493: Downstairs Downstairs
31 Jul 2022A lot has happened since we last recorded.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Last two weeks updates
- Follow-up:
- Custom 🇦🇺 emails (via Mark Vos & Brendan Ragan)
- BMW subscriptions (via Chris Church)
- Steve Stutz tells us you can get the mophie 3-in-1’s from Zagg at a discount
- 🇪🇺 & USB-C regulations (via Vern Johnson)
- Address & contacts (via Soluble Apps and Sherif Hassabo)
#askatp:- Can an indie app enter a crowded field? (via Abel Demoz)
- Why don’t we use cross-platform frameworks? (via Russel Bernau)
- Is Time Machine still the best feature ever implemented on the Mac? (via Guilherme Alles)
- Would John potentially void his TV’s warranty to prevent auto-dimming? (via Mark Vos)
- Has John decided on a backup strategy for his son’s MacBook Air? (via Brian Lazarz)
- Post-show: Casey’s HomeKit Adventures
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Chapters
- Since the last show
- M2 MacBook Air impressions
- DFU-restoring a Mac
- Two Phish concerts
- Sponsor: Businesscards.io (code ATP)
- Email domains and usernames
- Follow-up: BMW subscriptions
- Sponsor: Instabug
- Follow-up: Mophie 3-in-1 charger
- Old iPhones after a USB-C mandate
- Follow-up: Contact-address order
- Sponsor: Linode
- #askatp: Room for new apps?
- #askatp: SwiftUI vs. conservatism
- #askatp: Time Machine best Mac feature?
- #askatp: OLED protection-dimming
- #askatp: Backup for college kid
- Ending theme
- HomeKit-away-from-home
Since the last show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has been so long since we recorded. So since we last recorded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have gotten the new MacBook Air, already did an entire three hour podcast about it with John Gruber,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the talk show at 352. I DFU restored my 14 inch MacBook Pro, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think has fixed most of its problems. And I went to two Phish concerts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I went to two Phish concerts? Why are we going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we got to pull up that thread in a second, but since we’re doing our quick updates. Meanwhile, I went to Cape
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charles for a week and Michaela got her second shot. So the List family is as vaccinated as we can possibly be right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, and I’m very excited about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John, what have you been
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been on Long Island, just hanging out at the beach. I’m back now, though. My
⏹️ ▶️ John most exciting upcoming news, oh, I did get my M2 MacBook Air, well, it’s not mine. My M2 MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John for my son, he’s got that up on his desk and is using it as if nothing has changed from his M1 MacBook Air, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. But my exciting news is that my television, in theory, is arriving on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, did you prepare the way
⏹️ ▶️ John the way is not yet prepared? I just got back from vacation literally today. So I really haven’t, I’ve just barely
⏹️ ▶️ John started unpacking stuff and plugging things back in. Oh, I had an ominous email for my Synology while I was gone
⏹️ ▶️ John too. What saying what? I don’t know if you ever got this one. Let me see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology detected an abnormal power failure that occurred on drive two and volume one. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t sound good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are there normal power failures? What is an
⏹️ ▶️ John abnormal power failure that occurred on drive? How can the power failure occur on a drive? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t do anything to it yet. I went downstairs and looked at it and all the lights are on and all the lights are angry.
⏹️ ▶️ John It says to, for more information, go to storage manager, storage, and check the suggestions under the corresponding file.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the suggestion probably is, hey, don’t use hard drives for eight years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s a pretty good suggestion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but anyway, I haven’t looked into my Synology yet, but tomorrow, in theory, I will
⏹️ ▶️ John begin preparing the way for the television.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s gotta be a big job. Hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was gonna ask, we don’t have to go into the nitty gritty, but would you mind giving just like the briefest overview
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what you expect preparing the way to look like?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have to rip everything out that’s under my television stand thing now. So I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John a receiver, I’ve got a bunch of game consoles, I’ve got a TiVo, I’ve got a PlayStation 3.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s see, Apple TV, there’s a lot of crap back there. Of course, all the like plugs
⏹️ ▶️ John and surge strips and all the other stuff that it plugs into. That’s all gotta come out
⏹️ ▶️ John because some of those game consoles either can’t connect to my television or I won’t be connecting to
⏹️ ▶️ John my television. The PlayStation three is just going into cold storage because I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a dedicated Blu-ray player, and that’s the only thing I was using that thing for. And then I have to get
⏹️ ▶️ John my plasma television off of the stand, leaving the stand empty, and then I have to repopulate the stand
⏹️ ▶️ John by sticking in my new receiver,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco putting in the
⏹️ ▶️ John game consoles that I’m going to continue to keep slash use as decorative items.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some game console I’m going to become decorative items. I know I could buy an adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John to like, you know, connect things. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I have the component video
⏹️ ▶️ John cable for my, you know, GameCube and Wii and the Wii U is HDMI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I could get adapters for those things, but it’s not probably not worth it. So I’ll probably leave some of them in there as
⏹️ ▶️ John space fillers and decorations. But really the main task is putting the new receiver in and connecting the umpteen speaker wires
⏹️ ▶️ John to it and swapping in all new fancy 4K high frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rate, blah, blah, blah, whatever HDMI cables for the old ones, which don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John support any of the new fancy stuff. And in theory, fingers crossed, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have all the things that I need. I have the cables, I have the receiver, I have the Blu-ray player
⏹️ ▶️ John that had a little minor surgery as we talked about in the past episode. So the preparing the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it all goes well, when the television arrives, There will be a television stand with all new equipment
⏹️ ▶️ John in it with no television on top of it. And they will just drop off the television and hopefully leave my house. And then I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to connect the third party stand to my television and we’ll see how that goes. You’ll hear about it in the next episode, I’m sure.
M2 MacBook Air impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how is your MacBook Air to pop the stack a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so I did a much longer review on the talk show, but my gist of it here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels strikingly good. Like when you pick it up or move it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open it up to use it or close it, it feels really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is really fast and it sounds like crap. What do you mean it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like crap? The speakers are garbage. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, when you compare it to the MacBook Pro 14, most of the differences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the MacBook Pro is an upgrade, when you’re using them side by side or when you switch between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, you don’t really notice them. The differences aren’t that noticeable in the screen quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the promotion, I don’t notice when promotion is not there, really. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do very much notice the speaker difference. It is extremely obvious every time the computer plays any kind of sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air speakers are pretty rough when you are used to the MacBook Pro speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re good in absolute terms compared to other small, inexpensive laptops, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to the 14-inch MacBook Pro, it’s no contest. The speakers on the MacBook Pro are both much, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco louder and much better sound quality in general. The MacBook Air speakers sound like small,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tinny speakers, but everything else in its comparable category and like, you know, the PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market and stuff, you know, it compares very well to those, but compared to the 14-inch, it’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contest. However, the way it feels, oh my God, it feels so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thin and light when you compare it to the 14-inch. And the difference on paper doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like it would be that much, but it matters a lot. It is extremely noticeable, and it just feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic when you have to pick it up or hold it or whatever. It’s fantastic. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. So, very, very happy with it. I’m already finding lots of various uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for now having three computers. But it’s, I love it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s great. And if you are at all on the fence on whether you might want a MacBook Air, go for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s great. I did get silver. I think it is the, generally the best color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s available, I think, right now. It is the most boring color. Well, I wouldn’t say that. Space gray is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most boring color. But silver is certainly a close second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that regard. It is a boring color, but I, as I mentioned before, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new super dark blue in practice is very fingerprinty and usually looks just black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t love that. And the gold I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice if you don’t have any other silver aluminum on your desk. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have any other silver aluminum on your desk, it doesn’t quite match it and it looks kind of wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s up to you whether that’s a problem for you or not. But yeah, I love this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. I think it’s great. I did notice they moved the headphone jack back to the wrong side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because, you know, like for, you know, from the 2016, you know, dark days, we had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the headphone jack moved to the right. And of course, listeners heard me complain about that forever on this show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because headphones typically that have only one ear cup connecting to the wire,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually that’s the left side of the headphone. And so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone jack on the right, because not only does it intrude into your mouse space, if you’re a right-handed mouse user, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have them next to the laptop, but then also it has to then wrap around to the left side of the laptop, either crossing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind it or in front of it to get to the left ear cup of a left-sided, left-wired headphone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they moved the headphone jack back over to the left on the new MacBook Pros when they came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last year, but it’s, for some reason, staying on the right for the MacBook Air. So, eh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, you know, it’s not great,
⏹️ ▶️ John the same complaint about all the ports on the MacBook Air. It’s got two, you know, the MagSafe and the two Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John ports or whatever, and they’re all on the left side. And it would be nice if there was one port on one side and one port on
⏹️ ▶️ John the other. You can see that if they put them on one on one side and one on the other, people would complain that they aren’t both on the same side. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no perfect solution there. I understand that. Like we’re just, you don’t see the other side of it. But yeah, the headphone port being
⏹️ ▶️ John over there seems to be the same. Oh no, it’s not on the left, it’s on the right. So it’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of that whole, the left is occupied by all the other ports, so the right is the place with space
⏹️ ▶️ John remaining to put stuff. But it’s kind of weird because if you look at the motherboard, they did the thing they’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John for many years now and made the ports modular. So if you break a port or something, you don’t have to replace your
⏹️ ▶️ John entire logic board. You just, you know, they take off that little module and put another one on. But of course you’ve got to get all the traces
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything to the place where the thing is. So
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a shame that they didn’t flip the thing around. But speaking of audio stuff, did I miss the part where you compared the
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 MacBook Air to the M1 MacBook Air speakers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would if I still had that computer in my possession, but I do not.
⏹️ ▶️ John But based on your memory, though, because you’re saying, oh, the speaker sounds terrible. Like I would expect that they would sound worse than the much
⏹️ ▶️ John thicker or more expensive fancy computer, but I’m wondering how it sounds. I mean, I guess I have both of them in my
⏹️ ▶️ John house. I can check it out. I just honestly never use those speakers. My son always has his AirPods in or some other
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones in, but I’ll check. I have both machines. I’ll see if I can check back in next week, if I remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t want to assign homework because I’m not allowed to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to know that information from you, but I’m guessing it’s probably, you know, I’m sure it compares well to its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own predecessor and previous MacBook Airs. But yeah, it’s in general, this thing, I mean, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna sell an absolute ton of these things. And I think for the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, well, I just know the M1, you can say the same thing with the M1, but there’s no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a cheap but bad option in the Apple laptop lineup that you shouldn’t buy. There’s the 13-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro that you shouldn’t buy, but that’s not that cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is like, whether you get the M1 MacBook Air, which is still being sold now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether you get this, they’re both amazing computers. This is, they’ve done such a great job with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And man, the laptop lineup is in such a great place right now. Like, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the exception of that stupid 13 inch, which it’s not a, it isn’t a bad computer. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just much better computers right next to it in the lineup. But you know, with that sole weird spot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you really can’t make a bad decision in this lineup. Like, it’s just, it’s great. All of them are great and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get to kind of just pick what size and features and price you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s a great place to be. And it’s especially heartening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after, we had so many kind of dark years there in the middle and those times are now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very well behind us. And it’s a great place to be right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, the one bad decision you can make is if you get the base model of the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John M2, because the base models have slow SSDs with single chip and it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not that big a deal, but you should probably get a bigger SSD anyway. So that’s the bad decision you can make.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t get ones with 256 gigs of storage for multiple reasons, but in particular on
⏹️ ▶️ John this round of things, because it is slower.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it is, but again, like I don’t think that’s a thing, really, that’s gonna matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to almost anybody. Really, what you will feel is running out of space. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real reason you shouldn’t get 256 is that it’s just not enough space for comfortable use. get 512, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can’t afford 512, either wait until you can, or get the M1 MacBook Air, which is still for sale,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that having 512. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, the M1 MacBook Air is the problem here, because like, let’s say you have an M1 MacBook Air and you wanna get an
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 because one is more than two, or two is more than one, maybe. And you wanna do that upgrade. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get that upgrade and you make the mistake of getting the base model, it could be that some things that you do are actually slower on your fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John new computer, and that’s a bummer. So, you know, it doesn’t matter to the general public, but if you’re going M1 MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John to M2 MacBook Air, continue to be aware, do not buy the base model. It’s too little storage and the storage
⏹️ ▶️ John is slow and that may affect your performance if you do anything that is somewhat governed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So going back up the stack, down the stack, whatever, across the stack, you went to two, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, but two, count them, two Phish concerts over the last couple of weeks. Was this, were both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these in Jones’ speech?
