492: Umbrella Hammer Toadstool
20 Jul 2022Actively-cooled houses, passively-cooled laptops, and the long journey to USB-C ubiquity.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Air conditioners, memories, and house veins
- Follow-up:
- M2 MacBook Air [also] thermal throttles
- John’s Mac Studio safety straps
- M2 has Ultra-Wideband Chip?
- Default destination for Messages
- IPSec is not mandatory for IPv6 (via Brian Petersen)
- AirPlay & Touch Bar network problems
- Apple Patents Dual “Pro Stand”
- EU may mandate USB-C on all devices, including iPhones
#askatp- How do we manage mail notifications on our devices? (via Michael Chan)
- How do we backup our photos/videos? (via Don Clark)
- Do we think macOS will bloat enough to make Apple Silicon seem slow? (Nitesh Singh)
- Why does John say “program” from time to time? (via William Reynish)
- How does a current-whippersnapper pick a decent custom domain for email? (via Fletcher O’Connor)
- How does John prepare the way for a Mac to enter cold storage? (via Dave Braasch)
- Post-show: Updates on our SwiftUI journeys
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Chapters
- John’s air conditioning
- M2 Air early reviews
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Phone-number-change follow-up
- IPSec not required for IPv6
- Sponsor: RevenueCat
- Touch Bar news (!)
- Dual Pro Stand patent 🖼️
- EU USB-C mandate
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- #askatp: Mail notifications
- #askatp: Photo backup
- #askatp: M1 speed vs. future software
- #askatp: Apps vs.programs
- #askatp: Domains for email
- #askatp: Wipe retired devices?
- Ending theme
- Updates on our SwiftUI journeys
John’s air conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, hang on. I forgot.
⏹️ ▶️ John on a second. I gotta… Uh-oh. I’ll be back in a moment. What? Where
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going? We just started! I know. I had to turn off the air conditioner.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was looking at my levels and like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why is there… why is this little thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey flipping? That’s why Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m gonna go turn it off. I always turn it
⏹️ ▶️ John be back in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know exactly how the air conditioner looks in the frequency graph, because it has this low, mmm, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whenever the compressor’s running.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I… you… and you can see there’s this… this bright orange line, right, like, at 60 hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, oh, that’s and then you see it cycle on for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then for it’s off for a while. Then, you know, it cycles back on. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back. No, my brother and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their air conditioner in their townhouse, like figuratively exploded the other day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they were lent a in window, what do you call it? AC unit like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John has everywhere and they were saying in the defense of John Syracuse and your ridiculous air conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup that, you know, the modern in-window units, aside from the fact that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put in the window via duct tape and like cardboard, leaving that aside, they actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throw a whole lot of very, very cold air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, they’re very strong. Like they’re, they’re not, you know, they’re super, you know, big and ugly and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes loud and nowhere near as efficient often as, although actually the New ones are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty efficient, but yeah, they do actually function as air conditioners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco considerably well if you’re willing to let them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I have to warn you, I’ve bought many in-window air conditioners. They are definitely good ones and bad
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, it’s hard to tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s definitely not weight-based, I can tell you that, because I have some
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco very heavy ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that are just not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could look, the one that’s in our room now is, I think it was like a wire cutter pick or whatever, and it is by far the
⏹️ ▶️ John most powerful, But we have like, for example, the one in my son’s room, I got him like one of those quiet
⏹️ ▶️ John ones and it’s quiet, but it’s like one third as good
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as the non-quiet one in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of cooling. So I guess it depends on what your priorities are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I still think, as we mentioned, I don’t know, it was a couple of months ago, I think that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went around with John about this, but I still maintain mini splits all the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, frankly, that is the best option.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and you want to destroy your house, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re professionals, they do this for a living, they’re not gonna destroy your house.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the people around here have them, and you can see all the houses, they look like something out of an Aliens movie with all the
⏹️ ▶️ John tubing going around for the little refrigerant lines. And then inside the house, you got a bunch of giant things on your
⏹️ ▶️ John wall. And there’s no place for them on the inside of my walls, and I don’t want all the tubes on the outside. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of that, on my stupid property, there’s not even any place for the fan thingy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, there’s also holes in your house and stuff on your walls for electricity,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? No, there’s one hole in my house for electricity. And there’s outlets on the wall that
⏹️ ▶️ John are very small, and in my house, they’re very sparse. Yeah. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You don’t have that many.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s things like, we’ve decided that it’s nice to have water and plumbing in the house. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we make a hole inside of the house to allow pipes in. We also have all these things in the house that
⏹️ ▶️ John And my water and my gas come in underground. So those are holes in the basement. There’s still holes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the mini splits, you got to have a refrigerant line going to wherever you have one. I see
⏹️ ▶️ John them on people’s houses. They look so bad. Even when you try to paint them, it just looks like a bunch of bulging veins all over people’s houses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just saying the point, you know, we are willing to make exceptions to the aesthetic purity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our houses in order to achieve essential services. So if you feel that cooling
⏹️ ▶️ John service. Amen, brother. I’m doing that with window units. I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ John less of a permanent damaging of the house, and
M2 Air early reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with some follow-up. Let’s talk about the m2 MacBook Air which surprise surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thermal throttles But it’s still better than the m1 MacBook Air which is pretty exciting So there’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reviews actually the first shipments happened yesterday as we record we are recording on the evening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Saturday the 16th and Some people were lucky enough to receive some of theirs. Although I haven’t personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen too much of that, but the reviews are up Jason Snell, I’m sorry, just Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at six colors put up a great review There’s a great review at the verge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I read a gruber’s review, which I thought was very very good as well just earlier today So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, apparently it’s pretty freakin great all things considered
⏹️ ▶️ John not as great as the m1 MacBook Air though I mean this is the thing we talked about with the issue to the m2 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro with all its weirdness being in the old case and having the touch bar and not having magsafe and then we got
⏹️ ▶️ John on talking about the Single chip SSD that’s half the speed of when you have two chips and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem And of course the potential for thermal throttling there, which
⏹️ ▶️ John this seems fuzzy to me But anyway, not quick errors out now and in the reviews It seems pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John clear that it throttles everybody who’s done even the most casual tests and then what they’re testing it against by the way Is they’re testing
⏹️ ▶️ John it against the m2 MacBook Pro? so it’s basically like the same chip but with a fan and without a fan
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one with a fan does better than the one without a fan on the same tests and Thermal
⏹️ ▶️ John throttling is the obvious thing to blame and it makes sense. You know, one of them has a van one of them doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a teardown of the M2 MacBook Air, and there’s not much going on in there for cooling
⏹️ ▶️ John other than like thermal pads and stuff. I just want to say like, there’s no magic inside there. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not some exotic cooling solution. There’s no liquid metal cooling like in the PlayStation 5. It’s just thermal pads and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And so yeah, it’s a tougher thermal environment. This is not what I think is an issue with
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 MacBook Air, because if you’re gonna have a machine that’s going to sacrifice
⏹️ ▶️ John thermals for being fanless, make it this one, because most people are never gonna thermal
⏹️ ▶️ John throttle because they’re not buying an M2 MacBook Air so they can export 8K video on it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not what the machine is made for. So I think this is exactly the right choice. I would definitely prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John to have no fan and have it thermal throttle on their max load than the reverse, because there’s the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John point of the real MacBook Pro line, not the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco MacBook Pro, but the real
⏹️ ▶️ John whole point of that is those are the ones that are bigger and thicker and have fans and are high performance and blah, blah, blah. And these
⏹️ ▶️ John ones, even though they’re very powerful, not intended for that purpose. They’re supposed to be slim and light, and fanlessness
⏹️ ▶️ John is an incredibly valuable feature to me, and I think most people like it. And even if
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t even know about it, even if they don’t care that it’s fanless, it’s just one less thing to go wrong. Less cat hair,
⏹️ ▶️ John less bugs, less everything that being sucked through that case all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think that’s great. But the base storage is slow, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s only got the one chip, and so it’s got the same gotcha as the M2 MacBook Pro. and the M2 MacBook Pro has all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of reasons to avoid it. The M2 MacBook Air would be nice if it didn’t, but it does. Don’t buy the
⏹️ ▶️ John base model M2 MacBook Air because it has very slow SSD as compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to the one that has two chips, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a shame. Well, I mean, I would clarify that. Don’t buy the base model storage because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah. It isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is gonna feel like a hard drive. It’s not. It’s still one SSD and it’s gonna be very, very fast and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not gonna really notice unless you’re doing some very specific things And if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing those specific things, you probably need more space. Like, 256 is very, very small. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely to irritate you if, unless you know exactly that you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need more than that. Like, if you are currently on a computer that has 256 and you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not slamming against it, then fine, maybe you can have it. But I would say for literally anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, get 512. In fact, if you have to, I was listening to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Six Colors member special livestream where Jason and Dan Morin were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going through different questions and I totally agree with what their conclusion was. First of all, you should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become a Six Colors member so you can hear this as well, as well as other great content. And I love their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscriber podcast. But anyway, if you can’t afford to update the storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 512 on that low-end MacBook Air, maybe get the M1 MacBook Air instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use the savings to get 512 on that. That’s how important that is and how much of a pain in the butt that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is likely to be for you in the future because you can’t ever upgrade the storage. You should get what you can now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you don’t really have a choice later and 512 is what almost everybody should get at least.
⏹️ ▶️ John So related to this, I guess this is related to both the M2 MacBook Pro and the M2 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air because they both have the one chip and they both suffer from the slow speeds because of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you get the one chip model, the 256 gig SSD, and you also
⏹️ ▶️ John get the base RAM, eight gigs of RAM, when you do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that pushes these machines into swap, the slow SSD punishes the swapping much more so on other
⏹️ ▶️ John computers. So in a lot of the tests that I saw on the Max Tech YouTube channel, they would do, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 MacBook Pro or M2 MacBook Air versus another
⏹️ ▶️ John computer with similar specs with the bigger SSD. And they were very similar
⏹️ ▶️ John until you push one of them to swap, and they were doing it by just opening Chrome tabs, as most people would
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t take much to push it into swap. They’d say, OK, here it is without Chrome running, and they’re about the same speed. And here it is with
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome open with 10 tabs, which I don’t think is unreasonable, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t, yeah. But still, I feel like you could find yourself pretty quickly in a situation where you have Chrome with 10 tabs
⏹️ ▶️ John open, and it just destroys performance. Because as soon as you get close to swap, now your performance is dependent
⏹️ ▶️ John on that SSD speed and the SSD is slower. On top of that, Ars Technica review, I did it with the link
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, I should put it in. Anyway, the Ars Technica review of the M2 MacBook Air shows that even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you get the one terabyte model, the SSD is slower in some circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ John than the one in the M1 MacBook Air. Why? I don’t know, but you can look at their tests, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John slower in read, but it was faster in write. And that doesn’t make sense because there’s two chips in both
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. Maybe they went to a different vendor, maybe there’s something else we don’t know. So the M1 MacBook Air, like we were
⏹️ ▶️ John praising that machine to high heaven ages ago, because it basically didn’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John downsides. Now with the advent of the M2 MacBook Air, the downside that it has is there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an alternative with MagSafe, right? So it has dimmed the shining light of the M1 MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny bit. But beyond that, the M1 MacBook Air is still a phenomenal machine. So if you wanna save money,
⏹️ ▶️ John get that one. Oh, and speaking of the SSDs, So here’s the official
⏹️ ▶️ John spokesperson. So this is from The Verge, and The Verge has a policy now of naming, that they put the name
⏹️ ▶️ John of the person who speaks to them. Do you remember when The Verge posted their thing, like we have a new
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco policy for the marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company? No more on background.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no more just saying Apple says.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good policy, I like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but anyway, we get to people’s names now. So here it is. Apple spokesperson Michelle DiRio provided the following
⏹️ ▶️ John statement on the SSD speed of the base model MacBook Air. So this is Apple’s spin on the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’ve got one chip in there, and you know, and it’s slower. Thanks to the performance increases of M2,
⏹️ ▶️ John the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 chip. These new systems use a higher density NAND that delivers 256 gigabyte storage using a single
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. While benchmarks of the 256 gigabyte SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation,
⏹️ ▶️ John the performance of these M2-based systems for real-world activities are even faster. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that those two things don’t follow from each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they’re saying it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller. look, it’s higher density. It’s like, yep, it’s one chip. Now we get it, right? But they’re basically
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it’s slower if you benchmark just the storage, but if you do a real world task, it’s faster. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s borne out by most of the benchmarks. If you compare the M2 MacBook Air versus the M1 MacBook Air,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t push it to swap, even if the M2 MacBook Air throttles, it still usually
⏹️ ▶️ John tends to beat the M1 MacBook Air. But the swap factor is the big thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not doing a disk benchmark, like, I don’t care, I just wanna care about real world tasks, but you might be doing a real world task
⏹️ ▶️ John while having literally anything else open, or like you’re waiting for a job to finish and you’re browsing the web and it’s slaughtering
⏹️ ▶️ John your performance, making it significantly slower than the M1 model. Something to think about. So
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I don’t think this is that big of a deal because most people won’t notice this. If you only
⏹️ ▶️ John ever use it for email and web browsing and sending people messages and stuff, you’re probably fine no matter what.
