497: The Hotness Has to Go Somewhere
25 Aug 2022Only on this podcast can a host “get new wheels” and not be referring to an entire vehicle.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show Netural: In a shocking piece of news, Marco’s Defender hasn’t exploded (yet)!
- Follow-up:
- On people copying S3 API
- CarPlay navigation voice volume
- Former setting, prior to iOS 15 (via Daniel Finley)
- Use the driver’s side volume control on the wheel to adjust volume (via Josh Biggs)
- Postpartum doulas are a thing (via Matt Rigby)
- 4K TV
- Audio/video sync
- TiVo ad skipping
- Casey’s feedbacks
- FB10566546 is fixed! 🎉
- FB11080380 is fixed, but includes a new regression. ☯️
- Five other bugs have had no responses yet, though. 💔
- Marco’s bug (FB10758252) is fixed! 🎉
- Running to the press never helps
- Apple Event is Wednesday, September 7
- iPadOS is delayed
- The recent Plex Hack
#askatp:- How in the world are some app updates multiple hundreds of megabytes‽ (via Bart Kowalski)
- What do we think of Svalt? (via Robert Campbell)
- Post-show: Casey’s modified his car
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Chapters
- Neutral: CarPlay & touch UI 🖼️
- Sponsor: Snap AR
- Follow-up: S3 API cloning
- CarPlay navigation volume
- Post-partum doulas exist
- ATSC 3.0
- Audio-sync feedback
- Nobody should do this
- Sponsor: Memberful
- Feedback feedback
- iPadOS 16 delay
- Plex data breach
- Sponsor: Kolide
- #askatp: iOS-app bloat
- #askatp: MBP cooling stands 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Neutral Reprise 🖼️
Neutral: CarPlay & touch UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I hate this freaking LG monitor. It’s been crooked all night. I can’t fix it. It’s the it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one degree off like I just but I can’t figure out it’s like John’s audio. I can’t like straight. I
⏹️ ▶️ John LG so fine. I was in Costco the other day going through like the monitor section. I was saying like LG always
⏹️ ▶️ John makes bad stands. I just go there and I hit them with my finger and you just go online tap tap tap and the LG ones are just like shake
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little spinning
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco plates, a little bobble heads, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they would keep shaking as you went. It’s just so hilarious like the like the the
⏹️ ▶️ John alienware aces one would just move once and come right back and it’s like bad shocks on your car. You’re just like a wobble wobble wobble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been uh I’m doing a lot of driving today in the uh defender.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s interesting. I uh there’s a lot about it. I like there’s a lot about it that is um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know going back to the past, like I had to get gas today. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I so I got the gas at the pump and it was all you know gross and it’s you know, like relearning like oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do pumps take wireless payments now? No, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey least this does. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is you know some random one upstate right this one at least this one wasn’t advanced enough to have ads playing at me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I was standing there pumping my dinosaurs into my car, but I also like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so out of practice that like you know, I pumped the gas and I like drove over to one of the parking spots to go inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the you know to the the you know soda factory and I had totally left the gas cap totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off like not just the metal door like the the cap wasn’t even screwed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back on like I just totally forgot just normally
⏹️ ▶️ John the car will have a warning light for that because it’ll like the pressure on the gas tank will be weird and it’ll put on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and maybe you know how to driven more than 30 feet. Maybe that maybe it would have told me that I just I drove like 30
⏹️ ▶️ John parked. At least you disconnected the, you know, took the nozzle out. Didn’t just drive away with it attached
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey car. Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Right, right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it’s, yeah. But anyway, so one thing I realized, so you know, I did, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, geez, a lot of driving today, probably six hours of driving today. You know, got finally a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car play use in. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey one thing I noticed-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’ve been waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this. I’ve been waiting for this. Yeah, oh, and first of all, before I forget, the key fob is ridiculous. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing, let’s, Let me have my pocket here. This is bigger than an AirPods Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John It should be, to punish you, it should be shaped like the Defender. It should be like this, like the Tesla one. So it should be
⏹️ ▶️ John really tall and boxy and have huge wheels on it and lots of ground clearance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t think it’s that much bigger than a lot of modern car key fobs. I’ve just been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spoiled by Tesla’s nice little like tiny mini Tesla thing. So there’s that. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, and another funny thing. So, you know, the Defender, It’s it’s a very tall vehicle as discussed lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of headroom for John’s hair, but yeah, very tall vehicle and I’ve also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve attached a roof box to the top of it for reasons And I’ve never done this before I never used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these boxes before but as part of my you know beach preparedness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to carry with me recovery gear if I get stuck so that includes things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I have max tracks traction boards I have a giant one of those elastic tow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ropes and you know some soft shackles and other you know towing equipment Basically in case I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be towed out or tow someone else out And that’s all pretty bulky big stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I figured let me get one of me get the smallest roof box I can and put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all in there that way I can load the back because you know when I’m actually using this vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trunk is usually full of something, whether it’s groceries or whether it’s like our luggage coming to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and from upstate or whatever, like the trunk is usually full. So I don’t, I didn’t want to spend trunk space on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this recovery gear, because frankly trunk space is not that generous in the vehicle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So I got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to pause you again. You bought this probably not inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toy for yourself on the promise that it would be excellent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the sand, and then immediately just thumbs your nose at it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by putting a bunch of sand recovery junk on top of it because you assume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it will inevitably and eventually get stuck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, he already had that sand recovery stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I had it all in the FJ taking up its entire trunk. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. All right, all right, I’ll begrudgingly allow it. And just to be clear, you’re talking about like a Thule or equivalent that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you put on the top, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s this Inno thing. I looked at the, is it Thule? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey thought it was Thule.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might be, I very well have that, I might have that dead wrong, I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why would you pronounce, anyway, maybe they do, I mean that’s certainly not a charitable way to pronounce that, but anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got this Inno thing because I looked at the Thule, I looked at their offerings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this Inno one was lower than what they offered without going to their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really long, super long ski one. Because I don’t need a lot of height, I just need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some storage volume. This one’s only nine cubic feet. I didn’t want to be sticking up even further into the sky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I already am.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is going to make your car even more aerodynamic. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so I attached this box and so now the vehicle is even taller. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even without this box, I’m pretty sure it would not fit in my Westchester garage. Like I think my garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is too short. You know, it’s an old house. The garage is probably from like the somewhere around the 1960s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know, there’s no way there’s a vehicle fitting in the garage, even just with like the roof rails on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when I add another, you know, whatever this is, like 10 inches on top of that, forget it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was so high that I even, I took it around today. Like I’m trying to drive it as much as possible. Even when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in Westchester where I could just drive, you know, the Tesla, but I wanted to like, just get a feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the vehicle, like, you know, get a feel for how big is this thing, you know, get used to the visibility and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the handling and everything, just so I can drive it better. Cause I’ve never driven a vehicle this big really. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I drive it so carefully. I drive it like like when I rented that RV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I drive it like that, but anyway, so I’m driving around town getting groceries and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like, can I fit under these parking garage gates? Like I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like one of them, like I would pull into the whole foods garage and it says like, you know, clearance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight foot two and I’m like, Hmm, that doesn’t sound that high. It doesn’t look that high. Let me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go under really slowly. I’m watching through the sunroof, like watching the roof box and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cleared it, but I didn’t look like I had a lot of free space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It didn’t seem that generous. I’m like, okay, I’ll make it under like bridges and stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe not low parking garage. I’m getting used to having the larger vehicle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway, carplay. So for the first half of today, I’m using carplay and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is wireless carplay. Great. You know, super, super nice. And it’s fine. The only thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everything is laggy. Like, you hit pause in the steering wheel or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap pause on the screen or whatever, and it takes like a half a second to a second to actually respond.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s to almost everything. So play, pause, seek back, seek forward,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Siri button, and even like when a navigation prompt would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interrupt the audio, the audio would keep playing in the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app for like an extra half second to second before it actually, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while it’s being ducked, it would get ducked, but you’d still hear what the person was saying for another half second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it would take another half second lag on the way out. And I remember like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a couple of these little tiny, like, they almost look like crappy little Android GPS units
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have like, you know, little mounts for cars that are CarPlay test rigs for me. They’re like 200 bucks from Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better than my old test rigs I have to actually like have like a head unit and everything and They’re literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like cheap Android tablets basically in like a car enclosure that with you know a DCN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one of those that I have the first one I got was wired carplay I later got one that had wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support which makes debugging way easier because you can have a USB port on the phone anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I noticed with those that wireless carplay on those is very laggy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I ended up really hating using the wireless one because again, you’d hit play pause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would be wait and then it would go. And if you plug in wired, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no lag at all. I seem to have that same lag doing wireless CarPlay in this, and I’m wondering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is every wireless CarPlay vehicle like this? Like is this just a thing with wireless CarPlay?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Well, I shouldn’t say that with such authority. In my experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey admittedly a third-party dongle bridging between the wired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only CarPlay and my phone. So, you know, this is maybe not the best example, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noticed that my little dongle, which I do like, and if I remember, I’ll put a link in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, and there are newer versions than what I have. But anyways, my dongle, there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely a lag as compared to when I’m directly connected. I personally don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find the lag to be egregious or perhaps I’ve just gotten used to it. But as we all know, of the three of us, I’m the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least discerning by a mile. So consider your source here. But yes, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noticed with my car, there is a dramatic difference between when I am, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rare occasions when I physically plug in, if I’m gonna be in the car for like multiple hours at a time, or 99% of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my use when I’m just using that dongle thing. Yeah, there’s definitely a noticeable lag. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have updated the software on that dongle, which is an adventure because it clearly is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right out of China
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not everything has been translated and the things have been translated have been air quote translated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, I have been able to successfully update the software a few times and it’s gotten better, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still laggier for sure. And for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I will take that trade off for not having to plug in because my trips,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, this might not be true for you, Marco, but for me, my trips are like anywhere between five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 20 minutes tops, 99% of the time. And so it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long enough usually to bother plugging in my phone, but long enough that, Hey, it would be nice if CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came on. And so this dongle that I bought, which at the time it was a gift actually, but I think it’s like 130 bucks or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well worth the money to me. Even considering the lag, because it’s just convenient to keep your phone in your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pocket and be able to do all the CarPlay stuff and not have to worry about plugging and unplugging. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably the first worldiest of first world problems. I acknowledge that, but I think it’s that juice is worth the squeeze.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yes, there is definitely a noticeable lag. And it’s stinky, but you get used to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I noticed like when, so, you know, there was a period today where Tiff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adam were going into a store and I had to like wait in the car and play with all the settings and everything really for the first time that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually had like a good amount of time with it. And I went through all the menus and played all the settings and I actually found there was a setting to turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off wireless CarPlay and to then force it to be wired. So I love that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting is there. So I got to try it like back to back and it’s night and day difference. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I turn it off, like when I’m wired car play, it responds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more quickly than even Bluetooth in other cars. Like, you know, like Bluetooth in the Tesla, which doesn’t support car play,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Bluetooth there is kind of in between these two in terms of lag.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, you know, just, you know, wired car play, it was like extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delightfully fast. Like I was so pleased. I was giddy how quickly it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responding to everything when wired. And then sure enough, go back to wireless and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very laggy and frustrating. And so I think I’m actually gonna keep it wired for a while because again, as you mentioned, my usage pattern’s a little bit different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tend to go on a small number of long trips rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a high number of short ones. So for my usage pattern, I think it’s probably worth the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hassle to plug in to get that satisfaction of having it be really nice as I’m using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John plus having a charge while you drive, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, so I’m gonna play with that back and forth a little bit here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there and maybe report back later. But I was kind of surprised, like I would expect wireless CarPlay, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay didn’t exist with wireless at first. I would imagine down the road when they added it, I would expect that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the design requirements if they’re going to add it would be no major downsides in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience compared to wired. And I’d say it’s a pretty major downside. It’s laggy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough that it’s weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, again, maybe I’ve gotten used to it because I’ve had this dongle since around the time I got my first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vaccination. So I guess it was like a little over a year now. And I definitely have gotten used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it and it’s gotten better, like I said. If I was in your shoes, I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug in just like you said. But seriously, if you set your expectations appropriately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and if you’re not quite as discerning as Marco or John, I think you’ll find wireless CarPlay to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well within the realm of acceptable. But as much as I’m giving you a hard time, I don’t disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with anything you’ve said. And even I can notice that it is definitely, there’s definitely more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey latency when you’re wireless.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, keep in mind, the hardware in cars is pretty universally awful, like extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the times, very old, very slow stuff. And Apple doesn’t control both ends of this. If you want to know
⏹️ ▶️ John how fast Apple can do a wireless display thing, just use Sidecar on
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac and an iPad, and it’s incredibly responsive, right? Because Apple controls both sides of that. They control the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John and the software on both ends. Here, they can require that the car makers support such and such a
⏹️ ▶️ John protocol on these ports with this thing and so on, but they can’t control what hardware car makers
⏹️ ▶️ John use. And I continue to be amazed that no matter how expensive the car is, they are seemingly using like
⏹️ ▶️ John 386s inside there with like no memory, extremely slow. Like Tesla probably has the
⏹️ ▶️ John most powerful hardware of any car because they use semi-modern components, NVIDIA GPU, so on and
⏹️ ▶️ John so forth. And even in that case, it could sometimes feel less responsive than an iPad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple wants to do something for the car industry, instead of making a car, instead of trying to figure out self-driving,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could just donate a bunch of old A-whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco chips to car makers, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just so much faster and more capable than what is in these cars. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John your brand of car has a particular reputation for having very good
⏹️ ▶️ John infotainment hardware in it. Some brands are better than others, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s grim out there. So I’m glad that the wired one works better, but I’m not shocked that
⏹️ ▶️ John the wireless one is pretty terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and there are some other considerations. Like when we send computers to space, they have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely rugged and extremely reliable and be able to tolerate.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what the car makers say. That’s why we’re using 42 nanometer. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, in cars, they get to tolerate huge temperature extremes. It has to work in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freezing cold and the super hot. It has to work in direct sun. Good luck getting your iPhone to work in direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sun for very long. There are different requirements there. And so I understand why it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more conservative there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m apparently the king of tangents today, and this is the show of the trios of the kings of tangents, but here we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. I have noticed, I don’t know if this is something that’s happened recently or I’m just noticing it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more recently. Do you guys find that when you are outside, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the summer, your phone or your iPad, I’ve had this happen to my 2018 iPad Pro and my iPhone 13 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of a sudden the brightness will like collapse and it’ll be considerably less bright.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s thermal overloading.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I was gonna say. I assume it cools down a bit and then it gets bright for like half a second and then it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to dim again. I don’t feel like this is something that’s been going on for long. I feel like this has happened in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey semi-recent software update. Again, might be bananas, I might have this all wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because it’s August. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was gonna say, like maybe it’s the time of year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This happens every summer because yeah, that is the phone going into like thermal protection mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. There’s a couple of levels to it. One of the levels is, oh crap, I’m getting too hot, turn the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brightness down. And then if it still gets too hot, then you’ll actually see it go into thermal shutdown where it’ll show that little alert message