DFU-restoring a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re forgetting I also DFU restored my 14-inch. Oh, yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s quite an experience so so so for those of you who don’t know the details of all this stuff, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You at some point you might have had to do this to an iPhone or an iPad So there’s this process called DFU exchange for device firmware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update And this is one of the things where if the OS on your iPhone or iPad Gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hosed like to the point where like it’s it’s just there’s a major problem it can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know boot up and get updates or whatever or Or, a more common reason you might have seen this is if you ever want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to downgrade from a beta back to the previous OS release. The way you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is you have to put the phone in this special DFU mode, which basically involves like, you hold down the power button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time and then the screen turns black and it shows up, you have to connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to a Mac and it shows up in like the iTunes kind of interface and it says like, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device is in firmware restore mode and you have to like tell it to restore and update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer controls the whole thing. Well, the way that you can restore M1 and M2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based Macs, they basically have that exact same process available on them. Now this isn’t the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only way you need to restore them, but the issues I was having with my 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were so weird and seemed like it might be some kind of possibly like, you know, firmware level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems that I was having with some component of it maybe, I decided let me restore this in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most, to use a for-fellowsm, the the most blow away way that I possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I looked up how to do this and the process is hilarious because it basically comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down to like, you know, you turn it off, connect it to another computer, like to another Mac with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a USB cable. And then like you turn it on, holding down these keys and then holding the power button for a certain amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you do the sequence with holding down buttons for a long time and then your laptop pops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up as a DFU mode thing in the other computer you connected it to. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a giant iPhone that you’re restoring. The process is very, very similar and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually worked surprisingly easily and well. And so far, I’ve only had it this way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for about a week, but it seems like my problems may have been solved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I was having two recent major problems. One was that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would plug it in sometimes, and sometimes it wouldn’t accept a charge from either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MagSafe or USB-C until I shut it down and restarted it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was a fairly recent thing. That seems to have been a software problem introduced in Mac OS 12.4 that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to be fixed in Mac OS 12.5, which came out recently. So, I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a lot of people who had this issue, if you had this issue where your computer, your recent MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro wouldn’t accept a charge until you shut it down, update to 12.5 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seems to be fixing this problem for everybody. So good luck with that. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed it for me so far, but again it’s only been a week. And then my other problem was it would kind of not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco receive FaceTime calls and other weird stuff until it would restart it and it would work for a little while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it would stop receiving stuff again. So far, that has been fixed as well since I did the DFU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blow-away thing. So we’ll see if that continues, but so far, so good on that. So that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s restored, it’s done. And the restore process, by the way, what I did was I just created a whole time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup to a USB drive, did the whole restore, had it restore from the time machine backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I didn’t have to reinstall anything. It brought over all the passwords and everything. I didn’t have to reset up anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything transferred properly with that time machine round trip situation. And so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fixed. So I’m very happy about that so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of weird iPhone things that you do with your computer, when I got the M2 MacBook Air, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John setting it up and I was using a migration assistant. I think we’ve talked about this before, how great that program
⏹️ ▶️ John is and how it transfers everything, how you can change transport method while it’s running. And I did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I mean, I connected the two things together with a Thunderbolt cable that I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sure was a Thunderbolt 3 cable. Cause I think it came with like a Thunderbolt 3 peripheral that
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought or whatever. And I plugged it in and I saw the, you know, the M2,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, change its connection. And it said this connection has been sampled to transfer whatever umpteen
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabits per second that it lists for Thunderbolt. And I was great, that’s gonna work great. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the donor machine, the M1 MacBook Air was saying like preparing documents and something or other,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it sat on that preparing step for a really long time. And I’m like, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John give it a while. So I gave it like two hours, came back, it was still in that preparing step. I’m like, okay, this can’t possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John be right. I’m going from an M1 MacBook Air to an M2 MacBook Air, they’re both pretty fast. They don’t have much
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff on them. this should progress. And I noticed that the M1 had a disagreement
⏹️ ▶️ John with the M2 about how they were connected. The M2 said we’re connected by a thunderbolt, the M1 said we’re connected by ethernet. There
⏹️ ▶️ John was no ethernet involved. There’s no ethernet involved anywhere in this thing. And so eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John I just had to give up and cancel and say, no, stop. That was a little bit tricky, because once you cancel,
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 MacBook Air wants to continue through the setup process. Like, I’m like, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to transfer anything? No, I canceled the migration. It’s like, okay, well, let’s keep setting this up. I’m like, no, no, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to set up. And eventually I found some way to go backwards instead of forward, because it just kept bouncing me
⏹️ ▶️ John forwards to make a user account, do all this stuff. Like, no, no, I don’t want to do any of that. I think I just restarted
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Anyway, second time it worked, but just FYI, if you’re ever, because I Googled this while I was waiting.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re ever doing a migration and it seems like it’s stuck on like some kind of step, you know, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John progress bar and it’s like preparing to do something for hours and hours. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tough for me to say, oh, it’s probably not gonna progress. You just kind of have to know, like, are
⏹️ ▶️ John there 17 million files in this and preparing should take three hours and I have to wait it
⏹️ ▶️ John out? Is it like Casey’s Synology where everyone was like, re-silvering the drive or like, migrating
⏹️ ▶️ John the content, took some obscene amount of time because that’s just how long it’s gonna take. You have to kind of know
⏹️ ▶️ John in your gut, like, back of the envelope, like, is this a reasonable amount of time for the job that it’s doing? Because you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to be like, well, I waited two hours and if it hasn’t progressed in two hours, I need to just, you know, cut it off and pull the plug.
⏹️ ▶️ John That might not be true. You’ll never successfully do the thing if the thing is gonna take actually
⏹️ ▶️ John eight hours to get through the preparing stuff. But this felt like it shouldn’t take two hours to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the preparing step, so I did a second try. And lo and behold, on the second try, everything went way fast. The preparing
⏹️ ▶️ John step was over in mere minutes and it transferred all the data and everything worked fine. So word to the wise there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, it is possible to
⏹️ ▶️ John opt out of a migration, opt out of my migration to cancel a migration job and not continue with the setup. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what I didn’t want to happen was, oh, continue with the setup and make a user account. And this is stupid and probably
⏹️ ▶️ John means nothing and probably has no effect on migration assistance, but not behind the scenes. I’m like, oh, but I really want
⏹️ ▶️ John my son’s account to be UID 501 or whatever, like the first number that it picks. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? Because it’s his laptop. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if I make a new user account, like a temporary one, and then when migration assistant runs, this is gonna pick 502,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s just not the way it should be. Like an animal.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. Oh my God. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John is possible to just,
⏹️ ▶️ John any user accounts and redo the whole thing. If I didn’t, I might have to DFU update. I think the only time I ever did, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was called DFU update, it was like, maybe it was one of my T2-based Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe it was a work Mac or whatever. I use Apple Configurator 2. Is that the program you use to do the thing? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I love how it’s called Apple Configurator 2. I don’t know what happened to Apple Configurator 1 and Y2 was always in the name. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that to a T2 Mac and they- It was Discovery D. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they were, it’s not in parentheses.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the T2 Macs were enough like the modern ARM Macs that this was the process.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never had to do it to an ARM Mac and hopefully I never will, but fingers crossed. I have been updating Ventura
⏹️ ▶️ John on my little external drive here. And the Ventura betas supposedly do
⏹️ ▶️ John update the like Bridge OS version. So technically when I boot into my old safe
⏹️ ▶️ John Monterey, I’m using the new version of BridgeOS, but so far it hasn’t hosted. I don’t know, I haven’t learned
⏹️ ▶️ John my lesson. Remember last time when I hosted
⏹️ ▶️ John updating? Anyway, I do it for the show. I gotta get the latest Ventura beta and
⏹️ ▶️ John get in there and see what’s going on.
Two Phish concerts
⏹️ ▶️ John We appreciate your sacrifice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Are we finally at fish time? Because I am curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you ended up seeing two concerts in the span of just a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So, uh, fish, even though no one likes them except me, they somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are able to sell out arenas and stuff really easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same, it’s the same 3000 people, you know, I mean, you, you’ve gone to two concerts now you’re seeing how it
⏹️ ▶️ John works. Hmm. If I go to every concert, I become one of the 3000. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they were playing here at a local theater, Jones Beach,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Long Island region. I don’t think it’s actually on Long Island because it’s on, I think it’s on Cap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tree Island or Jones Beach Island. Anyway, it’s not on Long Island for whatever it’s worth. It’s a different island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, they were playing two two nights in a row there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when fish plays in, when they play multiple nights in one location. They don’t repeat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco songs between those two nights. The two shows will be 100% different from each other in what songs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they play. Not to mention the fact that they’re a jam band, so even if they would play the same song, it would be pretty different both times. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ignoring that fact, they always play different stuff on different nights in the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place. I’d gone to two shows previously, one last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year and one 10 years ago. And in both of those shows, they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decent but I didn’t get a lot of my like favorites played and I thought well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here I’m going to be going to you know because each of those that I went to before those were each three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night runs that I was going to like the middle night of well this time I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to two nights in a row of a two run of a two night run so I figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my odds of hearing my favorite songs or at least some of them are way higher if I do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so let’s do it what the heck you Now let me see what it’s like. I’ve never been to two concerts in a row, like, you know, two different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two days, two days, right in a row, never done that. Never been to Jones beach at all anyway. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I heard it was a great venue. Tiff went there when she was younger and she loved it. And everyone else said that’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco venue. So it is a great venue. I thought let’s do it. What the heck? It wasn’t that expensive. And you know, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was arranging logistics, because there’s, there’s a question of like, how do you get from fire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I asked you this in Slack and you ignored me, I guess, for this very moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like you could just kind of take a boat and just zip over. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theoretically one could do that. And in fact, I asked the water taxi company, hey, can we just get a boat like all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way there? And the answer is yes, we could, except there’s apparently a five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mile an hour speed limit most of the way, and it would take like three hours. Oh, cool. So not an option anybody would actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to do. And you can’t drive there because A, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have to drive over part of Fire Island, which you can’t really do and B you really can’t do it in the summer time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even people with driving permits cannot drive on the island in the summer because it’s just too many people everywhere. So anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you get to Jones Beach from Fire Island is you have to take the ferry from Fire Island back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Long Island. That’s you know a half hour on the boat. Then have somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you or a car service, somebody drive you from there to the concert venue. Then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive back from the concert venue back to the fare terminal but oops it’s too late because you get back at like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know 1230 at night and there’s no more ferries then you take a water taxi back to fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how you get there and anyway so I did you know when I was scheduling all that stuff I just scheduled it to do two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nights in a row okay can you can you just like Tuesday and Wednesday night please at the exact same time yes okay good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it was great it was and I was very pleased. The two shows I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw, I think were very good shows, and I’m still in the process of listening back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of judging them with some distance compared to my previous shows, but I think they were my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows that I’ve been to by a pretty big margin. They were great performances. This is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tour. This is a great part of the tour. And my plan of seeing both nights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a two-night run did pay off. I did hear a lot of my favorite songs, and especially many that I hadn’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the previous two shows that I went to. Good. Yeah. So it was a great success. I’m now getting more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accustomed to it. This was also… I was very impressed by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jones Beach as a venue. I got the expensive old man seats, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this case, they were actually very good because they were very central, but it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you had these little boxes you could just walk out of and walk down this open aisle to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited bathroom area and stuff. So it was very convenient for what old people actually want, which is like, I want a good amount of space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around me and I want to be able to get in and out quickly and I need easy access to a bathroom. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was great for all those things. So I was very, very happy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I Billy Joel takes a helicopter to the bathroom
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to and from his Long Island home to Madison Square Garden. You read that article?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, flies out to Madison Square Garden
⏹️ ▶️ John for his concert. He is a helicopter. He sings his song, makes whatever million dollars and goes back on a
⏹️ ▶️ John helicopter to his house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that surprises me. I hadn’t heard that, but I’m not surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ John you can imagine like if you’re out there and you know, you’re a Long Island beach house and you want to get to Madison Square Garden and back
⏹️ ▶️ John Geographically, you look like, Oh, that doesn’t seem that bad. But like logistics wise, even if you have someone driving
⏹️ ▶️ John you and you know, a fancy car or whatever, it’s just a nightmare. But the helicopter is real quick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how long did it take just ballpark to get there and then later to get home?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I include the time on the water and then walking back to my house from the boat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Um, let me see. Yeah, like 30 there, 40 ish there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. About, about an hour and a half each way. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not a short evening, but it’s not a, it’s not a completely egregious trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, it really wasn’t that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, if you’ll allow me, who did you go with?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went with two different groups of people because I don’t know anybody in my friend groups here who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like them enough to go to two nights in a row.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So. Can I just, can I just tell you for the record, I do not think I would, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actively enjoy a Phish concert, but if we lived closer, I would absolutely go to one with you and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would enjoy it, maybe I wouldn’t, but I would go to one for sure. I mean, come on, you know, you got to try it, but anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who, who did you go with? Anyone that we would know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, yeah. So night one, I went with some local guy friends, um, and I, I even, I told him, like, look, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to Phish beforehand. Cause you know, they were both like familiar with them and in a concept but they hadn’t been to a concert I mean look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t listen beforehand so I’m like I know what’s gonna happen you’re gonna listen you’re gonna realize you hate them then you’re gonna cancel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t just don’t listen before and and but fortunately like they they both liked it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I don’t know if they liked it they certainly I don’t think would have gone for two nights in a row but sure they both liked it and then the second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night Tiff joined me with another friend as well so Tiff even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volunteered to come with me for one of the nights and had a good time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, that’s what I’m saying. I bet, you know, it’s like, as an example, I really don’t care for baseball. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not my thing. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s just not my thing. But going to an actual baseball game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an entirely different experience that is quite delightful. I would never seek out fish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a fish concert, but I bet you I’d have a great time at a fish concert. Cause why, how can you not? It’s live music. It’s hard to have a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time at live music. And I’m very pleased that Tiff seems to have had an okay time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s it. I feel the exact same way. Like I’ve I’m not a sports person as you all know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however, and I would never choose to watch sports on TV or follow what’s going on in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sports like on the internet or anything, however, if my friends are going to a sports game and they invite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to go with them and The logistics can work. I will say yes because I actually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live events Sometimes and it can be and it’s a totally different experience when you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there live like in the sports circle cheering on with all the other people about the sports teams
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s all great and it’s a big you know group energy experience and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you pay attention you get into it eat the crappy food for the thousand dollars like it’s the whole experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I get the appeal of that even if it’s an activity or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco band or whatever that I wouldn’t normally get that into or follow outside of that experience so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so you know most people don’t listen to fish as much as I do when they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just working throughout their day. But if you bring most people to a fish concert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you provide them with enough chemicals to make their brain happy, they will usually enjoy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s a whole lot of people who listen like, you know, some of my friends are like, you know, I’ll be playing fish and they’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yeah, I would like this if I was high right now, but not now. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, I understand that. If that’s, you know, that’s, you don’t have to like them as much as I do in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoy them in that kind of context. But, you know, I happen to like them so much that I want to listen to it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so since Tiff volunteered to go to a fish show with you, quid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro quo Clarice, what are you going to do now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it doesn’t come up. I offered to go to the Her Dave Matthews show with her earlier this summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, but she was smart and said no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fortunately there were enough other people in that group that my company was not required.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I would, look, I would do it. And you know what, I don’t like Dave Matthews, but again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would probably be fine at the concert. I can’t guarantee that I would love it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would at least enjoy myself at a concert.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s how I feel about Phish. Like, I don’t know if I would go leave the event saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holy crap, that was the night of my life. But it is okay to go somewhere, experience something, and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was fun. Maybe not something I wanna do every day, but that was fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you probably wouldn’t buy the poster.
