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to anyone else’s body. And I find that, in my personal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey opinion, abortion is health care. And I think that health care really should be universal in this country,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but that’s neither here nor there. And I just wanted to make it plain and public that I think that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is the wrong way. I think this is disgusting, and I am not in support of it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know if that does any good, but I just wanted to make it plain and public,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my opinion on it. And I don’t know if you guys have anything else to add or say or correct on that, but I’m all ears if you do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, absolutely, I do. I mean, I can’t believe that we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gone back in time on this. So like we’ve gone back, what, 50 years, whatever it’s been?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah. You know, in the view of time, overall

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things are better now than they were 50 years ago in most ways. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you take such a big regression like this, it really can feel like they’re not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this is a major regression in a number of different areas for a number of different reasons. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the fact is, you know, Casey, you said a minute ago that, quote, in your opinion,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco abortion is health care. And in reality, it’s more complicated than that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In reality, it literally is health care for a number of conditions. You know, and people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who are anti-abortion normally have a fairly simplistic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco view of the issue. And if you’re one of these people listening to the show, if we somehow still have any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco conservative listeners, first of all, I respect that you listen to the show knowing that we’re not conservative. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco agreed. And that that hasn’t scared you off, and that you’re willing to hear other opinions. Good on you for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. The view that anti-abortion people tend to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is this very simplistic, almost storybook view of all abortions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are killing babies, and that’s it. And the reality is much more complicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than that, 1,000 times more complicated than that. There are so many sides to this. There are so many conditions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in which it is literally the only possible outcome to save the mother’s life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There are many conditions where you have tricky problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or literal health problems, literal health care is required that is considered an abortion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for various conditions or situations that happen in real life all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So even if you think that women shouldn’t be allowed to choose abortion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for other reasons, which that’s a big if, and I would question that as well, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if you can set that part aside, the reality of the issue is so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more complicated than that. And there are so many situations where it is the required medical procedure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to preserve a woman’s life, or at least physical and mental well-being,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that to actually ban it and to actually make it illegal is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco literally putting women’s lives in danger. It is literally going to result in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco women dying. That is not an exaggeration. It is not a frivolous thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is not a thing to be taken lightly. And anybody celebrating this as a victory, I think you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have all the facts or you’re willfully ignoring them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Well

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} put.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is literally a step backwards into a barbaric past time that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we did have where lots more people died who either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco couldn’t afford to get the kind of, you know, under the table treatments or to travel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somewhere where it was available or who took something more desperately available

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that ended up killing them or hurting them. We are now going back to that barbaric time in huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco parts of our country, and this is going to affect thousands of people. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to result in more deaths, more illness, more problems. If you are still somehow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the anti-abortion side of this, I urge you to consider that the issue is more complicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than you think it is. And there’s lots of situations. We, personally, I mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this a long time ago when this happened, but my wife had to get an abortion. We had a failed pregnancy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at five months, and we were about, I think, one week away from not being able to do it, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in New York. It was an unviable, it was deemed unviable of a pregnancy. We had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco terminate it to preserve her health and her ability to possibly have more kids in the future. We had to terminate it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That was the required healthcare move at that time. And this was for a pregnancy that we very much wanted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it was, you know, it wasn’t gonna happen. And had we not been able to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, we could have had some much more serious problems down the road. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just, I urge you out there, if you are on that side of the politics of this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco please open your mind to the possibility that the issue is more complex than you think it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And for everyone on, you know, the pro-choice side of this, like us,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I urge you to just do whatever you can politically to help right this wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And frankly, I don’t know how much we can do right now. I’m, like many of you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty jaded at America’s prospects right now in lots of ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, this is just one issue of many large recent issues

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we’re having to deal with that are seemingly going in the wrong direction. I mean, we have a legitimate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chance here that our next major national election might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco literally be contradicted by state legislatures and possibly the Supreme Court.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So our actual democracy is literally being threatened in very, very large

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways that I don’t think most Americans fully appreciate. So we have lots of problems right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but this is a big one, and to have regressed so far in such

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a damaging and dangerous way is despicable. And as we just passed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco July 4th, I am super not proud of America right now, and we have a lot of work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do to fix the train wreck we’ve made for ourselves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, a couple of things I’ll add. In any kind of situation where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re trying to set some kind of policy or laws or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surrounding health care, and you’re using some criteria other than what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the unfortunate phrase that we have in this country, which is terrible, evidence-based medicine, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically is just medicine. If you’re using

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} anything other than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what is best for your health to make a health care decision,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something has gone wrong. And that’s exactly what this issue is. What would be the best thing to do in this situation?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What does the patient want? These are the things that should be in question when determining what course

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of health care to pursue. Nowhere in there is, yeah, but what do a bunch of other people think about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t care that it has worse outcomes. And people say like, well, if it’s not going to kill you, it’s fine. Let’s just wait to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see this. Already, already with this decision, there’s been situations where doctors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have been afraid to do what they know is right health care wise because they’re afraid of getting sued or losing their license because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re in some terrible state that has terrible trigger laws that took effect as soon as the Roe v. Wade, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing decision came down, right? That’s not the right decision to make for the health

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the patient. It’s like, well, if they didn’t die, you know, like, it was like, we have to wait until they get worse because it has to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be only to save the life of the mother and the mother’s life isn’t in threat now. So let’s wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until her life is threatened and then we’re allowed to do the, this is not how medicine is supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to work. Let’s wait until it gets worse because then we’re allowed to do the thing. We could do something now to save her

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it would be the right thing to do, but actually something people don’t like that. They’re not here. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the patient, but we’ve decided that these laws have decided for us that we have to make a decision based on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something other than the best outcomes of the patient. This is setting aside all the other outcomes that Marco was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talking about. Women will die. There’ll be worse outcomes for everybody. There’ll be worse outcomes for children. There’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worse outcomes for mothers. There’ll be worse outcomes for everybody involved. law and this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decision, it runs counter to all that. So that’s terrible. Another thing someone brought up in the chat room, uh, someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was saying like this is, uh, um, that the Supreme Court didn’t, uh, you know, didn’t ban abortion,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just made it a state’s voting issue. The Supreme Court, uh, doesn’t, isn’t supposed to set the policy for everybody. What the Supreme Court is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John supposed to do in theory, in practice, it’s very grim, but in theory is they’re supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to interpret the laws in light of the, our sort of foundational, you know, things like the constitution

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. And the reason that, you know, that we have a Constitution and a Supreme Court

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, even if the majority votes, I think we should bring back slavery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the majority votes in favor of it, which honestly in this country, sometimes I think it would pass.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The Supreme Court has to be there to say, hey, actually we have existing laws and decisions on the book that say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even if everybody wants this, it’s not a thing that you can do. It’s like something easy. The First Amendment, oh, I think I should be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John able to set a law that no one’s ever to say anything mean about me. Sorry, we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a foundational document and that will hopefully be correctly interpreted by the Supreme Court to say, no, even if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the majority of the country wants that law, it doesn’t fit with our system. Abortion is no different. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like in the Roe v. Wade decision, which was decided and then subsequently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John upheld, it’s part of the right to privacy. The state can’t come and tell you what can or can’t happen to your body, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s what’s been overturned, and it’s a terrible decision, and hopefully, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big step backwards. It’s very easy to tell. It’s like, oh, maybe from the lens of history, we can tell what was bad. No, you can always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} if some group is fighting for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rights and some group is fighting against them, the people who are fighting against them are always wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It never goes the other way. It’s like, women want these rights, you know, and gay people want these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rights or whatever. You can tell when you’re there. You don’t have to wait 50 years in the future. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is obviously a bad decision. It’s taking us backwards, or you can like look at the rest of the world, or you can look at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outcome. Anyway, it’s a bad situation. We all hate it. Hopefully things will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get better, and we’ll all do what we can to make that happen, if we still have a democracy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the next several years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will say, too, on that point, which again, that is a, you might think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is hyperbolic. I assure you it’s not. This is literally a risk that we have to face.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because it’s not like an accidental thing that’s happening to us. It’s a thing that people are doing. There are groups

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actively lobbying that have been lobbying for decades to make this happen. It’s not something that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happens accidentally or like, whoops, looks like Roe v. Wade went awry. This has been some people’s life’s work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re active agents trying to drag us backwards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and there are also active agents trying to basically give

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco state legislatures the ability to overturn election results that they deem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quote, suspicious, which read this as code for we lost. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you think there were some shenanigans with the Trump team suggesting that our whole election should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be thrown out because they lost, you haven’t seen anything yet. Because there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on at the state

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco levels that are, that’s very, very scary. And so I urge you all, vote in local and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco state elections, even if it is not a presidential election year. Because a lot of this stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of goes, kind of flies under the radar at times, you know, during elections and at times when there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not a lot of voter turnout because it is not a presidential election. Vote in every single election that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can. Every single one. Vote. Make your voice heard. And if you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco follow the particular politicians at that level, that’s fine. Most people don’t. Vote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco however you feel is for the party or people or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever it is that you think will be least evil because not a lot of people show up to vote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so if you do, like on those non-peak elections, it matters.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It It counts, and we really have to defend our democracy at all levels,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco local, state, and federal, because I’m telling you, those are under

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco significant attack. And as the upcoming elections are soon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we have midterms, what, this year, right? We have the presidential election in another couple of years, and I’m telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you, it’s gonna be rough. You thought this past election was a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bit rough with the state of our democracy. I’m telling you, it’s going to get worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we have to be ready for that. And we have to start defending against that and rolling back some of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco terrible things so that we can literally have a democracy. Like that’s what we’re fighting for, among other things. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, we have lots of other major issues. We have this terrible abortion thing. We have all the gun problems. We have so many issues,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the foundation of our democracy is also literally under attack right now to the extent that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most people don’t realize. So please get out there and vote in every single election that you can.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you need a voting guideline, here’s your guideline. If someone who’s going to be in charge of the election says no matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the people vote for, they’re going to make sure the outcome is one way, don’t vote for that person. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s their one job is like, okay, our state is going to vote, say, in a presidential election.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the rule is whoever wins more votes in the state, you know, gets the electors. And they say, I’ll do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, but only if my favorite person wins. If my favorite person doesn’t win, I’m going to ignore what you voted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for and decide that my favorite person’s. But there are literally people running on that platform and winning, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John winning their elections. They say, I wanna be in charge of elections in the state. And by the way, no matter what happens with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the vote, I’m going to make sure that my person is the person who gets the electors. Because if my person doesn’t, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously the election was a scam and a fraud and you know, whatever. Those people are winning elections. That’s why we’re all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scared here because they say they’re gonna do that. It’s not a secret. That’s their platform. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then they get the most votes in the state and they’re gonna be in charge of the election. So that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re all a little bit scared over here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s right out there in the open. And I will again say, and maybe go a little further,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you vote for a politician or a political party

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that cares more about winning than about votes being counted properly and actual democracy happening,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you are not an American. You are anti-American, you are anti-patriotic, you are anti-democracy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you wanna be an American patriot, here we just celebrated our birthday, all the flags and everything. You know what that flag means?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That means democracy, that means votes counting. And so if you support any politician

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or party that tries to interfere with votes counting, you are anti-American

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you might as well be committing treason as far as I’m concerned. On that note, let’s start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our tech show.

Plex vs. WebM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so I talked, we spoke last week about how I’m now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey using an M1 Mac Mini as my Plex server. And a handful of people wrote to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that working? Because nobody, apparently, not many people apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are trying to do this right now. And so people wanted some feedback.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is a bit early to tell, I think, but I will say that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was watching or I was attempting to watch something that was a 4K video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in Plex, but it was encoded in WebM, which is, I think, what is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Google? Google, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, Kodak or whatever. The video was encoded in WebM, and it did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not want to play on my Apple TV, and Plex got very upset about the fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the Mac Mini wasn’t transcoding quick enough for it. That being said, what I did was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because I’m me, I used Don Melton’s incredible other video transcoding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey scripts, I’ll put a link in the show notes, in order to, which is basically like a front end for FFmpeg,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I converted from WebM to HEVC or H265, depending

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on, I think they’re one and the same, or at least in this context, they’re one and the same. And anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey once I did that, I tried again and everything was good to go. So if you have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t want to make any like broad statements, you know, I don’t know if all webm is bad. I don’t know if just 4k

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey webm is bad. I haven’t really done enough testing on all this, but certainly 4k webm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey did not go well for me against the most recent Apple TV that exists, you know, which is what 17 years old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now. Um, so, uh, if you’re like me and you tend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to store things in H.264 and H.265, I think you’d probably be fine. But if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you are a little bit more omnivorous and don’t really care what things are encoded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as and just try to throw it at plex, which is one of plex’s advantages, then you might be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in for a little bit of pain. So just something to think about. I’ll report in again if I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have any other discoveries of any sort, but it’s worth thinking about.