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, sorry, you can’t use me right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so I’m glad it’s not just me, I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, so going back to what you were saying, What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think of the CarPlay experience? And I don’t mean that flippantly. I know you’ve used CarPlay on occasion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly during testing, but this is, to the best of my knowledge, the first or one of the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real honest-to-goodness, genuine uses out in the quote-unquote wild. Do you like it? Do you think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good? Are you somehow yearning for your Tesla for some reason? Well, specifically with regard to infotainment for some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason. What do you think of CarPlay as an idea?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the Tesla for the last five, six years, so almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seven, seven years, wow. Using the Tesla for all that time, my solution not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having carplay has been, I just got a ProClip USA phone mount and just mounted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone, you know, next to the steering wheel on the dash. And so it’s, you know, just outside of my field of view, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, diagonally down into the right a little bit and I just, and I plug it in. So it’s charging all the time. It communicates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the car via Bluetooth. So I have all that integration. So I, and I just use, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, Waze, my mapping app on the phone as a regular phone app. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, if I have to like bounce over to music or overcast, like I can do that, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not safe to be doing a lot of interaction with the phone. So the idea of CarPlay would be, hey, let’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restrict what can be done and, and, you know, optimize it for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger screen with larger, you know, tap or wheel targets and fewer interactions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible. You know, don’t show any kind of messages that could be distracting with text. Like, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of those benefits with CarPlay are there and are real. I do find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though that it is a little frustrating how limiting it is, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that’s good for me. Like I don’t want all the capabilities of the full phone when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am driving. It’s unsafe to use all those capabilities. I don’t want those available to me and I don’t want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s unsafe at any speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but at the same time, if doing something in CarPlay is clunky,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that will result in my eyes being distracted from the road for a longer period of time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if it’s, you know, I’m sure it’s safer overall probably, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-control with what you’re doing is way more important than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type of screen that you’re looking at for the actions that you’re doing. And if CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by being so limited, I’m not sure if it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be that much of a gain over what I was doing before, if it’s having the phone in a mount. Again, having the phone in a mount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just practicing reasonable self-control and not like texting or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve driven that way for almost seven years or whatever and it’s been fine, it’s been great. And I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the abilities of the mapping apps. Yeah, so for the first part of this morning, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried using Waze for the first leg of the trip, and its CarPlay view just was buggy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just was displaying like an empty map and just wouldn’t load the map. And I tried force quitting Waze, I tried restarting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay, just didn’t work for whatever reason. I’m on the beta, it could be that, who knows. That’s, you know, it’s beta life, welcome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to summertime, being an iPhone developer. But I just couldn’t use Waze, so I had to switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over to Apple Maps. And it was frustrating that I couldn’t use my preferred mapping app. I tried it again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later in the day, it worked fine. But all that time, Waze, like the iPhone app, would have worked fine. It’s just their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay view that was buggy. So I had to deal with the fact that, well, I’m using it through the special view mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have to use it through this mode, I don’t have a cell phone mount for this car yet. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was kind of annoying that I had to deal with this buggier side of Apple’s software, or Waze’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software, one of them. Whoever was responsible for this not showing a map, you know, I had to deal with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know from Overcast development, CarPlay is buggy, and it doesn’t get a lot of attention. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so when there are like weird little CarPlay quirks, as a developer, you kind of just have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal with them. Like, and you have relatively little control over what is shown on a CarPlay screen. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some control, you’re kind of working with these like pre-made template styles and everything, but certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little behavioral details you can’t control. So anyway, so it is kind of a mixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bag compared to just having the phone available to you in a mount. I do intend to just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live with it this way for a long time, just so I can experience more of it. And so I can be a better CarPlay developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my app. You know, actually having used it more, like that’s fairly important to me for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my app. So I’m gonna keep using it this way. I’m like, I’m not gonna switch over to a phone mount quite yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it wouldn’t surprise me if long-term I stick a phone mount in this car, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure people will send us this link, which I’m sure all of us have already seen by now, but we’ll put it in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John just so people know. There was this like Swedish study on touchscreens versus physical controls. That has been going
⏹️ ▶️ John around the internet for the past week or two, you know, and surprise, surprise, they found that physical controls
⏹️ ▶️ John have an advantage over touchscreens in terms of distraction. I have to say, though, I’m not convinced
⏹️ ▶️ John by the rigor of this study. It seems like they did a small number of perhaps not
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely representative tests, and the results are not particularly as dramatic as the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the distribution of this magazine would lead you to believe if you actually look at them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this is, you know, I don’t think this is a great study, but I do
⏹️ ▶️ John think that the biggest factor in terms of distraction is kind of what
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco was getting at, but in terms of like, well, not so much self-control, but what you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John use the touchscreen for. So in all the cases, whether Marco has his phone mounted or he’s using CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s not using the touchscreen to adjust where the airflow is going or to turn the fan
⏹️ ▶️ John up or to turn the seat heaters on or to adjust his side mirrors or anything like that in the Land
⏹️ ▶️ John Rover, right? There are no car controls there. There are just the
⏹️ ▶️ John map and whatever phone things he might be doing. And the self-control is, okay, if you have access to the full phone, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use all the features of the phone, but there’s no amount of self-control he needs to not use a touchscreen to turn on his
⏹️ ▶️ John seat heaters, right? That’s just, that’s not on that screen. It’s not on. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the defense of, you know, both this comparison and of your example here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I think the tasks that the comparison thing had them do, I’m not sure were super realistic for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually making this judgment. There is some esoteric stuff in there. And secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have, like, you know, right now, I’m learning a new car, because I’ve, you know, I just got this car. I’m still learning. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had this brand before, so I don’t know their conventions. As I’m learning this car, even the physical controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a learning curve. I have to figure out where they are and how they work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s one of the things the study did well, though. It let people sort of study ahead of time
⏹️ ▶️ John So they weren’t do a learning process. So everybody who was being tested had, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you were able to sort of figure out the controls in a stationary car and get it down pat.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what they were trying to test. I still don’t think it’s a particularly representative test because the things they had them do are not particularly representative.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you look at the results, it’s not like the touchscreens all lose to all physical controls. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a more of a mixed bag. Like you’d have to study this more to, you know, to, it’d have to be more rigorous than
⏹️ ▶️ John a magazine article, but they did at the very least do that and say, look, we’re not, we know it’s hard to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff out. And like I said, physical controls can be stuff to figure out, but just like study ahead of time, take two hours. And
⏹️ ▶️ John basically what they were trying to do is like, okay you know exactly how it works now, speed run it, right? Now, you know, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not looking for any buttons. You know where the buttons are, you know where they are on the menus. You’ve done it a hundred times before, but now do it
⏹️ ▶️ John as fast as you can, because this test was like, you know, how quickly can you do it? How much ground does the car cover
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re distracted? And they tracked where their eyeballs were and where they were looking. Another big factor in this is how low down in the dash
⏹️ ▶️ John is the screen versus how high as your phone mounted and stuff like that. Again, I don’t think this is a great study, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I personally believe that a smart mix of physical controls and screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best solution. And anything that goes all in one direction or the other is probably leaving money on the table
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of using the interface for what it’s best for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but also, you know, just to finish my argument also, like, you know, when I learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the touchscreen in the Tesla over six years or whatever, I became very fast with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The downside though, and right now, I’m very slow with with the lamer because again, it’s it’s unfamiliar to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me the downside though is when you learn those touch screens Then after six months they got a new freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designer and they move everything around And so it’s like it’s like you’re forced all of a sudden unexpectedly to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new car in the morning in a bad way It’s like wait a minute. Where do my controls go? now everything looks different and has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved around and reorganized because Some designer from Facebook got into Tesla and just decided to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun with it Like like that kind of stuff like that drove me nuts with the Tesla with Tesla and that’s gonna happen with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know many touchscreen things that are run by these more kind of tech forward companies. Like that’s unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to happen with like, you know, BMW, you know, Toyota, like they’re not going to be changing their interfaces through software updates. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that’s going to be less of a, less of a thing with these traditional companies, you know, with somebody like like Tesla or Rivian,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, these kinds of, you know, these very techie companies, I think it’s going to, it’s going to keep being a problem where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get used to all the controls. And then, and again, I think once you’re used to it, I think this is the kind of thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet in a few years they’re going to do you know, more studies like this, and over time, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna end up being no difference between touchscreens and physical controls for most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they are familiar with them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know about that. I don’t know about that because the big barrier, well, first of all, there are things that touchscreens are just plain
⏹️ ▶️ John worse for, but even for the things where they might be as good, once you thoroughly understand where everything is,
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem they have is what I just talked about before. Touchscreens make you wait between steps due to
⏹️ ▶️ John slower hardware. Physical controls don’t make you wait. You can press the button, press the button, press the button, press the button. The buttons, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no lag, there’s no waiting. It’s a physical interface. It’s not like you need to push the button in six inches and hold it for two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas if you know it’s two menus deep and you know exactly where it is, you don’t even need to look at the screen. You still need to wait for the next screen to
⏹️ ▶️ John load. And right now, there is no car interface where there is no screen waiting. And I would imagine that even
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple one on a fancy A whatever chip in a fantasy Apple car would also make you wait so they can play some stupid 120
⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second animation that takes 0.25 seconds. But you’re also, this argument is presuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that things are in like sub screens or sub panels. And this is why like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when people criticize Tesla’s design for being all touch screen, that applies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more to their current vehicles than to the one I have, which was before they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut the steering wheel in half and got rid of the shifter and everything. And so the one I have, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much all the, every Model S before like 2020 or whenever that change happened, every Model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S, every Model X before that time, they had a small number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of levers and buttons and then a lot of stuff on the touch screen but then the touch screen first of all was giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would it would have a lot of controls along that especially on that bottom strip that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you didn’t have to bring up a sub screen and so it was kind of like having a physical control array
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that you could always count on on the this certain array of very common controls like you know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan speed and the defroster and everything that was all on the bottom row in like the in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of constant toolbar that was down there. And so when touch screens are done well, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one generally was before this stupid new designer came in when these things are done well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also had you know a few physical controls for like the most common stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the shifter you know like the you know drive direction shifter you know obviously things like turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signals windshield wipers, you know, the, the, uh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John say obviously, but they basically got rid of a physical physical control for that. And now it’s a capacitive button
⏹️ ▶️ John on the steering wheel. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Anyway, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, that you think that you had physical controls for all the most obvious things. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a Volkswagen Golf and I have a Volvo SUV, and I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you in Aaron’s Volvo, the HVAC controls are on the touchscreen and mine have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physical dial that you twist. And only one of those cars can I adjust the temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without looking down. And it’s my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And those volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those. In the Tesla, before the stupid software update last winter, in the Tesla, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have done that. Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John controls are always visible. It was in the corner. It’s right there. You can’t. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could literally just reach down and boot. I’m telling you, after driving one of these for many years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was just as fast with that as I ever was with physical controls in any of my other vehicles.
⏹️ ▶️ John I call foul. I think that’s the type of thing you need to test, but I can tell you in car reviews, everybody hates it when
⏹️ ▶️ John the HVAC controls are touched. Yes, almost all the car manufacturers make them visible all the time. They dedicate a part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen to it. It never changes. It’s got, and they even lay them out like physical controls. They’re always there. They have
⏹️ ▶️ John the temperature things. They have, you know, the different vents. It’s almost like they took a picture of the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John controls and just made it on a touch screen. Some of them even have haptics. So you can actually tell when you push the button. So you don’t have to look down
⏹️ ▶️ John to see the button highlight. And yet they are universally reviled in favor of actual physical buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John for those controls. Is that just old foggyism? Maybe, but these are car reviewers and they spend a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of time in these cars. They don’t just drive them for five minutes, right? So I’d have to think that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s something to the idea that even with no nesting, even with entirely visible
⏹️ ▶️ John controls, even with years spent in knowing exactly where it is, that it’s still ever so slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John more distracting, slower to do the touchscreens. That may have to do with responsiveness. It could be if we get good
⏹️ ▶️ John haptic feedback on screens and they’re very responsive and people have the confidence that when the same confidence
⏹️ ▶️ John they have of pressing a button because when you press a button or turn a dial, there’s that physical feedback through your body
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives you the confidence that you’re doing the thing you thought you were doing, right? If you can get a touchscreen that is that responsive
⏹️ ▶️ John and that communicative, then yes, I agree, a fixed set of functions that never goes away that is that communicative
⏹️ ▶️ John will be equivalent to physical, but we’re definitely not there yet with current cars. Most of them don’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ John any sort of haptic feedback and let alone haptic feedback that is as reliable and reassuring
⏹️ ▶️ John as turning a knob or pressing a physical button. That’s why the Fords have a big, giant plastic knob
⏹️ ▶️ John poking out of the middle of their touch screen for a bunch of functions. I don’t know if that’s why they
⏹️ ▶️ John have it, but they do have that, and I think people like it, and car reviewers like it as well. I think that’s a silly
⏹️ ▶️ John solution. I think it’s better if you’re gonna have physical controls, just don’t shove them in the center of your screen, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think that the trend of putting more and more stuff on touch
⏹️ ▶️ John screens, Part of it is fads and fashions and looking high tech, but part of it, and part of it is cost savings. And
⏹️ ▶️ John both of those reasons are not the right reason to be doing that. The only reason to be moving things to the touchscreen is because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re better in measurable ways, in enough measurable ways than the physical equivalent.
⏹️ ▶️ John And right now that is not the motivating factor for touchscreens in cars. It’s the other two things, 90% of the time. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I agree, like physical controls, like I would rather have them and they are the nicer and probably better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option in many ways. but I think the difference between a control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has a physical knob or button versus a touch screen that is well designed where things are always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in predictable spots that you can learn,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that big of a difference as much as you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey are saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I disagree so much. I disagree so much. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco would I know? I’ve only used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these cars for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but here’s the thing though, but you’re getting myopic because you’re used to the Tesla and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing else. So I put a link to a picture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s like saying like when the iPhone first came out, oh, touch screens are crappy because all the other touch screens on the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suck. No, no, that’s not what I’m saying. You can make a good one like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no, no, you’re missing my point. So I put a link in the show notes. This is not my picture, but this is a picture of Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Volvo. I’m sorry, an equivalent to Aaron’s Volvo. And you can see in a huge font in the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottom corners are the temperature, which just so happens to be 69 degrees, nice. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those numbers never leave the screen. They are always there, always.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are always there. And I find it so much easier to adjust the temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my car where I can blindly reach down and twist than having to tap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that number and then reach up to the plus button that I know is roughly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know roughly where it is, but I have to plus, plus, plus, plus, or minus, minus, minus,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a nested control. That’s not what Margo was talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the old Tesla design, it had the up and down arrows right on the number. Like, they’re always there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what I was saying. The car reviewers really hate that. They really hate it when the supposedly new Ferrari
⏹️ ▶️ John has touchscreen controls for climate. And they’re the Tesla style. Always visible, no nesting,
⏹️ ▶️ John no pop-up menu. Like, it’s, again, just like you took a picture of the physical controls and painted it onto the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I mean, maybe I’m wrong, but I think I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Volvo interface is bad, because it’s making you do a submenu. That’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, agree. I’m not trying to defend the Volvo interface. What I’m trying to say is I live this, I go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back and forth several times a week. I’ll be either driving Aaron’s car or in Aaron’s car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then other days I’ll be in my car. So I am going back and forth weekly, and I see and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live the differences between the two. And for something like HVAC, oh my gosh, give me a physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control, please and thank you.