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Email domains and usernames
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word. Well, we have had an eventful couple of weeks for nothing going on in the world. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we actually don’t have all that much follow up this week, which is extremely surprising to me. We could have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recordings that are like two days apart, you know, because of odd scheduling conflicts or whatever, and have a mountain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of follow up. We’ve had two weeks and we have almost no follow up, but let’s, let’s power through.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone’s on vacation. That’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re always on vacation in California. But anyways, Fletcher O’Connor’s custom domain email.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was an Australian fellow that wanted to do some sort of custom domain for his email,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we were trying to figure out what can you do about that. And Mark Voss writes that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the.au domain is now available for registration, and that namespace is not well polluted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet. Brendan Reagan writes, there’s also.id.au. However, there are some rules
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. use that you must A, match a person’s legal name, first name or family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name, B, have an acronym or abbreviation of the person’s legal name, first name or family name, or C, be a nickname of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco kind of flimsy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. This seems super flimsy, but that’s the rules.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A nickname, that could be a lot of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but here we are. And a lot of people wrote in and said, and I’m making up the specifics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, but, oh, I am, you know, kcliss.email or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently a lot of those weird top level domains like.email, for example, they can cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real big validation problems with forms like online forms that aren’t the best or aren’t the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most modern at doing validation. So using.email, I’m not even sure if that’s a thing, I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, using.email or an equivalent can be not so great because you might end up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having to have a different alias that’s at.com or something in order to just pass through
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s one of the worst problems you can run into, because at that moment, you want to sign up for the thing. You
⏹️ ▶️ John want to create an account on the system or whatever. And it says, please enter a valid email address.
⏹️ ▶️ John Assuming it’s not trivial client-side validation, or let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say you’re not a web developer, assuming you can’t get around it, what do you do then? You either
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have another address, like Casey said.
⏹️ ▶️ John have another. What’s the point of having your own domain if you have to have this second email address anyway? That’s a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you’re in the position where you’re trying to like contact the website somehow, get to
⏹️ ▶️ John a human to say, hey, I’m trying to sign up for an account on your website and it tells my email address
⏹️ ▶️ John is not valued, but I assure you it is, I’m emailing you from it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good luck with that. Yeah, that’s a super advanced level of corporate bureaucracy penetration. Trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to a human who is going to answer that question, there’s no good website
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. Like if you’re trying to do a google.com, some Google property, forget it, you’re never gonna get a human.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re trying to do some dinky little website that was made, you know, seven years ago by a teenager who has since moved
⏹️ ▶️ John on, you’re not going to get through that. Like there’s no situation where I can imagine that going smoothly. And then you’re just like, well, I can’t create
⏹️ ▶️ John an account of this thing. And it just makes you feel so bad about your, you know, your fancy custom
⏹️ ▶️ John domain that you were so happy about two seconds. I don’t have one address and it’s going to be a domain that I own and I’m going to unify on
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m going to own my identity and I can’t use it. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if you can’t use it, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just two places. It really sucks. So please people fix your for I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know why I’m saying this we’re still how many decades into the web We’re still in a situation where they
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, you know into your phone number here. Don’t enter hyphens. We can’t handle that It’s like just remove the hyphens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my god. That’s still a thing and every time I see that I’m like really
⏹️ ▶️ John 2022 please enter digits only really Absolutely boggles my mind. I mean people
⏹️ ▶️ John who aren’t programmers Maybe you think that’s just normal or whatever but there never was a reason for that, and there continues to
⏹️ ▶️ John not be a reason for it, and yet it still exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you noticed, I keep noticing this, I’ve occasionally recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signed up for some new website or whatever using the sign in with Apple option where it can hide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your email address,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sets up a forwarding alias, and then it forwards to your real address. In, I think I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this three times in the last few months, and in all cases, all three times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right after the sign up form, The website has kicked me to a secondary form where it’s like, all right, what’s your real email address?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it won’t let me proceed until I give it an actual email address that’s not the relay one. It’s like, well then what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the heck did I just do that for? Like, what’s the point of all this stuff? Now they have two of my email addresses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I lose the, and now I have to figure out like, how do I ever log in here again? Like, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave it up to the web to ruin everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of ruining everything and web authentication and accounts, it’s one of the things that struck me about
⏹️ ▶️ John the various passkey demos that Apple did at WWDC, just
⏹️ ▶️ John showing the cool passkey things to replace them for passwords or whatever. And I think in all the demos that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve ever seen, they have like a sample, a toy app just to show what the authentication flow looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Since you don’t have to pick a password, there is no account creation screen where they say, enter your password
⏹️ ▶️ John and then confirm to enter the password. Like that doesn’t exist anymore. But there is still a place,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least in this demo application where it says enter and they have on the
⏹️ ▶️ John demo, enter a username. And as we’ve discussed on past shows, no one should ever be prompted to enter
⏹️ ▶️ John a username. A username as in something that’s not an email address, or maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ John is an email address. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John situation where it’s like your username could be an email address, but it might not be, or it has to be an email address, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the battle days, they made you pick user names since you’d have to be like, you know, J. Smith, one, two, three, four. You’d
⏹️ ▶️ John have to remember that you were J. Smith, one, two, three, four. But if you forgot your username, the forgot
⏹️ ▶️ John password flow, they also had a forgot username flow where you’d put your email address. It’s like just use the email address as the username.
⏹️ ▶️ John Almost everybody got on that page, but still occasionally you have to pick a username. So anyway, in the PASKEY thing, the
⏹️ ▶️ John demo they show, they keep showing enter a username. And the people would enter like a username as like their first name, space, last name.
⏹️ ▶️ John It reminds me of the original Apple ID system where your Apple ID could be
⏹️ ▶️ John capital J, John, capital S, Smith with a space between them. That could be your Apple ID. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. My original Apple ID was not an email address. It wasn’t my
⏹️ ▶️ John first and last name, but it wasn’t an email address. It was just a string. It was a username. And eventually Apple forced
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone to change to email addresses. So even if we get to the mythical future of passkeys where no
⏹️ ▶️ John one has to remember passwords anymore and authentication is great, we still have the problem of, okay, but who
⏹️ ▶️ John are you? Right? Should I enter my email address? What if I want to hide my email address? Like that all still exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing that Marco was encountering is like, oh, so you’re signing with Apple and hiding your email address. well, we can detect that you’re doing that and
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t like it, we want your real email address, so please enter that here. Like, you know, people can do whatever they want on their websites,
⏹️ ▶️ John like their authentication flow can support whatever features they want it to support. And if they say, hey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get through the flow without giving us a real email address and we can auto detect ones that look like they’re the, you know, fake Apple ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John then that’s what they’ll do. So I do kind of fear that even if we defeat passwords, the username
⏹️ ▶️ John monster is still out there waiting to eat us all. Ha ha
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ha. Well, for what it’s worth, you know, I will bring up Fastmail one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more time. They didn’t sponsor this episode, but hey, I would love some free Fastmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should put your referral link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey notes, Casey. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should put my referral link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I should have a referral link for someday when I go off Gmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, they do a similar like mass email thing. And I will admit it’s not as straightforward as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way it works with Apple, where you just say, yes, I would like a mass email right now, please. But it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straightforward to do it on their website. And that ends up giving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you just like two random words that, and I think a numeral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you use as an email address but it’s at your domain. So it’s like two random words, you know, with a couple numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at caseylist.com and that’s a lot less obvious I suspect to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a vendor or whatever, to a website than the Apple alias that basically everyone is sharing or the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple alias format that everyone is sharing. So as an example, like one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on mine is like fuzzy.koala1234, basically, you know, or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John But then you can never remember what that is if you ever have to go through the forgot password flow, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true, but first of all, I have all this in one password. And second of all, they have a, not a dashboard, but they have a page
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, you know, in settings where you can look at all of them and it tells you whether or not they’re active, when the last message
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, you know, three months ago, two months ago, yesterday, et cetera. And then you can go in and edit it and so on. So it really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really is pretty slick. So I will put my referral code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes, but it’s www.caselist.com slash fastmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just for you, just to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John nice and easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet you’re all sure to get off the triple w dot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, would you stop? I don’t want to hear it, dad. Leave me alone. The 90s. Oh, you stop it. I’m an old man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you expect from me? Anyway, moving right along.
Follow-up: BMW subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris Church writes with regard to BMW subscriptions, if you paid 400, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is pounds, which that’s fake money, right? That’s not real, is it? Yes, that’s weight. Anyway, if you paid 400
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks for heated seats at time of purchase, you would not need to pay a subscription to use them. BMW said this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the BBC, quote, “‘Where heated seats or any feature available “‘in the connected drive store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been purchased “‘when a customer vehicle is ordered, “‘no subsequent subscription or payment is necessary,’ quote.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey “‘The subscription model enables customers “‘to try these features later as opposed to paying up front. This means that the hardware to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey facilitate these features will be built into all models, which makes sense from a manufacturing perspective as it makes for fewer hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey configurations. I still really want to hate all of this, but it does make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of sense
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Only for features that they can build in, like eating the cost. Like again, they’re not going to build in the
⏹️ ▶️ John V8 when you pay for the V6 and you unlock the two cylinders. So that doesn’t make any monetary sense. Apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ John seat heaters are cheap enough to include that it doesn’t really add an impact. but for example, leather
⏹️ ▶️ John seats is not something like, they put cloth over it and if you pay extra, you can rip the cloth off underneath this
⏹️ ▶️ John leather. Like there’s a narrow window of features that can work like that. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, I’m still not quite sure how it works in terms of reselling and
⏹️ ▶️ John not having to pay for it up front makes it feel a little bit better, but then I almost feel like, okay, well, if you want me to
⏹️ ▶️ John unlock it later, can’t I just do the same thing as I would have done when I purchased it, as opposed to paying $12
⏹️ ▶️ John a month forever so my steering wheel can be warm. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, you know, again, due to the math, but I just feel like even if the math works out that it is actually less expensive to do that than
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay $400 for the heating steering wheel, it just feels worse to pay $12 a month for your heated steering wheel, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is separate from the $18 a month for a heated butt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the other nice thing about this is, so I buy, presumably, a white BMW,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I decide I want to sell it to one of you knuckleheads. Well, that would never happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for many reasons, one of which being it being white, but nevertheless, in this fantasy world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you imagine selling a car to John?