⏹️ ▶️ John So don’t freak out about this, but for those in the know, do not get the base model
⏹️ ▶️ John of the M2 MacBook Air, do not get the base model of the M2 MacBook Pro, or probably any model
⏹️ ▶️ John of the M2 MacBook Pro, unless you’re really interested in battery life, because that’s another thing that came up. The M2 MacBook Pro does have bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John batteries. Again, at the sacrifice of MagSafe, and you have a touch bar, and yada, yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more about the touch bar later, believe it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is touch bar news somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, it’s important, I think, to put all this in context, though. These machines, like, you know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s cheapest series of laptops. I guess I know they’re still selling the old ones, that’s why I’m saying series, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air series. This is their cheapest series of laptops. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get significantly higher pro-level stuff, it does cost significantly more money. So you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at something that’s in the 1200 to $1500 price range in most configurations people are gonna be buying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you compare that to the differences between the low-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and high-end products 10 years ago, or maybe even five years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were vast differences. And you’d buy the low-end product and it would actually feel slow right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from day one. These machines are not like that. The gap between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how these feel and how they perform in almost every task that almost everybody does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the base models of, you know, the cheapest MacBook Air you can get, even the base model M1 version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even that, or heck, let’s hobble the SSD, the base model M2 version. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cheapest model of that. Compare that to the top of the line Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in almost every kind of task that most people do, you won’t even feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a difference between those two products. Except one has a loud fan, and the other one has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small screen. But otherwise, the difference between the low end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the high end is pretty much not noticeable anymore for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a vast quantity of tasks. And it isn’t even, it isn’t just like, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just say like, Oh, well, now, like, I’m a developer, so I will notice everything I you know, I must have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolute, you know, highest everything maxed out everything, just so I can do my development work. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need it. I mean, it helps it might make certain things a little bit faster. But the difference like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you haven’t used one of these, you know, m one or m two based machines yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might be over thinking how much these upgrades will matter for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in reality, these are so fast at almost everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t even know what you’re in for. Like you don’t need, if you’re like really stressing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not being able to afford or justify certain spec improvements, don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. You probably don’t need them. Like, you know, storage space is one thing because that’s something that you kind of can’t, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, mess around too much with. RAM is a little tricky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the SSD and bus subsystems on these are so fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you do have to swap here and there, it’s a lot less of a hit than it used to be in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of noticeability and performance in most workloads. And you only really need like the really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high core count pro and max chips or the really high core count GPUs if you’re doing workloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that really do stress those things. And most workloads don’t, even things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we used to call pro. Like if you’re doing photo editing, development work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even a lot of types of video editing, like maybe more casual style video editing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of that, you’re not gonna notice much of a difference between the cheapest laptop they sell and the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive desktop they sell these days. That’s how great all these are. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need to make a tough decision about what specs or what model to get, you kinda can’t go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong with any of these, except the M2 MacBook Pro, don’t get that. But with the exception of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much everything else, they’re all great, they’re all amazing machines. They’re all good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dogs, Brent. Even the very cheapest one of these laptops is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly better than you think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I would say that the thing that some regular people do, like if you’re doing anything else like a batch job,
⏹️ ▶️ John like where you set it to do something and it shows a progress bar and you go have dinner. Like if you literally do anything like
⏹️ ▶️ John that ever, depend, if you get one of the ones with the single chip
⏹️ ▶️ John and eight gigs of RAM, it can end up being like twice as slow as an M2
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air was with the two chips, because it’s like a disk-bound task or it pushes into the swap,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like very easily. Now, if you don’t have anything to compare that to, or you’re comparing it to an Intel thing, yeah, it’ll still be fast, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a shame to know that you buy this fancy new machine, especially if you’re like upgrading for an M1 model or something, and you expect it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, and it goes half the speed because you’re swapping and the SSD kills it. So I would still keep
⏹️ ▶️ John that in mind. If you ever do anything that has a progress bar that you’re impatiently waiting for that takes more than like 10
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes or whatever, and it’s not that hard to do that. You won’t notice the difference while you’re editing the video. You’re in iMovie, you’re moving things around,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything’s fine. It’s when you do like export or, you know, send it to YouTube or whatever, that type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing that takes a while to run. You don’t want that to run at half the speed of an M1 MacBook Air, and you could find
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself in that situation if you’re not careful with the base config. So I’ll throw that in there. Oh, and since you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio and the fans, I just want to give you an update on that. For people who haven’t heard past episodes, I got the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio. I don’t like fan noise. I put it on the desk. I decided I could still hear the fan. So I bought
⏹️ ▶️ John this 3D printed plastic cage from Etsy that exactly fits the Mac Studio. And I stuck it to the
⏹️ ▶️ John underside of my desk. This is not my desk, it’s my wife’s desk. Stuck it to the underside of her desk. And I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John say that solution, it is 100% silent. Like even if I try
⏹️ ▶️ John really hard to hear the fan, I can’t. If I’m sitting at the desk and literally
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else in the entire neighborhood is quiet, not just everything in my house is quiet, but anything’s in the neighborhood
⏹️ ▶️ John to be quiet, I can maybe pick it up. So, and as we know, the Mac Studio, no matter what
⏹️ ▶️ John you do to it, the Mac Studio with the M1 Mac’s chip in it, no matter what you do to it, the fans
⏹️ ▶️ John never get any faster. So it is effectively silent. So now it is not only silent, but also invisible,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not on my wife’s desk anymore. She just has the Apple Studio display with cables that go down the back
⏹️ ▶️ John and a keyboard and a mouse. That’s her whole computer. It’s like an iMac without the iMac inside it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stuck to the bottom of her desk is this little thing, but it’s completely out of sight and out of mind. So I’m pretty happy with the solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was nervous about the 3D printed cage, you know, getting stress fractures or cracking
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t know, you know, how strong this 3D printed plastic is. So I did actually get some safety straps
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing. You would. Sent by a listener to- I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John would have. Yeah, sent by a listener to ADP, especially since that’s a place where my dog goes. She stays under there a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ John like under that desk and just kind of snoozes down there. I don’t want a Mac studio falling on her, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a heavy thing. Two feet away, but yeah, I wouldn’t, anyway. So I got some safety straps. I’ll put a link in the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s these things that’s a listener to the show sent me. They’re like perfect for this application. I was wondering what I was going to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John for this, and I got these things and they’re absolutely perfect. They’re little they’re overkill. They’re metal cables with metal, metal
⏹️ ▶️ John islets at the end. But yeah, I just put a bunch of those across and screwed them in. So
⏹️ ▶️ John now I’ve got belt and suspenders for that Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So to go back to the M2 MacBook Air, you teased a little bit about a teardown. So what was going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on in Max Tech’s tear down?
⏹️ ▶️ John They tore it down and what they do on that channel always fascinates me because, yeah, so they’re gonna crack the
⏹️ ▶️ John machine open, you know, it’s a thing you do, like a lot of these things are not easy to take apart
⏹️ ▶️ John or you take it apart once and that’s it, but they tore it apart before they did their thermal testing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, do the thermal testing first, you’re invalidating all of your work, why? Because now all you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is testing how well you put the thing back together. And let me tell you, when you take this thing apart and strip
⏹️ ▶️ John it down to like, so you can see the M2 chip on there, it’s never going back to the way it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you look at how it is, like the motherboard is covered with this, covered on both sides with a full
⏹️ ▶️ John length thermal pad sticker with thicker thermal pads in different places plus
⏹️ ▶️ John thermal paste on top of the M2. It’s a mess in there. But anyway, you should watch the Teardown
⏹️ ▶️ John video if you wanna see what it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and why you should
⏹️ ▶️ John never do what they did. It’s just, but like I said, it’s not exotic. It’s thermal pads.
⏹️ ▶️ John seen the little pads that they use them in the consoles a lot right it’s it’s fairly cheap it’s just some material that spreads the
⏹️ ▶️ John heat and it spreads it to these little metal plates that are inside there there may be like a very thin vapor
⏹️ ▶️ John chamber thing but according to their tests when you look at it with like one of those IR cameras the heat spreader
⏹️ ▶️ John is not spreading the heat much the heat is the hot spot and the thermal camera is
⏹️ ▶️ John the m2 and it spreads a little bit or whatever so but that seems to be adequate for
⏹️ ▶️ John it to do okay thermal Throttling only on the other extreme conditions that I think that’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John for their lowest-end laptop And I definitely appreciate it not having a fan Oh, and then one more thing they
⏹️ ▶️ John found in the the teardown is they found what they what they say I haven’t confirmed this or anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they found what they think is an ultra wideband chip in the m2 MacBook Air And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that would be the first ultra wideband chip in a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought all of the Apple Silicon series models had one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be misremembering
⏹️ ▶️ John well anyway I don’t think there’s any application for ultra wideband
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yet like unlike drop
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike the phones but they have the thing where you could be close to somebody in the airdrop and stuff like whatever they whatever they made up before
⏹️ ▶️ John the air tags were out yeah so this makes me think of the previous rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John about air pods you know going away from bluetooth and moving to ultra wideband for audio for a bunch of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be you know better more efficient lower power better bandwidth for lossless audio and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know hopefully better in all the ways that Bluetooth is bad so
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see we’ll see if anything comes of that but just throw that out there we’ll probably follow up in
⏹️ ▶️ John the coming months, whether that really is ultra wide band chip.
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Phone-number-change follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about what happens when somebody changes their phone number. This was based on an Ask ATP from last week, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was my frustration at having lots of contact info for people, but then when I initiate
⏹️ ▶️ John a form of contact, say for example, I want to share a funny thing that I see on the web with the share. I’m on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and I want to use a little share icon, the box with the arrow pointing up and I go share. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John the person I want to share to isn’t in the recent ones, like the little thing that shows their face and like messages or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to hit the messages icon and then you have to type their name. So I wanna share it with my son and he’s not visible in the resources.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I hit messages, I type the first few letters of his name and it auto completes to his name. And next
⏹️ ▶️ John to his name is his phone number and I never want to send him messages to his phone number. I always wanna send
⏹️ ▶️ John them to his Apple ID. And no matter how many times I go over to that line and click the little Chevron and
⏹️ ▶️ John go pick the Apple ID and then send the message to his Apple. No matter how many times I override the default that it’s sending to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John Next time I do it, I type it for a few letters, his name shows his phone number. So people had some theories about how
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix that. So first, here’s an Apple document that
⏹️ ▶️ John tries to explain something that sounds like what it is, but it’s not. So this document, which we’ll put a link in the show notes, it says
⏹️ ▶️ John to change the default phone number or email address for a contact method, touch and hold the button for that method
⏹️ ▶️ John below the contact’s name, then tap a selection in the list. This is in the contact card.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you’re in the contacts app or any place that shows the contacts card, You see the person and their name, and then you see
⏹️ ▶️ John these little icons, messages, call, FaceTime, mail, pay, with the little, you know, right? If you tap and
⏹️ ▶️ John hold on those, like if you tap and hold on messages, you see all the ways you can message them. You can message them with their Apple ID, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can message them with their phone number, whatever, right? And then you say, oh, pick one of those, and that will set the default.