Sponsor: Snap AR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Snap AR. Snap AR
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to SnapAR for sponsoring our show.
Follow-up: S3 API cloning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some feedback. I don’t necessarily want to attribute this feedback. Do we want to attribute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this feedback? This
⏹️ ▶️ John is no request for anonymity, but you can provide it. Optional anonymity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, I am going to executively declare anonymity for this individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who provided the following feedback. I worked on the S3 team in the earlier years. We specifically changed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the licensing for our docs to make it unambiguous that other products, even competitors, could clone the API.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this was maybe 2009. Our director realized we had an opportunity to find the de facto standard API,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as John articulated well, I think it was like two episodes ago. We knew it was a win for us when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other products advertised an S3 compatible API. Not long after Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cloud launched, they not only copied our API, but also error codes in parts of our documentation. This was all back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before AWS even provided a supposed client library. The executive team didn’t want to have to deal with version updates, library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compatibility, et cetera. It took a long time to convince them that AWS should provide a client library with a dedicated team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to support it. So thank you, Anonymous.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when they did, it was 19,000 lines of PHP or whatever the hell it was.
CarPlay navigation volume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s talk about carplane navigation voice volume And and I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not really sure what to make of this or particularly the second half of this But the first half makes sense Daniel Finley writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there used to be a setting in maps to adjust the volume But this has since been removed in iOS 15 And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a old 9 to 5 Mac link that will put in the show notes about that But John told me about the second half of this which I’m a
⏹️ ▶️ John little actually for the first one It’s fun because like the setting that used to be in maps Apparently you can still search
⏹️ ▶️ John for it in settings and the match will come up that when you tap the search results, it doesn’t take you anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John the setting has been removed. Right. All right. So this Josh, Josh Biggs has this feedback. Siri’s volume on CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John can only be adjusted while Siri is speaking from the driver’s side volume control on the steering wheel. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John saying like all the things that we tried. No, no, no. Not only do you have to change it while it’s speaking. Not only do you have- Well, we told you that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t change it on the phone and you can’t change it on the console. You can only change it with the steering wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John new to me. Which I’m not entirely sure I tried that. I’m not entirely sure I believe that. Lots of people sent
⏹️ ▶️ John me, like we saw last week, the pictures of all my Toyota has a thing called voice and it has this option for voice. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John this Toyota did not have that option. Now this was a fleet car, it was a rental, it’s different than other things. People ask me why I didn’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John the built-in nav. There was no built-in nav. When you went to the built-in nav thing, it’s like, you should option navigation,
⏹️ ▶️ John contact Toyota or whatever. So fleet cars are different or whatever, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have worked either. That is really, really
⏹️ ▶️ John But just FYI, if you happen to have a car and you tried all the things we listed before, here’s one more to try.
⏹️ ▶️ John Law series speaking, steering wheel control only. Seems unlikely, but try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, if somebody can independently verify this one way or the other, I’d love to know, because I’m not trying to say that Josh Biggs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is wrong, but that’s the person who wrote in, but this strikes me as extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unusual. So Josh very well may be right, but I would love to have some independent-
⏹️ ▶️ John it’d be totally dumb if it was true, because what sense does that make?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey None. Right, exactly. It’s not Josh that I have a problem with, it’s Toyota.
Post-partum doulas exist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matt Rigby writes, and actually even before I get to Matt Rigby’s feedback, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to thank everyone for the kind notes about our baby, you know, how do you get ready for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a baby discussion. There were a lot of people that said some very, very kind things. I will speak for all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three of us in saying we really appreciate that, and that was very kind of you. Now, specifically with Matt Rigby’s feedback, I’m writing on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behalf of my partner who is a postpartum doula to say that postpartum doulas are a thing. They can fulfill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a ton of the needs you touched on, especially for new parents who have recently moved and are without social connections or far away from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family. Or just for new parents who have trouble letting in someone they’d otherwise be asking a favor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of. Unlike a birth doula, postpartum doulas work mostly with families once they’re home from the hospital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or have had the baby. They can assist with things like recommendations of medical specialists and local groups while you’re too overwhelmed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to look, basic coaching for new parents, coming over and running a load of laundry, watching a new baby for 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes, bringing over snacks, prepared meals, et cetera. They usually work on a sliding scale that’s, shall we say, cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than software developers. You can read more at donut.org, and we’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I can strongly, I didn’t do a postpartum doula over here because I didn’t frankly know those existed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we did have a regular doula for the birth process and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lead up to it, and she proved to be extremely helpful. And they’re basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like birth coaches, and they can teach you through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process, they can answer a lot of questions beforehand, and then during the process, they can not only help you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through it and coach you through it, but also kind of be an advocate for you in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s going on medically and stuff, and that’s also extremely valuable. So I can recommend looking into that if you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you can find somebody good.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like getting a lawyer to represent you or when you’re doing real estate, what is it called, like a buyer’s agent? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John someone involved in the process who actually has your needs, who’s actually representing you. And you would think, oh, my doctor has
⏹️ ▶️ John my needs in mind, but actually having a doula to advocate for you during labor and delivery is
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly useful because they know what they’re doing, they have experience with it, and you may not be,
⏹️ ▶️ John neither one of you may be in the best position to advocate for what you want
⏹️ ▶️ John and need in the strongest way. It’s good to have someone with experience. And then a postpartum doula, I also
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t know it was a thing. I’m sure my wife did, but that’s why we put this feedback in there. now you listen or know
ATSC 3.0
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think we might, might be able to avoid a 45 minute discussion about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app channels this week. But I would like to know, no promises, Marco, I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know how, how your test went of recording the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4k Fios channel standby banner. To recap, we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unsure whether or not if you set channels to record the channels app to record
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Fios channel that broadcast in 4k to record they’re like, hey, we’re not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to record the channels. airing anything right now, would that come through as 4k? Yes or no? And you said you’d give it a shot and apparently you have.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did and it’s not it’s 1080. Now it wasn’t a broadcast it was just it was just the banner thing. So and if
⏹️ ▶️ John you look at the banner it lists a broadcast that is in the past. So I’m not sure what the deal is. But
⏹️ ▶️ John no 1080 so far. I’ll try it if I ever catch it in a broadcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would like to I would not be surprised necessarily if it did not record in 4k.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I did ask my buddy john about it and I’m pretty sure he said that it should come through as 4k, but no promises.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then, so we got some really good feedback from Colin Weir that had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a map attached to it that it makes my skin crawl. I’m offended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by how awful this map is, but let me talk about the feedback. So Colin Weir writes, to get 4k over the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air you need to live in a market where your local channels have upgraded to ATSC 3.0. These deployments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are few and far between and much like cable, the content is not widely available. Even if your local network is broadcasting ATSC 3.0,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of the content is probably still 720p. And so Colin provides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link to a website where this god awful map exists. And if you’re not American,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this probably won’t be quite as offensive to you, but this map doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any intelligible boundaries for the purposes of locating yourself. Like I understand these boundaries.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you not find yourself on a map of the US? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, roughly, but my state is not a wee little state like yours is. Mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is relatively large and I don’t live in a- You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t know where you are in
⏹️ ▶️ John that state? You’re just somewhere in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Looking at this map, no. I don’t know where I am in this state. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m in the north section, but- I
⏹️ ▶️ John think you need to brush up on your geography. Maybe you’ve got one of those map of the United States puzzles where you have little wooden pieces shaped by each
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, we have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like, I don’t know where you are in the state, but that’s, you know, I’m allowed to not know. Yeah, because we don’t live there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, anyway, I don’t know. I hate this map. I viscerally hate this map, but be that as it may, this is useful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback and I do appreciate it. So do you live in one of these areas? Because I’m not even going to try to guess for you. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the three categories in a legend are on the air with ATSC 3.0. I guess that’s the good one.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, you’ve got it. You’ve got ATSC 3.0. Good for you. That’s orange. Then readying broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ John is blue and then announced target market is blackish or dark blue. Both
⏹️ ▶️ John of those colors mean you don’t got it. And it’s just a question of when will it come? Who knows? And then there’s gray areas,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like not even on anyone’s radar. No, no No timeline announced, tough luck to you. My,
⏹️ ▶️ John where my island is gray. Yeah, where I live is blue, which means readying broadcast. So I don’t know how long they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be readying, but who knows. Colin continues, the best way to get high quality 4K content
⏹️ ▶️ John is to have it fall off a truck. Yes, we all know that. Most non 4K over cable is probably three to
⏹️ ▶️ John four megabits. Netflix 4K stream is 25 megabits and Blu-ray is around 60 megabits. So I’m assuming that’s per second
⏹️ ▶️ John to just give you idea of the relative qualities.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Mike C. Wells in the chat has given me a link to a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of atsc.org where it says all seven of Richmond Petersburg’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full power local television stations have begun broadcasting with the next gen, aka ATSC 3.0 signals. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently such a thing exists here in town. I had no idea, but that does indicate to me that I was able to read the map and say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was in the orange section. So ha!
⏹️ ▶️ John You were in one of the orange things. Good for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So I guess I would need a new antenna or maybe a new HD home run?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know actually what I would need in order to get this. Somebody tell me. Reach out via Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving along.
Audio-sync feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s see here. OK, so audio and video sync. We got a lot of feedback about this, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from former feedbacker Matt Rigby from just a few minutes ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He apparently is a dialogue and ADR editor and has his own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey page on IMDB, which I just think is the coolest thing in the world. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matt Rigby writes, you’re friendly neighborhood dialogue and ADR editor here, writing in again to say, when it comes to syncing audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and video playback delay, there’s an app for that. And Matt was far from the only person who recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Catch in Sync. And so I’ve not used this, but apparently it’s an app that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helps with this sort of thing. So Matt continues, this was introduced to me by our chief engineer here at PostWorks New York and has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to calibrate mixed rooms where we’ve done multiple Apple, HBO, Netflix, A24, et cetera, shows, and movies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s instinct to align the attack of your beep was correct. I usually do the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fully white frame, since projectors and TVs are running slower than 120 frames per second when you get a half frame or two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first. and with the very peak of the waveform. Oh, and for your edification, it took me two to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three years of doing this full-time professionally to be able to reliably tell which direction something was out of sync and move it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correctly. And still about one third or so of the time I’m wrong on the first try.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so catch and sync, I think that’s a kitchen sink pun. That’s my best guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, I get it, I get it. Because I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it’s a term, an industry term. It’s just someone, whatever. I don’t know why you’re catching the sink
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So I use this app. I’ll, I mean, we should, we should read the next
⏹️ ▶️ John item and then I’ll tell you my experiences with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So Andrew Gibbons writes, John asks, at what point do I want to align to the zero? Look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source, download the YouTube video and open it in iMovie or Final Cut Pro. Where did they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey align the zero? That is the same place you want to align it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the question I had last time. It’s like, I’ve got a video timeline and I’ve got an audio timeline. And the audio timeline
⏹️ ▶️ John has like a lump where you’ve got the attack and decay of the beep noise. This is all stretched
⏹️ ▶️ John out and elongated because it’s 240 frames per second me recording my television screen, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m trying to do is line up the video where it shows like, you know, the white bar in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the line and make the audio waveform line up for that. But the audio waveform is like an inch wide.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve got, you know, that one frame of video, where do I align the audio waveform? And Andrew’s answer
⏹️ ▶️ John was, look at the source video that you’re playing, like the thing that’s playing on your TV, put that video
⏹️ ▶️ John into your editor and look at where they aligned it. So you’ll see the audio waveform
⏹️ ▶️ John in the source video, and then you’ll see, you know, what part of the waveform did they line it up with. Now here’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John things start getting awful. So first let’s take a look at this.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just pull up that image. This is the source audio file
⏹️ ▶️ John with no adjustments to it whatsoever. I have moved the play head. First of all, look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the audio waveforms. Look how beautiful they are. Yeah, that’s very good. They are vertical lines. They don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any attack. It’s just like instant loudest volume and then there’s like a little parabolic decay, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is what the player had lined up exactly at the beginning of that noise. Would you look at the video above it, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not lined up. Not even close. The mark is not on the zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John gosh. So I have it lined up exactly at the beginning, but the mark is like at 35 milliseconds
⏹️ ▶️ John past the zero. So I’m like, all right, what the heck is going on here? Maybe that’s what they built into the, because
⏹️ ▶️ John again, this is a YouTube video. Maybe they’re telling you to eyeball it, So maybe they did this because they know people are always a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit late or whatever. Like maybe that’s just something they did on purpose. Right, but then I’m like, aha, but wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John I downloaded this off YouTube with like YouTube DL. And I think I did like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John H265 recoding. I need to get like the source thing. The source thing is WebM. So I’m like, let me just look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John WebM. I don’t wanna convert it. Maybe the conversion does something weird because we’re talking about minor, minor things here.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I downloaded the WebM and then I had to find something that can show the WebM with a timeline. So here
⏹️ ▶️ John is the WebM file. Now look at the waveform now. It looks very different because this is a different editor. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not iMovie, but it’s an editor that natively understands WebM. And again, it’s got similar shape and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John line up with exactly the frame of where the sound is. That’s closer. It’s closer, but it’s still not on the zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, God, what? What? And so I’m like, okay, but this is just some,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to find like an editor that understands WebM. I don’t know if this editor is any good or whatever. So I found a second
⏹️ ▶️ John editor that understands WebM. And here is what that looked like. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s in the other direction at negative 100 milliseconds. That’s a big difference. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my word. This is the same file. This is the source web M file downloaded directly
⏹️ ▶️ John from YouTube and I’m putting the same file in two different editors. And these are not small differences. When the total delay that I’m putting
⏹️ ▶️ John in is in the range of 100 milliseconds, a delta of like plus 35 and minus 100 milliseconds,
⏹️ ▶️ John just everything is out the window, right? So, Catch in Sync. Originally,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t plan to mess with it, because I’m like, I don’t need that. I did my own way and it’s fine. And it’s also like 20 bucks or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I did launch it and you can try it and demo it. I’m like, ah, this app seems a little bit janky. But after this
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, I’m like, all right, Catch in Sync, you’re up. So I downloaded it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they give you a bunch of test videos that you can download as files at different frame rates and stuff. They don’t put
⏹️ ▶️ John any of those videos on YouTube or something. In theory, I could upload one to YouTube, but that would go through all sorts of processing
⏹️ ▶️ John steps or whatever. So instead I just put these video files in my Synology and I played them with Infuse,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the thing that does the decoding on your device. Anyway, they have them in ProRes and H.264. I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole bunch of different things. I played them, I used Catch and Sync. This app has one of the most frustrating interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve ever used on an iOS app in my life. So it forces you into landscape mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of the things you need to do involve using controls that overlap with
⏹️ ▶️ John the gripper bar in iOS 15, you know that thing on the bottom? like the horizontal bar. If you take that bar and
⏹️ ▶️ John you swipe it sideways, you’ll go to another app like that, but you have to swipe sideways to
⏹️ ▶️ John mess with the timeline. So it doesn’t seem to understand that bar is there. And then it’s got frame advance,
⏹️ ▶️ John forward back buttons on the left side of the UI with touch targets that are so small that when you sit
⏹️ ▶️ John there, speaking of trying to use touch targets to do things, when you’re using a touch target going frame, frame, frame, frame, frame, inevitably,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re getting close to lining things up the way you want them, you will miss tap by like a millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John And tapping anywhere outside those buttons will tell the video to play. And then it will just play and mess up your position. Then you have to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll it back to the right position. Oh, you switched out of the app again accidentally. Go, switch back to the app in the multitasking switcher.