⏹️ ▶️ John God, no. I would- I don’t need any more oil stains in my driveway, thanks. No BMWs here. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too soon. Actually, I don’t think that ever leaked oil. That might be the only thing it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John do. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John true. Your BMW is leaking oil right now. There
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t leak oil. It’s one thing you learn from YouTube and car-revealing channels, BMW’s leak oil
⏹️ ▶️ John is impossible for BMW’s not to leak oil.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if it leaked. They definitely spent oil.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, maybe when
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s brand new, it’s not gonna leak, but eventually BMW’s will get oil leaks. They leak oil from everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, doesn’t everything leak eventually on an infinite timescale? I
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but I think in the useful lifetime of a car, it’s not a given that
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the seals that are supposed to keep oil in will die and need to be replaced on like a frequent
⏹️ ▶️ John basis like they do with BMW’s. There’s a reason they have a reputation. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why their gaskets don’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John as well as other people’s or whatever, but there we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on. If I sold my hypothetical white BMW to anyone, and it doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t matter who it is, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s pretend I’m selling it to Marco because of the two of you, that is my only hope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sell my BMW to Marco and because apparently I live in a place that doesn’t have winter, supposedly, even though that’s not true,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t option heated seats or heated steering wheel, But Marco, living
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a place that indisputably has winter, he would like those things. Well, what’s nice about the setup is he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can go and pay either a one-time fee or a monthly fee or whatever and get the heated seats and heated wheel that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never bothered paying for. So there is something to be said for this. I think there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way you can look at this that it’s not absolutely disgusting, but it sure feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little gross the way it was originally presented to us. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of those things where like, some nerd somewhere made a good argument
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this on nerdy principles in the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Just like what we’re talking about now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here are some reasons that kind of academically seem justifiable. But at no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point did anybody with any kind of read the room kind of sensibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this idea past them before it went out. Yes, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some cases where you can say, well, that actually would be useful. But that is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far outnumbered by the negativity, or outweighed, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the negativity of this getting out in the world in the first place, and what we talked about last time, of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a very luxurious experience that would be on brand with a luxury car company to feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re being nickel and dimed for something that you don’t have to be. Now, that being said, if the option exists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay the 400 bucks up front and not be nickel and dimed over indefinite time span,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is better. But this is still, I think, it’s just this is a PR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fumble. That they, whatever they’re gaining in utility or revenue is not worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cost of the PR.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder also, I don’t know the details of this, I’m sure we’ll find out, but like if you pay up front the $400 for the heated seats,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you sell the car to someone, do the heated seats come with it? Or does that person then need to begin
⏹️ ▶️ John a new subscription as if the heated seats weren’t already in the car because that heated seat was tied to your
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase and your identifier, you know what I mean? Like the other thing about this is this, like I said, there’s a narrow
⏹️ ▶️ John range of features that this works for. Cause if they’re gonna build it into the car anyway and just enable it later,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do that with stuff that’s basically software, right? And things that are cheap enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can include them and it’s not too expensive, but that’s it. There’s tons of like almost all the options in the
⏹️ ▶️ John options don’t fall into that category. They’re the type of thing that someone needs to pay for and they’re not just gonna give
⏹️ ▶️ John you for free and it’s not possible to unlock them. Better brakes, better wheels, you know, the leather interior, the
⏹️ ▶️ John wood trim, right? Even things like that, you know, the nicer headlights, like those are hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I know Tesla’s done it where they’ve, you know, given you the bigger battery because they couldn’t get the smaller ones in stock and
⏹️ ▶️ John then they software locked out the battery. You remember when they were doing that with the threes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a common thing. That’s a like temporary operational shortage kind of thing. You know, that’s not something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but it made people cranky about it because it’s like, well, I know, you know, I didn’t pay for the, you know, 100
⏹️ ▶️ John kilowatt, whatever. What are the batteries measured in?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It doesn’t matter. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t pay for the 100. Gigawatt. Yeah, I paid for the 60. But I know you had to put 100 in because
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t have any 60s, but like whatever. In some ways, like, okay, but now I’m getting worse mileage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I’m getting less distance on a charge because I’m hauling around this big battery that I can’t use all of, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel good. This is a story with some person who got the 100, look this up, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really annoying me. What is the unit? Kilowatt hour, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They had the 100 unit battery. Excuse me, they had a car with a 60 unit battery. And because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Tesla, it got replaced with a 100 unit battery. And at the time, I guess Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not lock them out. And I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was a mistake on Tesla’s part. They didn’t do the lockout. It’s kilowatt hour. They got the 100, and it wasn’t locked out,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so like, oh, well, you know, whatever. A bank makes a mistake in your favor,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey collect $200.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yep, yep, yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then this person drove the car like this for some substantial period of time. And then Tesla realized
⏹️ ▶️ John his mistake and said, oh, nevermind. And then they software updated it back down to 60.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s a terrible move.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so this is an example of brand management. If you want to manage the brand to make people feel
⏹️ ▶️ John good to have a Tesla, if you make this mistake as Tesla, oh, we forgot to software lock
⏹️ ▶️ John it out, just eat it. Just let that person have the 100 kilowatt hour battery for the rest of the life of their car. Like, it’s your mistake,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just eat it. Because the ill will, even just from that one customer, the ill will that that
⏹️ ▶️ John customer is gonna feel, let alone like, you know, when the person puts their story on the web and people talk about it on podcasts or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not worth it. You already lost the money on that battery. You already put a bigger battery in there. That
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger battery costs you more money and you had to put it in there because you didn’t have any smaller ones. Just eat it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why these companies don’t, like, it’s not a policy. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing with, when you hear stories at the Apple store. A good Apple store and a good, you know, person in charge of whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John makes decisions at Apple knows when to just eat it, right? to just make the customer happy and just eat it. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John policy, it’s not tell all your friends you can come in and get this cool thing done. Tesla will replace your battery and forget
⏹️ ▶️ John the software cap it. Like that’s not, you’re not changing your policy but on a one-off basis, no
⏹️ ▶️ John one to just say, our bad, let’s make it right for you. This is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a new policy, we’re making an exception in your case. The person will be happy and you haven’t bankrupted the company by
⏹️ ▶️ John causing a flood of people to come in and try to get the batteries replaced. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you remember when Amazon displayed to the world that they had a remote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete capability for Kindle books and which book they deleted?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t remember this at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was amazing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there was, this was-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, it was 1984, right? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John In 2009, Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a copyright issue with a copy of 1984 that they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they remote deleted it from Kindles. Oh my gosh. Like of all
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you should always DRM crack all your ebooks.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can also share your own content with other people.
Follow-up: Mophie 3-in-1 charger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, very, very quickly, I spoke about last week the Mophie 3-in-1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charger thing that I was planning to bring on vacation, which I did. It worked well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I lamented the fact that it’s $150 for each of them. Steve Stutz, Stute Stutz,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote that you can actually get these from Zag, which is in contrast to what Apple says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their website, which it says only at Apple. But anyway, you can get it from Zag, and if you’re willing to sign up for their email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey newsletter, then you can save a whole bunch of money and get like a coupon code or whatever for a whole bunch of percentage off. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking to get something specifically this three-in-one thing, I will put a link in the show notes. out.
Old iPhones after a USB-C mandate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Vern Johnson writes, in your most recent episode, you talked about EU regulations mandating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C for all phones and covered it well. Thanks. What I haven’t heard anybody online discuss is how this will keep Apple from selling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fewer expensive previous year models of phones in Europe once the requirement goes into effect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems that this might adversely affect consumers by giving them only the choice of the newest phones that include USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your thoughts? I thought that was a very interesting point. I still don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way in which this is definitely gonna be the case. It’s like, I just don’t see Apple being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coerced into putting USB-C in iPhones. Now they may say, oh, we have decided now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the iPhone will be USB-C and mean it, but I really don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them not fighting this or including like a stupid adapter thing like they did years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago for, I think, micro USB. Like, I don’t know. Do you see this happening?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is flying in the face of the real Tim Cook doctrine, which is keep selling the same products so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as long as you possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think, I mean, I don’t know the details of the law here, but it’s plausible that it won’t apply to them because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not new models, right? So the thing will be like all new models introduced after such and such a date.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s an interesting thought experiment that changes in regulation,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with that have to do with hardware, could be written in such a way that it thwarts
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s ability to do what it loves to do, which is make a product and then just
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to sell it and move it down market, down market, down market until becomes the cheapest one. Sell the same thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacture the same thing for years and years. It makes sense from a bean counter perspective because you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got really good at building whatever it is, the iPhone, you know, I was gonna say the iPhone 6, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a little bit too old, but right. The iPhone 11 or, you know, the XR or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you really get the manufacturing process down, you got the parts available, the quality is really good, and you can just keep making that
⏹️ ▶️ John same phone until it just becomes an unviable product. And during all those years, you know, You’re, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s pure profit because you’ve already, uh, you know, recoup the costs of all the tooling
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that other stuff. Right. Um, but if they ever did require some change that had
⏹️ ▶️ John to be across the entire line, that would really mess up their strategy. It would be the old Steve jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy. What he loved to do is say, we have a new idea and it’s, you know, whatever it is. It’s that our laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John are made of aluminum. And now starting today, the only laptops we’ll sell are aluminum.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those plastic ones, forget it. We’re not going to continue to sell those for the last three years. you’re never going to see them again. We erased them from our website.
⏹️ ▶️ John We pulled them off our store shelves. It’s all aluminum. That is not the way Tim Cook operates,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think the EU thing won’t affect Apple in that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and you also have to figure like, you know, if Apple really sees this as something that is inevitably coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down in the future, they probably have some idea of a time scale of when they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really 100% have to commit to it. And so, you know, if the iPhone, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, what are we on, 14 now? if the iPhone 15 next year comes out and that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one with USB-C, they might be thinking like, alright, well, we’ll start USB-C next year and we won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have to do it for a few years so that’ll give us enough time for it to filter through the lineup. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also might be thinking, you know, if something happened where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old model of phone couldn’t fill its role as being the cheaper one for a little while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s already happened once before. That happened with the iPhone 5. And the reason why the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5C came to be, or at least one reason the iPhone 5C came to be, is that the iPhone 5,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it was the new model, it had that dark gray color that was almost black. And remember, it chipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco along all the edges, and it really did not age well. So what we heard from a bunch of different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumor sources was that one of the reasons the 5C existed is that that finish on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 5 was just, it turned out to be so expensive and not durable enough that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they couldn’t use that really effectively to beat the cheap phone in subsequent years. So one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons they made the 5C was because their flagship phone of year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X really wasn’t gonna be a good cheap phone in year X plus one and X plus two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they just designed a new phone that had cheaper specs and that was it. So if they really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to do something like that today, they could. Worst case scenario, if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mandate, to have to move everything over to USB-C in a couple of years, well, the iPhone 15, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that comes out with USB-C, will have a certain case design that will accommodate that port, and they can always just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a cheaper version of that case design with cheaper guts and sell that as the new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, cheaper model. So there are different ways around this. They probably won’t need to do any of those things. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably can just wait it out and just wait until USB-C filters throughout the line and it’ll kind of just solve itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they certainly have options if they need them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think they’ve forgotten how to make new products. They just tend not to do it unless they really have to. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John the story you’re saying about the, uh, was that the one with the Chamford Edge?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was the first one with the Chamford Edge.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or as Johnny Ive would say, what did he say? Chamford? Yeah. Instead of Chamford? Anyway, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John it reminds me of one of the, I don’t remember which one, one of the Johnny Ive, like, uh, love
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple divorce articles or whatever, or maybe it was the Trip Knuckle book. But anyway, there
⏹️ ▶️ John was a bit where someone was telling a story about it being in a design studio and someone was presenting a design
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone in the meeting brought up how expensive it would be to manufacture the design
⏹️ ▶️ John that was being shown. And they got chastised and got evil looks from the design group because it was basically
⏹️ ▶️ John like under the Johnny Ivers name, that’s just not something you did. It was like during the
⏹️ ▶️ John design process, you didn’t bring up unseemly things like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey how much it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to cost to manufacture or how difficult it would be to do it with precision and quality control. And that’s how you end
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Why not? A thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s how you end up with a phone which has like that chamfered edge that Johnny really loved
⏹️ ▶️ John and you talked about it so much in that presentation. And it turns out to be one of those type
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I don’t know the details, but apparently if this, you know, like one of those manufacturing details that
⏹️ ▶️ John even after you’ve been making the phone for a year, it’s still expensive and hard to do. Like it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not like it was one of those things where you, oh, we’ll get the hang of it. We get the machine set up right. And then it’s just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John bang them out after that, right? Or like, no matter how we manufactured, it’s just not durable,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the problem may be. But like, the when I read that, I was like, the idea that you’d be in a design
⏹️ ▶️ John meeting, and someone would bring up something unseemly like money, and they would get, you know, dirty
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like I understand, there could be like a brainstorming part where it’s like, there’s no bad ideas, let’s just talk this through whatever. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like when you say design, you have to include all the factors. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John two of those big factors are manufacturability in cost. I’m not saying they should drive everything, I’m not saying those
⏹️ ▶️ John should be dominant otherwise you just ended up making a bunch of ugly plastic crap and I would not include the iPhone 5C in that because
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone 5C was an amazing phone. On the outside anyway the insides were kind of crappy. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the challenge of design. If you say okay well I’m going to make an amazing thing but I don’t want anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk to me about money or manufacturability, you’re not a designer. And I’m not saying Johnny Ive does that, like
⏹️ ▶️ John he does care about manufacturability and how things will be put together or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, if that story is to be believed, the idea that the design group didn’t want to hear about money
⏹️ ▶️ John in any stage of the design process, I feel like that’s kind of ridiculous because you know, so we’re going to put
⏹️ ▶️ John diamonds along all the outside and someone brings up money and say, shh, we’re in the brainstorming phase. No one talks about it. There’s no bad
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas here. I’m like, no, diamonds around the outside is a bad idea. You need to include that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that in theory, that’s, they had so much expertise. Like that’s why that person is in the room, the manufacturing expert
⏹️ ▶️ John who says, uh, you know, here’s, uh, why that would be expensive to make. And the other thing about that,
⏹️ ▶️ John with all these stories from the, you know, the, the innovations that Apple’s done in manufacturing is very often that person will
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the room and say, you can’t do that. It’s too expensive. Right. And then the job of Apple as a business is
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, okay, let’s find a way to make it economically feasible to do
⏹️ ▶️ John unibody, you know, aluminum, you know, CNC machined cases. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s too expensive now. What would it take to make that not expensive? Let’s now solve
⏹️ ▶️ John that problem. put millions of dollars into a company that builds these tools like, can we get on the other side of this
⏹️ ▶️ John after a decade of making these things or whatever, where we become experts at it, where it is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can do it in a way that doesn’t break the bank. And also we get the design things
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, that’s why it has to be part of the conversation. And you have to listen to that person when they tell you it’s too expensive to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to say, OK, now here’s another problem we have to solve. And apparently with the chamfered edge, they didn’t do that. They said,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just going to do it anyway. and it turned out it was either more expensive or not as durable or both
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they had to retreat from it. That’s not a win in my book.
Follow-up: Contact-address order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Soluble Apps writes, you asked whether the order of addresses and contacts matters. It definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does when you send email to a group in mail, as the first address is always chosen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to add a feature to my app to change the first address.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mentioned before,
⏹️ ▶️ John like going through contacts and deleting all the emails and then re-adding them in the right order. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t reorder them, but apparently the first one is important. This is really bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe this is not Apple’s fault. it has to do with whatever that V card spec is, doesn’t include this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I don’t know how you get into like the V card spec version two, let alone version three or four, or whatever the heck number
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re on, and not think about the fact that you support multiple email addresses, but don’t support any kind of prioritization
⏹️ ▶️ John or ordering or sort of stealth do, but I don’t like it. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I know we’re talking about features being at the contacts. It’s not a, you know, exciting feature, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like that sometime in the next decade or so now that we’ve got shared photo libraries. This is gonna be my new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Prioritize multiple elements in context.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Sharif Hasabo writes, the preferred target when you message someone is actually based on how the message thread was created.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If the thread was originally sent to the iCloud address, it will suggest that first.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a happy solution. I heard from a couple of people who said, yeah, I had the same problem. And my solution was I deleted
⏹️ ▶️ John the thread with the person. So if you go to messages and you see like, your spouse, their face,
⏹️ ▶️ John and like the thread that you have ongoing with them. If
⏹️ ▶️ John this is to be believed, if that thread was started by you sending a message to your spouse’s
⏹️ ▶️ John phone number, forever when you type your spouse’s name in an autocomplete,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will autocomplete to their phone number. And so you can fix that by just deleting the thread, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna delete a literally years long thread with like my son to just delete,
⏹️ ▶️ John lose all those messages, delete entirely and start a new one with his Apple ID but apparently that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the only solution that people have told me that they tried and actually worked so Apple, get on that.