M2 Air orders opening up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And speaking of M1 things, and in this case, actually M2, we have gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a date just earlier today, actually, we got a date for the M2 MacBook Air. And when John will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be feverishly mashing the keys on his old and busted Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mac Pro. John, what are you going to be doing Friday at 8 a.m. in the One True Time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey zone?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I’ll be ordering my M2 MacBook Air then. Although, you know, with availability things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially like, oh, you have to be ready at 8 a.m. Eastern time. I’m there, I’m ready to order, I’m ready to click the button. Does that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean it will be available on the educational discount store at 8 a.m., or is that gonna be later? But anyway, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still determined to order this through the education store. I did the math to see what the actual discount

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, and it’s not great, like I said. It’s not like it used to be where you get like $1,000 off or something. It’s gonna be like $160 saving on the config I’m getting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which for people who are curious, M.2, MacBook Air, Space Gray, 24 gigs of RAM,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one terabyte hard drive, and probably the two, a hard drive, SSD,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever, and the power adapter with the two USB C plugs, the 35 watt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two port adapter, that’s probably what I’m gonna get.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And I’m also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna get AppleCare probably. Yeah, so that’s my plan. I’ll be there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at 8 a.m. trying to order this thing. Let you know how it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey goes. Good luck, Godspeed. I really think these things are gonna fly off the shelves, if you will, because I know a fair number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of people that are, you know, queuing everything up, ready to rock in order to grab one of these.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And they certainly, from everything I’ve read and seen, they certainly seem like they’re damn fun computers. And Marco, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mean, you’re the one who actually handled one briefly, so you know better than either of us. But they seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like they’re gonna be great machines.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I’m still trying to figure out, like, do I have a use for this thing somewhere in my house? Because I just want one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m sure I do. Because they’re so, I’m telling you, it feels so good when you pick it up. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s so nice. I just want one. I don’t blame you. I kind of want one too. I actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might, I kind of do have some uses for it. so I will see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Here

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} we go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do wish I liked more of the colors better. Like, if I get one, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would probably be the silver one. But I’m tempted to go with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco midnight just because it’s different. But I know in practice, it’ll just be too dark for me. Because I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I saw it. It was very dark, and it was covered in fingerprints. So I think in practice, I wouldn’t like it as much. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at least new and interesting and different. It has that going for it. So honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think if you’re buying the MacBook Air, you can’t go wrong with any of the colors it comes with, except space gray.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I think really, folks, the problem is is that I am the one who has most recently bought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a computer and this is not computing in Marco’s world. And so he needs some reason to be the one with the newest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey machine of the three of us. That’s what it boils down to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I actually, I do actually have like some uses for it, potentially.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it’s, I gotta figure out if I actually, if this is actually the right move for me or not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough.

Pi-Hole tip for Safari

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey A quick piehole tip from Todd Whitesell.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} never not funny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is probably relevant to four of us, but there might even be dozens of us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I noticed a while ago that when I was using Safari, and Safari specifically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey often, but not well, maybe not often, but occasionally, it would start to load a page and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just kind of sit and sit and sit. And I’m on a gigabit internet connection,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it would sit and sit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Have you tried going to the microwave tower thing for Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ultra Fast 5G wireless network? And have you tried going at 2 gigabits? Was it faster?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have not tried mm-wave for this because I think Todd solved my problem. And so Todd writes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a couple of iOS releases ago, and for what it’s worth, I’ve seen this on macOS, I noticed Safari would just stop loading pages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after a few ticks on the blue progress bar. This wasn’t affecting other browsers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I recently discovered that turning off hide my IP address in the Safari settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fixed this. My guess,” writes Todd, is that Safari was looking up trackers in DNS, getting an address

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from my Pi hole, and then Apple’s relay servers were trying to connect to that private address and timing out. I have no idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if that theory is right. But if you go into Safari preferences on the Mac anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is in the privacy tab. There is hide IP address from trackers. And by turning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that off, which I wouldn’t generally recommend, but it did seem to fix That’s the problem for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So if you are one of the dozens of people afflicted by this issue, give that a whirl, if it helps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by WorkCheck, a new original podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from Atlassian, makers of teamwork software like Jira, Confluence, and Trello.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, our workplaces today are changing quickly, but which of these changes are actually going to serve us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco best? WorkCheck takes workplace practices, things like agile at scale, off-sites,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dogfooding, and they separate the hype from the helpful. In each episode, two Atlassians

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco debate how the practice should be applied, if at all. And Workcheck takes your most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pressing questions about the ways that we work together and hashes out the best arguments on either side, hosted by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Christine De La Rosa, the Ways of Working brand lead at Atlassian. And you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, it’s never been more important to think about this stuff. You know, a lot of us are staying remote. A lot of us are heading back to the office. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this season, they’re debating some wonderful questions. One episode they’ve done is about wearing pajamas on a Zoom call.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What about what do you wear on the bottom half? It’s out of the frame. You know, let’s let’s debate that a little bit. how it may be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco affecting your performance at work and what the history of dress codes can tell us about where work where is going next.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In another episode, they tackle the four day work week. So if you fantasize on Friday

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco afternoons about the luxury of a three day weekend, they actually debate this and dig into the potentials and pitfalls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of this four day work week schedule to generating buzz around the world and ask, is the grass really greener?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’s a wonderful podcast. Check this out. Go to work, go to whatever your podcast app is and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look for Work Check. That’s what it’s called. Work Check. It’s an Apple podcast, overcast, all the different apps that you might get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your podcasts in. Work Check. We will also include a link in the show notes so you can find it yourself there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But once again, it’s called Work Check by Atlassian. It’s a great new podcast examining these really cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco questions about the future and present of work. Thank you so much to WorkCheck for sponsoring our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show.

Pay Later risk for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey By now, pay later. Rob Sayer writes, without getting into the details of BNPL and credit cards,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the basic game Apple seems to be playing is that they have much less fraud risk. That’s why the rewards are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey higher for phone authenticated purchases. It’s a side effect of having good authentication functions, aside from all the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the podcast already mentioned. There’s also a more basic insurance or financial technology game here, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you poach the lowest risk customers in exchange for marginally better service. An iPhone is a good proxy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep, that’s the advantage Apple has. The same thing with CarPlay of like, you know, whatever it was, 79%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of customers saying they wouldn’t buy a car without CarPlay. It’s like, how is that possible? 79% of the public doesn’t have iPhones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why would they care about CarPlay? Ah, but 79% of new car buyers apparently do. So yeah, Apple’s got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John customers with money and it’s got a fairly good way to authenticate them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with all of its biometrics and Apple ID and security and everything. so they can afford to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John skim a little bit more off the top for their financial transactions.

Bitcode deprecation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then a little bit more on bitcode deprecation, Augie Fackler writes, I’ve been working on some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey LLVM stuff that requires adding functionality to LLVM IR. And one of the things that came up in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the process was forward compatibility of IR slash bitcode. As far as any of my mentors know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple’s the only LLVM user that cares about forward compatibility of IR. And during my work, I noticed that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nobody has done the work upstream in LLVM to keep forward compatibility tests complete since

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey LLVM 8 or 9, which is several releases ago. I believe 14 is the current release, with three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey releases a year. I wouldn’t be surprised if the seeming lack of community interest on the LLVM side

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey forced some hands at Apple to drop the use of Bitcode to ease LLVM upgrades going forward.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s one of those things we forgot to talk about, that LLVM is actually an open source project, and it’s not just Apple that gets to decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how things go with the Bitcode thing, because it’s a whole compiler infrastructure that’s under it. Now, you can’t tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whether this is, you know, which is the leading indicator and the trailing indicator. It could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be that there is less activity on the LLVM side because Apple lost interest in it and they were the major ones doing the contributions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to this open source project. And once Apple sort of put that project in the back burner, they just let it rot. On the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hand, it could be that Apple had been relying on the community to keep this up and the community doesn’t care about it. And Apple did, and you got this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disconnect and Apple wasn’t willing to invest what was required to keep up to date with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of these tests. And either way, it’s gone by the wayside. But it’s just to show that if you, one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the things that comes with using open source is if you’re not doing 100% of the development

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the features you care about, and the community decides that some feature you care about is not as important to them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have a decision to make. You either let go of that feature and take it out of your product, or you decide that you’re going to fully fund

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the development of it. And in this case, Apple has chosen to let it go by the wayside.

Passkeys and passwords

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey One of you put, probably John, in the show notes, a link from front of the show, Glenn Fleischman, why passkeys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will be simpler and more secure than passwords. And I read that earlier today and it’s a really good overview of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey exactly that. So I don’t know if you had more things to add, John, but this article is a pretty good summary if you were looking for one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, Glenn has a good way of explaining complicated topics. It’s a long article or whatever, but if you want to know more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it and you still don’t quite understand it, you can give Glenn’s article a try.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And speaking of passkeys, there are some questions from Janice Pukert. Apple appears to be very slow in adopting their own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sign-in with Apple solutions. Past keys appear to be the same. The dev portal looks like it’s stuck in the year 2000.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Authentication-wise, especially in the dev portal, you might think Apple would be willing to roll out these features to its more technologically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey adept users. Why do you think Apple is so weird about using their own stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The reason Apple is crappy about this is the same reason any big company is. There’s always dark corners of the company that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t get updated with the flagship features. And I think we’ve all experienced this, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wandering around what used to be called iTunes Connect or is now App Store Connect and the developer side and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John documentation system, you’ll stumble upon these corners of Apple’s web presence that are so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clearly haven’t been updated in years and years and they do get updated eventually just not as quickly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the more high profile part. So maybe iCloud.com is likely to look fancy and get new features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, but App Store Connect less so let’s say so. And why is you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, why is Apple slow about this? because any big company is slow about this. It’s very difficult to have entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John companies have like sort of the same priority of like, we’re gonna roll this new feature and it’s gonna roll out everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John across every single thing that we have on the web at the same time. That’s just not feasible in a company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the size of Apple. Obviously we wish they did a little bit better, but I think it pretty much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scales with like, how many people use this webpage? I bet a lot of people use apple.com and iCloud.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and very few people compared to that use App Store Connect and yeah, anyway, I guess developers are more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John important than the average person, so, but whatever. It’s, you know, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surprise me this is the case. That said, you know, I haven’t actually, I mean, the OS that fully

⏹️ ▶️ ^John supports Passcase, the various OSs are still in beta, right? So I wouldn’t expect Apple to be converting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of its products or services to use Passcase until, you know, Ventura

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is out, iOS 16 is out, iPad, until those things all release. And even then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe I’m just pessimistic, but I wasn’t expecting that on the day of release, suddenly I’ll be able to log into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developer portal or any Apple property using Passkeys. I don’t know who’s gonna go first, maybe Apple will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first, but I don’t think it’s gonna be on the day of release. So I’m still watching for if and when Passkeys

⏹️ ▶️ ^John start to come into my life. If we look at how long it took USB-C to finally become a thing that we could have some confidence

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, maybe a little while for Passkeys.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Too soon, John. Janice continues, the documents I read mentioned that most services will provide a password

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and passkey authentication feature. Password is there as a fallback. Doesn’t that kind of negate all of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey benefits of passkeys? We still have to generate, manage all the passwords.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Some discussion of this on Twitter. The upshot is like individual services and sites

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can decide what they want to do. Nothing about passkeys dictates that they must be the only way to sign in or that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to choose one or the other or you could have multiple, right? So it’s not, there’s no technological

⏹️ ▶️ ^John answer to this. It is a policy decision. I don’t know what the most common policy is gonna be. and I don’t even know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the best policy is gonna be. In some ways, especially during the transition, it may be better to have passkeys as a sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of convenient type thing and then sort of have passwords as a backup, but sort of lock those passwords

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down real hard, like so that you never really need to use them or send them and they can just be, you know, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you have some passwords in a password manager, even in iCloud Keychain or whatever, and they’re never actually extracted and sent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John across the internet, that’s still more secure, but it is kind of good to be there as a backup if there are bugs involving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John passkeys or if people don’t know how to use them yet there are some issues we haven’t discovered, or if some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John site wants to be forward-looking, they can decide when you quote unquote convert to Passkey, we get rid of your password

⏹️ ▶️ ^John login, you just use a Passkey. But there’s nothing inherent in any of these technologies or two-factor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or YubiKeys or anything that dictates that you have to use one or the other. Just like you have websites

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now where you can log in with lots of different methods, I think that will continue to be the case in each website, but we’ll just have to decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the policy they wanna use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is. I recently noticed the option to generate app-specific passwords on appleid.apple.com. The Apple document

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about this, we’ll put a link in the show notes, mentions as an example use case, quote, so that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app can access information like mail contacts and calendars that you store in iCloud, quote. Why would one want to do such

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a thing? The Apple ID is basically the key to anything. That seems super risky for the benefit it provides. That being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said, it appears one cannot log into appleid.apple.com with an app-specific password,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so maybe it’s not blanket access.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is yet one more authentication method when you’re listing all the different ways you can authenticate and log in and do stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this one’s kind of here for legacy support. If you have some kind of service that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John needs to be able to, let’s say you’re using Gmail and you want it to be able to check your iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^John email. Back in the day, what you could do is you could just tell Gmail your iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^John email address and password, and it would connect to the authenticated, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mail server and authenticate using the password you told it and pull your mail down. That’s obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not great because now Google and Gmail have your password somewhere stored, hopefully securely. But when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple rolled out two-factor stuff, remember when they had two-step and two-factor? That