⏹️ ▶️ John But all it actually does is set the default for the next time you’re on this specific screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and you tap messages without
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t help me. I’m not on this screen, right? I’m, I’m, you know, I hit share messages,
⏹️ ▶️ John then type the first few letters of their name and see that it has auto-completed to my son and his phone number.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s frustrating. Jan Gobble had another theory. According to a friend at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John iMessage picks the way you contact people via each person’s iMessage prep. If you have your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John number in this and I have your phone number and email and my contact card for you, then iMessage will address it
⏹️ ▶️ John to the phone number. So this is the thing where if you go on the Mac version of messages and you go to the preferences, that says
⏹️ ▶️ John start new conversations from, right? And you can pick where do you want to start new conversations from.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that does not, I mean, this may be true, but A, it doesn’t make a lot of sense and B, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really help me, right? So it doesn’t make a lot of sense because what you’re saying with that preference is when I message other people,
⏹️ ▶️ John who do they see the message coming from? Like who am I, you can pick whenever I message somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want it to be sent through my phone number so that what they will see is a message from my phone number.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you can say, I wanna start new conversations from my Apple ID. And so when they see the message coming
⏹️ ▶️ John in, they’ll see it coming from my Apple ID. That’s for me sending outgoing messages, right? That’s who
⏹️ ▶️ John it appears to be coming from. But what I wanna control is how I send it to the person.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this theory is that the only way to get it to work is I’d have to go to my son’s phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and change his preference to say, start new conversations from your Apple ID instead of from
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone number. And that seems weird to me that on my phone, when I hit share
⏹️ ▶️ John and I hit messages and I type my son’s name, but the only way for me to tell my phone to pick
⏹️ ▶️ John his Apple ID is to go to his phone and tell him to change it to hit an Apple ID when he sends to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I really hope that’s not true. I suppose I’ll try it and if it fixes the problem then I will cause my son probably doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care what he sends his conversations from. But this is all very confusing and it gets
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the larger issue, which is contacts. You can have many things in each category, many
⏹️ ▶️ John email addresses, many phone numbers, someone and so forth. And there’s apparently no way in context
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell it. These are the, this is the priority water order. These are old ones. These are new ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a completely unordered stew. Sometimes I don’t know if you’ve done this thing, but like I delete all of them and re
⏹️ ▶️ John add them in the order that I want them to be just crossing my fingers at the order that they display on the contact card has
⏹️ ▶️ John some meaning, but it probably doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Let’s be honest. So to back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up way to the beginning and perhaps I missed something, I’m sorry, but why is it such a travesty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to send something to Alex’s phone number? Because you can send something to my phone number or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Apple ID email address, and they both end up in the same spot as far as I’m concerned. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, they don’t always end up in the same spot. So the reason you want to send to an Apple ID, that’s a good question though. The reason why I sent, why I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to send to an Apple ID instead of a phone number is not everybody has their Macs set up to
⏹️ ▶️ John receive messages sent to their phone number. And even if you do have it set up to do that, that I think your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be nearby for it to work. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no. You’re thinking of SMS, like the SMS relay thing that was introduced many, many years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you receive an SMS from an Android person or from your bank,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like two factor, that does need to be set up explicitly. And I always forget how to do it. I wrote actually a blog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post about it way, way, way back when this was new, but that your phone does need to be nearby,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think. And that actually might’ve changed since the feature was new. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, there’s still a settings in Mac messages that says, hey, where do you want to receive messages from
⏹️ ▶️ John on this Mac? And not everybody has their phone number checked off. So they might just have their Apple ID. You always have your
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID checked off because when you like sign in with your Apple ID and create an account on your Mac, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way to stop that. But you might not have your phone number checked. So I don’t want to be in a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where I send a message where he’s on his Mac and he doesn’t see it. It shows up on his phone, but his phone is over on the bed and he hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John looked at it and he doesn’t see it on his Mac. So if I send the Apple ID, I know no matter where he is, it’s going to show up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I guess, but I can’t think of anyone I know who has that situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And- I have very frequently found when I go to my preferences that it is not set. And I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John unsetting it. So it must have be, I don’t know if it’s something to do with upgrading OSs or like, who knows what makes
⏹️ ▶️ John that become unset. Who can know? But like, you know, I’m always on, you know, you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything to be on your Apple ID. Your Apple ID is your Apple ID and it is everywhere that you were assigned into your Apple ID. And that makes perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. But your phone number is tied to your phone and your Mac is not a phone, at least not yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I get that. I think this is one of those cases, and I should not be throwing stones on this, but it’s one of those cases where I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re fretting about something that’s not really an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John issue. No, it’s happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s actually happened. That’s why I’m obsessed with this, because it’s like, I’m sending you a message, why aren’t you responding?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh, I didn’t see them, they’re just on my phone. Like, but you’re on your Mac, weren’t you? It’s like, yeah, but I didn’t see them there. And then you find out why not, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John go, and it says, it’s just not the, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it’s only happened with people that, at least for the next month or so, or living in your house. May I suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an easier solution, which would be to march up to his MacBook Air and just fix it for him. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I do that on my own. I do that on my own, Max. I’m gonna go look right now. Everybody launch messages. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hold on. And
⏹️ ▶️ John go to see in preferences where it says that you’re set to receive messages from. All right, it is checked online,
⏹️ ▶️ John although one of my Apple IDs is not checked. Do you have three Apple IDs listed for each one of your Apple IDs?
⏹️ ▶️ John At Mac, at me, and at iCloud?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have at iCloud, I have at me, I have my third
⏹️ ▶️ Casey party email that is basically my Apple ID. And then I also have my phone number. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have my phone number, iCloud, me, and my domain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I also have all of those things. You don’t have at Mac? No. My Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID, I think, was created after.Mac because I joined during the mobile me era.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, but I mean, I’ve never had in all of the Macs I’ve owned, and granted it’s been quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit fewer than you, but in all the Macs I’ve owned, I’ve never to my recollection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had that setting just magically uncheck itself. So far be it for me to argue with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your experience, but this is not a problem that I have seen in my personal
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other thing now that I’m looking at this thing is, oh, well, you don’t have to worry about that because even if they just get it on their phone, if you have messages
⏹️ ▶️ John in the cloud side, it’ll show up on their Mac anyway. It’s like, yeah, maybe eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to say that iMessages in the cloud, it is, has not up to the standards of, let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud Photo Library, in terms of reliably and, you know, quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John syncing changes. That’s, I mean, to messages credit, is the only application
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m aware of from Apple that has a sync now button, but I can also tell you from experience that when you click that sync now button,
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, you’re in for a wait, and there’s no progress bar. Of course, yeah.
IPSec not required for IPv6
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then finally for follow up, tell me about IPsec and whether or not it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey required for IPv6, please. Yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is from Brian Peterson who pointed to some information, but I just pulled from Wikipedia because it says succinctly,
⏹️ ▶️ John IPsec was a mandatory part of all IPv6 protocol implementations and the Internet Key Exchange was recommended.
⏹️ ▶️ John But with RFC 6434, the inclusion of IPsec and IPv6 implementations was
⏹️ ▶️ John downgraded to a recommendation because it was considered impractical to require full IPsec implementation for all
⏹️ ▶️ John types of devices that may use IPv6. And uh, Squozen on Twitter, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John says it in a slightly different way. IPsec is quote unquote mandatory in IPv6 in the sense that everything
⏹️ ▶️ John running IPv6 must be capable of supporting it, but that doesn’t mean all IPv6 traffic automatically uses IPsec.
⏹️ ▶️ John It must still be explicitly configured between two hosts. So it seems like this is a thing they wanted to do and they had it in the original RFC
⏹️ ▶️ John but then backed off because probably people complained like, oh, even for my whatever, you know, smart
⏹️ ▶️ John home toaster or I got to use IPSec? We’re using TLS for everything. Why do we need to use IPSec? Seems overkill. So
⏹️ ▶️ John now it is not mandatory everywhere as of like, what now? As of like 2011 or something, it’s not mandatory.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is just, you have to support it, but it doesn’t mean that you have to use it for all of your communications.
⏹️ ▶️ John And everyone cited like TLS, basically, you know, HTTPS that you see on your URLs as
⏹️ ▶️ John the predominant way that information is encrypted in transit. And having IPSec on top of that just
⏹️ ▶️ John probably seems like overkill and it requires too much of the people until launching their smart toasters, I suppose.
Sponsor: RevenueCat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Revenue Cat. I’m an app developer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My least favorite part of my code to work on is the in-app purchase code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my least favorite part of my server stuff to work on is the in-app purchase subscription management.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus pre built integrations and webhooks make it easy to sync customer events and revenue data
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great service. I strongly recommend it. It is so much better than writing in-app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code yourself. Revenuecat.com. Thank you so much to Revenue Cat for making this
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Touch Bar news (!)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So apparently, if you have a Touch Bar Mac, which in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and of itself, I’m sorry, if you put an AirPlay button on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Touch Bar, you can expect that your networking will just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of pause periodically, always. What is going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a good article of someone debugging a problem they were having and tracking it down to this thing that’s in the touch
⏹️ ▶️ John bar that periodically checks for stuff on the network? I’m not a network expert.
⏹️ ▶️ John My question with all these things is like, all right, so this kills this person’s network. Will it kill everybody’s network?
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I say kill, I mean make everything slower than you that it would otherwise be because it seems like what it’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s being wasteful and it’s constantly checking for a thing. It’s like the airplay button and it’s like looking for other
⏹️ ▶️ John for things that can airplay to any kind of thing where you have polling where something is saying, what’s around here that I
⏹️ ▶️ John can airplay to? What’s around here that I can airplay to? What’s around here that I can airplay to? That’s polling, right? That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John good, it’s inefficient, and it’s inefficient for the thing that is asking the question constantly, and it’s inefficient
⏹️ ▶️ John for your network, because there’s constantly a pulse going out, messages going out saying, hey, who’s out there? Who’s out
⏹️ ▶️ John there that I can airplay to, right? But it doesn’t seem like that should make your network performance so
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly awful that you notice it. So maybe there’s something else bad with the network, but I just thought this was an interesting story just
⏹️ ▶️ John because the touch bar, everybody’s favorite thing, is still out there
⏹️ ▶️ John causing problems for people who probably just wanna use it as a row of function keys. And I just wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John bring this to people’s attention because it’s the type of problem that most people would never figure out. Like it takes a fairly heroic
⏹️ ▶️ John level. You can look at the article here. It takes a fairly heroic level of debugging to track
⏹️ ▶️ John it down to something in your touch bar because that’s not what you’re thinking. And you’re like, why is my network slow?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re checking everything you can think of. You’re not looking at what buttons are in my touch bar right now. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the solution is just to not have that AirPlay thing in your touch bar, and then it solves this problem. But I thought this was
⏹️ ▶️ John funny. And also, hey, if you have a touch bar and you’re having network difficulties or put it this way, if you have a touch
⏹️ ▶️ John bar and you never use that AirPlay button, remove it just in case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a good thing they’re not making any more. Oh, wait.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, don’t worry, they they’re constantly updating touch bar and improving it. solid.
Dual Pro Stand patent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Apple in the last couple of weeks apparently patented a dual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro stand for studio display and Pro display XDR users and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way, this is like kind of exactly for me because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you recall I you know had my Semi beloved LG 5k that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate yet love. I love hate. Anyway, I had that then I got the studio display and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I currently have the studio display sitting directly in front of me, and then off to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my right, with the screen angled at about a 45-degree angle, I have the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K. And it is sitting on a single stand that is just sitting on top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the desk, because I still have my glass desk, which eventually I will replace, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, I didn’t really trust a clamp onto glass without… I just didn’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was a good idea. So I have this kind of meh freestanding stand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I will put a link in the show notes if you’re interested. Again, it is meh. It is very much the LG 5K
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of stands, but one way or another.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Ultra fine. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is extremely, extremely fine. But anyway, but this Pro Stand, excuse me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dual Pro Stand that Apple seems to have patented looks like a kind of similar thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with mine, there’s a single stand and a post that comes up, and then off of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single post are two arms that hold up the screens. This is kind of the opposite,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually. It’s two posts, one at each end, and then a connecting rod, if you will, between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. But what’s very interesting is because if you look at the MacRumors post, well, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying post a lot all of a sudden, but anyway, if you look at the MacRumors article, there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straight crossbar between the two vertical posts, the two supports. And I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to myself, that doesn’t do what I want it to do because I want it, you know, kind of at an angle. I want, I want the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one screen directly in front of me and then, you know, perpendicular to my face, and then I want the other one at a 45 degree angle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as you scroll down, hey, sure enough, right in the middle of the horizontal support, you can bend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if I were to get myself a second studio display, which I totally have not considered, no, of course
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, why would I do such a silly thing? I could pair it potentially with this very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancy schmancy pro stand, dual pro stand, which looks very cool and I’m sure is super cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the disclaimers that patents don’t often result in products. I think this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no way in heck that Casey would ever get this because the stand itself would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably cost $2,500. You’re so right. You are so right.