Sponsor: Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers. Visit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco linode.com slash ATP to see why so many developers like me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choose Linode for hosting our projects. I run a lot of servers. I have run a lot of servers. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will run a lot of servers, all my various projects. And when I’ve been with a lot of different hosts, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve stuck with Linode the longest, you know, they’ve been serving developers for projects both big and small since 2003. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been with them for I think about a decade now. And it’s just a great thing to be a limited customer because you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything at your fingertips you might need from a hosting company, from the basic, you know, server compute instances,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to things like specialty needs, you know, GPU plans, high memory plans, and other services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now they have things like block storage as a service, they recently launched a managed database service. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully managed databases for MySQL, Postgres and Mongo. Redis is coming later this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they have everything you would expect from managed database services, you have simple fast deployment, redundancy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure access backups, it’s everything you would want from a managed database. They have all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Linode now with their managed database service. And it’s just great. You know, at Linode, you have great support if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need it. And it’s all an incredible value. This is their key, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value is not something that is that fun to talk about. But I’m telling you, Linode has the best value in the business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, that’s why I went with them in the first place. And that’s one of the biggest reasons why I’ve stuck with them all this time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t know how they offer what they offer and why no one else does. But the fact is, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best value in the business. And they have been the entire time I’ve been with them. So Linode makes cloud computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast, simple and affordable. So you can focus on your projects, not your infrastructure. Go to linode.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP, create a free account there and you get $100 in credit. Once again, linode.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP, new accounts get $100 in credit. Thank you so much to Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for hosting all my stuff and for sponsoring our show.
#askatp: Room for new apps?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, that’s it for follow up. And since not all that much is going on these days, we thought we’d clear the decks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with some Ask ATP. Abel Demos writes, I’ve had a jobby job as an iOS developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a while now and recently started thinking about creating my own app on the side. I frequently listen to podcasts and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Reddit and Twitter. As such, the types of apps that seem most interesting for me to build are Twitter clients, podcast players, and Reddit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clients. However, it seems like it’s next to impossible to compete with the likes of Tweetbot, Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Apollo. These apps have been in production for years. As such, they have numerous complex competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features that would take new developers several years to build. By the time said features are built into the new apps, the existing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps will have gained even more new features. Assuming that the new apps can even catch up to their competitors in terms of features,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then they need to be marketed differently before seeing any downloads. Is it too late to have a successful indie app as a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entrant to a market with well-established indie apps? And should iOS developers instead focus on advancing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their careers in their jobby job? I actually went back and forth with Abel on this a little bit. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I pointed out, I don’t remember, I want to say it’s Aviary, which is, um, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new-ish Twitter client. And I believe they, there was a new version that just came out in the last week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two. I have not personally used it, but it seems fairly impressive from what little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve seen of it. And that’s just come out in the last like year or two. And so that is an example of something where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could make something brand new or have a different approach to something old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it might work, but I do understand the general gist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what is being said here. I mean, Marco, when you wrote Overcast, there were plenty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of podcast players in the world, and yet somehow you made it work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, there are different times and there are different times when it’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or harder to get into these markets. However, it’s worth remembering that Apollo was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the first Reddit app, not the first big Reddit app. Tweetbot was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the first big Twitter client, and Overcast was not the first podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. And there were many apps in these categories before each of these three examples
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were present. And whatever you use might seem dominant to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you now, but I don’t know what Tweetbot has as market share relative to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every Twitter user. I don’t know what Apollo has in terms of market share and relevant to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone who uses Reddit, But I can tell you that Overcast market share among everyone who listens to podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is something like 1.5%. So that’s 98.5% of everyone who listens to podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who could be looking for something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it’s hard to get a lot of this market. And marketing is difficult and expensive now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s so much competition. But when I started Overcast, before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote a single line of code, I made a notes document, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t even in notes at the time, I think it was in task paper, because Apple Notes was not the way we know today, it was the old version that sucked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the marker felt. And what I’ve sketched out like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other big apps at the time, Apple Podcasts, I believe Downcast, which is what I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using at the time, Pocket Casts, I think that might be it. Oh, and Instacast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are the four that I I considered like, you know, the big podcast apps at the time. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instacast doesn’t even exist anymore. You know, to tell you how much this market can change and, you know, not that much time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and you know, the dynamics certainly like, you know, right now, if I, if I were making that list today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple podcast would still be there, but my biggest competitors are not Instacast or downcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or pocket casts. My biggest competitors are Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, so, you know, things change over time. And anyway, so what I did when I made this list was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote down each of these apps, what their advantages were over what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to build, what their disadvantages were, and why somebody might choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their app instead of mine, and why somebody might choose my app instead of theirs. And I went through and I took screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all these apps and I had these folders that had like, you know, here’s each of these apps, their list screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their now playing screens, their podcast view screens, their directory screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I did some basic, just market surveying, market research of like, what’s out there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then that helped me figure out, first of all, do I have a chance here? Are there any openings here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things differently? And can I do that? And how will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my app differentiate itself? And how can I market that? Where can I reach people?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have good answers to those questions, there is still room for new stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what you have to realize is that everyone wants things a little bit differently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is why, I mean look, there’s a to-do app that ships with every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform of everything for the last very long time, and yet to-do apps are a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco healthy category of products. And the reason why is because everyone is only ever about 75% satisfied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their to-do app, and everybody wants something a little bit different from everybody else. And so there’s basically an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infinite market for to-do apps. See also weather apps. There are certain categories, notetaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, there are certain categories where people just want different things and they have different priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you can make something that appeals to some people, that’s enough to differentiate you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now in cases of these specific categories, I’ll address Twitter and Reddit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. I would say don’t make a Twitter app because Twitter as a company is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over the place with its relationship with developers and the feature set of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people expect from a Twitter client is just massive. So I would not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would stay away from that if I were you. Reddit, you still have a pretty large feature set.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard from Christian Sealy who makes Apollo on a podcast recently, I forget which one, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’ve heard that Reddit’s actually pretty good with its API and it’s pretty good towards developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s something worth looking at for sure. And podcasting, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so many different ways people want to listen to and organize and discover their podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I get feature requests and design complaints all the time that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna do because it doesn’t fit within my vision or it wouldn’t work well in my app or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there is a lot of room there for doing things a little bit differently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one of the best examples of that is Castro. You know if you look at what Castro did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they still are operating. I don’t know if they’re super active anymore, but they still are operating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Castro had a totally different take on organization. It was more like this kind of like inbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco queue kind of system with this triage mechanism. And that’s something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still get feature requests every week or so from somebody who used to use Castro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now using overcast for some reason and wants more of those features to be an overcast. And some of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of fits with what I’m doing a lot of it doesn’t. Some of it I will never do as well as Castro did because you kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of have to like specialize your app design to do that really well. So there’s all sorts of different ways people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might choose to use this. Now on the technical side, by starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new you have a number of major advantages. So first of all you can learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from everyone else’s mistakes in the past. There are certain things that other apps have done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that their developers probably have talked about somewhere before that weren’t worth the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that that ended up being big headaches down the road. So you can learn not to do those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are certain things that you can just do in much less code than the previous entrance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did, because the API is are different. Now there are newer, easier API is to use. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then finally, you have no legacy, you have no existing audience, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no legacy code base. If I were to start a brand new podcast app today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t just rebuild everything that’s in Overcast exactly the way I built it the first time. I would do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things differently and I would do fewer things. There are certain features I wouldn’t do at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steven Powell Such as? Andrew Warren Streaming I wouldn’t do. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco causes a lot of weird issues. In this era of dynamic ad insertion, it’s even weirder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would not do streaming at all. There are certain kind of like, you know, back end changes I would definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do differently. I might not even do sync. I wouldn’t do a website. I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would probably not even run servers. Like there’s a lot of things I would do differently. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are certain options I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have the dark mode override. That’s a massive pain in my rear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end. Certain things I just wouldn’t do. But if you’re starting new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do only the easy things. You can cherry pick. You can only, you know, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use AV player and not do all my sound processing stuff. And that saves you a ton of time. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can use SwiftUI and Swift is the back end and cloud kit doesn’t didn’t exist when I started.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably would have based on cloud kit if you know if it if it did. There are so many advantages you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have by starting new. And because you don’t have an existing audience that that have been using your app for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this time, nobody will complain about some feature not being there, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just got taken away from them, because you’re starting fresh. So you can start with iOS 16. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start with a basic feature set and you can add from there. And you can differentiate in ways that the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entrants in the market can’t or won’t do. So for instance, a pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of Overcast is its playlist organization system. And you can have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playlists. One of the reasons Castor was able to do what it did with its triage system is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it didn’t have that. It had like this one main inbox kind of thing, or this one queue thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and forgive me if I’m getting the details wrong, I never actually really used it myself, besides just looking at it for two seconds, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were able to structure their app in a way that I literally can’t do that in Overcast without massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco structural changes. So there’s stuff like that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have freedom when you’re starting new that existing entrants won’t do. Other things, so for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not in the Reddit community. I don’t use Reddit. I don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TikTok for much, except occasional viewing. I barely use Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you can integrate with these services in ways that I can’t, you have a differentiating factor there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do social features that Apple would never do, that I would never do. You know, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s lots of room to address these problems in ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the other entrants either can’t, won’t, or at least haven’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there’s always room for that. There might not be a ton of room, there might not be a ton of money to be made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, But when the markets are this big, even a very small percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it is, you know, that can be a business.
⏹️ ▶️ John The difficult part of all this is kind of like, you know, I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John make an app that’s like the apps that I like. So I listen to podcasts and read or whatever. You have to really kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of be honest with yourself about expectations, right? How many apps have you made?
⏹️ ▶️ John How complicated an app have you ever made before? God, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think you can make an app that will be good enough to get any
⏹️ ▶️ John percentage of the market in a very crowded market in a complex problem space? Not that these are particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John complex, but like, so let’s say, you know, pick the Mac where it’s easier to pick an example. I’m going to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a Photoshop competitor. Boy, that’s tough. I mean, there’s a lot of graphic editor apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are ones that are less complicated than Photoshop, but even the less complicated ones are pretty complicated. editing
⏹️ ▶️ John is not simple. And if you do make a simple image editor, that’s basically like the equivalent of MS paint.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure there’s a market for that or if there is, it’s a different market than Photoshop, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John you really just, you know, just because like, I love using Photoshop, I love using pixelmator, like I’m going to make an app
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. I’ve never made an app before, I’m going to try it like be careful about, you know, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John watching baseball, therefore, I’m going to be a major league baseball player, right? Be careful what you choose to build.
⏹️ ▶️ John And be honest with what you’re, you know, what you couldn’t expect to make on your first outing or second outing or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Um, because it’s not easy. Like you only hear from the successful people. You don’t hear for the, you
⏹️ ▶️ John hear it from Marco and his podcast app. You don’t hear the 50 people who tried to make podcast apps and did,
⏹️ ▶️ John and put there, put them on the app store and you can use them to, you know, subscribe to an RSS feed and hit
⏹️ ▶️ John play and make a playlist and no one hears about those apps because they did what they did just fine, but they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have anything to differentiate them. And. You know, it just ends up being too much to add, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, all the features that would differentiate them. So yeah, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re looking at like all these things that interest you, like pick one, don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t try to make a podcast, a Reddit, a Twitter client, right? It’s too much in
⏹️ ▶️ John a single application. Even just doing one of those is very difficult. Um, and then when you do the market research,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco described, like looking at what the competitive landscape is and thinking about, you know, what you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John offer there, that should give you an idea of like, all right, if I did this successfully,
⏹️ ▶️ John could it work? And now let me look at, let me look at what I’ve signed myself up for. Okay, so I’m going to make an app that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like X, Y, and Z. Oh, and by the way, it has to look nice and be nice and be bug free and have good performance. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, it’s a tall order. I don’t want to be discouraging, but I feel like in some ways it’s easier to
⏹️ ▶️ John make, uh, you know, an app for organizing your model train parts
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that it is to make a Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John client, right. Or a Reddit client even, because how many apps are that are organized model train parts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably not that many. And if you’re super into model trains, and you have a really good idea about how
⏹️ ▶️ John you would like to organize your parts, you have unique insight and
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a market that doesn’t have as many competitors. And you know, if your app is a little bit janky,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be one of two or three model train part organizing
⏹️ ▶️ John applications in the entire app store. And the other two haven’t been updated in five years. And that gives you a big advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John right out of the gate. As opposed to a Twitter client or a Reddit client or a podcast player where
⏹️ ▶️ John there is tons more competition and that competition is active and experienced and the ones that are left alive
⏹️ ▶️ John are probably pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would say too, like, you know, building on that a little bit, you know, you said that on the Mac that, you know, a Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replacement is a pretty complex thing and that’s true. And even the market for those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already has, you know, you have Acorn, you have Pixelmator, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever that one is, all the designers. photo yeah yeah you have very strong entrance already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a lot of competition and those are very big apps but two apps that I use what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use all the time is called paint code and paint code is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some ways a replacement for Adobe Illustrator but it’s so programmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specific it is it’s like a programmers dry and specifically an Apple programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vector drawing app because that can export source code to draw these things. And even when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m drawing something that doesn’t need to be represented in source code, I still will often use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Paint code because I know it, and it’s simpler, and it fits my view of how these things should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work very well. Whereas something like Adobe Illustrator, I never really learned, and it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big and complex and intimidating for me. Another good app is Monodraw. We talked about it before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an app that specializes in making ASCII art. It’s basically a drawing app on the Mac for making ASCII
⏹️ ▶️ Marco art, and the author of this app did an incredibly high-polished, amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job for this extremely nerdy, specialized app. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are lots of areas like that where, you know, if you… I mean, we’ve all had this experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are on your phone somewhere, you don’t have your computer nearby, and you have some need. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to put a few images together, or, you know, crop something, or remove a splotch from the… you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have some need that you have to do on your phone, and you search the App Store, and there’s 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garbage apps to do it, and that’s it. There are so many examples of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’ve run into as just iPhone users that every one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be, you know what, I could just make a really good version of this in two weeks and just put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up there. And I think there’s a lot to be said for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the underscore David Smith approach just start making stuff whenever you see an opening. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make something and get it to a, you know, reasonably, you know, usable, sellable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level and just put it up there. And throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and see what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sticks. Because eventually stuff does start to stick. And there are so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas where there is underserved or unserved demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all that’s out there is crap because computer nerds like us weren’t paying that much attention to it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have tons of great, you know, podcast apps and Reddit clients and Twitter apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because all of us nerds use those and pay attention to those areas. Meanwhile, look at anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else’s phone in your life and see the apps they use and you’ll find at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least some crazy stupid subscription scam based app that’s, they only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it to like crop an image and they’re paying two bucks a week for it because of some stupid scam. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much out there that’s being badly served or underserved. And so even if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get like the high profile, you know, big popular nerd app categories, there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other stuff out there that you can try for. And a lot of that stuff, you can make an app in two weeks or less,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just stick it out there and see if it works before you invest more time into it and just place a bunch of bets on the table and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see which ones pay off.