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} wasn’t confusing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, when Apple rolled out two-factor, Google didn’t change its system and Google’s thing had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no idea about two-factor. So all of a sudden, Google couldn’t check your mail anymore because it just had your username and your password, but it would try to log

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in with them and then it would get bounced off the two-factor prompt and you would never see that because it’s all happening behind the scenes, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it didn’t know how to handle that. There are all standards built around avoiding this issue, like OAuth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. But another way that you can deal with this, if you have some kind of service that doesn’t have a fancier,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more modern authentication method, it only accepts username and password, is you can make what Apple calls

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an app-specific password, which is a special password that they show you one time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they say, here it is. Take it and write it down somewhere, or copy it, or whatever. We’re never going to show it to you again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then it disappears forever. And you just give that password to Gmail. and it is not your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John password to your account. It is just a password, you would hope, that just lets Gmail get your email

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and doesn’t let it do anything else. GitHub has similar things where you can choose the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John various roles and permissions you want it to have. So it’s a special purpose password that you give a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John name like, this is so Gmail can check my iCloud mail. And the only thing in the entire internet that has that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John password is Gmail. And the only things hopefully it lets you do are very limited things that you want Gmail to be able to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if it is ever compromised or Gmail ever goes rogue, you can revoke that one password and stop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Gmail from using it anymore. This is different than if Gmail had your real password or if you had done some sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of authentication where it goes through the two-factor thing because then it would have access to your entire account and there’d be no way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to revoke it without changing your whole password, which could mess up a bunch of other stuff. So that’s why app-specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^John passwords exist. They are useful, they have a function in this weird password world we live in, especially in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John age where most good systems require more than just a username and a password to log in, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are lots of old things around that only understand how to use a username and a password. So to let them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John continue to work and to try to limit them to not have as many permissions as you want and to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John able to individually revoke them, that’s why I have specific passwords work. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the knowledge base

⏹️ ▶️ ^John article from Apple tries to explain them.

Hardware vs. software controls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on, stateful hardware controls versus software controls. So, where did this come up? This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey started with the conversation about the Rivian and I think it was the wipers. We talked about a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of other things that have this kind of disconnection between what does the software think the state of the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is and what is the hardware showing the state of the world is. So, we had several different pieces of feedback about this. Jordan McEwen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey writes, I thoroughly enjoyed your discussion about how knobs no longer inform state and cars. This has been an idea that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has been explored thoroughly in the live music soundboard arena for many years. The high-end solution is motorized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey faders. As you can see in the video that we’ll link in the show notes, you can do very sophisticated programming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the faders or just mess around. And so there’s a link where you see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey these faders doing dances and the wave and things like that. So it’s like a bunch of vertical dials

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on a soundboard that are doing all sorts of silly things. It’s kind of fun. So we’ll put that link in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show notes. Yeah, have you ever seen a video of an old-style soundboard in a recording studio? It’s got all these sliders,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a giant dashboard with just dozens and dozens of sliders. all physical controls, you know, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slide them up and down, right? And the way they dealt with it is sort of the way that we were talking about that, or whatever that was, Buick or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dealt with it is now that their software control, they just motorized the fader. So if you change a value in software,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fader literally moves like the physical control literally moves. So very often you’ll see these videos of the faders

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all going up together, down together, going in a sine wave when you turn the system on or doing neat stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that is one solution. And if you have a lot of money, you want to have physical controls and software control at the same time. Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keep them in sync. No problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No worries. You just need a whole bunch of motors. All right. And then Samuel Cohen writes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I thought you might find it interesting to see how the same challenges are manifesting in the slowly modernizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey world of guitar amplifiers. I have two digital modeling amps with radically different approaches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to their UI. And they were kind enough to include a video where they walked through this exact thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And we’ll put a link in the show notes and add about, what is it? Was that a little over two minutes in?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s an example of two and a quarter minutes in, there’s an example of a screen on one of the amps clearly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just violently disagreeing with one of the knobs on the same amp, and that’s kind of funny to see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The great thing is what they put on the screen are tiny pictures of knobs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} with indicators where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the knobs are, but then right next to the screen with the picture of knobs are the actual knobs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} But the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actual knob, now this is a case with like a guitar amp, like where you don’t have the money that they have for like a professional recording

⏹️ ▶️ ^John studio to motorize everything, because they could have motorized the knobs, right? but you’re trying to sell a guitar amp and you can’t make it like a $10,000 guitar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amp. You wanna have cheap guitar amps for people too, but you also want software control. So they put pictures of knobs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the screen next to the physical knobs because they still wanna have physical knobs because you want this one to go to 11 or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And with indicators on them, they’re not just knobs that spin together, they’re knobs with indicators. They have a beginning and an end, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way they dealt with this, one of the amps had like lights on them to sort of use a different method, sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like software controlled knobs. But the second one, the way they dealt with it is just plain old physical controlled knobs and a screen that can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conflict. But if they conflict, if you touch one of the knobs and move it anywhere in either direction, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software immediately switches to match the knob, right? So you can change it in software and the knobs don’t move and then the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is sort of in control. But the second you touch one of the physical knobs, that immediately tells

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the software, oh, forget what you had before, now take the knob thing. And that’s a reasonable compromise if you’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to save money because the worst thing you want to happen is you’re playing music and you need to make an adjustment real quick. It’s much easier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to just, you know, grab a knob and twist it, right? And you want that knob to say, look, if I turn this knob, I don’t care what the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says, I’m turning the knob, the knob should win. But if you did some careful setup and software, you want that to win

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as well until you touch the knob. So not an ideal solution, but it’s a way to, it’s a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have both systems without breaking the bank on motorized knobs that let’s face it, probably someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would probably break anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Dave Roanhorst writes, one contributing factor to the crash of Air France flight

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 447 was the lack of physical indication of the control stick on the Airbus A330 cockpit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which acts like the Rivian stalk switch, which, you know, snapping back to the center after an input is given.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Thus, the other pilots were not aware that the co-pilot was continuing to put in the wrong input. He was pitching the nose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up while the position of the stick indicated a neutral input. Had the stick stayed in the pitched up position

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or location, it would have been clear what the input was being given. Furthermore, if both the co-pilots

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and the pilot’s stick represented the current state of input, it would have been more obvious to everyone involved. And this was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a really, really terrible accident that happened just a couple of years back, or probably a few years at this point. And I remember this being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a thing, and I remember everyone had a fit about the way Airbus cockpits work on account of this. And I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any real changes were made. I would assume some sort of change was made. But I still think the Airbus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cockpits are largely the same. I don’t know if either of you know. Sorry, I don’t know. That’s fine. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey somebody else brought up something I should have brought up myself. Anton Yelchin’s death back in 2016. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is the young guy who played Chekhov in the Star truck reboot and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reading from an NBC News article, the actor was pinned against a gate by what sources told

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey NBC News was one of the Jeeps involved in the safety recall. The vehicle was a 2015 Jeep Grand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Cherokee, an SUV recently recalled because of problems with its electronic shifter. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles recalled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey three different models and a total of 1.1 million vehicles in April following an investigation by the National Highway

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Traffic Safety Administration. The agency found the shifter could confuse motors by not giving clear feedback

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as to what gear the automatic transmission was in. If I recall correctly, and I might have this wrong, this was one of the first like dial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey transmissions. And so-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was like a knob, kind of like the yoke on the Airbus thing, where like it would just return to middle. No matter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are ones like this, they’re more like little switchy things, but it looked a lot like a PRNDL, you know, move the thing. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing is this one, you would press it, and when you let go, it would just spring back to middle, just like the Rivian stock and just like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controls on the Airbus. And in that case, if you look at it, there’s no clear indication

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whether the car is in drive, reverse, or whatever, because it’s always just vertical, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So yeah, it is an anti-pattern with like, I don’t want to say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having wiper controls that spring back to middle is gonna kill somebody, right? But like this whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing about having hardware that is not stateful anymore when previously it used to be can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually have life and death consequences in big ways and small. So it is something worth considering when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John designing car interiors because cars are very big, heavy things that can actually kill people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t realize it was one of the stock ones. And as soon as you described it, what you’re basically describing is every BMW

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey automatic that I’ve seen for the last several years. And almost all of them use the ZF8

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey speed, which is a transmission that I actually really like, despite being a pure blood automatic. And sure enough,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Jeep Grand Cherokee from the 2014 through 2022 model years used a ZF8 speed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I don’t have a picture in the Wikipedia entry that I put in the show notes. I don’t have a picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the gear shift that I typically see. But the gear shift that I saw on BMWs was almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey identical to the one that the Alfa Romeos I tested had. I mean, maybe it was lightly different,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it looked almost identical. So.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s not the transmission, to be clear. It’s not the transmission’s fault, because it’s an electronically controlled transmission. It’s fine. It’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controls that you hook up to the wires that tell the transmission what gear to be in. Because you can do those controls in lots of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different ways. And I think, in this particular case with the car thing, the worst combination is a control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that looks like a mechanical thing, but isn’t. I think more of the modern

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones don’t look anything like old transmissions. Like there’s no expectation that you can look at them and see like a lever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shoved in one position or another to give you some reassurance about what gear it’s in. If you make it look like the old

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind where you could see where the lever is and know what gear it’s in, people are going to assume that’s how it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worked. But if you make it look totally different, no one will look into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John console or dashboard of your car and expect to be able to tell what it’s in. Very often you can’t tell what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s in because they just have a bunch of buttons. And unless the car is on and something lights up and says

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a D or an R, there’s no expectation that you know what gear it’s in. So you’re not lulled into a false

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sense of confidence. I think that is the problem in particular with these first set of electronically controlled transmissions, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing that you touch with your hand look just like the old style, but they worked nothing like it.

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Lockdown Mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Breaking news, lockdown mode is a thing that is coming in iOS 16.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple put up a newsroom release today. We had not heard about this previously, right? We had heard about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the like, I don’t want this person to know anything about me. What was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} that? Right, the safety check, I believe. That,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yes. Thank you. Thank you. But lockdown mode, I believe, is brand new. So reading from their press release,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple’s previewing a groundbreaking security capability that offers specialized additional protection to users who may be at risk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of highly targeted cyber attacks from private companies developing state-sponsored mercenary spyware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple’s also providing details of its $10 million grant to bolster research exposing such threats. At launch, Lockdown

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mode includes the following protections. For messages, most message attachment types other than images are blocked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Some features like link previews are disabled. For web browsing, certain complex web technologies like just-in-time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey JavaScript compilation are are disabled unless the user excludes a trusted site from lockdown mode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple services, incoming invitations and service requests, including FaceTime calls, are blocked if the user has not previously sent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the initiator a call or request. Wired connections with a computer or accessory are blocked when the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is locked. I actually thought that was true already, to be honest with you, but I guess not. Configuration profiles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cannot be installed, and the device cannot enroll in mobile device management while lockdown mode is turned on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it says Apple will continue to strengthen lockdown mode and add new protections to it over time. We don’t have it in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey show notes, so I’m gonna have to stall as I dig up the quote, but I also noticed that they said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that, Apple’s also making a $10 million grant in addition to any damages awarded from the lawsuit filed against

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey NSO Group to support organizations that investigate, expose, and prevent highly targeted cyber attacks, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey those created by private companies developing state-sponsored mercenary spyware. So they’re saying if they win their lawsuit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey against NSO Group, all the money that NSO Group is gonna pay them is going into this fund

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as pretty much a big you back to NSO group. So I thought that was quite funny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and not a bad idea. Yeah, that’s delightful. It is. It’s kind of juvenile,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I’m here for it. But anyways, this lockdown thing, they say in the post, like, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not for normal people. It is an extreme, this is reading from it, an extreme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey optional protection for the very small number of users who face grave targeted threats to their digital security.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what they’re basically saying is, if you’re like a journalist in certain countries, maybe America, not too long,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you’re perhaps a particular celebrity or a person in government, then this might be for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you. But for the three of us, not worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, is it not? So when you look at the actual list of protections,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I kind of like this. And I think the only thing that I think would really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get in my way was that it said that you basically can’t participate in shared albums and photos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Other than that, the rest of this stuff kind of sounds like I would actually turn this on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you’d be annoyed about websites going slower because the JIT is disabled in JavaScript. And I think the messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing would be really annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How much slower could it be?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I want to bring this up again because we talked about it last time and it’s just good to keep in people’s minds if you’re not used to thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it this way because a lot of people have kind of, very sort of binary thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on security. Security is always a trade-off. between security and convenience, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this is giving you a different place on that continuum. You are sacrificing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some convenience in exchange for some additional security. The difficulty with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of these things where you’re asking people to give up convenience is it’s very easy for people to get frustrated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by just one aspect of this and say, well, I tried it, but this one part of it annoyed me, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because I tried to do a thing and I realized the reason I couldn’t do it because I was in lockdown mode, I’m tired of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tapping a second time to get through to a link to find out what it is I like the better when I could see them in line