⏹️ ▶️ John like only 2000 because it’s like two regular thousand dollar stands. Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this looks a lot like patents that come out after
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve already decided not to make it. So it’s like several years ago, they’re making the Pro Display XDR and they have a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas for stands. And this is one of the ideas. And they just said, actually, we’re not gonna make this one. We’re just gonna make a regular stand. We’ll charge
⏹️ ▶️ John a thousand dollars for it. Here’s the XDR. And that’s what they decided to do. But then eventually it’s like, but we did think
⏹️ ▶️ John about and design this double stand. So eventually the patent goes out and we should still patent it. Cause that’s what companies do. Cause patents
⏹️ ▶️ John are dumb and they have to patent everything. So they patented it and it comes out, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the time you’re seeing the patent, it’s a product they long ago decided not to make, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John was a wise decision because to Marco’s point, this would cost so much money as evidenced by the single stand that
⏹️ ▶️ John costs $1,000. Can’t imagine what this even fancier double stand would cost. And it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like the situation with my TV where, you know, Casey’s ugly central stand thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have your two monitors extending out pretty wide and you just got one stand in the middle. These
⏹️ ▶️ John things, it’s like, you know, it’s like soccer goalposts. your desk needs to be as wide as your two displays
⏹️ ▶️ John so that the feet, because the feet are all the way at the
⏹️ ▶️ John feet aren’t in the middle of the two monitors. The feet are at the far edges of the monitor. The left monitor of the
⏹️ ▶️ John foot is at the left edge of that monitor. The right monitor of the foot is at the right edge of that monitor. So you need
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a desk that wide. And then you need those feet. Those feet are like, because if you do do it on an angle,
⏹️ ▶️ John those feet are kind of, you know, toed in. Like they’re, like just look at your desk and think of where those feet would
⏹️ ▶️ John be and think of what, you know, maybe you have speakers there or maybe you have like, they’re taking up desk space. The good thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about a central stand with just the one thing is, yeah, you’ve got a foot in front of you, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right in front of you and you can put stuff on top of it and you can still have stuff flanking it. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, I don’t think this is a good design for a stand and if you read the patent filing, so things they talk about, like what are
⏹️ ▶️ John the features of this? Why is this patentable? Or, you know, what’s good about this? And
⏹️ ▶️ John they say some things that I guess appeal to people’s sense of precision, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you can just have two stands or something like Casey’s, but it’s hard to get the monitors exactly even
⏹️ ▶️ John with each other. And if you adjust one and you have to adjust the other one to be exactly the same, I think the idea with this is
⏹️ ▶️ John they move as a unit, right? So that you don’t have to, like if you wanted them to be higher or lower,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you raise and lower it, they both go up and down exactly the same amount. And they’re both always perfectly aligned and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re never crooked and don’t meet it the right way or whatever. Is that a big deal? If you have a traditional
⏹️ ▶️ John stand, you can probably just move them so they’re both the way you want them. And then you probably never touch them again and it’s fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John again, this is a product they didn’t make and I hope they never make because it seems like it’s not a great idea, but
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, like to think that, I mean, I’m gonna say they’re over there. The time spent making
⏹️ ▶️ John this stand, I wish they had spent it, you know, getting the Apple Studio Display out sooner
⏹️ ▶️ John or trying to source better
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. It’s always easy to
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the things, you know, obviously they try lots of different things, but this looks pretty detailed
⏹️ ▶️ John for a product that didn’t come out. And it’s like, oh, that was kind of like a dead end where you wasted some time
⏹️ ▶️ John looking into something and decided to bail on it. I’m glad they bailed on it, but I’m kind of sad that
⏹️ ▶️ John they even spent as much time as was required to make this patent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you were saying a minute ago, where would the two uprights go? It is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noting that the way I have my particular setup, the stand, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support for my two monitors is basically in the back right corner of the desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the LG 5K, it crosses the edge of my desk about halfway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down the LG 5K. So the right half of the LG 5K is effectively floating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over nothing. So in this case, it didn’t even occur to me until you said something, but in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be putting the right-hand stand on thin air, which would probably not work too well. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this is perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not for me, even leaving aside the fact, as Marco so astutely pointed out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this will be a trillion dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, it would be if they made it. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they would. It’s just like this, my
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid TV stand. I don’t have enough room for a wide piece of furniture for my television to go on, so the right and left edges
⏹️ ▶️ John of my television, they’re over the floating, over the ground, right? And they have a central stand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Any stand that has feet at the extremities just assumes everybody has a very, very wide piece of furniture, which
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people do, but not everybody, especially if you’re in New England and you have no place to put your TV, except for on an angle
⏹️ ▶️ John in a corner, and it’s very difficult to find pieces of furniture that are very wide and also fit in
EU USB-C mandate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, we have had this thing in the show notes forever, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like now is as good a time as any since we are recording from the future to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what went on, what is this, September of last year. The EU proposed, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think since accepted or ratified or whatever, a mandatory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C on all devices, including iPhones. So I think it was John who put some very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful excerpts, which I will now read to you from the Verge article, which we put in the show notes. The rules are intended to cut down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on electronic waste by allowing people to reuse existing chargers and cables when they buy new electronics. In addition to phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rules will apply to other devices, like tablets, headphones, portable speakers, video game consoles, and cameras. Manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will also be forced to make their fast-charging standards interoperable and to provide information to customers about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what charging standards their device supports. The proposals only cover devices using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wired, not wireless chargers, EU Commissioner Terry Breton said in a press conference, adding that, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s plenty of room for innovation on wireless, quote. A spokesperson for the commission subsequently confirmed to The Verge that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a USB-C port is only mandatory for devices that charge using a cable. But if a device charges exclusively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via wireless, like Apple’s rumored portless iPhone, there would be no requirement for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C charging port. If adopted, manufacturers will eventually have 24 months to comply with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new rules. So what do we think?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this first point, cut down on electronic waste by allowing people to reuse existing
⏹️ ▶️ John chargers. So we’ll talk a little bit about the
⏹️ ▶️ John wisdom of a single charging standard in a second. But in the short term,
⏹️ ▶️ John requiring everybody who has a million lightning cables to throw them in the garbage and get USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John cables does not cut down on electronic waste. And I’m going to say there’s a lot of lightning cables out there in the world at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Not a small number of them. So citing specifically that this new
⏹️ ▶️ John proposal will cut down on electronic waste does not ring true to me. Now I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John people do have USB-C chargers, but I don’t think people buy enough USB-C chargers for all the devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and then only use half of them because the other half use lightning. No, you buy as many chargers as you need. You buy the lightning cables and
⏹️ ▶️ John chargers for your lightning devices, and you buy the USB-C cables and chargers for your USB-C devices, and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a million extras of both. So if this standard came out, And you know, if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to USB-C on their phones, the short-term effect is a lot of lightning cables in
⏹️ ▶️ John the landfill or recycling or whatever we do with them. So that seems a little bit silly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I mean, long-term though, like I see what they’re doing long-term. Now that being, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of those things like, you know, the arguments that we’ve heard so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the tech community, I think hold water, which is first of all, from a convenience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point of view, this would be incredible to be in a world of all USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, if you look at how we might get there might be messy, but to be in this world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all USB-C today would be great. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there’s also a significant downside to the idea of a government forcing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech companies to use and, you know, keep indefinitely into the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this particular type of connector. Now, the USB connector type does not change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as frequently as most things in our tech world do. I mean, my first computer with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-A port, I’m pretty sure, was in 1999. That was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 23 years ago, and USB-A is just now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting around to slowly, painfully being replaced. And so, if we say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to stick with this connector, on one hand you can say, it’s probably not a good thing for governments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mandate things like this to tech companies, because what if we want to change it in the future, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a slow and painful process. On the other hand, you can say, well, this actually doesn’t change that frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe that wouldn’t be that bad because the actual lifespan of something like this, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the context of mobile charging and stuff where you’re almost certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only or primarily using it for supplying power and not for. like rapid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data transfer in most cases for this kind of device. So you don’t have to worry that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like, oh well, you know, what if it won’t support Thunderbolt 17? You know, chances are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for this type of use it’s not going to matter for a very long time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this would be a great world to get to. I still am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hesitant to say that requiring it by government action is the way to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there Because, again, like, there is some conservatism about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco letting government control something like tech that tends to move quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably warranted.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you look at past, you know, government or quasi-government mandating
⏹️ ▶️ John technologies, we tend to get stuck with them for a long time. Power plugs that are in our walls,
⏹️ ▶️ John telephone cables, even things like Ethernet, which are vaguely related to telephone things.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, a part of that is you build up a lot of infrastructure and it takes, it costs a lot of money to tear it all down and everything. Part
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is that once it’s a government type of thing, everyone just gets on board with it and it assumes like the safe bet or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the world, in the faster pace, let’s say, you know, the moving world of
⏹️ ▶️ John internet-related technologies, like, you know, the telecom era is, you know, back in the 60s, 70s,
⏹️ ▶️ John 80s, the internet age, things move faster now and there is more,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, development, like as people in the chat room are talking about, micro USB, the
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible connector that we all hate, the one that is asymmetrical, but it’s so small it’s hard to tell. It’s the worst. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if they had standardized on that, maybe we wouldn’t have USB-C, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if they had standardized on something before lightning came out, we never would have had lightning and lightning was a big bleep over what came before
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? So the idea that the government should do something because left to their own devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently Apple is refusing to budge on this, right? So everyone else is going to USBC, but Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John out there and they sell a lot of phones. It makes sense that, you know, there’s apparently not
⏹️ ▶️ John enough motivation for these companies to get together on their own. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the mistake is not in governments requiring something, but in governments
⏹️ ▶️ John requiring something and specifically saying what it is. If for instance, they had instead said,
⏹️ ▶️ John there has to be a common charging standard, decide amongst yourself what it would be. everyone would pick USB-C. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John good thing about that is that years in the future, when there’s some newer standard, like an Apple wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to use Thunderbolt 19 on their new hollow iPads or whatever, oh, but we can’t do it because
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone has to use USB-C and we don’t wanna put two ports. Eventually, everybody in the industry will be in a similar
⏹️ ▶️ John situation with like, oh, there’s a new standard and it’s better, or I have a new thing in mind and it’s better, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all stuck on the stupid USB-C because we all agreed back in 2022 that we had the one standard
⏹️ ▶️ John requirement and we all agreed it would be USBC because duh, of course it would be, right? At that point
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future, there would be enough companies that wanna move on to their own particular innovation to come back
⏹️ ▶️ John together again and say, okay, everybody, let’s get together again. Let’s all agree on a new standard because we all agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that USBC is holding back all of our products because now in the future, we all have different, and then they’d have to agree
⏹️ ▶️ John on like, well, what is the new standard? Let’s fight over that or whatever. But they would be motivated to do that because everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John would want to have newer, better devices, right? If we had standardized on 30 pin, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone would be like, well, 30 pin has served us well, but we all have something better in mind. And let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about what that would be because with all us being stuck on 30 pin, it sucks because we have to add a second port off to the
⏹️ ▶️ John side and it’s awkward or whatever. And so you got to use a 30 pin for, you know, like there
⏹️ ▶️ John is motivation for companies to get together on standards. Just look at the matter standard, which may come to
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing, but still like, those companies spent years killing each other in the market, trying to see who’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to become dominant And eventually nobody became dominant enough to just like dictate the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they all came together and said, all right, now this is hurting us more than it’s helping us. We all have our own standards or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but people are, every one of us has people, customers who won’t buy our products because their house is already set up for Hue,
⏹️ ▶️ John or it’s already set up for Google Home, or it’s already set up for HomeKit or whatever. And they won’t buy our
⏹️ ▶️ John products because they have a different, so we need to decide on a standard because that will help all of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the market working correctly. when everyone agrees that we have to get together on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John or just look at any other standard, Blu-ray versus, what was the competing thing on Blu-ray? I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco HD DVD versus
⏹️ ▶️ John God. Beta VHS or whatever, like whatever the standard you ended up picking, the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John does have motivation to consolidate on a standard, but historically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John the government is very bad at dictating the specific technology that standards should be, and when they
⏹️ ▶️ John do do so, it kind of gives people the excuse to like, say, well, we’re just stuck with it and we have to use this forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and I don’t know, I’m not saying this is not what they’re doing. I don’t know the details of the EU proposal. Maybe the EU proposal has a time limit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe EU proposal has a way that they can get back together and deal with this. And even if it doesn’t, the EU itself
⏹️ ▶️ John in 15 years can get back together and say, okay, we all agree now that that USB-C thing, the time has come and we should redo
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? But why leave that to chance? Why not bake it into the thing? A one standard policy
⏹️ ▶️ John for something as big as the EU to say all phone manufacturers have to agree on a standard
⏹️ ▶️ John decide amongst yourself would have the same results and would be a better policy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now that’s just like pie in the sky how I think this could be different or better and hopefully it will
⏹️ ▶️ John work out, right? Practically speaking, I’m not sure what this means. Does this mean
⏹️ ▶️ John that in two years, starting from whatever date, Apple has to
⏹️ ▶️ John switch their iPhones to USB-C or make them wireless? Seems like it does. Was
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple gonna do that anyway? Maybe, I don’t know. There’s the ultra wideband wildcard that we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about for a lot of this stuff. There’s the wireless MagSafe puck charging thing that’s gonna send
⏹️ ▶️ John data as well as power through everything. And then there’s just, they’ll go to USBC and it will be fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You know, and this proposal, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s like, it’s the EU mandating a standard or whatever, but really this is just an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Cause everybody else is already doing USBC.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one else is out there with their own proprietary connector. It’s just Apple, but Apple’s so big that they have to make this law because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wasn’t doing it on their own. So in many ways, this is another case where Apple could have made a change on their own to avoid this,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If Apple had just gone to USBC like last year, they could have maybe prevented this
⏹️ ▶️ John because then they would be in a situation where everybody is on USBC, the EU is happy, this thing doesn’t pass
⏹️ ▶️ John because when they were trying to get votes on it, everyone would say, why are we voting on this? Everybody already uses USBC. What’s the point