⏹️ ▶️ John Get the thing lined up, carefully avoiding the little bar at the bottom. Tap frame, tap, tap, tap, tap. One more,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh no, it started playing again. It’s, I hate this app with a fiery passion.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know if anybody uses it. It’s like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John has one job. Make the touch targets like half the freaking screen. Frame forward, frame advance.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should not be able to. Anyway, ignoring all of that, this app,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the things this
⏹️ ▶️ John app has on its page is per device
⏹️ ▶️ John offsets. It says, by the way, we’ve measured somehow and determined that
⏹️ ▶️ John for these hardware devices and this OS, there is an inherent delta for
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone itself in terms of when you, because you remember, you’re holding the phone up and recording your television screen in a movie.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is an inherent delay in the phone itself. And it tells you, find your phone, So mine is iPhone 11 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 15, and the Delta is plus 15 milliseconds. And you can go to settings in
⏹️ ▶️ John the app and add the plus 15 milliseconds. I’m not sure where they’re getting the number, but whatever. So I did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I use this app to try to line up the, you know, the timings of everything. And you will not be shocked to learn
⏹️ ▶️ John that it had a different number than every other thing that I’ve tried, right? Now, it was in
⏹️ ▶️ John the ballpark. Like if I did it with my current settings, the Delta was, you know, 10
⏹️ ▶️ John or 20 milliseconds. And so what I ended up doing is I use catch and sink, previously, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was using one input, Apple TV. My Apple TV input as measured by my previous technique with iMovie was 120 milliseconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John According to catch and sink, catch and sink, whatever, according to catch and sink, after I fought with it and cursed
⏹️ ▶️ John at it for a while, it thinks the Delta should be about 150 milliseconds. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I changed it to 150, I’m gonna live with it for a week and see if I notice a difference. Because it didn’t tell me you’re off by 100
⏹️ ▶️ John in either direction, it told me you’re close, But you know, and again, this is with the 15 milliseconds like
⏹️ ▶️ John inbuilt delay that I did according to this webpage that tells me you should do that for an iPhone 11 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John All of this is just, is very frustrating because there are so many pieces of hardware and software
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chain and the, like, what you’re doing is such a fine adjustment,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That any kind of, any kind of thing that adds a little bit or moves a little bit or is a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John off, just throws the whole thing off. Because like the margin of error is equal to the size of the adjustment you’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John practically, which is one way of telling me, don’t worry about this. It’s probably not that big a deal. But, you know, I did notice
⏹️ ▶️ John when it was off and I did notice when I improved it. More updates next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, continuing, Joshua Scholl writes, executive summary, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lip sync, try to err on the side of audio slightly behind the video, preferably 10 to 20 milliseconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joshua writes, I work in the cabin automation industry. We design and build computerized systems that go in aircraft and attempt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and marry up modern technology features like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, HDMI, et cetera, with the Byzantine FAA certification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process so that billionaires can have surround sound and watch Netflix on their private airplanes. This sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most fascinating and infuriating job in the world. But anyway, Joshua continues, your brain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is much faster at receiving inputs from sight than sound. When you stop and think about it, the mechanisms make a certain amount of sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sight is pretty much all electromagnetism. Hearing involves some mechanical interfaces in your ear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As a result, brains are used to sound slightly lagging sight. I know this is based on some actual research, but I’d have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig that up. Industry received wisdom and our requirements lead to settings for that sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no more than 10 milliseconds ahead of video, but easily as much as 40 milliseconds behind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Having sound slightly behind is far more ideal than ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is interesting advice in terms of, hey, if there’s gonna be a margin of error, try to err on the side of
⏹️ ▶️ John the sound lagging. I’m not sure I entirely buy the reasoning here though. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing about, okay, well, you’ve got a, you know, air pressure waves have to move little, your eardrum, which moves little
⏹️ ▶️ John hairs inside your ears. Like, that’s all true. And the electromagnetism interface for eyes in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John could potentially be faster. But here’s the thing. Uh, when a human is talking to you from across the room,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sound comes out of their mouth in sync with their lip movements. It doesn’t reach you in
⏹️ ▶️ John sync because you see their lips before, you know, if assuming your interface was equally whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s that, you know, The thing making the sound, your lips, that P, that plosive comes out when
⏹️ ▶️ John your lips do the P thing. Like there’s no question about that. So one way to think of this, and I think it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable way, is to say your television should act like a person. When the person on the television makes a
⏹️ ▶️ John plosive with their mouth, that’s when the P sound should come out of the television. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John seated really, really far away from the television, yes, the sound will get to you later than the light does,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because of the speed difference. But that’s exactly the same as it would be if a person was over there. That being
⏹️ ▶️ John said, I think what most of us are used to may not be that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John when we watch someone on television, first of all, half of it’s ADR, so there’s not even a connection between the person’s lips and what they’re saying. But
⏹️ ▶️ John second of all, that’s why I was saying adjust it when you’re on your couch. You might want it to be in
⏹️ ▶️ John sync as if you were sitting as close to the person as you visibly are. Because when you see a headshot on a TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John that person’s head on a 65 inch TV is like three feet high, right? So it’s like you are sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John close, it’s like that person is not 10 feet from you, right? They’re whatever distance they would be for their head to be three feet
⏹️ ▶️ John high in your field of vision. And that’s why I’m adjusting it from the seating position on my couch and not adjusting
⏹️ ▶️ John it as if it was a person who was standing where my television is because their head would be much smaller in that case. Anyway, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a very complicated topic. I’m glad for the, to know the wisdom that, hey, if you got an error on one side
⏹️ ▶️ John or the other, make the sound lag. And that’s kind of why I’m trying the 150 because that’s a little bit more delay in the sound
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m gonna see if that feels better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Tell me about TiVo ad skipping, if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t giving being fair to Tevo my wife informed me that if you have the new interface Which I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John Tevo will auto skip ads it still won’t do it in the iPad app Which is annoying but only my old downstairs
⏹️ ▶️ John Tevo won’t do auto skipping, but the new interface will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I had known this is more Tevo love I wouldn’t have admitted it Speaking of…
Nobody should do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not kidding you. I refuse to read the following feedback. I will not because I disagree with it
⏹️ ▶️ John much. I will read it just because I feel like I feel like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this is amazing. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John person. It’s just one person’s opinion. It is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I disagree with this so much. I will not read it. Here we go. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John from Jason Smith. For over 10 years, I ran an HD home run for four
⏹️ ▶️ John tuner set up to record over the air TV using antenna in my I use a product called Sage TV and later
⏹️ ▶️ John a channel setup. There is not a human being on earth I would recommend this to. Alton Brown is famous
⏹️ ▶️ John for his hate of unit taskers in the kitchen, but a TiVo or God forbid a cable company DVR is
⏹️ ▶️ John always a better option than this. Do you like people in your house asking why can’t we watch TV like normal people?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you like troubleshooting some insane issue where the fragile Faberge egg of your home setup you created needs troubleshooting
⏹️ ▶️ John and robs all of your free time from you on the weekend? Do you like doing tech support over the phone when you’re out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the house and explaining here significant other okay the TV will work again soon but you need to restart this analogy
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully they will buy a VibroSlap and randomly at three in the morning play it loudly in your ear to wake you up to remind
⏹️ ▶️ John you that you chose the worst option for team managing TV don’t get me started on managing files John’s wife
⏹️ ▶️ John is 100 correct in her desire to not have the channel server running on her computer her computer should not be the source of entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John for the family that has to be up all the time in order for the rest of them to watch TV every iteration of a home-based DVR setup
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad and always will be this is a job for an appliance Jason has
⏹️ ▶️ John very strong opinions. I mean, he has he has 10 years experience with it and you can say, well, you use the
⏹️ ▶️ John bad software. It’s much better now or whatever, but it sounds like this is not something he tried on a weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this this is incredible. I mean, look, haven’t we all been guilty of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting up, you know, complicated technical solutions in our houses that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John really Casey, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What are you, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still thinking about fiber. I’m still thinking about fiber. No, I’m not guilty of this at But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I genuinely, like of all the things that have gone wrong with my setup,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of which were self-created, about the only thing that I don’t think is ever broken is channels. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not trying to say Jason’s lying. I’m not trying to say he’s even wrong necessarily, but his lived experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so the polar opposite of mine that I just, I can’t wrap my head around it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, people have different experiences with tech and I could definitely feel where he’s come
⏹️ ▶️ John from. mentioned last time which is I feel like a reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ John big advantage of TiVo and other kind of all-in-one things is I mean it’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right in the thing I did say many times channels and setups like that have modular components right so you
⏹️ ▶️ John get to pick and choose which they are you have a lot of flexibility it’s you know you can be more cost-effective that way
⏹️ ▶️ John has lots of advantages but one of the disadvantages that because the components are modular that means they’re separate
⏹️ ▶️ John and that means you need to communicate between them with TiVo The cable goes into the TiVo box and in that
⏹️ ▶️ John same box is the hard drive that will record it and a thing that will decode It so there’s no network traffic
⏹️ ▶️ John throughout your house of whatever that signal is the network traffic is entirely within the TiVo because the video
⏹️ ▶️ John goes in there and You know other than if you’re watching on your iPad or something upstairs But the video goes in there
⏹️ ▶️ John and the hard drive is right in the same box. So you do not need to send X number of megabits
⏹️ ▶️ John of video wandering across your house Whereas if you do the channels method and you have things set spread out the you know
⏹️ ▶️ John my cable goes into my HD home run and there’s an Ethernet port but then I need to send that video downstairs through
⏹️ ▶️ John my network to the Synology where it gets recorded and then when I play it back on my TV I’ve got to send it back from the Synology through the
⏹️ ▶️ John network to the thing not an issue for me in my house and my network bandwidth the way it is but it’s just There’s one more thing
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Feedback feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let me briefly talk about feedbacks. Do you know what, gentlemen? Suddenly, I started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting responses to my feedbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why. Why would that be? Why are people rewarding you for your tantrums? That’s my question. Running to the press never helps.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the press never helps. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John he doesn’t run to the press. I mean, is he the press? I don’t know. Yeah, probably. He ran to himself and
⏹️ ▶️ John he stomped his feet real loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did, and I stand by it, darn it. I listened to it again and I stand by it. Anyways, I had a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different feedbacks actually get a response. There were two out of the, what, seven or so that I cited last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. I’ll put the feedback numbers in the show notes. But one of them was about manual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transferable implementations with regards to the new photo picking API. That is fixed, legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fixed. And the update I got was, thanks for submitting this report and for your patience. We believe this issue has been addressed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in updates to iOS and macOS. Please test with the latest macOS 13 beta 5 and iOS 16 beta 6, which I did. Thumbs up. All good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The bigger one was the toolbar regression. This is when I’m swapping views in Swift UI, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them has a toolbar, a bottom bar, one of them does not, and it never honors the new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey views bottom toolbar, never shows it. And so I got the following feedback. Hi, Casey, thanks for filing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this feedback. If you’re running into issues with bottom bar not showing or showing when it’s not supposed to, you can try using the toolbar, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, either visible or I think hidden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then your toolbar location. I’m trying to read you an API, which is why it sounds a little funny. Modifier to work around this issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was extremely useful feedback, full stop. That was exactly what I wish I had seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long ago. That would’ve been great. However, I tried this this morning and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is something wrong with my code. I haven’t had the chance to break this out into a demo app to see if it’s me or not. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what ended up happening was I can, when I use this modifier, it shows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the toolbar that’s up in the navigation bar. And it does indeed show the bottom bar, which it was hiding previously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, so far so good. Except, one of the two bars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always looks disabled. They’re not disabled, mind you, but they’re grayed out and are not showing the app’s tint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey color as though they’re disabled. If you tap on them, they work, and then it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flip to the other one being disabled. So one of the toolbars is always disabled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what I’m gonna do about this before I ship. I have no idea. I have a week or so, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two weeks until iOS 16 ships. I have no idea what I’m gonna do about this. I really don’t have the faintest idea. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have written a response saying that this seems like it’s still broken. I still need to do my due diligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and break it out in a sample app and see if it’s really broken there or maybe I’m doing something wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I got feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Hey, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look compared to where we were and where most of our bugs are. I mean, look, and I have I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great news to my the one like the one bug I was really tracking all summer that actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I filed a couple of like enhancement requests that I know those just go right in the trash. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured like, at least let me, there’s this one that’s actually a bug that I talked about last week about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the tint color not applying to the navigation split view buttons. And sure enough, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta seven, it’s just fixed. I didn’t get a response on the bug, but I don’t care. They fixed the bug. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, that’s, you know, I did my due diligence. When beta seven came out, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opened up Xcode, I installed a new beta on my phone. I, you know, the new Xcode update, it’s actually beta six. Thanks a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot, it’s off by one now. And so I’ve ran everything, and it just worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I dutifully closed the bug, saying, hey, thanks. You fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So last time, when we last left this bug, if I’m remembering it the right bug, what they were telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John is the deprecated API does what you want, but it’s deprecated. And the new API is functioning correctly and doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do what you want. So what did they do to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? They made it function correctly. Now, they didn’t comment on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The bug screeners’ comment to me was basically like, hey, you’re using it wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash, this is broken by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in more words than that. But the gist of it is, yeah, this is just broken, and sorry, it’s your fault for expecting it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work. And I responded with an argument that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy. They never said anything, but they just fixed the bug. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s it. So it’s done. I wonder if that was intentional, or it’s just backsliding. Because the communication
⏹️ ▶️ John you have is this API isn’t supposed to do the thing you want. But then in the new beta, it does do the thing you want. say,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, we changed our mind and now we agree with you, Marco, it should do the thing you want. It does do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think the reason why somebody thought this was worth fixing is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not like it was behaving a different way intentionally. They were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, their response to me was basically, you know, paraphrasing, you shouldn’t expect this to work this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. But like, it’s the most obvious way for it to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes it sound like it was intentional, that they didn’t intend it to work that way. And so it not working that way isn’t a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s what they always meant. Well, anyway, we’ll find out if anyone communicates, hey, did you intentionally change your mind about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Was that person mistaken about how the API is supposed to work? So you’re good in beta 7. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John beta 8, it goes back to the other way. It’s not as if you’ve had any subsequent communication to let you know whether
⏹️ ▶️ John beta 7 was a mistake. You know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? Yeah, I’m definitely not going to be deleting my UI kit workaround anytime soon, just in case. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, hey, running to the press helped. Surprise, that’s how it always does with Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately. I wish it didn’t work this way. I wish that, first of all, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everybody had access to get their bugs fixed and that more bugs got fixed. And second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, I wish that for those of us who are fortunate enough to have a loud enough megaphone that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can actually get our stuff fixed when we complain about it, I wish we didn’t have to complain about it to get it fixed because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last thing we wanna be doing is complaining constantly. And that’s not really what we want to be doing here, or what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody wants to hear. And so I wish the system was just better and that these kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of workarounds were not necessary. And long term, I hope they can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a better job of achieving that. Obviously, in the rush right before all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff is about to ship, this is a bad time to be telling them this. But this is the reality, that look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things have to change here long term. Because what they’re doing seems, It just does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not produce quality software at the rate they’re pushing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it doesn’t produce quality software for them or for us. Like our software is now crummier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on account of them not being able to respond with the quickness that we want them to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, with regard to running to the press never helping, Martin Pilkington writes, I found one needs to treat radar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the App Store. Putting an app on the App Store won’t ensure anyone finds it. You need to market it externally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Similarly, radars are only really found if you rant about them online. someone at Apple sees that rant. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so freaking frustrating, but it is a perfect distillation of what I’ve been saying over the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of weeks, last couple of months. It is 100% accurate. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got to market your bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is 100% accurate. And it’s BS that that’s the case, but I’m trying to keep myself reined in so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go on another rant. And then Bjorn Skoglund writes, sounds like an opportunity for ad revenue for Apple if I
⏹️ ▶️ John So just wait, you’ll be able to pay, it’ll be like paying for indulgences at the church. you’re gonna be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay money to get someone to look at your bug and honestly like it’s kind of like one of Those things and you know, there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of things in video games especially video games that have subscription where they’ll They’d be quality of life improvements where like oh you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to put this hit this button an extra time or you get more Space in your vault and destiny or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and those things seem silly and trivial And I just hope that you know, no one ever
⏹️ ▶️ John well this game designers you think about this But like the amount of money that people would be willing to play to
⏹️ ▶️ John pay to, for example, get more room in their vault and destiny is obscene. And so if they ever did say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want your radar looked at, just pay us some money, or let’s have a bidding war, or let’s have an auction for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would make so much money because developers are desperate to have their bugs looked at because it could
⏹️ ▶️ John mean the different, I mean, maybe not for, you know, a dinky app like I make or whatever, but like, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t really care one way or the other, but like, what if your app is the basis of your entire company and you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a VC funded company, you’ve got to make money and your app is broken and you can’t figure it out, how much money would you
⏹️ ▶️ John be willing to pay to actually get Apple to look at and respond to your feedback or radar? An
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, what kind of response are you getting? Like, are you getting the kind of BS responses that I often get?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not endorsing this. I’m just saying that’s how much people want it. Like, they’d be willing to pay obscene amount, which is why Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John never do it. And there are DTS support incidents, which is kind of what that’s for. Hey, you get a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John number of those with your developer subscription. I think you can pay for more of them, can you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe you get to I’ve never used one because I’m always afraid to use them because we only get to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve literally you know been Been a developer for like 14
⏹️ ▶️ John years. I’ve never used you’re saving your super for the big boss and you beat defeat the boss And you never used it because you were just saving
⏹️ ▶️ John it the whole time, right? Yeah, anyway, so there are ways to do this through money, but all I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John is like the How desperate developers are how desperate rank-and-file developers are
⏹️ ▶️ John to get any response to their feedback? It’s part of the reason why people go to the you see I can talk to you human being
⏹️ ▶️ John who, you know, like it would kind of be fun if the human beings that we ever see treated you the way feedback does.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’d sit down, you’d show them your sample project, you’d explain it, and they’d just sit there silently looking at you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And you’d be waiting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then like 10 years later, they’d come to your house, knock on your door and
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you just need to put this line at the bottom.