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people will Go back on a higher security setting very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quickly for the smallest inconvenience But all security policies are a trade-off between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John security and convenience And so having a mode that is farther up the line for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who really really need it is good But to Marco’s point you look at this and you kind of wish you could pick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and choose Well, I would like that one, but this one would annoy me, but I like that one, but you know, there was some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John debate on Twitter when this came out between some people saying, shouldn’t this just be for everybody? Like, why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t everybody want this? And people were saying, well, but I would find it inconvenient, but what about this? And it’s like, you can look at some of these things and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, you know, like, should there be two tiers of security? Like, why isn’t this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why shouldn’t everybody need this? Because, you know, there’s a debate of whether, you know, who is an extra threat,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? You know, it’s only important when a politician gets hacked, but everybody is an equal threat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if some root kid hack is out there and script kiddies are running it all over the place or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it is true that people have different assessments of like, what are the consequences of my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone getting hosed? If you are an important person in government or a journalist in a hostile

⏹️ ▶️ ^John environment, the consequences could be life and death. Whereas if you’re just a regular citizen and someone hacks your phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the consequences is you have to like cancel a bunch of credit cards and maybe you lose a little bit of money or whatever, right? And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the probability, who’s targeting you? You can use the big sky theory where there’s a zero day hack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out there, but there’s also millions of possible victims and you’re just one of those millions versus you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being a head of state and you know that there are entire countries focusing on you like a laser beam all the time trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get in. So I think it is appropriate to have, to give people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different levels of security based on how much convenience they’re willing to give up. And lockdown mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a step in that direction. But I think, we will be able to look at the list of things that lockdown

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mode does and says, Some of these should probably graduate to be the defaults, but it’s not clear which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones quite yet, right? Now, obviously doing this doesn’t mean Apple is ignoring security

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for regular users. Apple is constantly doing tons of things for security. You know, almost everything you see here, listed messages,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John web browsing, all of Apple services, they’re constantly doing things to improve the security of all of that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That, you know, what used to be possible with wired connections to your phones versus what is now, to Casey’s point, he thought this was already the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case because they have locked down the wired connections. This is just one step up from what is the default for everybody. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s a move in the right direction. But I think I would like to see some of these things graduate to be the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John defaults as long as we can get the convenience security trade off correctly balanced for normal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Out of curiosity, as just a little experiment, and this might not be very interesting, but if you guys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have your phones handy, would you go into settings, general VPN and device

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey management. And let me know if, you don’t have to be specific about what they are, but do you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey configuration profiles there?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, I do not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay. So for me, I have Charles proxy, which is, you know, so I can sniff network traffic,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I do very rarely, but I do from time to time. And Fastmail offers you, and I think you can configure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it manually, but it offers a way to just have everything pretty much automatically configured by way of downloading a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey profile. So that’s the two that I have. Marco, if you’re willing to share, I’d love to hear what you have there. If you would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rather, you know, for OPSEC reasons, not share, that’s totally fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it’s super boring. I have the FastMail one for the same reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on past phones configured them with the iMap and it’s in TP passwords and everything. You can still do that, but the configuration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco profile is just a faster way to do that. And I also have the iOS 16 beta profile from Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No. So super boring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because the reason I bring that up is because I thought there was a time that fonts came in as configuration profiles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can be done. I don’t think that has to be done that way anymore, but that is a way they could be done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, well, I was just curious Because I feel like in the past I have had more things here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than simply the two that I have now. I might be thinking of MDM, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I had work email on my phone and maybe MDM shows up there. I’m talking a bit outside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my comfort zone now. But I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} curious.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was going to say, I kind of hope not. Like, you shouldn’t have a lot of these things. I mean, the thing is, a lot of people do. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh, God. So somebody else who lives in my house

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has a highly customized home screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh my.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the way this was achieved was in part with a configuration profile.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What? And when I saw that, I was like, oh no. What is going on here? And I looked into it, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s fairly innocuous, but it’s something that shouldn’t be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s why seeing this on the list of, oh, lockdown mode doesn’t allow MDM profiles. and you’re like, is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a big problem or whatever? As we discussed on past shows, these MDM profiles give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John abilities to do things that you can’t really do any other way. And tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of things are constantly throwing come-ons at regular people to say, you want this cool thing on your phone? Just install

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this profile, right? And it’s the thing you should really talk to your kids about. If anything ever asks you, just install this profile

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or do this thing. Like, say no. Now it doesn’t mean they’re all scams because they legitimately give you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John abilities to do things that you couldn’t do otherwise or they would be more cumbersome to do. That’s why things are always prompting you to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do them. And I think it should be a signal to Apple for like the legitimate uses that people are using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MDM profiles for, like build clean hooks into the OS to do that so people can stop doing that. But that’s why they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just blanking this out because if you’re gonna social engineer your way into someone’s phone, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Getting them to install one of these MDM profiles, either like, you know, willingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John install it by convincing them, hey, you need this to play this cool game, or getting them to accidentally install it by tapping a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of messages and exploiting a thing or whatever, it’s a very common vector. And so this, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously the solution is not just banning them entirely because you actually need them for enterprise stuff or whatever, but this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a weak spot in iOS. And the lockdown solution is, no, you just can’t have any of those, that you can’t install

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them, period, right? It doesn’t say you can’t have them, it just says you can’t install a new one. And honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s probably the correct default setting for everybody. This is one of those things that I think should be the default for everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John By default, no one has any profiles installed, but it’s really easy to encounter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something on the internet that asks you to install it and that you want to do it. You want to install it because you just want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do the thing, right? And there needs to be better protections here. This is kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an area of ongoing work, let’s say, in iOS security.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Whenever I see stuff like this, I’m always like, all these very popular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps that require a configuration profile for some feature. And it’s like, I’m always surprised it’s allowed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by Apple. It always seems like, like the potential for problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there is quite high. Now I think Apple’s argument there would be like, well, App Store can review it and see what it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything. And and the problem is that I’m sure that applies to in the same way that every other app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco store rule applies. Yeah, maybe they review some of them some of the time, but a lot of stuff still can get through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or things can be changed after the fact or a lot of stuff can just slip by a reviewer here and there or the rules

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aren’t applied evenly. Like so, you know, App Review is not the main security there. And so installing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a configuration profile, in many cases they’re allowed to bypass

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other security measures on the phone that you expect to be there. Apple does a pretty good job of keeping this reasonable under control,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that’s another level of security. It’s like an app asking you for your root password on your Mac. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whenever it pops up that dialogue and it’s like, hey, we need your root password to install something, you’re like, you should think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, why? Why do you need my root password to install something for this like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco calculator app? Like this, this probably is not a legitimate request, right? The same thing should apply

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to configuration profiles on your phone, like treat it like it’s your system root password. Like, you know, do I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need to give this app root access? And you know, it isn’t quite the same thing technically, but it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it should be considered in the same ballpark of suspicion and conservatism.

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M2 MBP thermals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, there have been a lot of fuffles about and issues with regard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to this M2 MacBook Pro, my favorite computer ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But Max Tech, a YouTube channel that we’ve brought up several times in the past, they did an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey extreme stress test and they exported 8K RAW to 4K

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey HEVC, trying to max out both CPU and the GPU, and they found that the M1 MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pro was GPU limited, that’s the M1, mind you, and did not throttle. And the fans did not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hit maximum RPM. The M2 hit 108 degrees Celsius

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with the fans at maximum RPM and then had to thermally throttle to get things back under control.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So in other words, the fans weren’t enough to cool the processor down, and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey processor couldn’t be that hot. So the only choice it had was to choose to operate more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slowly until it was able to cool itself down. And then it would say, oh, I’m cool now. Let me ramp back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up and operate fast again. And then the fans scream, and then it gets too hot, then it cools back down,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it slows down, it cools back down, this whole thing just starts again. And so Max Tech found that the M2 was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey still 10% faster than the M1 MacBook Pro. And without thermal throttling,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the M2 GPU can be up to 35% faster, and the M2 CPU can be up to 18% faster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But apparently the thermals on the inside of this thing are not good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Before we get to some more opinions on that, just to lay out what was put in this video, if you watch it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see the thing, they’re picking an extreme test. Like they’re trying to find something that will, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John light up every part of the system on a chip at the same time, which is hard to do in regular workloads, right? But apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they did find one and, you know, you could watch it, you can watch their results. They have these tools that they’re measuring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the clock speed and you can watch the clock speeds just drop in half or a quarter, like really hard thermal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John throttling, with the fans going at max, right? But despite all of that, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still being 10% faster. It’s like, well, that’s not great, but your M2 was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still faster and you were trying to find an extreme workload that most normal people aren’t gonna have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So anyway, take that for what it’s worth. But then there’s some debate about this result because some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people have not been able to reproduce it, in particular Gary from the Everyday Dad YouTube channel tried to do the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same test with an M2 MacBook Pro rendering 8K Canon RAW footage for 15 minutes straight.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So he said, no fans, no high temps, no anything. So I think the jury is still out on this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What I think about it is, if it’s thermal throttling and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting super hot, but it’s still faster, that’s not ideal and a better cooling system would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better. But one of the things we know about the M2 MacBook Pro is it’s just the old computer. Like to the point where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they put stickers over the boxes of the old computer right before you make new boxes. It’s the old

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer, it’s the old case, it’s the old single fan cooling solution. I mean, it’s not exactly the same cooling solution,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s like, it’s not, they didn’t completely redesign this. The form factor is the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the innards are very similar. And on this particular M2 MacBook Pro that Max Tech

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was testing, apparently that cooling solution was not adequate when everything is maxed out. And,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, we’ll see in the coming days and weeks if people can reproduce this result, if it’s widespread, if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John specific to the one test that they were doing, or if other people can reproduce it. But I was kind of amazed that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even with massive thermal throttling and incredibly high temperatures, it was still faster. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s pretty weird. Yeah, we’ll keep an eye on this. If you’re looking for yet another reason not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy this computer, here’s one. And to Marco’s point from several shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back, what about the air? The air doesn’t even have a fan and it’s got the same chip in it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is that gonna thermal throttle and how badly? Now, obviously with the air, it’s less important because no one is buying the Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for maximum CPU performance. You want it to be thin and lightweight and silent and hopefully cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And maybe that’s not the best machine for you to run your 8K raw renders

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on all the time, right? Maybe get an actual MacBook Pro for those purposes. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if this modified five nanometer, a slightly bigger, slightly hotter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John M2 does have thermal limits even with a fan on it, what is it gonna be like with no fan? I guess we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all find out when we get our MacBook Airs. And I’m still ordering mine day one because my son is gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be using it as a glorified terminal emulator or running

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google Docs in Chrome or not rendering 8K raw footage. So I think for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John normal uses, it will continue to be difficult to make these things hot and make them make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any noise just because it’s a very cool system on a chip. We kind of know the power draw that it pulls

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s around 20, 25, 30 watts, which is within a reasonable envelope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for fanless cooling. And it’s gonna be much lower than that in day-to-day

⏹️ ▶️ ^John usage. Actually, I should find this link for the notes. There was a hardware unboxed review that also did a comprehensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John review comparing the M2 MacBook Pro to Intel laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this is a very Windows-centric channel, so keep that in mind. They’re showing this to the audience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In fact, they had a segment that said, but what about macOS? Well, a survey of our listeners shows that 80%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanna use Windows. like, all right, well, you’re a Windows, that makes perfect sense, right? If you want a Windows laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the person was actually kind of disappointed that there wasn’t a better way to run Windows on it. So I feel that, right? But the important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spec for where this is concerned is, they were showing how little power the M2 uses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you’re doing single core tasks. It’s so incredibly energy efficient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you just are using one core, like for non-paralyzable workloads. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most of the time, when you’re just putting around or your computer is scrolling a web page or typing in Microsoft Word, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not gonna be lighting up all the cores or all the GPUs doing anything. And a single core blipping on for a second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to handle what you’re doing is mostly what it’s doing. And you compare that to the power usage of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the competitive spec wise Intel things, and they’re using like 20, 30

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Watts when a single core is going and the M2 is using eight Watts, right? So, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, the M2 still has a huge lead when it comes to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John efficiency, performance for watt, and in particular, performance when it is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plugged into the wall, because a lot of these Intel laptops, to get the maximum performance to even be competitive with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the M2, they need to be plugged in, and as soon as you unplug them, they all ramp down in speed, right? So I still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think the M2 SoC is pretty good, and even in the M2 MacBook Pro, it’s still head