⏹️ ▶️ John of this law? And that would free them later to go to Thunderbolt 19 without having to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ John the EU to do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with you that, I think the thing I find most offensive about this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s the government deciding specifically USB-C is the way forward. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you said, it’s so obviously the way forward today, but we don’t know when that’s gonna change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don’t know what the situation is. And it’s funny because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not that offended that the iPhone isn’t USB-C. Like I absolutely would prefer it to be without question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m not that bothered by it. And I think that’s in part because I’ve decided to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey embrace either USB-C or just wireless charging for everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I still have a trillion lightning cables just strewn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throughout the house, just like you said, John. But I’m going on a trip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhat soon, and I use that as an excuse to spend money. Hi, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve known you too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was just looking at chargers today because I keep that my family seems to eat USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging equipment and so I’m out of multi-port chargers and relevant to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the story my wife is away this weekend and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she requested chargers for her trip because of course I’m in charge of wires she’s in charge of soft things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I look at my you know my wire cabinet all All my multi-port chargers are gone. So I had to give her separate bricks with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just one output each. And she wanted to take with her, this is not unreasonable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and an iPad. I had to give her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not a good look. You don’t want that. And so this is something that I was running into.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So many, many moons ago, I wrote a couple of different blog posts, both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about the same thing, which was, what is what I like to call my go pack? And I’ve, I’ve preached the gospel on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, uh, many, many times before, but the short, short version is I like to have a pack, like a small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bag full of all the cables and doodads and whatnots and wizards that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need in order to charge all my stuff when I travel. And that go pack, that pack of cables and whatnot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is, it is never touched and never pilfered through when I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not traveling. I never just, Oh, I’ll just grab this. Nope. Nope. It has to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely untouchable thing when you’re at home. And so in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GoPack, I used to have a five USB-A plug, you know, so you plug into the wall once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because five USB-A coming out the other end because I need, you know, two phones, two watches,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and potentially one other thing. But I feel like that’s just so many cables, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since I typically bring a couple of USB extensions so that Erin doesn’t have to like hand me her phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before she goes to sleep. can get the cable all the way over to her side of the bed or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was just too much. It was just too much. And so I did the most Marco thing possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you think I did, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bought a bunch of new stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bought new stuff to fix my problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an absolutely preposterous amount of money and I bought two Mophie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3-in-1 travel chargers with MagSafe, which was recommended to me many moons ago in the relay slack. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a MagSafe puck in the center, an iPhone puck on the right and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then just a Qi charger really, really, really intended for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods on the left. And it folds up and it has a nice little like canvasy bag thing. Each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these, and you need two if you’re part of a pair, each of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is $150 and is only available at Apple. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the only place you can buy them is from Apple. So I spent $300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frigging dollars to get chargers that just replace a bunch of cables that already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s amazing. But I did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did it because I’ve spent way too much time being Marco’s friend and because it’s going to make my life so much nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that all I have to do is plug each of these in and guess how they plug in gentlemen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C baby. I plug these in either to the USB-C charger that they come with or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could repurpose my two-port USB-C charger that I’ll use for my laptop and I could bring it to the bedroom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at night and I will plug these into some USB-C power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adapter, and then I will get Aaron’s watch and Aaron’s phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my watch and my phone and my AirPods if I so choose, all charging using just one cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per person, as opposed to two USB-A extension cables, a lightning cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two lightning cables, two watch cables, it’s just, this is gonna be so much better and I’m so excited about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But all of this is relevant because I want to get away from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lightning. Like I don’t have a problem with lightning except that it’s, it’s its own bespoke thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want lightning in my life anymore, except when I’m doing development, which is something that we’ve only glanced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off of the outer atmosphere of, but for charging purposes, just give me Qi charging or MagSafe charging,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give it to me everywhere. I don’t want it. I don’t, I don’t want to charge via lightning unless I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to. And I think that moving away from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wired charging, for me anyway, I’m all in baby. Like let’s just go all wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the time. Where this gets really, really squishy is what happens when I’m sitting at my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Xcode. Because if the watch tells us anything, oh boy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not want wireless debugging for my phone. No thank you, and I know you can do it now. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have done it from time to time, particularly when I was using my Adorable. No, thank you. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not want any part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything about it is worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I do not want any part of that. No, thank you at all. So like if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple comes out with some, we’ve talked about this in the past, if Apple comes out with some new phone that’s completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sealed and charges only wirelessly, all of the consumer side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me is ready, baby, like sign me up. But the developer side of me is going to be devastated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless they have some sort of solution that actually freaking works for doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, debugging and development against a wired or some new replacement for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I’m not holding my breath on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope. One thing I’ll miss about Lightning is the, well, I have one of the things we use for charging the house is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like, I don’t know what you call it, like a dish rack, bookshelf type thing, you know those things that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you put your devices in sideways. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, and you can put iPads in there. It’s got like a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John little slats And I’m trying to think of what analogous thing. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or like where you
⏹️ ▶️ John put your dishes in the dishwasher. Anyway, but the point is that the devices are sideways and it’s nice because
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what size of device you have, it fits. It’s big, small, short, tall, doesn’t matter. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John it connects to the power and everything and it has a whole bunch of ports along one side of it. And I got these
⏹️ ▶️ John very stubby little like rubberized connectors on one end
⏹️ ▶️ John is USB A, cause this is a really old thing. And that plugs into the base. and the other end is lightning connectors, right? And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John long enough to reach an iPad, right? But they’re not, they’re, you know, they’re like four inches long. Like they’re just long
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to curl around. And when they’re not plugged in, they’re just kind of like waving their like little tentacles, right? It’s cute, right? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great. The whole family puts their devices there, they charge. You know, it’s a great place in the house to be able to charge anything you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re all lightning, right? And lightning connector is curved on the sides. So when you
⏹️ ▶️ John plug something in sideways, you don’t have to get the wire exactly perpendicular to the port before you put it in. you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like angle it in and it goes in. So I’ll kind of miss that. I’m not saying that’s a reason lightning should stay around or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just one thing that I think I’ll miss is the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco easy ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to plug things in on a slight angle. Cause USB-C really wants you to line it up a little bit better than that, but I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be fine. And speaking of tech details, here is an older Q and A article about what I was talking about before
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, oh, you’re dictating USB-C, but what about when something better comes along? This is from
⏹️ ▶️ John the folks, this is when they were proposing it. So here’s a suggestion that this proposal encourages innovation for wired
⏹️ ▶️ John and wireless technology. Well, I’m sure it encourages innovation for wireless, because then you’d be exempt.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco if you come up
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wireless, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to worry about this. But anyway, the thing they say that will help is any technological developments in wired
⏹️ ▶️ John charging will be reflected in the timely adjustment of the technical requirements slash specific standards under the radio
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment directive. This would ensure that technology is not outdated. At the same time, the implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John of any new standards and further revisions of the radio equipment directive would need to be developed in a harmonized manner, respecting
⏹️ ▶️ John the objective’s full interoperability. Industry is therefore expected to continue the work already undertaken on standardized interface
⏹️ ▶️ John led by the USB-IF organization.” Those are the people who make the USB standards.
⏹️ ▶️ John In view of developing new interoperable and open non-controversial solutions. So they’re basically saying, don’t worry,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can adjust it. As new things come out, we’ll just revise things. Well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what I was talking about. You don’t want to have to wait for the EU to revise things. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John whole proposal, you know, led by the USB IF gives so much power to the USB
⏹️ ▶️ John group. The USB group didn’t come up with lightning. Innovation doesn’t mean just better versions of USB
⏹️ ▶️ John C. Innovation means things like lightning that are not coming from the same people who made the old standard, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we have an idea for a new plug for our devices, and it has nothing to do with USB really. It’s our own thing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lightning connector. Look at it. It’s pretty weird, but we like it, right? That’s an example of innovation. The USB
⏹️ ▶️ John IF, slowly and steadily coming up with better versions of USB and then renaming them all so we have no idea what’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not an example of innovation and waiting for the EU to revise the technical requirements
⏹️ ▶️ John of this law is also not an example of the kind of innovation we want so again, I reiterate
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think it would have been better to Use the government to force one standard
⏹️ ▶️ John but not to be in such strict control over what that standard is because I you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I believe in the the self-interest of of big tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ John be enough to get them to standardize on something reasonable at intervals,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? There’s always chaos and then we consolidate, they go on a standard, you use it for a while, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s another round of innovation. Eventually that second round of innovation becomes unbearable for everyone involved
⏹️ ▶️ John and they eventually do get together, if the government was asking them to get together and decide on a standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John The government doesn’t ask them to get together, they kill each other until someone comes up with a standard or they do
⏹️ ▶️ John the matter thing, which is everybody’s stuff sucks so bad that they all decide we do need to come together on the standard. Remains
⏹️ ▶️ John to be seen if matter sucks any worse than the existing stuff, but at least it’s a push in the
⏹️ ▶️ John right direction. I think there’s a similar, we don’t have anything in the notes about this, but maybe we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about it on a future show. There’s another thing about the similar type of standardization situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where like one group that comes up with the standards is given a lot of power because they are the blessed group.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is, I don’t know what the group is or whatever, but the people who come up with like HEVC and H264 and H265, whatever that group is,
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the people who own the patents in it and all that stuff, like those sort of standardized
⏹️ ▶️ John formats for video, for compressed video over the internet, all that stuff, it’s great that there’s standards there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s really important that there’s no standards there. It powers our whole modern age of streaming video everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John but they are patent encumbered in many cases and certain people are in control of it and certain people make money. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so now there is a competing standard, I think it’s called AV1, that’s either less
⏹️ ▶️ John patent encumbered are not patent-income and more like free and open or whatever. And the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are control of the previous standards do not like that because they’re like, Hey, you’re taking away our money and power.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just want there to be one standard, but we also like the idea that we have lots of money and power related to that one standard. And a new open
⏹️ ▶️ John standard violates that. And it just goes to show that the motivations of like, once you give
⏹️ ▶️ John a group like the USB, I have this kind of power to say, Oh, you are the new standard. And by the way, you’re in charge of future innovation.
⏹️ ▶️ John That goes bad really quickly. So I would prefer the more chaotic approach of
⏹️ ▶️ John demanding there be a standard, but allowing that standard to arise semi-organically at regular
⏹️ ▶️ John intervals every decade or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I was thinking more about my whole travel setup because it’s so relevant to me coming up soon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and of the things that I could potentially travel with. My drone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Nintendo Switch, my Playdate, my laptop, my iPad, all of those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things charge via USB-C. The only things that don’t that I’m likely to, oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GoPro, I didn’t even think about that, the GoPro would. The only thing I can think of, the only things I can think of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wouldn’t are my iPhone, potentially, now again, I’ve resolved this by throwing money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the problem, my watch, same story, and my Kindle, which is not particularly new, I don’t know what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new ones are using, and it uses that god awful micro USB connector.
⏹️ ▶️ John The good thing is the Kindle charge lasts forever, so you can probably just charge it before you leave.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you don’t need to bring Kindle chargers on trips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I charged it yesterday it’ll last me until the end of the month. So basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only stuff that doesn’t charge via USB-C are my phone and my watch. Basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything else I can charge via USB-C and I don’t need to bring a bespoke charger for any of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. Like I could just plug the switch into my computer if I really wanted to and charge it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Same with like the drone batteries. You know, I could show the battery pack that charges three batteries at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s USB-C. And so all of this stuff I can just charge by using my computer as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hub. And since I have a MacBook Pro, I have ports for days, kind of, sort of, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have at least a few options for ports. So yeah, it’s that inconsistency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that the phone and to some degree the watch are like the lone devices standing off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, no, I need my own special cable. Like, it’s just, no, just come on. Can we just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either go all wireless or just jump on board with USPC? I know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not as good in a handful of ways, but can we just do it anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ John The watch is the next downside here, like another place where Apple’s gonna spoil it for
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody, right? Because the watch, it makes sense, like you don’t plug anything into it because it’s so tiny, you probably wouldn’t want to plug in the cable,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that makes perfect sense. But what Apple chose to do for their quote unquote wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John charging for the watch is not what anybody else is doing. It’s a watch charger, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think you can put watches on Qi chargers and maybe you can get them to charge.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so. People have occasionally gotten them to work that way, but it’s not reliable. I’ve tried so
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we’re rapidly approaching another situation with the watches where there’s a wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John standard for charging.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, Qi is pretty widespread at this point, but there’s a wireless standard for charging. You know, if you use all wireless stuff, you
⏹️ ▶️ John just have to get Qi chargers and you’ll be fine. And Qi 2 came out and Qi 3 is even better and so on and so forth. And everyone’s on the same page.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so when you travel, you just need to bring one charger. It’s a Qi wireless charger and also your Apple Watch charger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Yeah. It’s a big pain in the butt. Yep, yep, yep. But ultimately, this is something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, this whole, the move to USB-C, I think is, it’ll be a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing if it happens. And I think if you look at like, if you kind of read the tea leaves a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple is no fan of having governments tell them what to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they will take many opportunities to just say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, and to fight them, and to pay fines or whatever it is. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you read the tea leaves, I think they’re actually about to do a big USB-C move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you, you know, the latest rumors were that the base model iPad, when it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its next update, is gonna go USB-C. It is, that would make it the last iPad, you know, it’s the last iPad on Lightning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the entire iPad lineup is almost all USB-C. By the way, that change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened over the last few years, and the world didn’t end. Like, they used to all be Lightning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now they’re almost all and about to be probably all USB-C and everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was all right. So that’s, it’s a good data point. Obviously it’s not as big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the iPhone and people tend to not have as many iPad chargers as they have iPhone chargers. So, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it’s a different situation but it’s at least a data point. So that, you know, iPad is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all USB-C. MacBook, all USB-C. The whole Mac, everything, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C. There have been rumors for quite some time that the iPhone 14
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming out in a couple of months is not gonna be USB-C, but that it might be the last lightning iPhone. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one after the 14 is, depending on which room where you read, either USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or no ports at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope it’s USB-C, but yeah, the one after the 14 is also supposed to have the periscope cameras. The one after the 14 is
⏹️ ▶️ John the one we all want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds like that’s probably gonna be the next case design revision, which would be the time to switch to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C. And this is something that they’ve seen that they’ve been planning for some time as iPhones tend to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think what we’ll really be telling is watching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what other hardware gets released from Apple that currently has a lightning port that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gains a USB-C port instead. So things to look out for would be things like the next AirPods case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peripherals, mice, keyboards, like Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John remote. I was gonna say, you were listing all of the MacBooks have USB-C, well the desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs sure don’t because my keyboard is connected with lightning on both of these Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but you know, Apple doesn’t update the peripherals very frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a brand new keyboard with the full-size touch bar. You know, like it boggles my mind why
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s lightning. It’s not as if there’s any kind of inertia for lightning on the Mac, and they were making a brand new keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John with the full-size touch ID key for the brand new Mac Studio, and it connects with a cable, if you wanna know.