#askatp: SwiftUI vs. conservatism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along. Russell Bernow writes, I remember hearing you advise people to stick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with battle-tested, well-supported languages instead of chasing the newest ones. But you don’t follow your own advice. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you felt the pain of switching to Swift and SwiftUI, have you considered trying to learn a battle-tested cross platform language,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe even a middleware instead? If you’re committing to learning something brand new anyway, why not take the opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ship on all platforms instead of being limited to just Apple’s? Before anyone answers this, let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me give a little more context, because I also exchanged emails with Russell a little bit. Apparently, I save all my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good stuff for email instead of bringing it to the show because I’m a professional. I exchanged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco emails- What’s your FastMail credit link there, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How are you storing all this email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sending it? Exactly right. Caselist.com slash FastMail. But anyways, it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that Russell is a developer, but develops against, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unity, one of the cross-platform game engines, which is a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different scenario than like a React Native or something like that. And so once I discovered that, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clicked into place because using a cross-platform thing like React Native, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t fiddled with it barely at all, but I have heard universally bad things from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many different people that I, that I trust and respect. And so the reason we don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like a React Native is because you’re always beholden to the React
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Native crowd to update and to do the things you want to do and make it better and do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in a timely fashion. Almost universally, when you use something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a React Native, it ends up being pretty obvious pretty quickly that it’s not true
⏹️ ▶️ Casey native and it’s garbage or even if it seems native, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the latest and greatest stuff because React Native hasn’t updated to the new APIs for iOS 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what have you. Um, this is quite a bit different though, with something like unity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I mean, John jump in when you’re ready, but unity and what’s a unreal engine is the other one that I’m thinking of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, both of those. As far as I understand are like best in class. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no really good equivalent, uh, you know, offered by Apple or Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, game engines, like these are the best of the best and it isn’t, it is in their best interest to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best of the best everywhere. Like that is the entire point of these engines. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really think it’s a very fair comparison to compare Swift and Swift UI To
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it turns out is like a Unity or an Unreal Engine or something like that Also for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of Swift’s problems of which there are many and more as time goes on I still personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it quite a lot and prefer it to Objective-C. There are ways that Objective-C is better, full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop I’m not saying that Swift is better than Objective-C, but in a lot of ways I still prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to Objective-C It feels, it felt better in this regard years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, but it still feels to me, I don’t know if light is the word I’m looking for, but maybe more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modern is the best way to describe it. But there’s a lot to like about Swift. In Swift UI,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you are within the guardrails, as we’ve said, both Marco and I particularly have said many times, when you’re within the guardrails,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is great. It really honestly is. It’s just that those guardrails, as I think I said last week, are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey humongously tall brick walls, And when you try to get around them, it is painful. So I don’t know. That’s my two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cents about all this. Uh, let’s start with John this time. John, what are your thoughts here?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the whole thing about sticking with battle-tested stuff instead of chasing new stuff. I think as Marco talked about on a past
⏹️ ▶️ John show, this is exactly what he’s done. If anything, he’s been a little bit late. Like we,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it comes to apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. When it comes to app development, we’re taking our cues from Apple, the platform owner, right? And so it was clear
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple was pushing Swift, but Marco waited many, many years before he jumped on that bandwagon. And same thing with Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John UI. It existed for a while until I bought to put a slide up and say, look, it’s Swift. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John FYI, like we will continue to support the other ones. They’re great or whatever. But we’re putting all of our efforts behind Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John UI. That is, you know, not jumping on the new thing. And it’s like a waiting, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, waiting for it to be, quote unquote, battle tested. Now, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect or even fit
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the purposes that you need it for, because the old stuff still exists. But waiting that long is sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of on the trailing edge. We’re not on the bleed. if you’re going to Swift and Swift UI in 2022, you
⏹️ ▶️ John are not on the bleeding edge, you are not chasing the newest hotness, you are merely doing the minimum
⏹️ ▶️ John necessary to keep up with the clear direction of the platform owner. Now with GameStop and engines,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s so much more sort of middleware, like for we’re talking about like React
⏹️ ▶️ John Native or even like RxSwift or stuff like that. When you’re building on top of a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John that builds on top of a platform, there’s just much more stuff involved, but the gaming middleware
⏹️ ▶️ John does so much for you. It’s not just like a thin wrapper around existing APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is an entire world unto itself. And games in particular tend not to have,
⏹️ ▶️ John much to Apple’s chagrin, very big platform tie-ins, like what makes a game a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac game versus a PC game versus a Nintendo Switch game. Like, games do their
⏹️ ▶️ John own UI, they have their own back ends. There’s nothing about them, in most cases, that reveals
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about the platform that they’re on with the exception of maybe integration with like voice chat on the consoles or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like Apple wants you to use Game Center and to be able to sign in with your Apple ID and
⏹️ ▶️ John to share your scores in iCloud. And it’s like, no, that’s all Apple specific work that has
⏹️ ▶️ John no purpose in any place else. So if your goal is to sell a game on more than just Apple’s platforms, doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple way is a big money and time sink. And that’s where, you know, Unity and Unreal
⏹️ ▶️ John in, where you’re like, I have to sell this game and as many platforms as I can, any moment
⏹️ ▶️ John I spend doing something Apple specific is wasted time because the players don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about it and it doesn’t benefit me and any of my other platforms and it probably has nothing to
⏹️ ▶️ John do with what’s going on Unreal and Unity. And that said though, speaking of like for the previous question
⏹️ ▶️ John about like market opportunity or whatever, Unity and Unreal themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John are gaming middleware that replaced older, creakier gaming middleware and surpassed them and
⏹️ ▶️ John ability and scope, right? And both of, basically any kind of modern game
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that continues to use C++, it’s the cutting edge, it’s what you should be using right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John but everyone hates C++ and has memory problems, right? And so who’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the next big middleware engine that does game level performance with a safer
⏹️ ▶️ John language? I don’t know the details of Unreal and Unity, maybe they have a Rust thing, maybe they have a safe mode in C++, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually know if they’ve already done this, But I’m not suggesting that an indie developer take on this
⏹️ ▶️ John task, but some multibillion dollar corporation, there is a market opportunity to be the first, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, game engine to try to compete with Unreal and Unity, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in a more memory safe way, because there’s, you know, games by their nature care about performance
⏹️ ▶️ John much more than other kinds of applications. And so they tend to stick with, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John less safe, more problematic technologies. they give them the speed they
⏹️ ▶️ John need at the cost of pain and suffering of the developers who make them and It’s an incredible black
⏹️ ▶️ John art Like if you ever look at go to GDC and see like what does it take to build a modern
⏹️ ▶️ John game? I’ll just you know pick destiny, but I thought I call of duty any of those type of games Under the covers
⏹️ ▶️ John those things are terrifying and the people who can build those engines There’s a small group as in probably hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ John or thousands of peoples on the entire planet who have the brain capacity and skills
⏹️ ▶️ John and experience to build those type of things, because they are so weird. They look nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John under the covers like an iOS app or Photoshop or Microsoft words.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re incredibly complicated and just their whole world’s unto themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s before you even talk about the things they’re running on top of like Unreal Unity, before you even get to all of that, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ferociously complicated and very difficult to do. And that’s why you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to hire these huge teams and spend millions and millions of dollars and have huge QA departments because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re asking people to do this Herculean task with languages where one false move
⏹️ ▶️ John gives you memory exception and kills your entire application. Now you gotta do it in multiple threads and over the network
⏹️ ▶️ John and on top of multiple platforms. I know by the way, it has to be fast. So that’s a big ask.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like there’s a market opportunity for a middleware
⏹️ ▶️ John that is more modern than the existing ones, just as they replace whatever, you know, things came
⏹️ ▶️ John before them. Like if you had sent this question back in the 80s, it was like, why are you considering using some kind of middleware thing
⏹️ ▶️ John when you could just be writing the engine yourself? Writing the engine yourself is battle tested or whatever. It’s like, you know, time marches
⏹️ ▶️ John on and eventually people realize that there is a new, better way to do things. And so I think that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what’s happening with Swift and SwiftUI. It’s the clear new and better
⏹️ ▶️ John way according to Apple and they own the platform. And so you better get on board that bus.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s that dividing line between I don’t want to be too early and I don’t want to be the stick in the
⏹️ ▶️ John mud who’s using Objective-C until they turn out the lights.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I would say too, there’s a lot of context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around certain areas of these choices that matters a lot. So for instance, in the context of this question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where Casey discovered through his email, but you can get to it at caseylist.com slash Matt’s channel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That this was about a game. Got the triple W.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right. Yes, dad, sorry dad. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re making a game, that’s a very important context. That’s different from making other kinds of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. Because the needs and priorities and environments are very different. What I’ve talked about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sticking with battle tested languages and platforms and tools in the past, what I’m usually talking about is the server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of things. And that’s a whole different ball game. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the server side, what you’re usually doing is fairly boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff of moving data around in some kind of scalable, affordable, useful way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re doing it on a very stable and pretty unmoving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform of Linux or whatever virtualized thing you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That platform barely changes at all over time. And so if you stick on top of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, boring battle-tested tools you’re in for probably very easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and a very stable server situation. The client side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you know if you’re again if you’re developing for like a PC that doesn’t change that much these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s platforms do change though and and not you know super aggressively I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift is eight years old and you know in public at least Swift is eight years old Swift UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is three years old. These are not, you know, Swift is, I would say Swift is not cutting edge anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift is, I mean, they keep modifying it because they can’t sit still for some reason, and they keep adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and more garbage on top of Swift, some of which is useful, much of which is not. But the language itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the core of Swift, is no longer the new hotness, it’s just what you’re supposed to use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like period. That’s like what, Swift is the correct language to use for Apple platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, that’s it. I’m not using Swift on the server because that seems a little fringy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less likely to be super well tested and things like that. But on the client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side, Swift is it. That’s what you should be using. And any code you write that’s not Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple platforms is technical debt. It’s simple as that. And I say this as somebody whose app is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly Objective-C, but that’s the reality. The reality is you should be using Swift. SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, again, it’s three years old. there are still a lot of shortcomings to SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And frankly, there’s just bugs. And some of those get fixed by the releases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them don’t. And that’s just the way it is. And SwiftUI, I still do consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat cutting edge. And while I’m writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this little prototype thing using SwiftUI, I’m not rewriting my whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app in it today. I’m writing this prototype to see how much can I get written in SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my eventual goal is to rewrite the whole UI in SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s not gonna be releasable, at least until I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can require iOS 16. And maybe, if I run into problems that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just insurmountable, maybe iOS 17 or later or never.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So right now, SwiftUI, I’m still considering kind of experimental. I’m kind of doing it in parallel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my main code base. But that’s still an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experiment. But Swift itself is-
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like Objective-C though. Like every line of UI kit code you write now is also
⏹️ ▶️ John technical dead unless something catastrophic happens with Apple’s stated strategy, right? It’s not that it’s bad or it’s broken