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and shoulders above the competition, it’s just that case is old, there’s no mag safe, it’s got a touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bar and the cooling solution may or may not be inadequate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, what I’m mostly curious to see here, you know, first of all, was this just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fluke? You know, you mentioned like people have trouble reproducing it. That’s, in my opinion, a good sign. That means maybe this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is just a fluke. But what we need to see when we get the new reviews of the MacBook Air and.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Honestly, if preorders are opening up in two days, we should get the reviews tomorrow. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and as this episode is released today, you know, Thursday morning,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as I’m editing this episode, chances are the press reviews will probably drop if there were press reviews on the regular schedule for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this product. So we’ll see, maybe, I don’t know if any of the press will do this kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of testing, who got review units, who knows. But what we need to see when we actually get these things in people’s hands

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the Air is, is it actually pulling 30 watts total package of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power and trying to cool that passively? Because that’s quite a large thermal load, I think, to try to cool passively.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you compare the total package power to previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fanless laptops. I think that’s significantly more than them. So we’ll see. Maybe I’m wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I think that seems like a lot. There’s also the potential that maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the M2 in the MacBook Air will be clocked lower or will have different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thermal maximums before it throttles its speed down compared to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco models with fans. We don’t know. until now, all the M1 products,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as far as I know, seem to be all clocked the same, or at least very, very close to the same.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} They all seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to- And apparently, they also have the same fan curves from the testing on the Studio. Like, you would have think they’d be tuned differently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the bigger cooling solution, but like, no matter what you did do with the fans would stay at the same RPM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the Mac Studio. It seemed like, at least on the initial reviews, that the fan curves of all these things, that the clocks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were the same, and the fan curves were the same.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and so you could assume that M1 meant M1, and it meant the same thing everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It had the same performance everywhere, it had the same rough thermal characteristics everywhere. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know if that’s always gonna be the case with Apple’s M-series chips. They could theoretically clock the air lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they had to for cooling. Something else to consider is that the M2 is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco based on the TSMC 5 nanometer process still. So they made the whole chip

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bigger. It’s a larger die, and made on the same process, So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s probably going to run hotter than the M1. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the exact same process. It’s the modified process that does give a slight performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John per watt savings over. That’s what I’m saying, like percentage wise. It got like X percent bigger and the new process is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Y percent more energy efficient. And I think the percentages are close to each other. It got like maybe 10 or 15% bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and maybe it’s like nine or 10% lower power. Like- That’s true. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not outside the bounds, but you know, the expectation is that this would use more power and be hotter because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is bigger. And it is, I think it is bigger more than the, the slightly modified five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nanometer process makes, you know, makes up for it. But like the thing to remember with this, and the reason that people have trouble reproducing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is, it’s not just a CPU, it’s a system on a chip. And to make every part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that SOC do work at the same time is actually pretty challenging. You can’t, if you’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna do a handbrake render, you’re not lighting up the whole chip. Well, I’m gonna play a game. You’re probably not lighting up the whole chip. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually difficult to do that because you gotta get all the GPU cars and all the CPU cars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and there are a bunch of ancillary units like that you could probably try to do stuff with the neural engine, where it’s difficult to actually make all that happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at once. So although the maximum possible sort of heat generating potential

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is always there, it’s not an artificial workload, but it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re not gonna stumble into doing it. You’re not gonna stumble into doing it by browsing the web, okay?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, unless you’re using Chrome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I learned like, there was one time where as part of an experiment, I trained a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco large ML model on my 16-inch MacBook Pro. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, and running this huge, like, you know, core ML training thing on this huge dataset

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was the only time I have ever heard the fan on the 16-inch spin-off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, I do all my heavy developer stuff. I do all my, you know, hobbyist, you know, photo and video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff here and there. I have never heard the fan any other time, except

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco after at least a half hour of maxing out who knows what different kinds of units on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this chip doing ML training, which was, you know, all the CPU cores, probably all the GPU cores,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possibly the neural engine, God knows what it was doing. It was a lot. And I barely heard the fans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then. So yeah, I think that’s a good point to take, John, that chances are in regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco workloads, you won’t see this. But what remains to be seen once we get the M2 MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Air in people’s hands is, are the thermals weirder or worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or more limited in some way than the outgoing model? This is gonna be the first one that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco designed from the start to be fanless, with the exception of the old 12-inch, sorry Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M1 MacBook Air previously was one of these kind of half-assed changes to the case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the sense that there was no physical change, They just kind of swapped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Intel guts for the M1 guts. So there was probably not much of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thermal consideration there to run this thing fanless. Whereas now the new M2 MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the first MacBook Air physical case design that was designed from the start, presumably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be fanless. So we’ll see what it can do and how it behaves. You know, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco learned at the last one, somebody wrote in, I forget how we learned this, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can’t just use the entire metal bottom of the laptop as the heatsink

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because there are certain standards for how hot a laptop can get in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certain countries and everything for like safety and health and stuff. And so the bottom of the laptop can’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like super, super hot. And so you can’t just like bond the chip to the case and call

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it a day. We’ll see what they actually did. I’m very curious to see the tear down to this thing and see how it works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and then see the benchmarking and see the limitations of it. And honestly, part of the reason I want to play with one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is just to figure this out myself to see like what is it like to use it? Because I use the M1 Air so much,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I loved it so much, and I want to know like how hot does it get in use? How do I ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see it throttle? Do you know, can I make it throttle by doing something that’s, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for example, like only stressing the CPU cores, but not the GPU cores? Stuff like that. That’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of stuff I want to find out. What I suspect, based on that 29 watt thermal peak that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco test video had, what I suspect is that you actually can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make the M2 throttle because it seems like Apple is allowing it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to run hotter at peak performance. Whereas the M1, it seemed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like nothing you could do would make it throttle. With the fan models, the non-fan models,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you could get a throttle a little bit more easily, but it was hard still. But if the M2, if they’re allowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to have a higher thermal limit in terms of wattage used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before they start capping it, then you will have these things in extreme cases. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, I hope still, that the common case is still gonna be very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cool and reasonable. And time will tell.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and letting it sort of get real hot and go real fast is actually usually a good move in laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you don’t always have sustained loads. You want it to be able to go real fast for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a second or two, even a minute or two, so it can get the thing done and go back to being idle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if you need to be able to do a sustained workload, then throttling and clocking down is not great. But even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the tests, even in the Max Tech’s test, it was still faster. It was constantly bouncing up against the limiter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going, oh, I’m too hot, and clock down, or I’m cool now, I’m too hot. It goes up and down and up and down. You don’t want it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to operate that way. You want it to be steady. But the bottom line is if the job gets done faster,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, then that’s still better. You know, but as Max Tech pointed out, if it didn’t throttle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would be even faster. You know, the GPU would be 35% faster and CPU would be 18% faster. Instead of just the 10% faster, it got bouncing off the heat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John limiter. I would imagine that you’ll be able to throttle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, heat throttle the MacBook Air as well. But the slim fanless computer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, that’s the one I feel like throttling is the most excusable. The M2 MacBook Pro, that’s supposed to offer sustained

⏹️ ▶️ ^John performance, it feels like it should have a better cooling system, especially since it’s not like, you know, a 96 watt,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, system in there. It’s only going to a max of 30 watts. You should be able to cool 30 watts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a laptop. I mean, just look at some of the past Intel laptops, you know, you just need a better cooling solution so that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it can run sustained on this workload of this 8K raw export for 30 minutes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at a time without throttling. I think that is a reasonable thing for something in the MacBook Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line. And I think that’s something they achieved with most of the M1 MacBook Pro models with the M1 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and M1 Max, and obviously with the M1 Ultra in the Mac Studio with its noisy but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apparently good at cooling fans. So we’ll see. I’m not sure what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of stress tests I’ll do on my son’s M2 MacBook Air, because I don’t think he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ever gonna do anything like that, but I guess maybe I’ll run Xcode and see if I can at least get the CPU cores to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crank up a little bit. But honestly, I don’t even know what I would use other than like trying to run Geekbench

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or using Cinema 4D or whatever the, I have a bunch of those benchmark apps or whatever, but most of those do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not actually stress all the things at once. They usually focus either mostly on GPU or mostly on CPU. It’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard to do useful work stressing all the parts at once.

System Settings: Beta 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, John, take me on a tour of system settings and venture a beta three, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Beta three just came out today. I was quickly able to install it and look at some stuff. Of course, I dove into system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John settings to see how that’s going. It seems slightly less buggy than before. I didn’t get any items duplicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the sidebar. I did still get a little red badge that I couldn’t make disappear. This time, I had no idea where it was. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you look at the screenshot in our notes here, you’ll see where it has a red badge with a number one in it next to general. If you click on general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s nothing in there with the badge. You can never make it go away. Anyway. Nice, bugs it, whatever, beta three.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I also went over to the trackpad thing, which is something that Cren Frederi talked about on the talk show live, saying, oh, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old one had those cool videos and the new one is boring. So we have something else in mind here. Well, this is what’s in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John beta three. I don’t know if this is what he was talking about or a step along the way, but what they have now are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you click on each one of the things that you can do, like zooming in or out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or scrolling or smart zoom or rotate, it has two boxes above

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. One of them shows a little, you know, diagram of a track pad with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two dots on it. If you’ve ever used a simulator, the Iowa simulator, kind of the same way you see those two dots that are supposed to represent basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the contact patches of your finger. That’s an animation. It shows the two dots and it shows them like for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pinch to zoom. It shows the two dots close to each other and it shows the two dots spreading apart on the track pad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then to the right of that is a sort of stylized abstract representation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a screen. Like it’s got a little dock at the bottom, but instead of app icons, it’s just got colored dots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s got a stylized window with some blank tiles. It’s kind of like preview with like little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John squares in the sidebar or whatever and the image it’s showing is two circles. And as those two dots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that represent your fingers on trackpads spread apart, the two circles in the window zoom in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So it’s basically doing the same thing as the old thing where before I used to show you a video of some humans actual

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hands swiping around on the touchpad. This is showing you the touchpad over here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a, you know, sort of a road sign abstraction of the screen over there saying, when you do this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the trackpad, this happens in the app. I think it’s a pretty clever solution, avoiding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the having to put videos in there and everything. But I do wonder if people are gonna look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at that and have any idea what it is that they’re looking at. Like, I know what it is, because I know what it’s supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be. I already know how it works. I already know the answer. So, oh, that’s a trackpad, and that’s where your fingers are touching. That’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obvious. If someone else sees this, they’re like, there’s these two balls floating in a box and then there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something else happening. I’m not sure it is better at communicating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the ideas that it’s trying to communicate than seeing a human’s hand on the trackpad because people recognize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John human hands pretty well and they recognize, oh, those human hands are touching something that looks like the trackpad that’s on the laptop that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sitting in front of right now. I recognize that. And then seeing what’s going on on the screen, having to use like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an abstraction. And then finally, both these things are pretty small. Like the little area

⏹️ ▶️ ^John showing the trackpad is pretty small because it’s like they’re side by side in this very narrow window that you still can’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any wider. Some people are asking like, why would you ever want the system settings window to be wider? There’s lots of cases,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s one. You can make those animations a little bit bigger than they are, right? Sometimes the labels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are really long, anyway. So we’re making progress. I didn’t go through every single one of the things, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they look slightly better than they did before. It’s still dark, dingy, dark gray and gray. The switches are still too small.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s still not particularly readable or nice looking, but it definitely looks better than it did in the last beta. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a low bar. It is a very, very low bar. It’s true, it is. But you know, betas march along,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and this is one thing that they said they were gonna change, and so here you go. Trackpad is not as dire as it was, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I am not convinced that this is an upgrade over what came before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This still, the whole panel looks like, have you ever come across, having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco children during the digital age, have you ever come across these YouTube videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are made for kids that seem procedurally generated with like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really simple animated shapes and stuff. You seen these? This, like the system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco settings look in Ventura, it looks like it was designed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by those people slash algorithms. It makes web apps and electron apps look like great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco design by comparison.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do see a little bit of a human touch in the left hand bar. Like the way they organize things in system preference has always been scatter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shot and now they’re adopting the iOS model, which is, it’s clear that a human arranged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these, but what the human was thinking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} not entirely clear. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know when you scroll through, people are more familiar with their phones. You go to settings on your iPhone, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they kind of put important stuff up top, but I can never remember, is the app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I’m trying to find settings for, is it one of those apps that Apple thinks is so important that it doesn’t belong mingling with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other apps? You know what I mean? Like, phone or camera or Safari versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mail, versus stocks, right? There’s a hierarchy in apps of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what Apple thinks is important enough to be a regular app versus like, oh, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is kind of part of your phone, right? And it’s confusing. Like there’s these weird little sections.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sometimes you see like App Store and Wallet together. You’re like, oh, that’s like money stuff, right? But then, you know, there’s this whole section

⏹️ ▶️ ^John above which is like hardware things. And then you get to like passwords, mail, contacts, what?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then there’s a new section, music, TV, photos. I guess this is the media section, but then there’s a separate section for the TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John provider and then you get to all the third party apps which are across at the bottom, right? So it’s clear that a human did arrange