⏹️ ▶️ John One end of it is USB-C that plugs into your computer, and the other end that plugs into the keyboard is lightning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why? Well, and in all fairness, like these keyboards, they seem very, very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in overall build and engineering and guts to the ones that we’ve had for a long time before
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I suppose it’s just disappointing. And I know this seems weird to people like, oh, it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPhone. You’re just supposed to charge it with that cable. Yeah, you can, but for people who don’t know, if you plug it in with that cable,
⏹️ ▶️ John it becomes a wired USB keyboard and that’s how I use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually, I never told you I actually have one. I did the thing where you stick it under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your desk so you can have Touch ID on a desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s actually really great. And the reason I, so, you know, it’s the small one that has the Touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the corner. And you stick it on, you know, Velcro to the desk upside down. And so I just reach under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one spot on my desk and poke and it’s Touch ID. And it’s awesome because otherwise my, you know, my laptop is in clamshell mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can’t reach that sensor. And I don’t use an Apple keyboard to type on. So that doesn’t have one. So it’s great. I have full Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID and it works fantastically. But I did notice if the computer has been idle and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I walk up to it and try to unlock it, it unlocks much faster when I have it wired. My theory is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you touch it and it’s Bluetooth mode, maybe it takes like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco split second to connect back to the computer before it starts the authentication process. Yeah. You know, whereas when I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wired, it works 100% of the time instantly. So it’s fantastic. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another thing that I missed for years on the Mac from like the
⏹️ ▶️ John super old classic Mac days, the Apple, Apple desktop bus connected keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John used to have a power button on them that you would power the computer on from the keyboard and
⏹️ ▶️ John also obviously wake it from sleep and do a lot of this stuff. And this kind of reminds me of that. So with the Mac Studio with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Touch ID, you can walk up to a computer that is locked and running the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John shaver or whatever. And all you do is you don’t do anything else. You just put your finger on Touch ID and it wakes the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and unlocks it. It’s so fast and it’s so much nicer than like, oh, hit the spacebar to wake it up and then
⏹️ ▶️ John type in your password or anything like that. You don’t have to wait. What I’m saying is you don’t have to wake it up before you put your finger on the Touch ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John put your finger on the touch ID and it does everything for you. It’s great. Face ID would be better, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and so related to your discussion of the lightning cable and how they changed the iPads and no
⏹️ ▶️ John one freaked out about it, because the iPhone is such a, you know, looms larger in
⏹️ ▶️ John pop culture and practically speaking, there are literally billions more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of those devices
⏹️ ▶️ John than there are iPads. People are going to complain, but that is not a complaint that is founded
⏹️ ▶️ John in any kind of facts. I mean, it’s difficult when any kind of transition takes place. People didn’t like changing
⏹️ ▶️ John from DVD to Blu-ray if people even did that. People didn’t like changing from cassette to CD. Like everyone always complains,
⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta replace my connection, I gotta buy all new things or whatever. When, you know, Lightning replaced 30 pin,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to throw away all my cables and blah, blah, blah. But it’s been a decade, people. Like Lightning has been
⏹️ ▶️ John here for 10 years, right? It’s okay once a decade to improve the connector, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then on top of that, you know, with Apple like seemingly not complaining or pushing back
⏹️ ▶️ John against this, my understanding is that Apple was heavily involved in the creation of USB-C, which is why it doesn’t suck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And so it’s not like they’re like, oh, they’re forcing me to use this weird connector. It’s a connector that they
⏹️ ▶️ John had a hand in creating that they apparently like a lot and put on a lot of their products. So it’s not like Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John anti-USB-C and there is no perfect time to do this, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so when this happens and there’s, it’s gonna be some story for iPhone 15, like, oh, I have to throw
⏹️ ▶️ John all my cables over there. It’s like, give it a rest. Apple’s constantly changing the cable. Constantly?
⏹️ ▶️ John Every decade? It’s okay. Like, it’ll be fine, I promise, you know? The idea that there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be one technical standard and you’ll never have to change it, like, that was true of the telephone system, maybe, but even then,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they never changed the telephone connector. It’s still whatever, what’s the small telephone one? RJ
⏹️ ▶️ John they never changed the RJ11 connector, but you know what? It stayed around for so long that it became obsoleted by,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people don’t have landline phones anymore. So like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you did have a landline phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got RJ11, but guess what? It’s not a thing in your life anymore because everyone just uses their cell phones, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t want that to happen. We want better, faster innovation than that. And Apple voluntarily
⏹️ ▶️ John choosing to change the connector for all their peripherals once every decade perfectly fine cadence.
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#askatp: Mail notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. Michael Chan writes, how do you guys manage mail notifications on your various
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices? What mail apps do you use and how do you categorize and control what emails you consider worth getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notifications for? And what emails you consider best looked at on your own time? Do you use priority inbox or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Outlook’s focus inbox? First step is don’t have a real job. And so you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to worry about this near as much. But for me, I think I established
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this when I was at my jobby job. I have my family,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Aaron and my parents and a couple of my brothers, and marked as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorites I think it is, and contacts or VIPs, whatever it is in contacts, and marked them as basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever that is, the first tier. And I have notifications for them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and for nothing else. And I just use the Mail app pretty much everywhere. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personally don’t understand how any person can use the web as their primary email app. I’m looking both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at my wife and at John. It is just not for me. And so I just use Mail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app everywhere. I did really like, what was it, Mime Stream, which is a very not great name. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used that before I had moved to FastMail, and that was really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s, oh, shoot, I can’t think of the name of the app. but somebody’s writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a similar style app, but specifically for like FastMail and JMap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey servers. If I remember, I’ll put it in the show notes. But I just use MailApp and I just let VIPs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come through in terms of notifications. That’s what I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t even have that because nobody I would have as a VIP ever really emails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. So I just don’t have mail notifications. I let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it badge the icon only on the Mac, not even on my phone, and that’s it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, I look at mail. If I have time, I look at it when I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that little badge up there. I will say one thing, too, this is not at all related, well, it’s very loosely related to this question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve been using the iOS 16 beta for, I don’t know, a few weeks now, and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it. Old joke. And one thing I’ve noticed is that with the new lock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen redesign, notifications are now relegated to a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller part of the lock screen. They basically have been pushed down and they kind of stack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up much more than they did in iOS 15 and prior. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually, it’s making me miss notifications now because they stack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and I never like dig down. And so one thing I’m having to do, so first of all, I think this is very interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that to app developers, your notifications are now worth less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than they were in previous versions of the app and they will be noticed less. And as a user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna make me be even more strict about which notifications I allow to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shown on the lock screen and therefore be noticed at all. Something like mail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications that are fairly unimportant for most people most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least, unimportant but at least not time sensitive, that kind of stuff, you’re gonna start having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make tough decisions. Like, unless this is some weird fluke about the way iOS 16 is working on just my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t think it is. I think this is just the new design. And so if you want to actually see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your notifications reliably, you’re going to have to start being much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strict about deciding what is time sensitive and what’s not. And most things are going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be not. And therefore most notifications aren’t aren’t going to be necessary
⏹️ ▶️ John I was hoping all of our answer and mail notifications to be the same. It seems like we’re close. But I don’t it’s not for me. It’s not because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you know, real you don’t have to worry about this. I had a real job for most of, the vast majority of my adult
⏹️ ▶️ John life. My policy has always been like a day phone, night phone guy. Always on offense,
⏹️ ▶️ John never on defense, right? I do not
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not have mail notifications on. I have never had mail notifications on. The idea of doing that seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John madness to me. Maybe it’s because I get too much email. Like, oh, you can just send it to VIP. It’s like, no, I never
⏹️ ▶️ John get notifications. I don’t have badges on for mail on any of my devices. Email is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a thing that comes and gets me. So I’m on defense. I go to email
⏹️ ▶️ John when I want to quote check email. And maybe that’s an old person thing, although the young person thing is never checking email.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would say the old person thing is better. I am not notified of emails and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John badge the icons. When I want to go read email, I will go read email. If I’m expecting an email, I will
⏹️ ▶️ John check my email. Check my email, meaning going to the tab that is always open in the very first tab in
⏹️ ▶️ John the upper left Chrome window on my computer at all times. is mail, Gmail is on my home
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, but notifications, no. Same deal with Twitter, zero notifications on Twitter or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s life is different. If you’re the type of person who will forget to check mail, if you don’t have notifications or
⏹️ ▶️ John a badge, then do what you have to do, but I don’t have, I won’t forget to check mail, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John never wanna be notified about mail. I never wanna know how many mail messages are waking me because that number would just be terrifying.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way I deal with email is I have a huge number of filters that sort of, stuff comes in and gets sorted
⏹️ ▶️ John into bins, right? And the main view I use in Gmail, I kind of wish it was like the default, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John really matters, because I don’t ever close the tab, is the all mail view. It shows me a, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like my unified view on Twitter. It is a linear chronological list of all conversations that I use, conversation view
⏹️ ▶️ John of all conversations and all my email. And what I see in that list is, you know, things that are unread or
⏹️ ▶️ John bold, and then along the sidebar and all the different categories are all the bins they
⏹️ ▶️ John got chucked in. So I can just look at that sidebar and say, okay, I’ve got, you know, 15 messages from this mailing
⏹️ ▶️ John list, 12 messages related to the app store, five messages related to ATP, two messages from
⏹️ ▶️ John my family. Like just by looking at the sidebar and seeing what things are in bold
⏹️ ▶️ John and what numbers are after them because it’ll give you the numbers, that at a glance tells me what the email situation is. And then the all
⏹️ ▶️ John nail view shows me all those messages interspersed with all the messages that I have read because that’s the way I prefer to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. It’s like my unified timeline on Twitter, like I said, that I use Twitterific to get.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t use any, Like I always forget like how many of these things Gmail has when I set
⏹️ ▶️ John up some Gmail for my kids or whatever. I don’t use any of this like focus mode, prioritize,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorted into social media. Like Gmail tries to do all this stuff for you. I’m not sure if people
⏹️ ▶️ John find that useful or not. I bet people aren’t going to do what I did, which is have, you know, 200 different rules to automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John sort stuff, but that’s the way I prefer to do it. So I don’t use any smart anything. My
⏹️ ▶️ John email client is dumb, but it is, well, it’s not dumb, but it is like, it’s not trying to use any intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John to organize things for me. My rules organize the things, and then I’m using the features of the interface, the fact that they
⏹️ ▶️ John have categories, labels, with counts on them, and the all-male view to do all my reading.
#askatp: Photo backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don Clark writes, I’m a new father. Congratulations. And I found myself taking tons of 4K60
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDR videos and photos of my child. I’m now very concerned with backing them up. Welcome to being a dad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that each of you have robust photo storage solutions. Are these steps documented anywhere?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me answer really quickly in the middle of his question. Mine are not, will not, and should not be documented anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s a mess and nobody should do what I do. Moving on to what Don said. Don says, I use iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Photo Library. I have a Synology, but I’m not actually doing anything with it yet. Ideally, all of my photos and videos would be saved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my Synology alongside iCloud. Ideally, these locally stored photos and videos could be playable on any of my Apple TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throughout the house, perhaps using Plex. It said Don, not me, don’t worry. As I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they don’t appear consistently enough or quickly enough in the Photos app on the Apple TV via iCloud, and AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stutters with the 4K 60 video content. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Yeah, like I said, don’t do what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. That’s all I’ve got for this. Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My photo stuff is all just in Apple Photos and the backup and sync solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, iCloud Photo Library as the sync and as, I guess, a backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then because these are all just files living in the file system on my Mac, it is also backed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up by my regular Mac backups, which include a local time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Backblaze for cloud backup.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is one of the questions that comes up frequently, although it has a little bit of a twist here with the 4K60 stuff and trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to play it. But for the backups, yeah, the recommendation is you should, you know, if you wanna do
⏹️ ▶️ John belt and suspenders, you should have two kinds of local backup, right? So that would be, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a single Mac in your house where all the fixtures
⏹️ ▶️ John are downloaded, like download originals, and then you back up that Mac with Time Machine. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then you also like do a SuperDuper clone or you have a local Time Machine and a Synology Time
⏹️ ▶️ John Machine, but basically two places in your house but there’s a hard drive with every one of the bits that is in all your photos. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I would back up the whole photo library because if you use iCloud photo library, if that’s how you organize your photos, don’t just back up the JPEGs,
⏹️ ▶️ John back up the whole iCloud photo library. It’s not that much more data. It will cause a little bit of churn on your backup
⏹️ ▶️ John because every time you do anything with iCloud photo library, it needs to re-backup like the databases and stuff, but it’ll be fine. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. So pick what those two are. Do you like Time Machine? You can just do two Time
⏹️ ▶️ John Machine backups, a local Time Machine to a disk that’s connected to your desktop Mac, if you’re cool and have a desktop Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a remote time machine to your Synology, right? Or you could do a SuperDuper clone
⏹️ ▶️ John and a time machine backup, or you could use whatever, right? But two local backups, right? And then for cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John backup, you’re like, oh, I got iCloud Photos Library, I’m covered. Should probably have another cloud backup. Backblaze,
⏹️ ▶️ John frequent sponsor of the show, any other kind of cloud backup solution that is just essentially backing up your Mac to
⏹️ ▶️ John a cloud service. And the important part of that, like I said, is to have at least one Mac, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that is having these backups done to it, have the preference set in Apple’s photos that says download originals,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you don’t, your local backups aren’t backing up your whole iCloud photo library. They’re backing
⏹️ ▶️ John up whatever subset of your iCloud photo library that’s actually on your Mac at the time, which means you gotta have one Mac somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s big enough to fit your whole photo library on it. So get big SSDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and for the 4K60 thing, so you’ve got all this stuff and you’re like, I need some way to play this. I agree that
⏹️ ▶️ John the iCloud photo library feature on Apple TV is comically bad. It
⏹️ ▶️ John chokes so, every once in a while, every few years I check Apple TV to see if it can make heads or tails
⏹️ ▶️ John in my photo library. It cannot. It does not know what to make of it. It just shows blank thumbnails
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can try to scroll and it just hangs and it’s like, you cannot use it for the intended purpose. I cannot look
⏹️ ▶️ John at pictures on it. It just can’t handle it. Someday maybe they’ll fix that, but they haven’t yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what should you use instead? I don’t know, but if you have these things
⏹️ ▶️ John on your Synology somewhere, you probably have a lot of options for serving that content to your television
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that is better than iCloud Photo Library. I know Plex has a photo solution. You could probably even
⏹️ ▶️ John just have Plex as like a file server type thing and have some other application that reads the Plex as an SMB share
⏹️ ▶️ John and uses it. I don’t know what the options are on Apple TV, but I feel your pain about iCloud Photo Library. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ostensibly has a feature that lets you look at your photo library on your Apple TV, but it just basically doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work once your library gets to a certain size.