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but you basically know you’re writing dead end code, right? Because Apple has signaled Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John UI is the future and maybe you have to, you have to use UI kit because Swift UI just plain can’t do it, right? But you know when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re writing that code, I will eventually have to change this probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and in the very first year of SwiftUI, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a big risk. After one year, maybe they would say, you know what? This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategy’s not working out so well, so you combine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Combine, yeah. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would just kind of quietly walk away. That happens all the time with tech companies when they launch new stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They throw something out there, some new initiative doesn’t work the way they want to or doesn’t get enough traction, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walk away from it slowly over time. or abruptly in the case of some other companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, with SwiftUI being already three years in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it getting tons of updates on each of those three years and having lots of steam behind it and lots of people using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and Apple putting a lot of, what is it? Wood behind the arrow, is that the metaphor?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Anyway, aren’t arrows supposed to be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John relatively- Wood behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the arrowhead, do you feel better about that? Maybe, but aren’t arrows supposed to be like really light so that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey can- Concentrate, concentrate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so, you know, Apple’s putting a lot of effort into SwiftUI and supporting it very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The community is picking it up and lots of people are using it just fine. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it, I think SwiftUI has probably crossed the threshold where its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future is pretty safe. I think it clearly has a strong future. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might even be pretty safe to say that it will be where everything is going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly on the way to that. And I think I think at this point, you can start making that call. And so at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, it’s it’s very important for Apple platform developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start familiarizing ourselves with Swift UI. Maybe not jumping 100% into it yet if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ready for that. But again, going back to the earlier question of you know, from Abel Damas about writing a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like podcast or Twitter app. If you’re writing a brand new app from scratch today, you should definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it in Swift UI. No question definitely use SwiftUI from scratch. The only reason not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to is if you run into some weird edge case that it doesn’t support, and you have to wrap a UIKit control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. But even that, that should be done very sparingly. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the only question is whether those of us who haven’t used SwiftUI yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have existing code bases, when and whether we should start adopting it ourselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and starting to replace our UIKit code with SwiftUI. And that’s a separate question. There’s, again, separate factors that go into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. it’s definitely like the correct language to choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have that choice today. And sometimes in tech, we have the luxury of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picking the safe old thing. Again, on the server side, we have so many great options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for safe old boring languages and tools and databases and stuff like that. Tons of great options for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on the server side because the server doesn’t change that much over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s also the platform that nobody owns though. Like that’s the web is the platform nobody owns, right? So the reason we can
⏹️ ▶️ John do that on the web, on the server side, is there is no dominant, imagine if Microsoft owned the server,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like, well, Microsoft decided this year that the new extension to IIS, whatever, is how we’re gonna do web development.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’d have to be chasing the platform owner, but there is no platform owner on the server side. It’s basically Linux,
⏹️ ▶️ John as close as you can get, and they’re pretty agnostic. And so you can stick with PHP forever, because no one’s going to stop
⏹️ ▶️ John you, and no one’s going to move on and say, oh, every line of PHP you write, that’s legacy code, because pretty soon, PHP’s not gonna run anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, what’s gonna stop it? As long as people still are using PHP, and they keep developing it, it will be supported. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not true of developing an iOS app. What Apple says is what’s gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I guess that’s true. I mean, I guess the same reason why, you know, email doesn’t change that much over time because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there kind of is no, you know, platform owner for email, although Google’s getting close. But anyway, there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so, you know, different conditions, different factors that play into it. But on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco client side, you have to follow your platform vendor when there is one. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to follow what Apple’s doing on the client side in order to be competitive. And as for like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, why don’t I learn some cross-platform thing? Again, in the games market, this makes way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more sense. In the app market, as Casey was saying earlier, those have so far proven to be pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco painful for people who use them. I have yet to hear anything positive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough about a cross-platform app framework that makes me want to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also seem to change very frequently. Like, you know, people say, oh, well, why don’t you learn this new thing? Well, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I learn Swift UI and Swift, that knowledge is probably gonna last me 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. Whereas if I learn React Native, is that really gonna still be the dominant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing in that market in 10 years? Probably not, if I had to guess. That’s very unlikely, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that tends to change much more often in those areas. And then finally, the whole idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this would be then I can capture people on Android. You know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want people on Android. Like, I really don’t, and there’s lots of, this sounds slightly dismissive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds very dismissive, I mean it only slightly dismissively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frankly, I don’t have a market on Android. There are podcast apps there, they do well, they can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that market. To serve Android, you have to be involved in Android. You have to have Android testing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android test devices, you have to know how to make stuff good on Android, you have to integrate with Android stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Android features that Android people like to use on their Android phones. I’m not in that world at all. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really can’t make a good Android app, and the language is not what’s holding me back. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else about the platform that’s holding me back. And frankly, a podcast app has a much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market on iOS than on Android anyway. The, whatever Android people think their market share is, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those numbers are a little bit, you know, there’s a lot of asterisk on those numbers. But second of all, when you look at podcast listeners specifically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones are way more dominant in podcast listeners overall than Android
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones. So my market is just not very strong there, even if I knew how to address it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I very much don’t, and the language isn’t the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Interesting thing about games is it is often the path of least resistance to use, you know, Unity
⏹️ ▶️ John or Unreal or whatever, even if you decide I’m only ever going to make this an iOS app. And even if you decide,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna make this an iOS app and I’m gonna do integrations with all the weird Apple stuff too. I’m gonna do all the Apple stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna support Game Center, I’m going to, you know, have Apple ID logins, I’m going to integrate
⏹️ ▶️ John with all Apple’s features. Still, still, even if that’s what you decided to do, the game engines
⏹️ ▶️ John do so much for you in terms of like, you know, that is the real platform you’re riding on top of, it’s still worthwhile to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And then if you do that, and since games, again, don’t have any, you know, usually don’t have many
⏹️ ▶️ John ties with the platform, you might think, hmm, I look at this app sideways, I could probably
⏹️ ▶️ John get this thing running on a PC or on an Android
⏹️ ▶️ John phone because I did use Unity and most of this game will work fine anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John else. I could just, those platform specific bits I did for Apple, I could just remove them or replace them with Android equivalents or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, there’s plenty of games that we know, games that we know and love that start off on the iPhone and
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes spend years on the iPhone before they go to any other platform. Some great games never leave the iPhone. They just
⏹️ ▶️ John live their entire life on the iPhone and they’ll go anywhere else because they’re made by one developer who, you know, there’s only so much a single
⏹️ ▶️ John person could do. To expect a single person to make a complicated iOS game,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a, that’s hard enough to say. Also, you should support multiple platforms and have this game available on every platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, you can’t ask that much of one person and not everyone wants to start a multi-person company. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a perfectly valid choice to say, I am just going to make this an iOS app. And I am just
⏹️ ▶️ John going to, you know, do, do what I want to do on a platform that I’m most comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m familiar with, and that’s all that I can do as an individual developer, even as a small team.
#askatp: Time Machine best Mac feature?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Gilherme Ales writes, on episode two of Hypercritical, John said that Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the best feature ever implemented for the Mac. 11 years later, do you guys believe that Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has found a worthy opponent? Is it still the best feature of the Mac? I don’t even know what I would call as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best feature, but John, is it still the best feature?
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I could remember 11 years ago if this feature existed,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now today, probably what I would say is iCloud Photo Library.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, that’s a pretty good one. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s, I mean, the bad thing about it is you basically still have to pay money for it, but you know, whatever, you can’t, server
⏹️ ▶️ John resources aren’t free. But what do people do with their computing devices, with their phones, let’s face
⏹️ ▶️ John it, they take pictures. And I mean, I guess this is kind of similar to the time machine, like, they take pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John and before the advent of iCloud Photo Library, it was too easy for people to lose those pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ John Photo Library basically does what it is intended to do and pretty much mostly works. And it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it so that you can take pictures with your phone and you won’t lose them if you drop your phone into a lake.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is super important because pictures are, you know, meaningful and not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John replaceable. And in the same way that time machine, the reason I said it was the best feature is because people had computers and
⏹️ ▶️ John they kept putting more and more stuff that is important on their computers. Computers became a bigger and bigger part of people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lives, especially with the advent of the internet, that the stuff on people’s computers had tremendous value
⏹️ ▶️ John and asking people to protect that stuff, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John using third party tools or through their own devices was just too much to ask. Nobody did it, right? So you had to
⏹️ ▶️ John build it into the operating system and it had to be easy enough that regular people could do it and Time Machine did that. And I feel like iCloud Photo
⏹️ ▶️ John Library is a more narrow version of that. Maybe in 10 years time, I’ll be able to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you know, iCloud backups for everything because Apple does it for phones. Hey, you can back up your whole phone to iCloud, right? They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John take care of everything. Obviously your photos is a separate thing or whatever, but like for Macs, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John still got Time Machine, but there is no iCloud backup for Macs. You know, frequent sponsor Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ John probably wouldn’t like that, but honestly this is the thing that Apple should create. Right? It’s been a third party opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John long enough. We’ve got Time Machine, which predates most of the, you know, the cloud stuff. And we’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John all of our iOS devices being updated, you know, backed up in iCloud. iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John backup for your Mac would be probably the new winner. Maybe that supersedes all previous
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. Time Machine, iCloud Photo Library, and then eventually iCloud Backup for Macs. So there’s my
⏹️ ▶️ John top three features, two of which exist and one of which hopefully will someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would say that the photo backup is even better than Time Machine in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more people have internet connections and three bucks a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever it is for the basic one, than who have external drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they plug their stuff into regularly. And the idea, Time Machine made way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more sense when computing was more stationary. You know, when you had desktops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you would always use your laptop like on one desk and that was it, and you’d plug into everything and basically use your laptop like a desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think that’s true of today’s world anymore, and we have the whole multi-device world today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can take a photo on any of your Apple devices that have cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they show up on every other Apple device, including the ones that don’t have cameras. Like they, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it not only does it back up things from one device, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it merges all your data and keeps everything in sync across all of your devices. And that is such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more modern, useful thing. And it doesn’t require people to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive hardware that they have to manage and don’t forget to eject, you know, so time machine was great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its time, but photo library, the photo library model of doing things is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more modern and has so much more broad and accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I cloud drive was supposed to do by the way. But I cloud drive is like, so I photo, I call it photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library. So clearly narrowly focused. It is literally the photos application. Like it doesn’t care about any pictures anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John else on your desk. It’s just the photos application. Right. And that’s fine. That’s where all the photos go. Your camera takes them. They go there. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in photos. I’m like, make sense. Right. Time machine is everything on your machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when they did a cloud version, they didn’t do cloud version of Time Machine, they didn’t do iCloud backup for your Mac. Instead they
⏹️ ▶️ John said, oh, iCloud Drive and documents can save their, you know, applications can save their files
⏹️ ▶️ John into iCloud and also your documents folder and your desktop will be in iCloud or whatever. But two things,
⏹️ ▶️ John one, iCloud Drive and that whole thing, in my experience, is way less reliable than iCloud Photos and two, that’s not your whole Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can put things in other places, right? So still that gap remains. And so, you know, and again, Time
⏹️ ▶️ John Machine is from an era when the idea that people would have the upload bandwidth to backup their entire Mac across
⏹️ ▶️ John the internet was not a safe assumption. But now I think we’re probably cross that threshold
⏹️ ▶️ John or at least getting close to it. So I really hope someday we get iCloud backup for Mac. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what they’re gonna do with like, well, then how do you deal with documents and desktop in the cloud or in iCloud drive?