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them, but every time I look at it, it’s not like I know, right? What section to go to immediately? I know where Safari is, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right in this section. No, I don’t know, I scroll until I see the Safari symbol. So it’s not a successful organization, but a human did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, right? Sidebar and system settings in Ventura Beta 3, there are sections,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s clear that they’re broken up in a similar way to iOS, and I also like the fact that they gave a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things names that they didn’t have before that will hopefully make it easier for people to find things. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s a section that says lock screen, login password, and users and groups. Lock screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was not a top level item. It has never been a top level item, but it is definitely a top level item in people’s heads of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the phrase lock screen and the concept of a lock screen. If you’ve ever had to use a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at work and had a lock screen policy mandated, that’s of course always been a feature in Mac OS for as long as lock screens

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have exist, but there was nothing called lock screen. So I think that’s an improvement that some human said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hey, I want the top level items in the sidebar to be named after things that are in people’s heads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And there’s a search bar that actually works pretty well to find stuff as well, right? And then sometimes you go to a section where it’s like keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mouse, and trackpad. Okay, it makes sense that there’s grouped together. But then you get like passwords, internet accounts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and game center. That’s a group of three items, but it’s separate from lock screen, login password,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and users and groups. But where is the privacy and security? One whole, you know, skip a section, It’s up much higher next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to spotlight and control center. Anyway, I think most people would just use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the search, but to Marco’s point about this being like algorithmically generated, it almost looks like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it looks more like to me, like it’s data driven. Like you can just spec out this thing and it just spits out this app, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Without much of a human touch, but then you go into trackpad and it’s clear that this is a very custom situation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where when you, you know, you can’t tell from the screenshot, but when you click on or mouse over one of these rows, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John changes the animation and then it plays it. This is all customized with a little bit of human touch. And the sidebar has a little bit of human

⏹️ ▶️ ^John touch. But a lot of it does kind of look like, you know, a very straightforward hierarchy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that was just sort of data driven by a PLIST somewhere. And then you just run it through and it produces this app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What’s with the capitalization of the titles of the options? Natural scrolling, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S in scrolling is capitalized. Smart zoom, the Z in zoom is not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, is that any different than it is today? Go look at it on your laptops if you’re in front of one. I don’t know if it’s any different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Inconsistent capitalization is not a new thing. Maybe natural scrolling is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little TM symbol next to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it’s still wrong. It’s still wrong. I hope, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ll see what happens when it actually ships here. Again, I have low confidence in Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco software design team these days and their ability to ship stuff that they think is cleaner even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco though it’s worse. because you look at this and it still looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the CSS failed to load. Like, I don’t know, to me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it looks cheap and sloppy. That’s what it really is. It looks cheap and sloppy and it doesn’t look like something that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you would expect a company like Apple to make with their reputation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It doesn’t look polished and doesn’t look high gloss.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac OS used to look not just like literally high gloss as in having specular highlights drawn onto things, but high gloss in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terms of someone, if you think of what looks like high gloss, Very often the homepage of apple.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks high gloss. Apple’s product pages often look high gloss. They’re supposed to look fancy and like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, sophisticated and like someone’s sweated over all the details and it is made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to look attractive. Now that’s not the most important thing about a UI. It’d be better for it to be readable, usable, accessible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so on and so forth. But once you’ve fulfilled those basics, it’s also nice if it looks, you know, attractive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and, you know, expressing your brand in some way. And Apple’s brand is very often sort of, you know, sophisticated,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John minimalist, polished, beautiful looking, right, and system settings is not yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John beautiful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I mean, you know, we make fun so much when an app switches to Electron, and we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say, oh my God, they’re gonna ruin the experience, they’re throwing away all this native code, native design, they don’t care about the platform, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, I just opened up one password, and I opened up its settings screen, and this is now an Electron app, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, but you open up its settings screen, and it’s a nice, regular Mac-looking preferences screen, and it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco couple of custom things in there, for the most part, it looks like a Mac setting screen. It looks nice. It’s looks put together and polished

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and thought through. And you look at the Ventura system settings app. And it is none of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things like it. This is the kind of thing that if an app like if some popular app that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used, switch their settings to look like this, we would make fun of them relentlessly and say they they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco abandoned their customers. They’ve abandoned the Mac, like and so I don’t know, it just seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know anybody who’s gonna who’s gonna upgrade their Mac or get a new Mac down the road opens up opens up for the first time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who was ever seen the previous versions and look at this and say, Oh, what a nice upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It looks like a downgrade. And it’s going to feel like a downgrade to anybody who is used to the previous one because it’s different to begin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with. But if you’re going to go through the the user disruption of moving things around a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco making them different, it might as well at least be nicer once you get used to it. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know if we’ve achieved that here. It doesn’t look nicer at first glance, that’s for sure. And I think a lot of people are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not going to feel that this is much of an upgrade the first time they see it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, one of the things that’s really gonna annoy people when we were talking about this just after we recorded last week’s episode in one of the slacks that we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in that I think I forgot to mention in the show. So some of the items on the sidebar, when you click on them, there’s a second level.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think general is like that. So you click on general in the sidebar and then the right-hand detail plane shows more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John choices. Right, I forget what they are because I’m not in Ventura right now, but you click on general and then you click on like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, about this Mac or something or storage. I don’t know what the options are, right? But you click on a second one and then when you click on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John second one, the detail pane slides over and you get into whatever item you’re in. and system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John settings remembers what you were in, right? It remembers that you went general and then about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And so what you see on the screen in this state is the general

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is highlighted in the sidebar, right? Because that’s the one you’re on. And in the detail pane to the right of it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you see like about this Mac or whatever you picked before. And if you look in the upper left, there’s a left facing Chevron saying, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can go back like the iOS style back button or whatever, right? But let’s say you just close system settings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Next time you launch system settings and you click on general, it’s just gonna show you the about thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not going to show you all the other choices. Like there’s a two level hierarchy and it’s really easy to forget.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like you’re gonna be guiding someone over the phone. Just wait, you know, it’s like, go to system settings, go to general. Okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now click, you know, whatever, you know, storage in general, like I don’t see storage. No, did you click on general?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I don’t see storage. Well, tell me what you see. I see, it tells me how much RAM I have. Okay, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John must be on about, go back. So what do you mean back? Look up at the top of the detail pane. do you see a left-facing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like less than sign, like a sideways V pointed left, yeah, click that. And then this is the point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they say, how was I supposed to figure that out? And you say, I don’t know. It’s not like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being stateful is good, but when you have a UI that is that non-obvious, on the phone it’s more obvious. On the phone we’re kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of used to, there’s gonna be like a back left-facing, you know, Chevron in the upper left corner

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go back. Like I think we’re used to doing that on the phone, but on the Mac, when you have all the screen space,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially when it remembers between launches, But when you click on general on the sidebar, you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see the list of all the things under general. You see whatever detail plane you were previously in. Good from like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power user perspective, I don’t constantly have to dig back into that if I was in that, but from a regular user’s perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad. So I think they haven’t really sorted out the, like they tried to use this UI to be more scalable, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John agree, you have all these settings and you wanna be able to scroll. That’s great. I think they should make the window more resizable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think we can handle that. We don’t have to have fixed size windows in the Mac. We can handle windows that resize and the UI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tries to be appropriate for the size of the window. And I think this two level thing under general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it’s working yet. So I don’t, you know, especially since the sidebar scrolls, right? So how many items are under general?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like nine? Put those into the groups on the left-hand side, make it a flat hierarchy. At least then people won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get, won’t have to guess how many of these items on the left have multiple things underneath

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them and how many don’t. Cause you can’t tell by looking at them, you just have to know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A bit. Mm-hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay.

Shared Photo Libraries

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so let me ask you, hopefully this is not a mess, tell me about shared photo libraries,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I’m super excited, I really honestly am super excited about this. So tell me, is it even close to ready?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m excited about it too. These are the first set of betas, the ones that just came out today-ish, that have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John support for iCloud Shared Photo Library. I just tried it on Mac OS, but I think it’s in the iOS betas and the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS betas and all that other stuff, right? Obviously this is a feature that’s being added to the existing Photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app, which is not great and continues to be not great and really weird. But the feature they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John added, this specific feature, went pretty smoothly for me. I mean, you’re doing a test Apple ID.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The only hiccup I had is, and this always happens to me, is I have a test Apple ID, and I wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make another test Apple ID to be in a family group with this test Apple ID,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Apple today on July 6th just would not let me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make an Apple ID. No matter what I did, go to the web, try to do it through the various

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac apps, system settings, there’s so many different ways you can create an Apple ID. Create a child Apple ID, create

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an adult Apple ID, create an iCloud.com Apple ID, create an Apple ID for a Gmail

⏹️ ▶️ ^John address. Apple just said no. I tried for about an hour today to create an Apple ID,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the farthest I got was a, it was on the final screen of making it happen, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was doing the web, and the error message I got was, you cannot create an Apple ID at this time. Try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again later. And if you Google for that, you’ll see lots of people saying, oh, sometimes Apple servers are weird or whatever. I’m like, really? Are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there whole days where you can’t create an Apple ID? Anyway, I couldn’t create an Apple ID, so I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not actually share my shared photo library with anybody, but it still lets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you go through the feature and see how it works just by your lonesome. So when you launch photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you go to its settings, it’s so weird for me. I go in there looking for the preferences item and my eyes like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John skim right over settings. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} where the hell is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John preferences? Oh, it’s called settings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you go to the photos menu, you go to settings, it used to just have general and iCloud. I think now there’s a third top level item

⏹️ ▶️ ^John called shared library and it has a little thing that says, you know, iCloud share photo library explains what it is. And you hit start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John setup and you go through this little setup process that’s pretty simple. And it constantly prompts you to add people to your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John family or do all this stuff or whatever. And I had to sort of cancel out of that and say, no, I don’t have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have a family but I’m the only person in it. No, I can’t create. It prompts you at that point to create an Apple ID. Would you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like to create a child Apple ID? That doesn’t work either. Like, you know, again, on July 6th, there was no way to create

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an app. Very often it would, I’d go through the whole process there, it would say, prove you’re an adult, and it would make you verify your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John credit card, branching the CVV value or whatever, right? And then it would ask the person’s name

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and give them an email address, can ask for their birthday and do all this stuff. And they make you go through many, this is again, this is on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac native UI, inside the Photos app. It’s prompting you to do all this stuff to like create a child

⏹️ ▶️ ^John account for your family. And you’ll get to the very last screen and it will show an indeterminate little spinner you click the like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it button, and it will just spin forever and it will never actually create an Apple ID. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that gets fixed eventually. Maybe it’s a Ventura beta thing. Again, I tried doing it through Safari in Ventura

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as well, and it still also wasn’t working. But anyway, me and my lonesome test Apple ID as the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person in my family was able to make a iCloud shared photo library.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Once you do that, the settings pane shows the following items. It says, here are the participants,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you can add participants. And I think you can add participants that are not in your family. I didn’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I’m actually obviously not going to add anybody, any real Apple IDs to this because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not, I don’t yet trust that it is all working and everything. And I wouldn’t want to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a shared photo library with like a member of my actual family and somehow later

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t add them to my real shared photo library. So I didn’t do that. But you can add participants. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a checkbox for shared library suggestions that says when enabled you periodically receive Suggestions for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photos and videos that you may want to add to the shared library. That’s another thing I forgot to mention during setup. It says hey, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made you a shared photo library What do you want to add to it and you can pick add all my photos to it or not add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it? What do you want to move to it? Move all my photos to it move photos based on a date or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll manually move stuff myself And it’s not like this is a one-time choice like at any point in the future. You can do any of these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but this checkboxes Photos or something in the OS will suggest to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it thinks you should move some photos to the shared library based on, I don’t know, like the stuff they talked about in the keynote, like when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in proximity to people or at an event with a bunch of people and taking pictures of them or recognize their faces, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all sorts of suggestions, whatever. So you can do that or not. And then the final item

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is delete notifications. We talked about this earlier of like, oh, anyone you add to the shared photo library can do edits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and deletes, isn’t that bad? Well, if you’re afraid of your sullen teenager deleting pictures of themselves they don’t like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the very least, you can get a notification and they delete a picture and then you can go into recent items and rescue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. And I think you can protect recent, like recently deleted items with a password so they can’t like permanently delete them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that’s better than nothing in terms of like making sure someone doesn’t like go rogue on your shared

⏹️ ▶️ ^John library and hose everything. Cause if you can get a notification and you can password lock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the recent deletes, that’ll help a lot. But once you’ve done that, photos launches and it just looks like photos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But now at the top, there’s a new item, a new pop-up menu where it has three options.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can see your personal library, which is just the only thing you would ever see in the previous version of photos, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your photo library, right? You can see your shared library, or you can see both libraries, where it shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you the union of all the photos of your personal and shared. And that is great, I was afraid it wouldn’t have this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature and you’d constantly have to switch back and forth. But no, it will show you the union of them and you can, it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put a tiny little badge on the photos, indicating which ones are in the shared library and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which ones are not. This is where you start to get into the limitations to the Mac Photos app. Like the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Photos app is so stingy about what information it will put on the main sort of photo thumbnail