iPadOS 16 delay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. There’s been an announcement that, as has been foretold,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first iPadOS release on 16 will actually be 16.1, which is coming, quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this fall. Apple writes, this is an especially big year for iPadOS as its own platform with features specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey designed for iPad, we have the flexibility to deliver iPadOS on its own schedule. This fall, iPadOS will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shift after iOS as version 16.1 in a free software update. Let me translate that from from corporate speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything’s on fire and we’re not gonna fix it in time. So we’ll get to it eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, there won’t be an iPadOS 16.0. They’re gonna skip 16.0 and just keep it on 15 point whatever as iOS moves to 16,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until 16.1 is ready with iPadOS. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the flexibility, as they say, well, it’s not the same OS. So we’re not stuck in the situation we would have been years ago where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, but iOS 16 needs to go out cause that’s what you need for the new phones and the phones are gonna ship come hell or
⏹️ ▶️ John high water. So what do we do? Do we rip these features out of iPadOS? ah, but now we don’t have that problem because iPadOS is a
⏹️ ▶️ John separate OS and we have the flexibility to ship it later when it’s ready. I understand where they’re coming from,
⏹️ ▶️ John but from a user’s perspective, especially in the past several years, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has been leaning on very heavily, and I think to good effect, the synergy between its platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ John That when they add a feature, they don’t just add it to one platform, it’s added to all of them and works
⏹️ ▶️ John together with them. And when one platform ships substantially before the others, that often leaves
⏹️ ▶️ John its users in a weird situation where like my phone is on iOS 16 and has, for example, you know, the family shared
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library thing, but my iPad and my Mac are not. And so how does
⏹️ ▶️ John that work? Sometimes you just miss out on the features. It’s like, well, the point of this feature is sharing, but if I can’t use it on my Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t use it on my iPad. Yes, it’s good that the shared library works between me and my spouse
⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone, but I can’t do any editing on my Mac. And do I even want to do the shared library like that? And then you have situations
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t remember if it was notes or reminders one of the others with it, where there’s like a one-time, one-direction upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John of your database backing for your thing. I say, you know, this OS
⏹️ ▶️ John has a new backend for notes. If you upgrade this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t be able to see these notes on old devices. Do you want to upgrade now? And if you say yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John now you’ve like got this split-brain scenario where some of your devices see one set of data and some of your devices see the
⏹️ ▶️ John other. So although I endorse not releasing the OS when it doesn’t work and stage manager is a big mess,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s better than nothing. I’m sad that the one feature that I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John forward to, I can’t even use on my phone or my iPad, let alone my phone, my iPad, or the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the phone’s gonna get the update and then the Mac and the iPad potentially months later. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a fun experience for me. And obviously Apple’s not doing this on purpose. Just feel like there are still more
⏹️ ▶️ John kinks to be worked out in terms of Apple correctly sizing their releases
⏹️ ▶️ John based on what they think they can actually achieve. And it seems like they were overambitious with their expectation that Stage
⏹️ ▶️ John Manager would be in a shippable state in time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, honestly, based on everyone’s reviews who are using it heavily, like all the iPad power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users and stuff who are really giving it a good try, it seems almost similar to the problem with the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Settings app in the sense that they demoed this at WBC, they made this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a headlining thing, but it really seems like Stage Manager is really not ready
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ship. And frankly, I don’t know if it’s gonna be ready another month or two later. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like this is possibly like another year before this really probably should have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released. Again, see also System Settings app. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we haven’t heard yet anything about macOS, but I think it seems very likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that macOS will probably have the exact same delay for many reasons, including-
⏹️ ▶️ John But macOS was always targeted to October. It’s always been like, macOS hasn’t been released
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time as the iPhone OS for iOS for what, five years, six years? It’s been a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, okay. But yeah, so anyway, it does seem like this year’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases, there’s a lot in them that probably needed more time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like probably needed another year. And I don’t know what that says about what’s going on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know, maybe, I think it’s, I said this before, but I think we really need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember that during the last few years, there’s been massive disruption to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their workforce with the pandemic and with work at home and some of the turmoil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on with certain internal issues and internal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conflicts and scandals and stuff. So there’s been so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disruption and they’ve done a really good job overall of hiding that from us. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this disruption has happened and their work has been affected. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think this is that finally coming home to roost that this year’s releases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the core of them seems fine. Like I’ve been using the beta on my phone all summer and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not crashing or anything. The battery life is mostly recovered. Like it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the core stuff is fine, but the list of new features this year was pretty small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you look at something like stage manager or the system settings app, and like, wow, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big feature that they demoed, it’s kind of not ready and looks like it won’t be ready
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the near future. And I think that we’re just seeing like, you know, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human too. And this cycle, you know, through all the pandemic stuff and everything has been tough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them. And they haven’t gotten done everything they probably wanted to get done. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if things are in this bad of a state, somebody should have made the call this spring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, this is not gonna hit in time for this year. This is not gonna be good enough in time for this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so let’s punt it till next year. And they didn’t do that, and I think that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bite them really hard this fall as these features ship in some form
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just are really rough. And I don’t see any evidence that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stage Manager or System Settings on the Mac is gonna be really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if they ship it on the day before Christmas. Fall goes until what, December 22nd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something? They could ship this right before Christmas. I still don’t think that’s gonna be enough time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the interesting thing about Stage Manager from what I’ve read about it, I mean, I have iPadOS 16 on my iPad, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been using it a little bit, but most of the complaints that I’ve seen from the people who are just really
⏹️ ▶️ John diving into Stage Manager and the iPad Power users are not that Stage Manager is crashing
⏹️ ▶️ John or is buggy. It’s that they don’t like how it works. And the changes
⏹️ ▶️ John such as they are from beta to beta and just the way that Apple’s designed it, it makes me seem like the main problem with Stage Manager
⏹️ ▶️ John is they’ve made the wrong decisions about how it should work, right? Like when you do
⏹️ ▶️ John this, this happens. And Apple would say, yeah, that’s exactly how we meant it to work. It’s working great. And people say, no, that like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know you meant it to work that way, but it’s terrible. Right, that they had the wrong idea about when you launch
⏹️ ▶️ John an app, what should it do? When you close an app, what should it do? When you want to add another app, what should it do? When you want to try to move a window, what should
⏹️ ▶️ John it do? And it’s like at every turn, Apple has made choices in stage manager that iPad power users
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like. And that is a different kind of problem than like they may have thought, oh, it’ll be ready in time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be ready in time, I think, if the choices they had made were pleasing to their users, but the users will hate
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And so it’s like, well, it works and it’s not buggy, but everyone hates it. So we can’t really ship it like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I hope what they’re doing is saying, we need to rethink, like we made the wrong policy decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John The design of this feature is wrong. And that is a tough place to be. It’s kind of like where they were, well, not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John the same with the Safari thing. I guess the design decision of address bar optionally on the bottom, that was okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but every other part of that design was the wrong decision. And it’s not like it was buggy. They’re saying, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John just a bad design. It makes it harder for web designers. It’s not pleasing to look at. It’s not easy to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, start over. Address bar on the bottom, fine. Everything else, forget about it. And that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John they did. They said, okay, how about we do the address bar on the bottom, but it’s like the address bar on the top. So like, see, was that that hard?
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t do that with stage manager. There’s no super obvious way they can change things, but I think the struggle
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re having is, it’s not like we just need to burn down a list of bugs and we’ll be ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s we need to rethink this feature because what we thought would be pleasing to our users is not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s not something that happens quickly. That’s not something that happens during a few months in a beta period. That’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happens over a year or two of hold this feature back from the public and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship it maybe in a future software update after we’ve rethought and reevaluated it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think this is gonna be the next AirPower? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they’re actually gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pull it? Yeah, I mean, I don’t think so, but it sounds like it’s real. I have not used it, my iPad’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old and busted, but I don’t know, from what I’ve heard, it’s not in a good spot, like you were saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve used it, and again, I’m not a heavy iPad user, so my usage of it doesn’t matter much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’ve used it and it’s fine. I don’t prefer it. The way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works, even for my very simplistic cases of having like three apps that I’m switching between and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have two on the screen at once. I don’t like it very much and I frequently turn it off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just do like a split view or something. But again, I’m not a heavy iPad user. Frankly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be surprised if, well I guess I was gonna say I’d be surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they pulled it. It’s easy to pull. Yeah, well it’s easy to pull technically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not easy to pull like ego-wise. It would take a lot of swallowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco egos and a lot of like facing the music for people, if they actually did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull this before release. That being said, if it’s really, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco given how the iPad power users are receiving this over the summer, and as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you mentioned, things that aren’t just bugs, that are actually just like design choices that people aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco liking and that aren’t working for people, like behavioral choices that aren’t working for people, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hard thing to fix in a short time under pressure. When you’re facing that kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pulling it and possibly bringing it back in the future is what you should do. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they really, and again, and I would say all of this exact same thing about the Ventura system settings app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the right move is to pull that and just ship the old app and whatever very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few differences there are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Network location, you gotta fix at least one thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, just delete it. I mean, that’s what they did in the new one, right? to lift it out. Maybe. But yeah, so anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would be less work and result in a better outcome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they pulled both of these things for this fall and and just put them back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the works, polish them up, decide whether to ship them later, you know, for next next year’s releases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in neither case do I think these things are going to be shippable by November or December.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so if I had in my magic envelope, here is the correct policy decisions for all of the the interactions
⏹️ ▶️ John and the stage manager. And I threw that to Apple. They could implement those decisions in time because they have the functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like a question of when I do X, what should happen? And it’s a menu of possible things that could happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of which the feature already does. It’s just a question of which one of the things that you do. Problem is I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John they know, they don’t know what’s in that envelope. They don’t know, well, how should it work? And that is, this is not a good place to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, we don’t even know how it should work, let alone getting it to work the way. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly use stage manager. Again, I’ve used it on my iPad and played with it or whatever, but I’m also not a big iPad power user, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John used it on the Mac a lot. And remember, according to that rumor slash inside story,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a feature that grew on the Mac originally. And I have to say, on the Mac, it fulfills its role
⏹️ ▶️ John in such a superior, more straightforward way, by giving you essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John spaces without spaces, little subgroups of windows. And the reason I think it works so much better on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John for that purpose, if that’s what you want, is because, well, two things. One, it is solving a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Mac has, which is if you don’t wanna manually manage a bunch of windows, it doesn’t have a lot of tools
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to sort of manage subgroups of windows other than spaces, which is intimidating to a lot of people and
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a heavyweight solution and has its own set of problems in terms of not, kind of similar to stage manager,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of determining like, well, when I click on this dock icon, where does this new window open? Is it gonna switch you to another space or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John Stage manager on the Mac does a little bit better in that. And the second thing is, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have, it fits in well with the basic Mac model of there are windows that are
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangles. You can resize them from all the edges. You can move them wherever you want. Stage manager says,
⏹️ ▶️ John yep, you can do that with stage manager too. All we’re doing is essentially taking subsets of windows and shuffling them in and
⏹️ ▶️ John out in front of you. And you can see the little subsets or you can hide that thing and you can move windows between them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s nothing else weird you have to learn. The windows are the same as the regular windows. They have window widgets on top of them. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John move them and resize them exactly as you do all the time. If what you want are subgroups of windows that you can shuffle
⏹️ ▶️ John in and out, stage manager more or less provides that for you. on iPad OS is like they took the Mac feature and said, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t just bring that to the iPad because the iPad’s got its own way of doing things. We can’t just let people move windows wherever they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have to snap them to both different, certain sizes and certain positions. So now we have to implement a policy to say, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, because iPad apps don’t expect to be all sorts of random sizes. They just expect to be these three different size classes. And we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even let people, iPad users move windows because what if they move them and only a sliver is visible and they can’t grab that sliver with
⏹️ ▶️ John their fat meat fingers. So we have to make it so that the windows carefully arrange themselves into a pleasing arrangement.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we can’t have too many windows because we don’t have a lot of memory, even though we implemented virtual memory, but nevermind, you can only have four windows
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And so what happens when you add another window? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the team that has, the
⏹️ ▶️ John instincts of how an iPad interface should work, the positive example of that
⏹️ ▶️ John is how they did cursor support. They took cursor support and they iPadified it, and I think they did an awesome job.