⏹️ ▶️ John How do you deal with that? I don’t know, figure it out. But they’ve never been, I’ve never had a lot of confidence in
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So I hope they give it to whatever team did you know, iPhoto, iCloud
#askatp: OLED protection-dimming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, Mark Voss, who we mentioned earlier, writes, I have an LG 77-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OLED CX TV. The LG firmware automatically dims scenes that aren’t dynamic and relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey static in nature, despite it still being a moving talking scene, it’s more that the camera doesn’t pan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s in a fixed position for a long period of time, et cetera. This auto-dimming is to protect the TV from burn-in. LG also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has an additional option where it detects a fixed logo displayed on screen, such as for sporting events or your HUD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, not Halo, Destiny. And to auto-dim that part of the display only, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDTV Test YouTube channel has shown how to disable these two things using the service menu. Note, you have to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a special remote purely meant for the official LG technicians just to get into the service menu. So just by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entering the service menu, you can void your warranty as each TV logs the fact that the service menu has been entered into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and also what changes were made. So John, if it were you, would you disable these auto-dimming features given that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do irritate, well, in this case, Mark, but I’m assuming they would irritate you too. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark says, I do notice the TV auto-dim, or would you leave them enabled for the very reason that they’ve been implemented?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another way of asking, what is the real likelihood that the TV would get burn-in from watching shows and movies with those features
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, obviously the answer for me is I would wait until like a buy television doesn’t auto-dim. Like that was one of the first
⏹️ ▶️ John tests that HGTV test did on the television that I ordered. They had it next to one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the modern LG ones and they were showing like a movie or something, like not some exotic, you know, test footage or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like real footage. And the other television would auto dim because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically like the average brightness level. Like if you have a scene where they’re just like in a room and the brightness doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John change a lot because like, you know, they’re just showing people talking in a room and one person, the other person, but the overall average picture
⏹️ ▶️ John brightness stays about the same. The TV you auto dim because it doesn’t, you know, it’s trying to defend against
⏹️ ▶️ John burn in by saying, oh, it seems like you might be showing a very similar image on the screen for a long period of time. And so if this room is like
⏹️ ▶️ John bright over here and dark over here, I don’t want to leave this playing for five minutes because then you might get image retention
⏹️ ▶️ John for the bright area that’s up in the corner. And the new television that
⏹️ ▶️ John I got with the Quantum.OLED screen, one of the advantages of
⏹️ ▶️ John Quantum. is you could make the thing brighter, but instead of making it brighter, what they did was
⏹️ ▶️ John made it less prone to burn in by turning down the brightness. Like it’s trying less hard,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So the WRGB OLEDs are as bright as they can possibly be without washing
⏹️ ▶️ John out the picture. and the QD OLEDs, they have enough headroom that they can sort of run
⏹️ ▶️ John them at 70% and still have the same brightness as the other ones. And they also have a heat sink behind them
⏹️ ▶️ John to dissipate heat better. And so it doesn’t need to auto dim. It says, I can run this
⏹️ ▶️ John scene all day and I’m not afraid of burning, right? At least that’s the theory. And that’s the warranty that’s been behind
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the QD OLED screen seems to indicate that the manufacturers think that these screens will be less susceptible
⏹️ ▶️ John to burn, right? So my answer to this question is, if you can’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John get rid of your fancy new TV and get an even fancier, newer one, is you should use the protection
⏹️ ▶️ John features because they’re not there for the hell of it, right? If these manufacturers could get rid of the features, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John because they know they get dinged for it in reviews, and they get dinged for it for users, right? They would not
⏹️ ▶️ John enable these features if they thought they didn’t need them, but you do need them. How much do you need
⏹️ ▶️ John them, right? Well, there’s the famous artings.com OLED burn-in test, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John did a multi-year burn-in test. Their test ended in 2019, so it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John relevant to modern televisions. Although the CX or C10, I don’t know how you’re supposed to pronounce it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is the 10, it came after the C9. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John not that much newer. I think it’s a 2020 or 2021 television. But yeah, OLED burn-in
⏹️ ▶️ John is definitely a thing, and if you wanna see it, go to the Artings page and look in horror at what can happen
⏹️ ▶️ John to your television if you watch MSNBC or something with a ticker or watch sports, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know, you may not like that little thing that dims the logo or the dims
⏹️ ▶️ John your entire screen, but the alternative is probably worse. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that said, you know, you wanna live dangerously, you say, guess what? I’ve decided in two years I’m getting a new
⏹️ ▶️ John TV no matter what, so go hop into that service menu, disable the feature, and then if you get burned in the end of two years, oh well, you
⏹️ ▶️ John were gonna buy a new TV anyway. That is also an option, but it’s not like they’re, you know, this is how they
⏹️ ▶️ John get you. They put the auto-dimming in and you have to know secret code to get in. Now they’re trying to protect your television. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what kind of content do you watch and do you care about burn-in? And then you can decide based
⏹️ ▶️ John on that. But don’t think that, you know, that you can enable this feature and not face
⏹️ ▶️ John any consequences. There will be consequences. They just may be acceptable consequences. Just decide that ahead
#askatp: Backup for college kid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Brian Lazar’s writes, has John decided on a backup strategy for a dorm environment?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My daughter is heading off to college in the fall. It’s not like I can send her to school with a Synology. Why not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m not sure she’s going to be diligent about backing up to an external drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, the strategy for dorms is the same strategy which should be for everyone where possible. It’s just do everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in the cloud, right? The internet connections are fast enough these days, especially for someone who’s in a dorm where you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have any expectation of having any kind of redundant local storage. Like you’re just trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John get the kid to not break their laptop or lose it or whatever, right? Cloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ John for everything. And from what I’ve seen from my kids’ education, having been forced to use the Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John been forced, been allowed to use the Google technologies for all their education, does
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in the cloud anyway. They don’t have any concept of saving. I remember my daughter got this screenplay writing application.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget which one, it might’ve been Highline, or I don’t remember what that, but it was some Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John native screenplay writing application and I had to show her how to save. She’s just so used to it. Like, oh, you just go to Google Docs
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just type. And you never have to worry about saving, right? And where is it saved? Oh, it’s in Google Docs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where is Google Docs? I don’t know, it’s everywhere, right? It’s on my Chromebook, it’s on my Mac. Like, you know, cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John saves. That is the way, it is literally the only way that most young people can keep track of anything is
⏹️ ▶️ John it is just in this place. And this place that exists, this place is not on my phone. This place is not on my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John This place is not on my Chromebook. This place is not on my laptop. This place is somewhere else. It’s in the cloud. That’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody’s stuff should be. That is the only viable quote unquote backup strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John for a college environment, I feel like. Obviously, in college you may get into a situation where you
⏹️ ▶️ John have large data files that you’re doing in some lab in a class or whatever, and then you will have to deal with file storage, and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no avoiding it, because it can’t fit in the cloud. But even then, they probably have a Google Drive
⏹️ ▶️ John for the class that has tons of storage that you can put the stuff in, right? Don’t try to put a Synology in
⏹️ ▶️ John your dorm room. Don’t even bother
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey with external.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t even bother the external time machine drives. It’s just not gonna work out. They’re just gonna spill a drink on it. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna unplug it when it’s mounted and it’s just, yeah, cloud storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Instabug, and businesscards.io.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join. We will talk
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
HomeKit-away-from-home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went on vacation last week and I had the strangest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home kit experience, which is weird because I was on vacation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not at home. So I have to set the stage and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am already regretting bringing this up and you haven’t even figured out what I’m going to say. But a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m wondering how you had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a home kit problem when you weren’t in your home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. So it starts with me deciding that it would be convenient to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have one of our Apple TVs in the vacation place with us, because we’re going to be there for a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It would be nice to be able to watch some TV in the evening and not have to hook up a computer or an iPad or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. I have the 1080 Apple TV that I use in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bedroom every great once in a while, very rarely, but it’s there. So I can easily unplug that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and bring it, and that’s what we did. And I noticed, I don’t remember exactly when it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started during the week that we were gone, but I noticed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was periodically getting the notification that I get when I leave the house saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, the garage door is indeed closed. So what am I talking about? So I set up an automation in HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will, by a very convoluted series of steps, will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey send me a push notification and say, either the garage door is closed, you’re good, or oh my God, turn around, the garage door is open. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does this when the last person leaves the house. So if I leave and Aaron’s here, it doesn’t do anything. If Aaron leaves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m here, it doesn’t do anything. But if both of us leave, even if we don’t leave at the same time, it will say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s the status of the garage door. And I’m getting these notifications while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m at the beach, a couple hours away from my house. And I’m getting them every great once in a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I come to find out, or I mostly think, that it started happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I left the beach house. So somehow HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has decided that home is not where the heart is. It is not where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my home is. It is instead where the Apple TV that I happen to bring with
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a similar situation on my vacation because every time I left the
⏹️ ▶️ John house that I was staying at, it would say, Oh my God, did you realize you left your iPod behind? Oh my God, did you realize
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey behind? Yup. Yup. Yup. because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m leaving a place that is not my home without my devices. And I was thinking, I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I did the opposite of what Casey’s advocacy saying. Why do you think this is my new home? I was thinking I wish I could
⏹️ ▶️ John tell home kid or whatever. This is not my new home, but for the week, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is my home. So every time I leave, don’t tell me I’ve left my AirPods behind because it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could not agree with you more. I had the same thought, but it took me quite a while to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out what is going on. And I think what happened is the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV in the bedroom, despite being an older Apple TV, because we have a 4K Apple TV downstairs. And remember, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have any HomePods in the house. So the Apple TVs are our HomeKit hubs. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that the primary HomeKit hub was the bedroom Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was with us in Cape Charles. And so it suddenly decided that home, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not my actual address, but rather wherever that Apple TV is. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of kind of confirmed to me, I think, because when I got back home, you remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have, you know, the little dongle that gives me wireless CarPlay, so I’m basically always on CarPlay in my car and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s cool. One of the cool things about CarPlay is when you approach your house, if you have a garage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey door set up in HomeKit on that like multi-tile or the tiled version of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CarPlay screen, it will pop up a little button that says, Oh, your garage door’s closed. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tap on it and it’ll open the garage door for you. Well, that just stopped appearing. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought to myself, I wonder if it’s because my home is still in Cape Charles, despite the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the Apple TV is back at my actual freaking house. I think my home might be Cape Charles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what do I do about this? So what I decided to do- Move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the beach full time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, not all of us have that luxury,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of us have that luxury. So I decided, okay, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the HomeKit features or hub or whatever in the Apple TV in the bedroom, which I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it appeared that the Apple TV that is always been in the family room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just didn’t feel like taking over. So, okay. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried disconnecting it from the home and reconnecting it. That didn’t seem to work. So what do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it took to get the downstairs Apple TV to wake up and reconnect to the house appropriately?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the one way you fix all Apple problems these days? unplug it and plug it back in? I rebooted it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco went to settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and rebooted it and then it seemed to come back to life. And I’ll give you one guest, which showed up in CarPlay as soon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I did that. My garage door is back in CarPlay now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what I was supposed to do about this. Like, I, I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t, I don’t even know if I’m upset about this because like, I understand, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why this happened, but I don’t want this to happen. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want is to be able to bring an Apple TV somewhere else, have it understand that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my home is not there. I mean, I do have a contact card that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is me. I’ve marked it as me. It has a home address in it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to assume via like, you know, IP geo location, if nothing else, the Apple TV realized it was no longer at home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Certainly wasn’t on the same network as the rest of my darn home kit, you know, devices. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should have, I think, been smart enough to figure out that it was in some sort of satellite mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I wish I could have told it, or what I’ve done is just disabled HomeKit Hub features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it entirely. But I wish there was a way for it to be smart enough to figure out, oh, I should not be a hub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now. And I concur with what John said. I kept getting notifications, oh, your error tag that’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your laptop bag. You left it. You left it. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left it. for a week, not a year, not a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for a few days. Or, imagine this, imagine I had the option to pick when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted this thing to end, but for some duration of time, don’t alarm me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t alert me, if I’ve left the house without my stuff. Just for a few days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would be very nice, please and thank you. Anyway, I bring all this up just because it was such a weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scenario that I never would have expected. And last year, when I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had all of this like notification BS set up, I don’t remember any of this happening last year. So I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why it didn’t, but I feel like I think I had both Apple TVs at the time, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t recall any of this being a problem. So it was very weird. And if you’ve lived through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this and have tips, please write me some way somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I will say that the like find my alerts, you can set a location
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say, don’t remind me about leaving things at this location.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed, but I didn’t want that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where is that feature?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco didn’t look for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s in the Find My app. It’s in one of those drawers from the bottom. You got to pull it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could do that on the notification itself too. I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be wrong about that. Or like customize it or something like that when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the notification comes up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You might have to do it per item. I think you have to do it per thing in Find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My. But if you go to Find My and you go to the Things tab, there is an option on there to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, don’t remind me about this location basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m not seeing, I know what you’re thinking of and I have done that for my house, but for the life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me, I don’t know where it is off the top of my head. But yes, I know there is a way to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t know what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the rest of it, you know, things with like home detection and home hub selection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and failover, that is mostly a mystery to me because it’s one of those areas where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple tries to be just smart and do the right thing. And what that means is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works fine in the common case for most people most of the time. But when it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, you have no idea, no recourse, nothing you can really do except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these random incantations that may or may not result in the problem eventually, gradually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some weird way being fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just want a screen where you can see Apple devices. What do you think is the deal? Show me. Show me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think my home is here. And I think this is like just, you know, part of it might be the data model. We’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about this before, but like, what is a decent data model for music, which is a, you know, surprisingly complex subject.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is the data model for home kit? Like, does it incorporate the idea that people might be at some place
⏹️ ▶️ John other than their home for extended periods of time? You know, how many homes can you have? What
⏹️ ▶️ John is the concept of a home? Is there, what is it? Is there a concept of a location? Uh, you know, that when
⏹️ ▶️ John you leave there, it’s okay for you to leave your devices behind because that’s, you know, like, I don’t, I don’t know what kind of vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to describe that. Um, but either way, whatever the vocabulary is, there should
⏹️ ▶️ John be something you can go to and says, here’s how we think the world exists right now. Even if you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John edit it, at least that would help. But then ideally what you’d see there is, you know, how many homes do you have?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re like in context, you have multiple homes, what order are they in? Are you at them for a certain duration or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it seems like their data model should support this. And once their data model supports it,
⏹️ ▶️ John they shouldn’t just try to do like, we’ll use machine learning and prediction to do the right thing. All right, fine, maybe do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also still have a screen where you can actually say, I will be at this address for the next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s all you need to tell it. And it just needs to be a UI, someplace in the interface that we can
⏹️ ▶️ John find. I just looked in Find My, and I couldn’t find it in two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t either, but I know it’s there
⏹️ ▶️ John It should be more prominent. I should be able to say, for any HomeKit type things, where do you think my house is,
⏹️ ▶️ John HomeKit? What device are you using as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hub? Well, that you can see. So if you go to home settings,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is buried, but it’s like under the house icon in the home app, you go to the home screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then go to the house icon in the top, then there’s a home settings thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s under there you can see home hubs and bridges. And in my case, I have eight. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this screen so much because it purports to be useful but isn’t. So home hubs and bridges, right now I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various home pods and something called Living Room Apple TV, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then something called Downstairs Downstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t, I assume that’s the Apple TV that I renamed the AirPlay target to Downstairs, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s called Downstairs Downstairs. And that says connected, and all the other ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say standby. So you would think maybe on this list of home hubs and bridges that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tells me which one is connected. You could tap on them, surely, right? Maybe you could select one to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that’s connected, or maybe you could delete one. you can do neither. This is simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a passive list. All you can do is look at it and smile. So I would love,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, to say, prioritize the two Apple TVs, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are hardwired to ethernet. They are AC powered. They are guaranteed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to always be online and ready to go. Home pods are flaky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pieces of crap. And I don’t want my entire home automation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategy to be resting on the reliability of a HomePod when I have these perfectly good Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TVs that can do the same job slightly more reliably probably. And I would love to be able to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, this thing, make this thing the preferred Home Hub. Nope, can’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All I can do is look at this list and wonder why I can’t do the things that seem so obvious on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you could add Home, like that’s in the Home app. But that seems wrong in terms of data model, like adding,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna be in this vacation house for a week, so I’ll add it as my home. But that seems too heavyweight. It’s not your home.
⏹️ ▶️ John just you just said a place for like where your hotel this hotel is now my home for a week. I mean, kind of, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems too much. I feel like this use case is something they should
⏹️ ▶️ John work on because I mean, I know we have doing a lot of travel with the pandemic and everything, but like, what about business travelers?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when they go somewhere and they leave their iPad and their AirPods in the hotel room when they go out to eat,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t need seven notifications telling them, Oh, you left your stuff behind. It’s like, yeah, it’s in my hotel room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean in all fairness though, I do think that the main weirdness of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was probably a result of Casey bringing one of his home hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a hotel room outside of his home and connecting to it. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably a situation that Apple has not really designed for. That they probably assumed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of weird nerd would bring an Apple TV to a hotel room? Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is fair. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Casey does it. when I went on vacation, you know, I’m missing other family members.
⏹️ ▶️ John My brother brought his Apple TV with him for the same reason I brought mine, right? And although we passed the milestone this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John the television in the rental place already supports AirPlay. So it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey when we were in
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPlay too, you could say AirPlay to the Apple TV that’s connected to it, or AirPlay just to the television, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we’re getting close to a point where we won’t have to bring Apple TV pucks with us. So we can just
⏹️ ▶️ John assume the television is there. We’ll, just like they all support Netflix now and have a giant Netflix button on their remotes that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll also have an Apple TV Plus button that you’ll somehow be able to sign into to
⏹️ ▶️ John see all your kids’ shows. I don’t know how it’s gonna work, but at least you get AirPlay to the TV, so there’s some progress.