#askatp: M1 speed vs. future software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Natasha Singh writes, I started wondering about the responsiveness of the M1 family under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS. By all accounts, it’s great right now. But I’m thinking back to the x86 transition and perhaps the PowerPC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one before it, and there was always this period where things felt so fast because the hardware was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just so much better than what came before. But then the OS and software caught up to it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’re, we’re, we get where we are now saying that x86 Macs don’t feel so responsive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think that we’re in a temporary era of macOS responsiveness under the M whatever family or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which will eventually be eaten away by software growth or does Apple controlling the silicon and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the OS mean that things will stay this way and possibly get even better? This is actually a very astute question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, but I would think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be hard pressed to see macOS just gobble up any extra, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literal bandwidth, but figurative bandwidth, to the point that we feel like macOS gets super sluggish on account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of hardware being the problem. It wouldn’t surprise me if we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a, you know, a mythical snow leopard moment for a few years and we start to wonder why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things are broken and why they’re not as quick as they once were. But to answer the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question more directly, I don’t think so, but it’s a very good question and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll be wrong, I don’t know. What do you think, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that what happens is that the software like bloats to eat all
⏹️ ▶️ John the performance gains. What happens is you just get used to things. Cause if you go back
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and try like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the first round of PowerPC Max, everything on it is incredibly slow, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Even compared to later PowerPC Max, like not compared to today, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a, just a psychological effect of there are these discontinuities where we go from one architecture to another and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big performance leap. It happened with all of them. I can tell you how amazed we all were playing with graphing calculator
⏹️ ▶️ John on a PowerPC Mac. You could absolutely not do things with that kind of performance on
⏹️ ▶️ John a 68K Mac. It was just phenomenal, right? And the Intel transition was similar, things got
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, and they got quote unquote snappier. Things that you weren’t aware
⏹️ ▶️ John were slow before suddenly got faster. I remember doing command line stuff, compiling things from the command line on
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel Max was so much faster than compiling them from the command line on PowerPC Max. And it’s like, why? Like what’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it just disk IO faster? Like I don’t know what’s faster about it, but it’s just faster, right? Things feel snappier. What
⏹️ ▶️ John happens is we just get used to those gains. Once you go through that jump in performance, that jump in snappiness, that jump
⏹️ ▶️ John in like just absolute raw horsepower, the gains become more incremental from there because you don’t have a big jump, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re still going up for the most part, right? And people say, oh, the software comes and eats all of that and it becomes slow
⏹️ ▶️ John again. It doesn’t become slow again, it just bends the curve of improvement to maybe where it becomes flat.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the level it flattens out is still way better than where it was. It just, you know, over the years you forget
⏹️ ▶️ John that leap, right? So as fast as things are on these M1s, five years now when we’re complaining with MacOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is bogging things down, pick any task and benchmark it. And that, you know, five, 10 year
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future, M whatever Mac will still be faster than the M1, right? It just doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John faster enough because it hasn’t been keeping up with innovation. And you know, there are some places where there’s regressions where you do
⏹️ ▶️ John something and it just bogs the whole system down. It used to be slower. An example of that is, you know, when
⏹️ ▶️ John the Macs went color, that ate a lot of CPU and memory and if you, you know, used an old black and white Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John it would do things faster. Or things like the Aqua interface in Mac OS X
⏹️ ▶️ John just making pulling down menus slow, where you know, pulling down menus were lightning fast on a Quadro 900 and
⏹️ ▶️ John on a massively more powerful computer pulling down menus was slow because we just went to, you know, double buffering and
⏹️ ▶️ John composited window manager and stuff. So there are cases where software eats stuff off, but over the long trend all that happens
⏹️ ▶️ John is we get used to the changes and also that the the changes become more incremental and not as fantastic and we get
⏹️ ▶️ John dissatisfied. As is appropriate. We we deserve, you know, continued improvement up until,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Moore’s law ends and we can’t make things smaller but we’re pretty far away from that so hang
#askatp: Apps vs.programs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey William Reynish writes, is there any reason why John consistently refers to Mac apps as programs as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if he were a PC user? Ooh, sick burn. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac program just sounds weird to me, even more so coming from John, who has been a Mac user for so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is, I think William just answered his own question with the phrase for so long. Am I
⏹️ ▶️ John Do I call them Mac programs? I don’t think this is a thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. You absolutely do. Well, I don’t know if you say Mac programs like that phrase with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two words together, but you absolutely refer to them as programs. not irregularly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you know, if you’re a programmer and you write programs, they kind of make it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, are we supposed to be appers now? Yeah, I don’t know. So the distinction that I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the old person distinction that I have is for a very long time, especially in my writing, when I was writing for
⏹️ ▶️ John Artis Technica, I refused to use the term app unless I was talking about an iOS app, because app
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, you know, when you say app, you mean like, oh, it was like a phone app. It was like a term of art for that
⏹️ ▶️ John round of software innovation for that marketplace or that thing. I always said Mac application
⏹️ ▶️ John spelling out the word. Application is what I call them. Because I’m an old Mac user, I call things application.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would never call MacWrite a Mac program. I would call it a Mac application. Have
⏹️ ▶️ John I said program in the context of things running the Mac? I’m sure because when you’re talking about programming, you’re in the context of running a program
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Yeah, I say program because I’m super old and remember the times before the Mac when everything that ran on your
⏹️ ▶️ John computer was a program, right? And things that are running on your Commodore 64 or your VIC-20, yeah, those were programs,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You write these programs and basic run programs on your computer, right? So that’s probably why I say program, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m super old. But in terms of the Mac, application is where my old man-ness comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then in the modern era, I just basically have given into app, because that’s what everybody calls it everywhere now. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone has come and swamped that term. So to give an example, and re-advertise my application that I continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to fight with using SwiftUI, Switchglass, everywhere in Switchglass in the help documentation and
⏹️ ▶️ John in the help text in the app. I just called it app, see? I refer to things
⏹️ ▶️ John as the app. It is the app switcher. That’s where all the apps appear. There are app icons. Drag an app
⏹️ ▶️ John into this. I use app everywhere because that’s what people expect in a modern application. And you know, see,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there you go. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m doing it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what people expect in a modern application that everything is called an app. So I consciously choose
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the modern term when I know it will be in front of people who don’t care about my old school Mac roots, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think of them as diamond-shaped icons with a hand and a tool, and they are Mac applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remember this change actually happening because this happened as we were users because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think when apps started getting used was the App Store on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It took me a while to start saying app because it seemed like one of those things like when Steve Jobs announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store and he kept saying app, app, all these apps, it sounded like they were almost trying to belittle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Like, snacks, we just snack on this little app over here. Look, here’s an app. Because they were,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in a sense, they were trying to commoditize apps, and they succeeded, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they wanted their glorious phone platform to have lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of little apps you can just snack on, and you definitely want to spend all this money on the phone and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get all these little apps for it with no big deal to get the app, so they have to be really cheap, you know. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was in part reflecting the way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the company, and actually I think directly that Steve, looked at these things. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way he viewed third party applications for the platform is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little snacks. That to me, it had that connotation of almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a diminutive kind of term for what we do. And then it kind of took over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as, well this is what we call all software now, everything everything as an app now. Well, then till later became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a service. That’s all thing
⏹️ ▶️ John like we can all agree, though, that no one should ever go appetizers apps. Oh no, and especially not appies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if somebody okay look if anybody wants to be my friend, if we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever anywhere in existence and you refer to a sandwich by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any abbreviation of a sandwich that you can possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey think of sandy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it you’re out like and We can’t be friends anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t heard Sando before. That’s a new one. That might be a letter Kenneyism.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sandy? What is the other ones you’ve heard?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t even say them. They offend me so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A witch. Because there’s the restaurant, Witch Witch. Wasn’t it Witchcraft? No, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that was really good. No joke. That was San Francisco, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, it was in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey San Francisco. It was really genuinely very, very good. And then they, I think they all folded.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And then it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closed down. Isn’t that why we left San Francisco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, that was why.
#askatp: Domains for email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, all right. Fletcher O’Connor writes, recently there’s been a lot of discussion about Casey’s transition to fast mail. I’m keen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take up your referral code, which is in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this why we have this question today?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I actually put it in. I really don’t, but at least in part. I’ve been exploring adopting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a custom email domain beforehand. As a young adult who is too young to get in on the ground floor, what would you suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for acquiring a domain which is clean and reasonable? Ideally, I’d love firstname at lastname.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or.com.uh for us down here in Australia, that’s AU. But obtaining a clean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TLD like that is extremely costly nowadays. I don’t want some weird and wacky TLD as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still want my email to present professionally, but I also don’t want to break the bank in purchasing a domain. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you suggest someone in my position do? If it’s just for email and you’re not trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web or anything like that, you could do fletcher at o’connor.name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s not already taken or something. So one of those like semi-wacky TLDs that are still professional-ish,
⏹️ ▶️ John You think O’Connor.name is available? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a few O’Connors in the world. Well, that’s why I immediately realized it would have to be some other, you know…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, one thing you could do is firstname at firstnamelastname.something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is slightly redundant, but it’s still reasonably easy for people to hear and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognize it, it looks professional. So, you know, if you do firstnamelastname.tld, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more TLD options there. Just don’t do a hyphen. First name, last name, no hyphen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear what Fletcher’s saying with regard to wacky TLDs. Like you don’t want to be Fletcher at O’Connor dot pizza
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. Like that’s just weird. But there are some reasonable, like dot family is another example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, I’m sure O’Connor dot family is taken, but. Well, family doesn’t sound professional to me. Well, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could get behind that too. But my point is there are reasonable, I think there’s like dot engineer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a surprising amount of TLDs available now that you could do that are at least reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presenting as professional. I don’t know, John, what’s your solution?
⏹️ ▶️ John There are all the comm that I use really taken. I mean, how many people are there in Australia? It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like you should be able to, it’s like an advantage of being in Australia that you don’t have to fight in the.coms that you have the.coms
⏹️ ▶️ John that they use. I don’t think anyone else wants.com today, you accept for people in Australia. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John similar experience trying to come up with like a PlayStation names for my kids that are not embarrassing
⏹️ ▶️ John to kids, not embarrassing to parents. Right. Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gamer stuff is the worst. There are so many billions of gamers. You don’t realize till you try to get your name on any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of game. Anything. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John You try to get any kind of reasonable thing. Well, it’s anyway, the domains, I think is actually an easier situation. Now you’re not going to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John get like anything. You’re probably not even going to be able to get Fletcher O’Connor or Fletch O’Connor
⏹️ ▶️ John or F.L. O’Connor or F.O. Conner. Like those are all going to be taken. Right. But you, you
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of get into blue ocean pretty quickly. if you combine two or more words. And they don’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John uncommon words, right? So you can just come up with two nice, pleasing
⏹️ ▶️ John words, maybe one or zero of which have anything to do with your name
⏹️ ▶️ John that look professional. And it doesn’t have to mean anything and it doesn’t have to prompt people
⏹️ ▶️ John to ask you questions. It is hard, I’m not saying it’s not hard, but there’s a lot of domains out there because once you start combining
⏹️ ▶️ John words, it’s like no one has thought of those combination of words. It’s kind of like those passwords that they generate
⏹️ ▶️ John for you is like, you know, umbrella, hammer, toadstool, right? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good password because it’s a weird combination of stuff. Now, you don’t want it to be too long, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s weird. You just have to like think of something. You can think of something that’s meaningful to you. You can think of like, I’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ John liked, you know, trees in the forest and look up different kinds of trees and come up with a name, like make sure it’s easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to spell. It doesn’t have alternate spellings. It doesn’t sound like some other word that’s spelled differently.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, no hyphens, just not too long. It is possible. So I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John like, take the time to, especially if you’re gonna like, this is gonna be my domain for everything, take the time to do it up front. I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this in my life. I had a perfect domain name and I could not get it. The person who had it let it lapse, but there’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John grace period, you know, like if you let it lapse, it gets, it’s still locked and you can’t get it unless like the grace
⏹️ ▶️ John period goes by. They let it lapse. I’m like, now I’m finally gonna get it. That’s how I found out about the whole grace period thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And within the grace period, they regot it. And it annoyed me so much. I spent years just bitterly
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get that domain name because it would have been perfect for me, but I couldn’t get it. And it took like 20 something years
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to settle on hypercritical. And I couldn’t even get the.com of that, although I make offers all the time. And they keep saying, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay $30,000? And I say, how about 200? And they say, okay, I’ll talk to you next year.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, hypercritical.co is my name now. And it’s fine, I kind of like the.co. And the reason I picked.co
⏹️ ▶️ John is it’s like.com, but shorter. Right, that’s why, you know, that’s why people pick.co. That’s another example of like a domain
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I don’t know if it’s unprofessional. If you did like dot IO or dot co those both sound pretty professional.