⏹️ ▶️ John But those same instincts, and maybe even that same team said we have the stage render feature on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad-ified this. And I think just the allergy to making window widgets or making it like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac or allowing iPad users to arbitrarily resize their apps or arbitrarily move them has
⏹️ ▶️ John made them so compromise this feature on top of the apparently inherent limitations of how many
⏹️ ▶️ John windows you can have at a time, which in theory have a technical foundation that’s causing them not to allow you to go hog wild
⏹️ ▶️ John with windows, has made the feature very limiting, very frustrating. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John within those limits, when you take an action where you expected something to happen like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, this new Safari link, this link that I tapped in my note should open a Safari window in my current stage
⏹️ ▶️ John manager thing, not chuck me to another one. When that doesn’t happen, for technical reasons or whatever, or when
⏹️ ▶️ John you try to arrange windows so they’re pleasing and you move a window with your finger and it snaps back three inches, but it says, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t you like it better like this? And you go, no, I didn’t like it better like that, I moved it there because I wanted it to be there. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John move it back on me. All of that has poisoned this feature that I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that it’s better suited to the Mac, because the Mac doesn’t need this as much as the iPad does. The Mac already has a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to arrange windows. This is a additional boon to the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who didn’t have this feature before. Whereas I feel like it’s almost like a life preserver to the iPad power users who desperately
⏹️ ▶️ John need something that lets them do this. Something lets, you know, Vitecci talked about how when he went
⏹️ ▶️ John back to using like the old thing, SlideOver and all that, that set of very limiting rules that iPad users railed
⏹️ ▶️ John against for many years. It’s like, that felt like relaxing to go back to that because at least it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a set of rules he understood and at least he could he could manipulate it to get what he wanted. Whereas with stage manager, if I like
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter how much fighting with it, he couldn’t get to do what he wanted. And that’s, you know, a damning, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John assessment because the whole point of stage managers is supposed to feel like, you know, you have more flexibility than that very
⏹️ ▶️ John limited slide over when slide over feels like the relief from stage manager. Things have gone terribly wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is it going to get pulled forever or no?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I think it can be saved if they figure out the right policy decisions of how it should work
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad. And I think that the only real technical barrier is, should we,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone eventually gonna say, hey, apps that are on the iPad have to handle being resized in arbitrary windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John That may be a big ask, and it may take years to come around, but I think it’s inevitable that if you
⏹️ ▶️ John really want the iPad to be able to do what it deserves to do, you can’t constrain every single
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad OS app window to the size classes that we’ve known.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s fair. I don’t know, we’ll see what happens. But it’s interesting. interesting for sure.
Plex data breach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, one other quick thing I wanted to briefly take mention of, or make mention of, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can move on. There was a hack that Plex announced this morning as we record.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently this was reported in a bunch of places, including 95Mac. Plex wrote, we want you to be aware of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an incident involving your Plex account information yesterday. While we believe the actual impact of this incident is limited, we want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ensure you have the right information tools to keep your account secure. Yesterday we discovered suspicious activity on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of our databases. We immediately began an investigation and it does appear that a third party was able to access a limited subset
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of data that includes emails, user names, and encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passwords. Even though all account passwords that could have been accessed were hashed and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secured in accordance with best practices, out of an abundance of caution, we are requiring all Plex accounts to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their passwords reset. Rest assured that credit card and other important payment data are not stored in our servers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all and we’re not vulnerable in this instance. So granted, it was at least the hash, if I’m reading this right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the actual plain text password, but still. So on the grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scheme of things, do I care? Not really. You know why? Because I use 1Password and Plex had its own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unique password. So what did I do? I changed it. And then the problem, unless I’m misunderstanding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes away. And it’s no big deal. I have many problems with 1Password these days because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t like 1Password8 at all. But that’s a discussion for another day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is why 1Password is great, because I changed that password and I moved on with my life.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you have to reclaim your Plex servers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, and actually, I did not receive this email. The chat room is asking, did you guys get this? Did you get this? I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually receive this email myself. I’m reading from 9 to 5 Mac, which is a little bit alarming. But nevertheless, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I reset my password this morning. I didn’t see any of the self-issued DDoS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that people were getting. Apparently, everyone was trying to reset their passwords at the same moment. I had no problem with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t have to reclaim my Plex server. Was it you, John, that said you had to do that? Like, I had no…
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like when I changed… I got this email arrived at 1.43 a.m., which obviously I didn’t see it, but then when I woke up this morning,
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw it, I changed my password, and then I went to… Yeah, I knew I’d have to re-sign in to all my Plex stuff, because I did the option.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you change your password, you can say, oh, and by the way, also sign me out of all my devices, and that’s what they recommended you do, so I did it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I went to my Plex server, pulled up the web UI, I’m like, yeah, I’m gonna have to sign in again, and I signed in, and then it listed all
⏹️ ▶️ John my servers. And then when I went to one of them, it says, this server is unclaimed. You have to claim it again and we’ll associate
⏹️ ▶️ John it with your account. I’m like, all right, well, so I did that. I mean, it was just a button press, but it did take a surprisingly long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe their servers were starting to be hammered at that point. I don’t even know what claiming the server is. I don’t believe I’ve ever done it before, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it wanted me to do it again, so I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s what happens when you like move it to a different computer. It’s just saying that this server
⏹️ ▶️ Casey belongs to this Plex account. Otherwise anyone else could swoop in hypothetically and say, oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my server. And then you get God, you know, that other person would have got access to your server.
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#askatp: iOS-app bloat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bart Kowalski writes, why does some app updates weigh in at multiple hundred megabytes in size, whereas updates from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smaller teams weigh in at dozens of megabytes in size? Anecdotally, it seems that larger companies’ app updates tend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be larger, while smaller companies’ updates tend to usually be much smaller. I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think my garage door opener app needs a 200 megabyte update every few weeks, right? How many changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could they squeeze into a garage opening app each time? Because of this, I’m super selective about what I manually update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when. Is it just a case of laziness where a dev simply re-uploads the whole app instead of some small part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the code base? Is there something going on on Apple’s end? Is there something else going on that I have no idea about? Please enlighten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I mean, I don’t know what the best way to approach this is. First of all, there isn’t any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of incremental update in the App Store, right? Or am I missing something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There wasn’t back in the early, early days. But they added that probably at least five or six years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been a while. So we have, when they introduced something called app thinning, remember that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that was less about incremental updates and more about rather than shipping you like a fat binary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with everything that every device will need, I thought app thinning was, let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just give you the junk for your particular device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what it started out as, but I think it later it came to also encompass like actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing more like a diff style for the app as well for updates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right, then that’s my mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that includes that. But anyway, no, yeah, the app store is doing this for you And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t an issue of the developer not updating a diff and just uploading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole app. That isn’t on the developer. The developer updates the whole app to Apple every time, and then Apple chooses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to send that to each device. So that’s out of our hands. What makes apps big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be a lot of things. And some of it is stuff that small developers and indie developers like me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend not to use as much, if at all, or we tend to have less. So one of the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sources of app bloat is stuff like image and video assets. So if your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app has a bunch of graphics and parts of the design, each one of those is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be stored as a relatively loosely compressed image. It’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a PNG somewhere, it’s gonna be massive in the bundle. And apps that have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole bunch of screens and designers and everything, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram, there’s so many different screens in that app to do all sorts of different things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all those buttons and toolbar icons and everything, those are all stored as images somewhere in the bundle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So images alone are a huge part of a lot of these apps by big companies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because they have just so many of them and so many screens that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even realize are there if you’re a more casual user. So that’s part of it, just tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tons of images. Also, if there’s any kind of animation where they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showing you, some kind of instructional animation, do this, then do this. That’s gonna be rendered as a video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s gonna be, again, very, very large files. So that’s part of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would say that’s probably a large part of it, maybe even the majority for most apps. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, there’s actual code bloat. And this, I mean, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes a lot of code to hit 200 megs, but it can be done. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is often the result of cross-platform frameworks. Things like Electron,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any kind of web technology based thing, they have to embed huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amounts of both, you know, resources like images and stuff, and also just huge amounts of code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be their giant runtime layer for whatever kind of fancy framework they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to do in the name of efficiency in other areas, which is hilarious. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Overcast is a little under 10 megs because I don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of these giant third party frameworks or middleware layers or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cross-platform layers, because I don’t have to. Because I’m one person making an app for one OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s it. You know, if you’re doing something as a big company, you’re required to have big company bloat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason you need big company bloat is so you avoid wasting money. And so instead you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to hire thousands of developers and other support staff to make these massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps in the name of efficiency and making sure you don’t accidentally have anything that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is inefficient or wrong. So anyway, most of this is the result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your standard big company needs. So more developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing larger amounts of crappier code with larger amounts of supporting code around them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of many, many, many layers of other people’s code and libraries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. there is no incentive at any part of that to make things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller. Like, usually there’s, for many of the people involved in the stack, there’s no ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to make it smaller. But, you know, at the larger level, there’s just no incentive for them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it smaller because Apple doesn’t care. Most users don’t notice or care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you kind of have no incentive to fight against the current. And where the current takes you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re working at a big company is just massive amounts of bloat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Overcast is 10 megs. Switch glass is only 3 1⁄2. That’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s still burning. I’m actually going down. It always irritates me whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some part of the APIs requires an image. Because I’m like, I can just render this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a few polygons in code, or I can give you an SVG or a PDF so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just a vector that’s like a kilobyte. Why do I have to render a 1024 by 1024 PNG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco image of, and also give you this image in 14 different sizes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fortunately over time they seem to be moving away from that. And like every new OS update that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, usually there’s a way for me to decrease the amount of those assets that I have to have in the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and that’s, and this summer there are a few of those, a nice little nice cities as well. So I’m happy about that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, like where most of my size comes from is like, you know, stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch extension or, you know, had previously like having to embed Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runtime stuff, although the need for that is going down over time as well. But yeah, it’s mostly like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of overhead. The actual overcast code is a few megs at most.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the Mac APIs pretty much want bitmaps for things too.
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying, especially when, like, for example, the menu bar icons, those are template images that treat just template images.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are ways that you can use a PDF for them, but a lot of the APIs do ask you for PNGs. And like the Mac icons,
⏹️ ▶️ John where they wanted 100 size, Now there’s a way where you can just give it a one size. I was like, I’m just gonna give you one size, just use this everywhere, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not best practice on the Mac because you really should be tweaking your icons to read better at smaller sizes and stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there’s a lot of bitmaps. I mean, something that programmers might not realize, but like everything should just be vectors. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, something is turning that into a bitmap to put it on your screen. And so you can see how it’s more convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John to just start with a bitmap on a disk and you can like memory map it and do all sorts of stuff. But the new APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John are doing that for us behind the scenes. Something, that’s another thing people don’t realize about, You’ve talked about this, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John about people who are a little bit technical but don’t really think about the consequences.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, JPEGs, those are compressed images. They’re really small. It must be very efficient. Yeah, it is an efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John way to store images. But when you display that image on the screen, something’s got to decompress it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it needs to exist somewhere in decompressed form so it can be put into a window buffer that takes up memory somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, the window backing stores are compressed on Mac OS and probably on iOS as well. But that compression is
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good as JPEG compression because it needs to be really fast, right? So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John things get big real fast, whether they’re big in memory or big on disk or big both. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as for the incremental updates, I have vague recollections of what you’re talking about too, Marco, but I would love for someone from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to, or anyone who knows, point us to the WWDC session or whatever. Does app update
⏹️ ▶️ John do byte range diff deltas for updates or is it on a per file basis?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I can imagine updates being really big if they’re doing it per file,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you change one little bit of metadata on that 150 meg QuickTime movie that’s your opening, QuickTime movie,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, that’s your opening tutorial animation, like, oh, maybe you just changed, you removed
⏹️ ▶️ John GPS data, they didn’t need to be there, it’s just metadata, like 99% of the bytes are the same. Does it do byte diffs,
⏹️ ▶️ John or does it say, oh, this file has changed, here’s a new 150 megabytes?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you know the answer to that question definitively, please let us know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Another thing that I feel like I’ve seen in the past is massive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t cite a source that confirms or denies it. I thought a lot of these analytics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and ad SDKs tended to be just freaking huge. I thought Firebase was massive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an example. Again, I very well may be wrong about that, but I thought some of these things were big.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re big, but not relative to 500 megabyte video file. Oh, sure, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re bigger than they should be. And I think Marco hit on the main one, which is like frameworks, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have some kind of framework that has like a widget library or whatever, especially if it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John young framework, they’ll give you the whole framework. You may never use that control
⏹️ ▶️ John in your app, but you ship with the whole, it’s kind of like when the Swift Runtime shipped with everything, they didn’t really pare down the Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John Runtime as far as I know to just use the features that your app used, you just get the whole thing. And so if you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John React Native, I’m not trying to blame or whatever, or the Mono back in the days, I don’t know if anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John still uses that. Xamarin. Yeah, Xamarin stuff. You just get the whole framework with your app because it’s very difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out the exact features your app is using and pare down the library so it just has those features because everything is so interlinked.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so yeah, if you looked at your app and just cracked it open and you were like, look at all this image data, I’m not using any of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that just comes as part of the framework. I think that’s probably the biggest source of blowup. And maybe SDKs are like that because maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the SDK itself uses some cross-platform library that includes a whole bunch of things that it doesn’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John all of. It adds up, but I do feel like that it is actually pretty difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to outrun video files, or even just audio files, if you have like, you know, long amounts of audio, video files,
⏹️ ▶️ John images, and stuff like that, can outrun your code load size pretty quickly if you have any substantial number of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and also like, you know, on framework problems, the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of frameworks and the size of them that you add to your app is oftentimes done,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either you don’t have much say in the matter, or you do it without actually really investigating this. So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your app is ad funded, like most ad packages, you have to add in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, the Google one or whatever. But if your app is ad based, you may
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to add three or five or 10 different ad platforms SDKs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just so you have the ability to maybe show their ads. And oftentimes there’s logic in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these SDKs where they bid for the spot and whoever is gonna pay you the most,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can show the ad from that provider. But that means that every provider you might show the ad from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta build in their SDK. And so, and there’s, I mean, fortunately, there’s been so much ridiculous consolidation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this business that there aren’t that many of them left, but that is still a thing that people do. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you end up with, you know, if an app is ad-supported, you end up with huge amounts of bloat there. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just in general, the style of development that so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers these days across multiple platforms, not just iOS apps, the style of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development these days is, if there’s a need that you have, the first thing you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is look for a package or framework that offers it, and just blindly add it to your project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And don’t even care how big it is or what it’s adding or what it needs. You know, like Node
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is famous for this, where they go totally overboard. And there’s the example of the is-even thing that required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is-odd to know. And that seemed like it was almost a parody. that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just, you know, we as an industry have like framework itis where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re so quick to jump to add a framework for a very simple need. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so relatively little scrutiny put on what that means and what that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to cost your app in terms of size and bloat and complexity and impossible security issues down the road.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s just how that’s like the best practice these days. And you know, people make fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of me for not doing this. You know, you make fun of me me for writing my own S three class or whatever. But like, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my class is 200 lines and you know, the real ones 100,000 or whatever, like that, that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adds up. That’s how everyone programs these days. Everyone programs by just jumping to a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of frameworks. Oh, I need I need to do this relatively simple calculation or show this relatively some kind of widget.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How about I add this entire framework over here just to have this one simple thing that I could have written myself in an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t say it’s the best practice to do what you’re describing to give an example.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, it’s what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is very close to your example. This is a real example from my previous job.