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen. It’s got this giant canvas with all these little thumbnails and the most it will do is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put these tiny little monochrome icons in the upper right-hand corner of the photos. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can you just show me the keywords underneath the photos like you used to? No. If you say show keywords, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think it’ll show a little icon that indicates this photo has keywords. We’re not gonna tell you which one. We don’t have room

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this screen to put text, but yeah, it’s got keywords, it’s got location data. It will put the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John file name of all things that it wants to put, it will put the file name. Like I wanna see the file name of like IMG0057.keek or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I don’t need to see the file name, show me the keyword. Anyway, all that is to say that it will show you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which ones are in the shared library if you squint and you turn that thing on and it will show the union of both of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you don’t have any limitations. You can just use that union view all you want. You can move things. If you right click on a photo, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can move that photo into the shared library. you can move it out of the shared library. The right-click menus continue to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really limited. Some features are in the right-click menu, some features are only in the menu, some features are, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the menu bar, some features are in both places. And when you do move things to shared library,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can do more than one at once. You just do any kind of selection and right-click and do move to the shared library. It’ll show you a little message

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that says, “‘Moving these photos to the shared library “‘will allow shared library participants “‘to view, edit, or delete this content at any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time.’” Just warning you that, you know, hey, when you put it into a shared place, it’s no longer just yours.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it all worked. Like, I mean, obviously I’m doing a shared library with, I’m just sharing it with myself, but I can take my photos and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John move them to and from the shared library. It’s even integrated into the import process. So when you import photos into photos,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can choose if you want to import them into your library, if you want to import them into the shared library.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Very little surface area for this feature. A few pop-up menus, one extra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John item in settings, a few items in menus, but it does what it’s supposed to do. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the limitations of the photos app that make it annoying continue to be there, but the addition

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this feature does not make them any worse. And the addition of this feature, I think, was done in a way that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is pretty obvious. I mean, it was obvious to me, so I’m looking for it, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s not a lot to stumble over and be confused about. There’s a couple of new pop-up menus, a couple of new little settings,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they all are clearly explained and work the way you’d want them to. And I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually very excited about upgrading to Ventura now for this feature alone, because it seems like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna work. And it seems like it does pretty much everything that I want it to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The, in particular, the delete notifications is all the peace of mind I need to know that I’m not accidentally messing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, someone doesn’t accidentally do something foolish and delete things. That if I get a notification, I can just undo that, I’ll be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the fact that I can sort of manually move photos on as I gain confidence, like I’ll just, you know, chuck a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photos in, I’ll just use, I’ll put the new photos into the shared library or whatever, just sort of like, I can move to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it at my own pace, instead of just saying, hey, we’re gonna convert your whole library to shared, or you have to pick up front, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones do you want to convert, that I can do it manually one at a time. It still boggles my mind, the sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non-uniformity of UI in photos, where the right-click

⏹️ ▶️ ^John menus seem to be made by an entirely different team than the menu bar, and they don’t talk to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John each other. Like the copy edits and paste edits thing, it’s just so inconsistent, the keywords,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the location stuff, Like it just does not work like a normal Mac app, but the functionality

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is there if you know where to find it and are willing to fight the UI to get it. But overall, I’m pretty happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the Mac incarnation of this feature. I’m using it in a test photo library with a dozen photos instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a real photo library, which has 145,000. So we’ll see how it goes, but I give this a cautious thumbs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up. And like I said, using this has made me anxious now to upgrade to Ventura, knowing full

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well that I can’t actually upgrade to Ventura until it’s out for real, because there’s no way I’m going to subject my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John real photo library to a beta, but I’m actually kind of looking forward to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s really good news. I’m super stoked about that. That should be really great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, this is one of those things that, assuming that they get it to work well, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sounds like they’re on their path, this is one of those things that we didn’t have for years and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re constantly yelling about it. We’re gonna get it, and we’re going to instantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forget about it. And it’s just gonna be one of those things that like, oh, we just have this now. Like this problem that we’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for so long is hopefully just gonna be solved and that’ll be it. And it’ll just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, we, Apple will have put in all these years of effort trying to get this to work for about a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minute of thanks for the public. And then we’re all gonna then just take it all for granted and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco assume instantly, of course this problem is solved. What are you talking about? Like, we’re hopefully we’re just not gonna think about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it anymore. Cause that’s largely that’s how iCloud photo library is for individuals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the syncing and everything like that. It largely works very, very well. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the most part, you just don’t have to think about it. Most people, you just take a picture on your phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a few minutes later, it’s on your Mac, and that’s it. And you don’t have to, you can make edits in one place, and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goes to the other one eventually, or quickly, it depends on conditions. It’s a pretty good, solid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system. You don’t hear a lot of stories of people having problems with iCloud Photo Library. It’s a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great solid system. And so if they went into this with similar care and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a similar platform and similar skill, which it sounds like they did, I expect this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is just gonna pretty much work and we’re gonna all instantly forget about it, which is great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One of the things we talked about when we would discuss this feature in the past and you’d get a lot of pushback, you’d say, oh, that’s so complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How are you gonna figure out which photo goes where or what you’re looking at? And there’s so many different ways you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do this you want to give individual people control and who has permissions and like, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a large, complicated problem space. And the way Apple has tackled this when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re successful in features like this is they choose a subset of features that they think is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can implement and that is understandable to people. And they make sure that subset is big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough to cover most use cases, but small enough that they can present a UI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it in a way that doesn’t overwhelm, right? To give an example of where they may have misfired and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like focus modes, focus modes overwhelms a little bit. Like if you try to set that up on a phone and it’s asking you all these questions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to make all these decisions and it’s a little bit overwhelming and it’s really kind of a power user feature, right? And it is very complicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s not very clear what’s going on. And shared photo libraries, people are always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying there’s no way Apple can do this, this is too complicated, people won’t understand it. The way they’ve chosen to do it is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John simple with so few decisions to make and so little new UI to learn.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the UI that is there is just incredibly straightforward, doesn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John require much of an explanation. It’s like, you get it and that’s it. And it just becomes, it fades back into the background.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not a thing that you think about anymore. It doesn’t have all the features that you can imagine for a shared photo library. I would like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more granular permissions for what people can do. I would like view only. So all sorts of stuff you can think of that you could add to this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But this is a baseline version one to get the thing working. I don’t know if they’ll ever expand on it, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the downside of Mac development and all these days. But I think the subset of features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ve chosen is good enough to cover most people’s needs, probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also include my own, and is so simple, so not like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no wizard you’re gonna go through that’s gonna ask you 8,000 questions. There’s no really complicated UI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the UI they previously, and probably still, have for shared photo libraries

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is more complicated and confusing and worse than this UI, and that’s a simpler feature. So kudos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to figuring out the right subset of things to make, and again, this is just Mac photos, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what it looks like on the iPad, but the right subset of features to make this simple for users while still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accomplishing the goal, which is I don’t wanna have to log into my wife’s account to deal with the family photos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, this’ll be really great because we have the opposite arrangement in our family where I am the keeper

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the family photo album and Erin basically doesn’t have squat. She has the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey last month of her own pictures on her phone And then that’s it. And so for her to have access

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to all of our family pictures going back 15, well, 17 years to the beginning of our relationship, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’ll be really great for her. And I’m really, really looking forward to this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Instabug, and WorkCheck. And thanks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join. We will talk to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t mean to

Been doin’ SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I’ve been doing SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, yes. How’s that going, my friend? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} saw you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complaining about that on Twitter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I had a good talk with Underscore today on Under the Radar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you should go listen to that. But I’ve basically resigned myself to the fact that I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I’m going to continue to be a professional iOS programmer, like if this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is going to continue to be my career, I have to jump into SwiftUI. I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the equivalent now of having a really big Carbon app in like 2008.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’s like, you know, I can see the writing on the wall for most of the code

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have and for most, and more importantly, for most of the knowledge I have. I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Objective-C and UIKit really, really well. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s not helping me right now. Like that’s, you know, if you were to start writing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a brand new app today, if you wrote the whole thing in Objective-C, people would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think you’re weird and you’re gonna miss out on a lot of the advantages from tooling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a lot of the newest APIs and things like that. Like you’re making it harder on yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needlessly. And so no question Swift is the language you should be using for any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new iOS or Mac app. But the UI framework thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is is a different question. Swift UI is still very early. However, every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time I write UI kit code, I get that same feeling as if I’m writing new object to see code like I shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be doing this. It’s been made a little more complicated by the recent developments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in UI kit feel like if I could borrow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a term from Joel Spolsky, it forever ago, it feels like the UI kit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco team has been taken over by by architecture astronauts. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amount of abstraction and layers and nitpicky configuration and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s going into the latest changes over the last few years in UIKit, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where they’re going, I don’t want to follow them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Can you think of an example offhand where this is getting ugly to you in UIKit?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so all the new button configuration stuff, table cell configuration stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco collection view, like a lot of this stuff, the old way of doing things was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more primitive, but another way to say that is simpler. And they’ve created these new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco levels and levels of abstractions and management classes and configuration classes and different things above it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you’re now expected to use. And many of the old methods are now being deprecated. Where they’re going,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I tried playing with a lot of the new UI kit stuff when I was doing my redesign last fall and winter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was just a lot more code to do the same things for me. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it seemed like they’re optimizing for needs and preferences that are different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from mine. I have many similar complaints with Swift itself. I mean, Swift, the language is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, they’re in space at this point. Like, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re doing in certain areas of the language, but at least most of those mostly don’t get in my way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But there are, I mean, there are certain things, Like, to fix an iOS 15 deprecation warning,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had to start using Async for one of my CloudKit calls.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco On the Overcast login screen, it queries CloudKit for the list of accounts that are associated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with your Apple ID. That way I don’t have to get, like, usernames and passwords. I can just pull from CloudKit, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a list of account tokens that I know exist from your Apple ID. And so it’s a very, very basic CloudKit thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I had to switch over to an Async call. they’ve already deprecated the previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco query method for some reason. So I had to edit this totally fine working code

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I’d never touch. And adding this, I had to add so many more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things everywhere. In an effort to make this simpler, they’ve made it even more complex,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and in certain cases, they went so far over the top. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just like a simple Cloud Kit fetch query. Fetch records matching this query. it returns this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco complicated result object with two different layers of generics and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco less than, greater than symbols. And it’s complete. So you auto-complete

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the closure completion for dealing with these records. And the type it gives you is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco full of generic gobbledygook. You have no way to know what you’re supposed to type into this box to actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what type is this variable? If you just let auto-completed errors out and give you an even more complicated error message that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t understand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just look at the code examples and documentation, right? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right. Ha ha ha ha. Got him. So eventually I had to start looking up Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco blog posts about how the heck do you use this stuff. And the answer is, as far as I can tell, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually it’s some kind of complicated result result result. And you have to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco result.0.result or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s actually in your shipping code that you have to have that, result.0.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Who is designing these things? I’m sure they have their reasons. They have very smart people there. But whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re doing in certain areas is drifting apart from any way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think of coding and any way I want to be coding. And UIKit itself is in many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways going in that direction. And so heading back a few levels in the stack here, SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think is what I need. Like if I’m going to keep making iOS apps for my career, and that’s my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco intention, then SwiftUI is what I have to learn. I’ve resigned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco myself to that. I don’t necessarily have to have everything in the app be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SwiftUI, that I think is, it’s probably still too early for that in terms of the framework’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco development, but I have to start using a lot of SwiftUI and really getting good with it and using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it by default and only bailing out of it when I really have to as opposed to bailing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out of it for comfort reasons or for familiarity. So that’s where I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now. And I was, I’ve been working on it all day, trying to like replicate some of the basic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco structure of Overcast in SwiftUI, just to see like, is this even possible? I’m slowly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco getting there. It is a slog, but I’m like, I’m finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in like the very, very slight upswing part of it, where like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m starting to finally get some traction and some progress. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I’m like, just starting to be motivated to keep going on it. So that’s my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mood for the day, my mood update. I know this is my feelings podcast because I don’t have one unlike you guys. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is where I am today. I am slowly getting better at SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and slowly starting to think I should probably switch to it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the alternative would be like if I said, yeah, I’m just going to use Carbon forever, you know, in 2008.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, well, that’s going to limit your career, then, and the usefulness of your code