⏹️ ▶️ John I O sounds techie co sounds kind of like company. There is the possibility that people will be confused
⏹️ ▶️ John the dot co and dot com. So maybe you don’t want to do that professional like dot dot com is the thing you want to go to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like people know what dot com is or dot name is probably okay as well. But honestly, I think in most situations
⏹️ ▶️ John you like email addresses tend to be electronic and people are clicking on them and not writing them
⏹️ ▶️ John in. So it’s not that bad. But but yeah, I don’t give up. I believe there is a
⏹️ ▶️ John one or two word.com.au or even plain old.com domain name that you will be happy with,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is professional, that can’t be misspelled, that is easy to say over the phone, that is not too long, and that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real time follow up, o’connor.wtf is available for $31 American. Great. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John make an offer on o’connor.name, minimum offer $200. That’s not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco .name isn’t that good, though. I mean, that’s not. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John For domain names, there’s so many sites that sell you domain names. If you ever see a thing that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John this domain name is available, make an offer. That has no connection to anybody wanting to
⏹️ ▶️ John sell a domain name, just FYI. Everybody will say, sure, just tell me how much you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to pay. And they will go off and try to make that happen. But don’t think because you see that, that there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John person or company that owns a domain name that is trying to sell it to you. That is almost never the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for the longest time, list.com was taken by, and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legitimate, it wasn’t just squatting, it was taken by Long Island Soda Systems. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was too young when the Long Island Soda Systems, I don’t know if it collapsed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they just didn’t care about the web or whatever, but it eventually got released. And so now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at seto, seto.com, s-e-t-o.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, they’re a big domain broker for domain transfers, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m looking at lists.com. This premium domain, and I guess it’s premium because it’s short,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is for sale in partnership with Cito, Ceto, whatever it’s called. Your offer, US dollars, make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offer, below the big green make offer button, minimum offer, $200,000 USD. It is four letters long.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although, to give an example of, say, domains are available. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I recently was selling T-shirts for one of my other podcasts. It’s called Reconcilable Differences. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when I made that podcast and was like, oh, we should have a Twitter account. Reconcilable Differences is a mouthful and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s too long for a Twitter handle. So I said, oh, let’s see if Rectifs is available. I got the Rectifs Twitter handle.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I came like, that was like, you know, seven years ago, just this past month, I said, oh, we’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a shirt sale. I need to get a URL for the shirt sale because it’s, you know, it’s hosted on its own site or whatever. It just redirects to the Cotton
⏹️ ▶️ John Bureau thing when you click through. Anyway, I said, let’s see, is rectifs.com
⏹️ ▶️ John available? Rectifs.com was available. R-E-C-D-I-F-F-S dot com.
⏹️ ▶️ John Short domain name, exactly what I would want it, matches the Twitter handle, seven
⏹️ ▶️ John years after I started the podcast, and it was available. I got rectiffs.com, I got rectiffs.store,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got rectiffs.org, that’s why all these names are taken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, why did, if you had the dot com, why did you get any others? Because dot store is fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. They were redirected to each other. I wanted to cover all bases. If people didn’t remember the dot store and they
⏹️ ▶️ John just type rectiffs, you’d get to it. Like no one was not buying a shirt because they couldn’t find the page, right? But the point is,
⏹️ ▶️ John rectifs, I know that’s weird, but you’re like, but see, because it’s a combination of two things, two things that
⏹️ ▶️ John happen to be an abbreviation, and it’s exactly the domain I want. I don’t even want reconcilabledifferences.com,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want rectifs, because it’s much easier to say. So don’t give up on the idea that all the domains
⏹️ ▶️ John are taken. There are ones out there which is waiting for you to find them.
#askatp: Wipe retired devices?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave Brash writes, what’s the proper etiquette for retiring a Mac to the Syracuse Museum in the Sky?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Format first or close the lid and pack it away, time capsule style. If I do the latter, will it poison
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my iCloud data when I fire it up in a decade?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s interesting. iCloud, ha ha. How many of my Macs have iCloud on? Do any of them have mobile meal?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, probably. So my intentional strategy with that is you just
⏹️ ▶️ John close it up, you don’t touch anything on it. Because it’s supposed to be like a time capsule. Like this is what my computing
⏹️ ▶️ John life was like. You don’t wipe the hard drives, you don’t copy them, you don’t remove anything, stuff is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John as it was the moment it was decommissioned, right? Now, yes, in theory, if you take the thing out and turn it on, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s gonna poison my iCloud, but trust me, it’s not. Like, they won’t be able to connect, they won’t work correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ John You probably won’t even be able to get them on the wifi, like, they won’t be plugged into ethernet, or it’ll be a 68K Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that has no idea how to get on the internet and you’ll be, you know, launching a Mac TCP or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ John try to open a PPP connection to somewhere. It’s not as big a concern as you would think, But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I don’t touch them is, well, one, it’s less work, and two, that’s what I want. I want the snapshot of exactly what things were
⏹️ ▶️ John like. I want all my icons, all my window positions back in the days when the Mac remembered them, you know, just
⏹️ ▶️ John everything the way it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back a step, flowcon.com, which is probably a mouthful, but f-l-o-c-o-n-n.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Fletcher O’Connor. I would not pick that. It’s too easy to misspell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, fine. I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say that. Also, it sounds like some kind of like HVAC company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It does, actually. Like don’t be tied
⏹️ ▶️ John to having it with your name. It could be anything that you think you’re interested in. You know, it could be just like, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s only $14 though, Flowcon, flowcon.com. If
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a service I can provide, you just have to sit down with somebody and say, what things do you like? What things or
⏹️ ▶️ John words or feelings or places are meaningful to you? And then just try to come up with stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Trade Coffee, and Revenue Cat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join atv.fm slash join. We will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to so accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech podcast So long
Updates on our SwiftUI journeys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the SwiftUI thing is actually improving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I have finally figured out how to use the new navigation split view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API in a way that I don’t hate. There’s a couple of bugs that I actually have to file bug reports for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like ASAP, because it’s just simple stuff. Like, if you change from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light mode to dark mode, it doesn’t regenerate some of the icons and the back buttons and the toolbars and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they have the old color. So I gotta file stuff like that, and if they don’t fix that before release, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally can’t use this. Unless I can find some hack work around. But assuming that that kind of stuff can get fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before release, I think I actually might have finally gotten it to a place where I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it. So we’re gonna see. I’m gonna proceed and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what else I can customize about this, and see how much more of my UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can get to function in this environment to some kind of minimum spec. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m getting there. I mean, and there’s still certain things that are comically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obtuse, and I’m still hitting walls, and I’m still hitting weird behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where, for some reason, if I write it this way, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update the state when the value changes. But if I write it this other kind of similar way for some reason, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works. There’s still things like that that I’m figuring out, or at least plowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through over time. But I am actually making progress. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not hating it as much as last week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was making huge amounts of progress in my hacking on my app with SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I always want more, because it’s a Mac app and I know how Mac apps are supposed to behave. And it’s like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it should do this, and it should do that. And as soon as I get something working, it’s like, I fight with it, fight with it, and I get it working, and it’s like, but I also should do this
⏹️ ▶️ John other thing. And it’s just, it’s compounding. and I feel like I’m getting to the point where I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have to, this is silly, but when you’re doing it, something like this, or it’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John hobby project that’s not gonna actually make me any money, I will have to eventually break down and read all the articles that
⏹️ ▶️ John people are recommending for like, we’ll put it maybe in a future show notes if I ever
⏹️ ▶️ John read it, but lots of people recommend it. Like, hey, you should read this. You actually know how SwiftUI works under the covers to
⏹️ ▶️ John Marko’s point last week. Like understanding what it’s actually doing and not just like poking at the surface,
⏹️ ▶️ John but understanding it at a deep level is the key to doing really complicated things,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Simple things you can get by with just sort of understanding it, but at a certain point, you really have to know how the machinery works to
⏹️ ▶️ John understand why, like I’ve already done things that I’m like, I’m not sure why this fixes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco theories about why it fixes it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the theories seem to be borne out by my experimentations because I always have, I have my project, and then I have a playground
⏹️ ▶️ John right next to it where I’m making the toy examples, like testing my ideas. But playground is such a
⏹️ ▶️ John mess, like that, it stops working like so often I have like quit Xcode and restart. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m always testing my theories, but I really do need to, I’ve been avoiding like understanding it at a deep level cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, ah, this is a fun thing. I don’t need to get that, but I think I have to get that deep. And then the other experience I had
⏹️ ▶️ John today to contrast with my SwiftUI experiences, my app is, it’s an AppKit app, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it uses SwiftUI for its one little thing that’s on the screen. But other parts of it
⏹️ ▶️ John are just plain old AppKit and you know, like dialogue boxes or whatever. And I was, in one of my dialogues,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was adding support for a bunch of features today and I couldn’t figure out how to do something. And the difference between SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John a four-year-old API, and AppKit, a what, 30-year-old API, is that when I’m doing stuff with AppKit, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I know neither one of these things. I don’t know SwiftUI, I don’t know AppKit. Like I have not an experience with any of these APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like clean, I’m starting from a level position for both of them. But with AppKit, I know that there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do it. It’s just a question of me finding. With SwiftUI, very often there’s not. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to get something to work in AppKit and it’s like, I can’t figure it out. And there’s like so many APIs. There’s just so
⏹️ ▶️ John many features and so many things. And it’s just, it’s like a giant forest. And it’s like, one of these things does what I want but I can’t find
⏹️ ▶️ John it. SwiftUI, there’s four methods and if they don’t do what you want, that’s it. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or like the one that you do what you want. Like I said, you know, oh, these APIs exist but if you want this one feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the basic feature you gotta, you know, increase your, you know target
⏹️ ▶️ John OS to Mac OS 12 because that feature isn’t available in 11. So, and the good thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John AppKit is I can go to the Slack with all the old AppKit people and say, hey, how do you do this? And out of nowhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody comes and says, oh, it’s just easy, just do this. And it’s always a one line solution in AppKit. It’s like, just type
⏹️ ▶️ John this. And it’s like, yeah, you pass negative one to this thing. And it targets the whole thing instead of the individual item.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, and it’s documented. It’s documented in the documentation. I just never had gone
⏹️ ▶️ John to a documentation because there’s so much documentation and so many features. So not that, you know, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John both frustrating, like not knowing how to do something. Oh, and the other thing is when I couldn’t do it in AppKit, I was in SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John mode and I’m like, you know what? I’ll just do it myself. What I was trying to do was get an entire table view to highlight instead of just an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John row, because when I drag something into the table view, it auto sorts. So if I use the default
⏹️ ▶️ John highlighting, it makes it look like you’re inserting the item between items two and three or whatever, but you’re really not, you don’t have that precision.
⏹️ ▶️ John As soon as you drop it, I’m gonna resort it, right? So I wanted to just highlight the whole thing. I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, this is AppKit. I’ll just draw the freaking highlight myself. I have total control of everything. just subclass
⏹️ ▶️ John override, draw a big rectangle. And you know, that works pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was like, you know, this is AppKit. I shouldn’t have to do that. That’s a SwiftUI thing. And sure enough, I didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Delete all that code, delete that entire subclass, put one line into an Internet method to set the thing the way I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted it and I did it. So yeah, 30 year old APIs, pretty sweet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pretty good. Yeah, I actually, on a lark, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey searched. So I had, you know, three different major areas complaint last week. And on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lark, I searched for the class, I think it’s photos, or it’s a view actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos picker, I think it’s called. And I searched for that in Swift UI,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either on Reddit specifically, or maybe I just did like a DuckDuckGo search, I don’t recall exactly. But I found a Reddit post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that told me exactly what I needed to know to solve the problem. Now, granted, it would have been nice if I could find that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s freaking documentation, but at least I found it somewhere. And so that one of my three issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been resolved. And so So all my god awful code that I was using to present
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a photo picker in the existing version of Masquerade, that can all go away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m willing to require iOS 16 right away, which I pretty much am. So here we are. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty excited about that. All my other issues though still remain. self-created, but who