⏹️ ▶️ John When we started to do much more stuff with AWS, we of course wanted to be able to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John AWS APIs. We’d already had our own S3 library because that’s a simple thing to do, as Marco found out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we needed to do more stuff. There’s more things you can do with AWS. They have APIs for everything, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John so of course we’re using Perl, which is weird, and we have limited choices. But anyway, someone, some developer
⏹️ ▶️ John and some other team So I said, I’m gonna go to CPAN, which is where you get Perl modules from, and I’m gonna find a good AWS
⏹️ ▶️ John library. And they found one. They said, oh yeah, I want this thing that gives access to the AWS
⏹️ ▶️ John API for services. I’m going to add this. And they added it to their task, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re sending their tasks through the process of approvals and stuff like that. And I was somewhere in the approval chain as
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the higher up sign-offs on things or whatever. And I had to give that a big red
⏹️ ▶️ John X and say, eh-eh. And they said, why, what’s wrong with this? Why can’t I have this thing? like, well, you’ve included this dependence,
⏹️ ▶️ John this new dependency on this new library. I’m sort of the keeper of the Cpan libraries and the tools that we
⏹️ ▶️ John use to install them. Like, yeah, I need that for the AWS API. Like, did you look at that dependency at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I have the numbers close here. We can, I’ll try to put a link in the show notes if I’m right about it, but this is from memory.
⏹️ ▶️ John The, so we had Cpan modules installed across the company and sort of like, these are the modules that we
⏹️ ▶️ John use. And it was, we use version control to track them. If you added another one that had to go through approvals, everything was all checked in, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like all that stuff, right? Not like Node where it was like pulled down in the build process, right? It was very sort of baked in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this, including this one new dependency would increase the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of files by like 50%. I believe there were 32,000 files. Oh my gosh. 32,000 files
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of this distribution.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing that from memory. If you would like to download this tarball and untar
⏹️ ▶️ John it and then just do a find wc-l to find out how many files are in this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, yeah, this task that you’re doing is not worth increasing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Over the course of the 20 years this company has existed, we’ve added like 65,000 files in
⏹️ ▶️ John our company sort of CPAN module repository. You’re not gonna add 32,000 as part of
⏹️ ▶️ John one task. Find the AWS APIs that you wanna use,
⏹️ ▶️ John write your own functions to do them,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’ll fit it
⏹️ ▶️ John in a page of code. please do not add this library. And hopefully this didn’t happen when I was there.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should also put a corporate rules. So the next person who says, hey, I wanna use this API from ADR. Oh great, there’s a library
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives me access to the entire ADR’s API. And obviously this is auto-generated. Like that’s a lot of problem with these things. They’re auto-generated.
⏹️ ▶️ John If there’s a spec for the API, there’s some like, you know, JSON schema or some kind of, what is that
⏹️ ▶️ John spec case you might know?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, that’s old.
⏹️ ▶️ John The standard for describing web APIs where you can auto-generate an interface to it and everything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, so we’re auto generating all of our spam now? That’s even better.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a swagger. Thank you. Gordon Freeman had a swagger. It’s a way to describe API.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you have your API described in swagger, there’s lots of tools that can just let you
⏹️ ▶️ John play with the API in that way. But anyway, it’s so clear that no human wrote 32,000 files.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was auto generated based on the API spec, which is cool until you have 32,000 new
⏹️ ▶️ John files in your source code repo. It’s like, yeah, no. So that is not best practice. and that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of the role of more senior people to sanity check that because you’re right, Marco, people will,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re not experienced, say I found a thing that solves my problem, let me just add it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you should look at what you’re adding. And that’s the thing with modern computers being so fast, oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just real easy. Like, you know, everything’s fast, everyone’s using SSDs or whatever. If I had you to guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many files do you think you added in that task? I don’t know, it was probably like a couple hundred, nope, 32,000. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the thing is like, you know, if, if you think to look for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, that’s one thing. But when you involve working with companies, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you know that one developer is like, Hey, I, I probably don’t want to do this because it adds this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. If their boss is like, just do it. Like we, we need to, we need to hit this ship date or we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to solve this need or have this requirement met. You just have to do this. And that’s it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, you know, the way that bloat on your users devices is treated by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every software publisher of any type, it’s treated like you’re spending someone else’s money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they don’t think, they don’t consider at all, hey, maybe we shouldn’t be taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up hundreds of megs for our very relatively simple app need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on every person’s device who has to use this. And that adds up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, that’s eating into your storage. then you gotta buy more expensive phones or whatever to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have bigger storage needs. That also, all that code at some point is gonna be loaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into memory, or at least a large part of it is gonna be loaded into memory. And so then you’re eating into people’s memory in their devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re making their batteries not last as long, you’re making other apps get kicked out of memory more often, therefore making everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slower when it has to switch apps and reload stuff. Those are all real costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We had this discussion a lot back, a few months back when OnePass switched over to Electron and we all complain about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, this kind of stuff matters. Like, these companies and these developers, like, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processes or sloppiness are leading to this massive bloat, they’re spending everyone else’s money,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re not spending their own. They don’t consider it as like, this is gonna cost us in our app being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big and bloated. No, they don’t care. Or the people who are making the decisions can’t care because some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other decision’s being made above their head that’s forced them to do things a certain way. And that’s, when you’re an indie, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about things that big companies might not care about. because you can just do things the way you want to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with your own priorities and your own sensibilities. And there’s no one else telling you from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above, like, hey, we really got to hit the ship date and make this quota or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fulfill this requirement or comply with this regulation or something. You don’t have the needs of big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies. That’s why our apps are able to be so much nicer in certain ways, because we’re able to make decisions
⏹️ ▶️ John Bateman I was unfair to this AWS module. 165 files. Oh, you are such a meanie. You are so mean. Which I now
⏹️ ▶️ John onto my desktop. So I will never remove that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, if you’re in the business of selling computing resources, maybe making your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John libraries really bloated might be a very profitable
⏹️ ▶️ John move. No, this is, to be clear, this is not an Amazon library. This is a library that just some random person, of the goodness
⏹️ ▶️ John of their heart, auto-generated and uploaded to CPAN based on some A-to-Base API definition. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, I’m not faulting the person who made this. It provides comprehensive coverage for the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John AWS API at the time they generated of this file, it’s just too big to include if you need one or
#askatp: MBP cooling stands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then finally for today, Robert Campbell writes, are you familiar with SV-ALT or Svalt? I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure how I’m supposed to pronounce this. Anyway, they make outboard cooling accessories for laptops. I’m getting ready to upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and considering a move from a desk, from desktop Mac to MacBook Pro, if I could get sustained performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for large photography processing tasks. Assuming even an M1 Max MacBook Pro will eventually throttle under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sustained processing loads. Do you think an outboard cooling booster like the Svalt might move the needle?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d love to make this thing as fast as possible when docked at my home office. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to heat-induced performance issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having been burned in the past? Background info. I run a photography, retouching, and graphic design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey business and I’m thinking about replacing two Macs, an Office 2017 iMac, which is having trouble keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, and a similar-aged on-site MacBook Pro that’s even slower, with a single top-spec
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 14-inch MacBook Pro Max dropping the desktop Mac. The new MacBook Pro will spend 80% of its time docked to my office
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 20% on-site. I’ve maintained the two-machine workflow as previous MacBook Pros have trouble staying cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and slow down dramatically during long production drops. For many of the reasons you guys have discussed at length, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love to reduce my two machines to one. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about this. Do you guys have thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have never used this one particular company’s things, but I looked at them when this email came in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like, basically like a laptop, like a clamshell mode laptop stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is itself a giant block of metal that has some fins carved out. So like, it looks cool. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will say it looks cool. Some of them have optional fans that you could mount on them and everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you as somebody who, you know, I drive my MacBook pretty hard. Now granted, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have a photo retouching workflow. That’s a very different type of load than what I’m doing to mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that being said, I would suggest get the 16 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it in whatever clamshell stand you already use, or you know, whatever you can find,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just try it first. I think you will be surprised how much it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it slow down because you know like so what Robert said right in the middle here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is assuming even an M1 Max MBP will eventually throttle under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sustained processing loads, that’s not a safe assumption actually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would suggest like try it and see if it actually does throttle under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sustained loads of your type because I I can tell you I have never seen mine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throttle. If I’m destroying the CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only does it not throttle and it stays the same speed the whole time, but I don’t even hear the fans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you’re lucky if you can even hear the fans spin up with these new ones. They’re that good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Throttling is a different story. To make a throttle, it has to both be at its max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cooling ability, abilities, so you know, the fan running at whatever its max speed is, and still not be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep up. That’s when it will actually throttle. I have, I’ve never seen the M1 Max 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even come close. The 14-inch might, because it’s smaller, has, you know, probably, you know, presumably, like, you know, a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit less thermal mass in there, but the, if you go, if you get the 16, I think you’d be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard-pressed to make it throttle at all. The only time I’ve ever even heard the fans been up on mine is when I was doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a multi-hour hour long ML training model that was totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saturating the CPUs and the GPUs for multiple hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straight. Then the fan spun up a little bit and it was a little bit audible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, if you’re looking at something like this, one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked at it because I was like, hey, I keep my MacBook in clamshell mode all the time, maybe I should look at this. I didn’t end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up going with it. And part of the reason why is that for these things to work, just physically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hot part of the laptop has to be on the bottom, the way you orient it in clamshell mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The hot part is the part basically between the screen hinge and the keyboard. That’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where all the heat sinks and main processors and everything are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I flip mine over so that the hinge of the screen is up. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do that is to give it a little bit of boost in convection cooling. Because that way it is sucking air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in from those little side slot vents, sucking them in on the bottom, and shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot air out of the top through the screen hinge vent. And I don’t know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this makes a big difference or a small difference, but it probably makes a difference. And so even just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running it, running it in any stand that way with the screen hinge up instead of down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’ll be totally fine. I don’t think you need anything else. And if you actually are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stressing both the GPU and CPU for sustained periods, you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear the fan. That’s a very different thing from throttling. And again, I’ve said it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before, I’ll say it again. The assumptions that you’ve made about how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs behave, performance-wise, noise-wise, thermally, if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made those assumptions only with Intel machines, drop all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those assumptions when you’re moving into the M1 and M2 era, because those assumptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer hold the way they did. And the performance characteristics and thermal characteristics of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very, very different than what you are used to. And they’re way better. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try, you know, if you’re gonna do this, you don’t need a heat sink probably for almost any, like unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re working in a very hot environment, doing, you know, video rendering 24 seven,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe even then probably not. but just get the 16 inch and run it in regular clamshell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode with the screen hinge up on any stand. And I would be shocked if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could actually make that thing thermally throttle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the thing is when he gets a new Mac, it’s going to be so much faster than his old Macs, no matter what, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was throttled to 50% speed, like there’s that, so you won’t mind that. And the other thing is you
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t notice if it throttles. It doesn’t mean that it’s not throttling. If you look at the people doing these really picky
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarks where they’re getting the clock speeds of the sub-execution units inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the SOC, right? You can see that parts of it do throttle, even when the fans aren’t running in an audible way,
⏹️ ▶️ John just because you get hot spots, but you won’t notice unless you’re running like a benchmark and comparing, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, fractional percentages of performance difference. The reason they’re noticing this is because they wanted to see
⏹️ ▶️ John like, with the M2 MacBook Air, which we know does thermally throttle in a way that you might actually notice, the Pros also
⏹️ ▶️ John have sub-components that sometimes thermally throttle, even when the fans are low, but by such a fraction
⏹️ ▶️ John of a percent, you would never notice unless you’re running a benchmark. And again, keep in mind that this new computer you’re gonna buy is gonna be so
⏹️ ▶️ John much faster than your old computers, you will never miss that fraction of a percent. So don’t worry about it. But related
⏹️ ▶️ John to this thing, with the M2 MacBook Air, people have been experimenting with it and you have thermally throttles and I’ve said on past
⏹️ ▶️ John shows, I think that’s the right call for that machine because fanlessness is itself a feature and Apple should ship a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John that is fanless and this is the one. And thermal throttling is, you know, a perfectly good
⏹️ ▶️ John price to pay because even with the thermal throttling, it’s still faster than the machine it replaces and it is exactly as silent
⏹️ ▶️ John because neither one has a fan, right? But people want to tinker. And one of the things with tinkering
⏹️ ▶️ John was they took the M2 MacBook Air and they just put thermal pads inside it, like they replaced a little like
⏹️ ▶️ John black vinyl stickery thing that is itself a heat transfer and just use like the thermal pads that you would
⏹️ ▶️ John put in, you know, for for removing heat and like a PC build or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that made a huge difference. But it made a huge difference in a way that we’ve discussed on test on past things.