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco base, you know, you’re going to definitely put it put a cap on the age of that. Well, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is this is how I feel about, you know, first of all, Swift, obviously, is a requirement at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I, all of my Objective C code, I regret it all. And I wish it was all Swift,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it would make certain things a lot easier. But Swift UI, I think is is that now like, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the idea like right Right now, the way you would feel about writing Objective-C code in a brand new app today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think we’re going to feel that way about writing UIKit code instead of SwiftUI in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe three to five years. Maybe sooner, probably not. But I’m guessing five years from now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the idea of writing a brand new screen or a brand new app using UIKit instead of SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is going to seem very backwards. So I want to, for once, be slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ahead of things and go where the puck is being thrown.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Whoa! Jesus. Easy. Because I’m tired of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my knowledge and my code base being out of date. And so I want to actually move forward at a reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time instead of five years too late.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you waited until they had a WWDC where they said, hey, dummy, UI kit. App kit, no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Switch UI, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, as we said when we talked about the WWDC thing, that as an aspirational goal. They’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they have clearly indicated directions. So yes, you’re you’re moving now to assess your level of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not level of frustration, but level of I don’t know how how far have you gotten into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Swift UI? One good indicator, I think, is have you yet implemented an if modifier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as an extension on view in Swift UI? Oh, my God,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} because I feel like everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who everyone who encounters this, I mean, it’s you Google for it and you’ll find it, Because when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re writing SwiftUI and you’re not used to declarative, you’re like, can I just write a conditional? And you can write conditionals in SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, but it’s not. But it’s not like, it looks like a regular Swift conditional, but it’s not, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And there are things you can’t do from it because it’s not a real conditional. So it is possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make, you know, you can just do, you know, like a dot padding, you know, dot accessibility label,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dot whatever, you know, dot modify, as you’re dot chaining off of the various things in a SwiftUI view, you can make a dot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if. and it was like a week into this when I said, you know what, F it, I need something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s like.if and you just Google for it and it’s like, you know, it’s like 10 lines of code, it’s really easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do and once you have it, you’re just, you know, like, ah, I feel better. I mean, again, you’re kind of like fighting against

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the declarative nature, but sometimes it makes things so much easier. Kind of like a view that fits that they added.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I love their naming, it’s like, it’s just this frustration of like, well, sometimes I wanna have this view, but sometimes when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing is this size, I wanna have this view and I can do all this geometry reader stuff to figure out which one’s gonna fit and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use the right one. And this is a case where I’d be like doing an if, like dot if this, then do this kind of view,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they made a whole built in view, well not built in, but like part of such UI is view that fits, and you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, hey, here’s the two possibilities, just pick the one that fits. Don’t make me do the math, don’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me figure it out. You know, view that fits. I feel like dot if is a similar type of thing, where you’re like, I could do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this another way, but just dot if, right? I still have a place in my code where I wanna do an H stack or a V stack based

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on some value, and I can’t figure out how to do that, because you can’t do like.if, you know, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to say, I guess I could take everything that’s in the HStack and the VStack and break it out into a function. And it’s like, but I don’t want to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not that much stuff. So now I have like, if this HStack else VStack, and I wish I could do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HStack or VStack based on this parameter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is something you could write, but I take your point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, you totally can write that. Like that’s the same thing with.if. Like all it is, is it’s not Stingtastic Sugar directly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it is actually doing some more stuff of like wrapping things in interview or whatever. but it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t wanna see as much stuff here, so I wish I could make this more compact. We’ll break it out into another sub-function. There’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John efficiency problem. SwiftUI would have squished it all back. But I don’t wanna break it out into another function. I just wanna do it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here. Then you end up doing extension view and you just start typing stuff and so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people have done this. I bet if you searched GitHub for extension view open curly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brace, you would find so much stuff. Because to SwiftUI’s credit, you can make all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sorts of view extensions that do really cool things and are super convenient. But it’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, well, once you have that hammer, everything looks like a new view modifier. You’re just like, I’m gonna make my own view modifiers. I’m gonna call them whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want. And they’re gonna, you know, you can paint yourself into a corner. But I feel like.if is a flagpole of like, when you get,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you reach the level of frustration of not understanding how it wants you to do things, you’re like, can I just have if and you make.if.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s impressive. I haven’t reached that level of hacks yet, but one level I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used a lot is like, making a custom view modifier just to get around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the lack of an if available construct for like, if I’m if I want to modify around something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s only available, say, on iOS 15. And then I’m writing for iOS 14 and 15, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have to basically make a custom view modifier that’s like, you know, iOS 14 compatible version of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and like, you know, inside of it, like, well, if available this then modify the view like this, otherwise don’t modify the view.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s just it’s one of those like frustrating things like, you know, because you can’t use a real if statement in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a dot chain, then you can’t use if available in a regular, clean way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you can use it with.if. I just put a pastebin for you. It’s 10 lines of code. Don’t paste this into your code.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’ll be so easy and tempting to use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s it. It’s not complicated code.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, God. What a ridiculous thing this is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is both awesome and sad all at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} same time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Oh, man. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have such mixed feelings about SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think because I’m a really crummy UI designer and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey developer, there’s a lot that I like about SwiftUI because I think it helps me as someone who is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an amateur at best when it comes to this stuff. It helps me create things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think are aesthetically pleasing without me feeling like I’m getting bogged

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey down in pixel perfect BS, where I’m trying to get UIKit to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something that it doesn’t really want to do. And I think that SwiftUI makes a lot of stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it makes making things pretty a lot easier for me anyway. But the downside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is, as many people have said many, many times, when you hit a wall in SwiftUI,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s one of two things. It’s either like a screen, on my screen in porch, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can push your way through it if you really try, like you can do dot if, if you will, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is the Great Wall of China And there is no getting through it, over it, around it, et cetera. Like the, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shall not pass. There is nothing you can do. And those situations are so incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey frustrating. And, and so often things that you think should be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey easy. And I wish I could think of an example of this, but things that you, you would think should be easy are very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very, very difficult. Now the flip side of that is things that oftentimes you would expect to be difficult can be very easy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But when the easy stuff is super hard, it’s just infuriating. And so I waffle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in typical Casey style, I waffle back and forth between this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is a pile of garbage that I wish I never saw before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was thinking of something that, one of those type of things that if there’s no way to do it, you have kind of a problem. I’m thinking of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the type of hacks that, I don’t know, they seem natural to do in an imperative language. One of the examples is I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a place in my code where I’m setting, I have a bunch of like enum values or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are gonna appear in a pop-up menu, right? And I put them in the order in the enum, like in the order

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wanna see them in the pop-up menu just for convenience. Again, I’m not writing a big fancy app, it’s simple. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like, why not make my life

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easier? Why not put them there? But actually what I want in the real pop-up menu is I want there to be a separator between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, you know, the first two items then a separator, then the rest of items, right? And there’s a million ways to do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in AppKit. It’s really easy to add a separator or whatever. But being a lazy programmer, you’re like, I kinda like this being data-driven.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I kinda like just being able to define the enum and put a comment above that says, by the way, the order of these things is important. It’s the order they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna appear in the pop-up menu. and being able to add something that will automatically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make the separator appear. An applicant doesn’t have that functionality. Applicant doesn’t know, hey, give me an enum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like there’s no way to express a separator item in an enum, because like it shouldn’t be tied to the UI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I have this whole like data-driven structure that’s saying here’s the, gonna be the contents of my menus and everything and the enum is part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it. And in that definition, I can put an item that’s just a string that’s a hyphen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then in the code, when I’m building that pop-up menu, I can say, oh, and by the way, if the item you got is not a menu item, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just a hyphen, put it in a separator. And I can do that because it’s an imperative language and I can hook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into any phase of the process. I can hook into the thing that’s like, here’s where I’m building this pop-up menu and here’s the data I’m being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John driven off of to do it. And I just feed this data in and it goes into the generic system and it says if it’s a menu item, put the menu item

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in there. And if it’s an enum, use the label of the enum and have the value be the value of the enum. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s data-driven code, you don’t wanna do everything by hand, right? But what if you need a separator? I’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John throw a hyphen in there and I say, I’m writing the code. I’m at the point where I’m reading the thing. If I see a hyphen, just put in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John separator. That type of plumbing, that type of like override this method and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John write your imperative code here is not how SwiftUI works. It’s declarative. It’s not like you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to like subclass a thing and override the methods where you wanna override and do this on setup and this on tear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down or whatever. That’s not how it works, right? And so there’s not really a convenient place to say like, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laying out a context menu and by the way, I want it to be data driven or whatever. And you can do that by, you know, making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a view modifier that says, dot data-driven context menu. And then in the dot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John data-driven context menu view extension, put all that imperative code again, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like you’re mode switching. You feel like it’s not, you know, I shouldn’t be writing a, you know, my own

⏹️ ▶️ ^John extensions to view every time I wanna do something. It’s just a different way of thinking about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But when you’re faced with that situation in SwiftUI, you’re like, but then what do I do? Like, you know, do I make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fallback that maybe, you know, you can always just do a thing where you say, I’m gonna fall back to AppKit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or I’m gonna fall back to UIKit, or I’m going to make this whole thing driven by UIKit, but then have the subset

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it be SwiftUI or something like that. And I do wonder about, I think it mentions the best shows, what would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you do if there was no UIKit? What would you do if there was no AppKit? Well, you know, SwiftUI wouldn’t work, because half the things it’s doing under the cover

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use UIKit and AppKit, but setting that aside, if there was no lower level to drop down to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how would you do the weird imperative thing where you look for a hyphen in a data structure, when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John write some code that’s when it sees that hyphen, it adds a menu separated, which is not a feature of any framework. It’s just some BS you made up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yourself to make your thing more convenient. So you wouldn’t have to manually write a bunch of code. I don’t know. I think about that when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m when I’m doing hacks like that of like, Hey, if this wasn’t here, what would be my alternative? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t really know the answer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I think it would be largely like the earlier days of the web, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of times like, you know, suppose you wanted to say, have a very custom behavior or appearance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of a certain form control. And browsers would render it using some kind of UI widget from the platform. And a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of times, certain customizations just wouldn’t be possible. I think it would be a lot like that. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would just, at that time, we web developers would just kind of accept,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, well, ideally, we would have the app look and work like this. But because of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the limitations of the browser, we can’t really do that. So we’ll just suck it up. I think that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John answer. Well, what we would do is you’d make an image. You’d say, okay, this is not gonna be a submit button. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna be an image and I’m gonna use JavaScript that when I’m gonna get the mouse down on the image and I’m gonna change the image to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the mouse down, like you’d basically custom implement your button. In fact, in Switch Glass, my little app that shows a one tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing on the screen, I was using the SwiftUI button, capital B, type for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my buttons for like, I don’t know, more than half of the versions until I just gave up because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could not get it to do what I wanted it to do. And I just had to stop using button and basically re-implement

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my own button the same way you would do it on the web, you know, back before CSS could style submit buttons, you’d make it an image.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’d try to grab mouse down yourself. You’d set your own mouse down state. You detect mouse up, you detect, like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically re-implement button, half-assed re-implementation of button just so you can get it to do what you want it to do. And of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John course it doesn’t look like the native UI. And of course the real solution is, please let us use CSS to style form controls, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John took many years for it to come. But yeah, that’s the alternative is like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t use button. I give up. I tried for six months and button

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just has too many bugs. And my thing, by the way, the bug was like, if you drag something, if you like pick a file off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your desktop and drag it over my window, it’s already weird that you can drag something over my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John window because it’s a floating palette and the active app is finder, not the thing, but you want it to react to your drag and you want it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John detect your drag and you want it to highlight. That thing where you’re already holding down the mouse button and you drag a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing over it, you could wiggle it back and forth over my palette and you could get the SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button into a state where it didn’t realize you were no longer on it and the mouse overstate would stay stuck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like you’d have to wiggle it a lot, but you could do it. Like you could outrun the mouse tracking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I just could not get rid of that bug because I don’t control that. I don’t control the mouse tracking. That’s happening in the layer below. If I was using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John AppKit, I would control it because AppKit, I have access to all that mouse tracking and mouse tracking regions and all that other stuff, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not using AppKit. It’s SwiftUI button that’s saying, oh, SwiftUI button, don’t worry. It knows when the mouse is over it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It doesn’t, it gets confused. And then my app has a cosmetic bug because now the highlighted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John state gets stuck and you put the file back down on the desktop and you look up at the thing and it’s stuck. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had to give up a button and I had to implement it myself. And that definitely felt like web UI of like, oh, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t style form controls with CSS, implement it yourself with an image map.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Those were the days.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m hoping that, so the discipline I’m going to try to have here is to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be more flexible on my requirements and to actually give in a lot of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cases where if the stock behavior of some controller or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easily achievable behavior of some controller or appearance of some controller is not exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what I want, but I can make it work, then I’ll just make it work. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one goal I have here, I have eight years of code here, and so my UI kit code,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even my UI kit code is not only in Objective-C, so it’s typically more verbose than a Swift equivalent,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But also it’s like using all old UI kit methods of doing things. So there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of kind of boilerplate going on everywhere and manually setting borders and stuff like that all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over the place. I’m hoping, and I think this is reasonable to expect, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a Swift UI reimplementation of a lot of this stuff should be way less code.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that would, I would see a lot of value in having way less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco code, especially at the UI level. So I’m hoping that’s achievable here. And if it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, I’m willing to give up some of the little details if it ends up being way less code.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that’s a reasonable and pragmatic trade off to make. And I’m dubious that Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Arment is capable of making that trade off just because I know how much you like things to be, you know, exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just the way you want. But if you can stick with it, I think that’s a perfectly, perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reasonable and again, pragmatic trade off to make. That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big if.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is a big F.

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