⏹️ ▶️ John those thermal pads were taking heat away from the SOC and the other components and
⏹️ ▶️ John dumping it to the case of the computer, which makes the computer feel hotter.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, there are rules about how hot the computer can get and still be allowed to be on people’s laps.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I think the M2 MacBook Air is calibrated to not even come close to getting
⏹️ ▶️ John too hot to comply with whatever different countries rules are about. Hey, here’s how hot your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John can get and still be a consumer product. Right. because you don’t want it to burn people and I think the consumer rules
⏹️ ▶️ John governing that are way far back from burning people. Although it’s hard to believe if you think about some of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac laptops of the past and just how hot they got in certain areas. But that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of the trade off with laptops. A lot of them have like, quote unquote, not very good cooling, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the hotness has to go somewhere. It’s like, why don’t you just dump it to the case? Well, now your case is hot. And even if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not so hot, that’s going to burn you or it’s uncomfortable. No one wants a wants a hot computer on their lap. So a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of these times, especially with the M2 MacBook Air, I feel like the computer is choking down heat on your behalf
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than dumping it to the top of your legs. And you should thank it for that, because like I said, even when it’s thermally
⏹️ ▶️ John throttling, it’s still faster than the M1 version in most tasks.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, for Robert’s question, just get an M1 Max MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. It’ll rock your world, it’ll be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Snap AR, Memberful, and Collide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join. We will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to. Accidental, check podcast so long.
Neutral Reprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a couple of weeks ago I did something I have never done before. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because we haven’t had enough car talk on the show, I thought I’d talk about my car for a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, let’s do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I replaced the wheels on my car. And I now have different wheels than what it came with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have never had the occasion to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that before. Now wait, when you say I replaced the wheels on my car, I didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. He doesn’t have one of those machines that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey takes the wheels off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, no, no. I could, well, you mean the tire off the wheel? wheel. No, I do not have that machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, my car came with summer tires, which means that under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 55 degrees, I really shouldn’t be driving the car. I did. I never drove it in snow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that’s just suicidal, but I did occasionally drive the car at less than 55 degrees. And despite what you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two think, I know you think I live in some tropical wasteland, but well, I guess right now at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this time of year, I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Not all year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad bad time example.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Not all year though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so in the wintertime it does get relatively cold. And so I found myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really driving my car very much in the winter, which was a bummer. And I finally got to the point in my stock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tires after what three years, four years, something like that. When did I get the car? 2018. So four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years. I finally blew through the tires, which is impressive because I forget what was on them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stock, but whatever it was it was soft enough that it should they shouldn’t have lasted four years. But they did because never drive anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was hemming and hawing about what to do and I decided what I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do was replace the Volkswagen English Town Wheels, which is what it came with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was the only thing that the car came with. The only option I had for the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it was new, and even though years before and after had different options, I wanted to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Volkswagen English Town wheels which I friggin hate and I have always hated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Volkswagen Pretoria wheels which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John are the ones that I-
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait a second. You just got good on explaining how you had summer tires and you didn’t want summer tires and suddenly now we were
⏹️ ▶️ John replacing the wheels? Is replacing the tires a prerequisite to replacing the wheels? Yes because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why would I get rid of- why would I stop using the stock wheels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that had the stock tires on them when the tires still had a bunch of tread left in them? I’m a frugal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Are you gonna switch
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the summer tires in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no, no, no. You know, I want a permanent switch from what I had to something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new. So why didn’t you just get new tires for your car? Because I hate the
⏹️ ▶️ John wheels. And I want new wheels. They’re not connected. It’s two separate things. One, you don’t like the wheels and want new
⏹️ ▶️ John wheels. Two, you want to have tires so you can drive it in the winter. But those seem like two separate tasks. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John combine them into one as if they’re connected, but it’s just aesthetic annoyance. And then I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not able to drive my car in the winter. And so I need new tires.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Well, I also need to do tires because the summer tires, like I said, were shot at this point. Like, not only did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate that they were summer only, but they were dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing you have to do to, like the practical thing. I can’t drive my car as much, both because the tires
⏹️ ▶️ John are worn out. And even when they weren’t worn out, I can’t wear them in the winter, so I need new tires. But then the wheel thing is just like, while I’m in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John I found a way to spend more money, which is, I don’t like these wheels. That’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So I decided to get Pretoria wheels. And then my buddy that I talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about often, who is one of the ones that convinced me to get this car in the first place, kept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nagging me and saying, you should go down an inch. You should go down an inch. You should go down an inch. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey telling you, you should go down an inch. It comes with 19-inch wheels. He kept beating me up, saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go 18, go 18, go 18. If he had his druthers, I would have gone 17 inches. But he said, no, I know you’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go 17 inches, but go 18 inches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what I did was I bought Volkswagen actually makes an 18-inch version of the Pretoria,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is my beloved wheel. put links in the show notes. Um, and I went and bought eight 18
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch Pretorias and had, uh, and but got new tires, um, mounted on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now I have my beloved wheel, the Pretoria with 18 inch tires, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 18 inch wheel and tire combination. And I got to tell you, I think he was right about going down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an inch because now I don’t feel every pebble in the road, even in race
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode, because I have the, you know, magnetic suspension where it actually gets stiffer as you move through different modes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in race mode, I needed new kidneys by the time I drove a mile or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now, I only need a new back, not new kidneys. So that’s a marked improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, as far as I’m concerned, there is no benefit to bigger wheels,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except if you like the way they look. Everything else is better when you get smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John ones and just get bigger tires. There is sometimes also a performance advantage, depending on the setup.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is the ever increasing size of wheels on cars. This is a great example of
⏹️ ▶️ John customers voting with their wallet for a thing that is on paper worse for everybody involved, but
⏹️ ▶️ John people really like how it looks. Like that’s why whenever you see like a concept car or even more, forget about concept
⏹️ ▶️ John car, when you see somewhat a sketch of a concept car, you know, they show you like the designer sketch. In the designer sketch,
⏹️ ▶️ John the wheels, like they don’t even have tires on them. They don’t even have rubber bands around them. They’re just like massive discs
⏹️ ▶️ John that are huge because it looks cool and people have been paying for that. They say, we want
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger wheels. When the wheels have just been going up and up. Like even my Honda Accord, I think my first Honda Accord had like 15 inch wheels.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now my Honda Accord I think has either 18 inch or 19 inch wheels on it. It’s just wheel inflation is everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and people don’t care that the ride is worse. And so I would, this is my recommendation for anybody who is about to spend
⏹️ ▶️ John six figures on a fancy luxury car and you’re listening to our show, A, join up at atp.fm slash join, please. But
⏹️ ▶️ John B, do not go for the 22 inches. Do not go for the 23 inch wheels. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know they look the coolest, but if you want to get your money’s worth out of your $300,000 fancy car that you’re getting, pick the smallest.
⏹️ ▶️ John The smallest wheel is gonna be like 20 freaking inches anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just get the smallest wheel you can get if you value your spine at all. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and so this has been really good. I really don’t personally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is just for me, I personally don’t care for the look of most cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with non-OEM wheels, with wheels that did not come with the car. In this case, I’m cheating a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit, because in the year before my car was made, the year after, the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was offered with this exact wheel in 19 inches. And so I’m kind of still within my own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rule set. But I think these ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look so much better. And the other advantage of going from 19 inches to 18 inches is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not 100% sure of these numbers off the top in my head, but I believe the 19-inch wheel is something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like $800 a wheel, and that’s without any rubber around it. It’s $800 a wheel for the 19 inches. And the 18-inch was like $400 a wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. Such a bargain. Well, yeah, it’s still a pile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John get me wrong. You
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned like wanting the essentially first-party wheels, and I mostly feel that way as well, but I have to say, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John in my neighborhood has a Honda Accord of my generation with third-party wheels on it
⏹️ ▶️ John that are not Honda wheels They look really good. And I look at them and I like, well, I have two things here. One,
⏹️ ▶️ John my wheels are super duper curved. Yeah, some of that is me. A lot of it is other people who live in this house.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I don’t like having my wheels, what do they call it, curb rash? They’ve been hit into pieces of cement
⏹️ ▶️ John that has caused damage to them and it is not attractive. But the other thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think these wheels I see in the neighborhood, I thought they look really good. Now, they look boy racery. They actually kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of look like these Pretoria wheels, but even more boy racery. And they’re kind of like inappropriate and people will probably laugh
⏹️ ▶️ John at them because why should a Honda Accord have such sporty wheels on it? But they looked really good. Next time I see it, I’m gonna take a picture of it
⏹️ ▶️ John and show you and you can tell me if I should never ever do this. Like maybe this is like my version of like the Civic Type R like
⏹️ ▶️ John should I get a giant wing on my Accord? And just say, no, don’t do it. But boy, I liked how these wheels look. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I fantasize about changing my wheels, but the wheels that are on my car are $650 each on a Honda Accord. Yeah, it’s bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive. But yeah, I would be very interested to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically what you’re talking about. So please do send a picture along.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like this. They’re like six, six spoke or no. Well, how many of this is what? Uh, five times a 10 spoke there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re either 10 spoke or six spoke. And they just have kind of like wire. They, they, they make it look like a little race
⏹️ ▶️ John car. And I thought they looked really good. They’d probably get curbed even worse than my current wheels. Cause they kind of stick out a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit, but I was like, wow, that actually looks good on an Accord. Anyway, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t, and probably
⏹️ ▶️ John never will buy new wheels for my car, but it is a, it is a fun thing to fantasize about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I tell you though, one of the disadvantages of being the only person in the house that is capable of driving your car, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, Erin doesn’t think she can drive a stick, even though, well, it’s been years since she’s tried,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I bet you she could. Nevertheless, when I curbed the snot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of one of my wheels, which was 100% my fault, I couldn’t even be like, well, maybe that was the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin took the car. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John no, she’s literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’s driven the car maybe once and it was around the neighborhood, I think. my fault and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curbed the piss out of it. Oh, if she had done that to one of her wheels, I would be still beating her up years later.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is a fancy modern cars with hilariously expensive wheels.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also these days have the cool cameras that will show you like the vertical view of how far your wheel is from
⏹️ ▶️ John the curb. And I’m saying car makers should go one better. Forget about auto lane assist.
⏹️ ▶️ John It should be literally impossible to drive a Ferrari’s wheels into the curb at two miles an hour. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the wheel should not let you do it. They should have LIDAR sensors dedicated to knowing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like put them in the wheels. I don’t care, like this is slow speed. It just, I should
⏹️ ▶️ John not be able to turn the wheel and curve the wheels on a car that expensive. Cause those wheels cost as much as my car, individually
⏹️ ▶️ John probably, cause they’re made of carbon fiber or whatever. Just like, I know the cameras are there and you got the beeping
⏹️ ▶️ John and you got all the different sensors and all the things, but it’s like, we need to just, it needs to be an impossibility
⏹️ ▶️ John to curve the wheels in these cars. I see it all the time. I look at fancy cars all the time. I always look at their wheels
⏹️ ▶️ John and you look at them And you’re like, ooh. You can just see that one or two
⏹️ ▶️ John bad days that they had where they scraped the wheels, especially in the Boston area where the roads are so narrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone’s gotta get really close to the curb. Everyone’s in a hurry. It’s really easy to
⏹️ ▶️ John scrape a wheel. You think you’re never gonna do it. You’re three years into owning a car. You don’t pay attention for one second.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, well, you’re either gonna live with that or you’re gonna pay $700 for a new wheel. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find the not caring option is really great in this case. I decided like back when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the Tesla, I decided at that point, you know what? I’m just gonna let the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get used and I’m gonna let it get worn and I’m just not gonna care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small stuff. Now, when a plow hit it, I got that fixed. But like, I have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my winter rims that I cut the snow tires on. One of those is scratched up pretty badly from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty bad curb incident. And I just, I don’t care. I just, it’s fine. This is the way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really, because it’s going to, like, I use my car. My car is a tool for me to use. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I open up the trunk now, there is so much dust and crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can’t even vacuum out anymore. It’s so buried in whatever other carpet stuff is in the bottom of the trunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t care. It’s fine. It’s there to be used, right? Like now, on the Defender,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that I put that roof box on it, I can’t even go through a car wash with that thing anymore. So therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s never going to get washed. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey my God, Marco. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never gonna happen, because I’m not gonna do it. Oh. You know how much that matters? Not at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have had a trunk liner. We have like a rubberized truck liner, so you can just take that out and hose it down,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s convenient. But you should clean your car occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even like for the Tesla, like I got rubber floor mats to try to, you know. You know how much good that did?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I have too many floor mats, and who cares if I got dirt on the rugs? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what they’re for. It’s designed to be used.
⏹️ ▶️ John Vacuuming is not too much of an ask. You can do that. I mean, you should get on my schedule. I clean my
⏹️ ▶️ John car once a year, whether it needs it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, once a year I’ll take the box off and I’ll go through an automatic car wash.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when I clean it, I take all the floor mats out, I vacuum them, I take the trunk liner out, I clean that out, I vacuum the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John inside of the car, I wash the outside. It’s not like I’m detailing the car, but you gotta get the, as Merlin would
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you gotta get the big stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, once a year I’ll drive to Casey’s house and he can wash it for me. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please, for the love of God, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should start watching some car detailing channels to see what actual fancy car detailers do. I love watching
⏹️ ▶️ John those things. Someone will bring in their McLaren F1 and you see what car detailing on the McLaren F1 is. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, the detailing job on the McLaren F1 costs as much as my car, but they do a really good job.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do a really, really good job. The part where they’re cleaning the brake calipers with Q-tips, you’re like, okay, they’re getting their money’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot, no. I just, I can’t make myself care that much. is so much work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I understand and agree with the principle of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re saying, Marco, but I can’t let go that much. My paint is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awful because I’ve gone through road debris that’s left chips everywhere. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used the car, to your point, and I am mostly okay with that. Yeah, that’s what it’s for. Use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Agreed. But I need to wash the car at least once a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John And curbing wheels is that’s like actual damage. It’s not like oh, it’s a cosmetic like at a certain point You’re taking
⏹️ ▶️ John chunks of metal off your wheels and it’s you know, it’s more than cosmetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is but it’s also like that. It’s such a common thing Like, you know for instance like, you know on on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla I last night went to go get it when I moved out of the parking lot last time I noticed that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now have a very small scuff on the corner where somebody parked next to it and scuffed on the way in It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way too small to get fixed by anybody This is a car that lives in parking lots most of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life. Scuffs on the
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic bumpers are gonna happen to everybody. You just have to wait for them to accumulate to the point where you do it. But curved wheels really hurt a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s metal and it’s like, there’s no occasion, like bumpers are kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have control over that, but like you’re not gonna, no one is going to accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John scrape by you and curve your wheels. They’re gonna hit your bumpers, they’re gonna put, leave some paint on your doors, but the wheels are
⏹️ ▶️ John probably fine. So if the wheels are screwed up, it’s because you did it. And that’s why it hurts.