524: The Anti-Fireplace Lobby
02 Mar 2023iPhone passcode thieves, John’s difficult living room, and the one trick you won’t believe the kids these days are doing to evade Screen Time limits.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Please go decline your Tweetbot/Twitterrific refunds!
- Follow-up:
- John’s COVID project
- mcg’s Experience with the Sony HT-A9
- Larry King’s band’s Rivian Parody
- “Not yellow” ≠ “no fun colors”
- Adam Wunn on iMazing
- Report on the Apple TV remote with touch disabled
- Bad Apple TV news
- Diabetes and blood glucose monitoring
- Sonos does allow you to shout requests into the air
- Criminals are shoulder-surfing passcodes and then swiping iPhones
- Mitigation ideas:
- Alphanumeric passcodes
Settings→Face ID & Passcode→Change Passcode→Passcode Options→Custom Alphanumeric Code - Don’t use iCloud Keychain for banking passwords
- Screen Time
Settings→Screen Time→Use Screen Time Passcodeand don’t use the same passcodeSettings→Screen Time→Content & Privacy Restrictions→Account Changes→ Don’t Allow
- Venmo:
Me→Settings→Face ID & PIN→Enable Face ID & PIN - Cash: Icon in the upper-right →
Privacy & Security→Security Lock
- Alphanumeric passcodes
- Mitigation ideas:
#askatp:- Post-show: Marco loses a war of YouTube attrition to Adam
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Chapters
- Tweetbot/Twitterrific refunds
- John’s living room 🖼️
- Tiny bit more on HT-A9
- Hot Rod Rivian 🖼️
- Yellow is cool 🖼️
- How iMazing works
- Apple TV fumbles
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Blood-glucose follow-up
- Sonos voice-assistant follow-up
- ATP Membership
- iPhone passcode thieves
- Sponsor: Kolide
- #askatp: Gigabit internet service
- #askatp: Mac battery limiters
- #askatp: Ads for scammy games
- “Accidentally Podcasted”
- Kids evading Screen Time
Tweetbot/Twitterrific refunds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, oh, one last thing. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. If you are a tweet bot or Twitter if it person, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John should put this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show. I didn’t even think about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s too late. I’m sure you talked about it on the talk show.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we didn’t. Well, either
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey way, you should have either way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t think it was out yet. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. All right. The point is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are a tweet bot or Twitter if a person who had a subscription, go and re download
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app. Not kidding. Go to the app store, re download the app, and then it’ll ask you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you want your do you want a prorated refund in the case of TweetBot, do you want to push that over to Ivory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or do you want to say, eh, I’m good, don’t worry about it? For all of us, I reckon we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey afford to say, eh, I’m good. You could, I think, do the Ivory thing, but you know what? I already subscribed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ivory and I still said, eh, I’m good, because it’s a few bucks of my money. It’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much money for me, but in aggregate, that’s a metric load for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TapBots. Same thing for IconFactory. So if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even just a handful of dollars that you can spare, why don’t you say no refund please? It would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really mean a lot to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because here’s the thing, like if you don’t go reinstall Tweetbot and Twitterific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and opt out of the refund, the default will be that they’re going to have this money taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of their like bank accounts that can be taken by them and refunded to customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever time was left in their subscriptions because like Twitter, you know, blew up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is like this is potentially a huge negative pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money out of these companies like this. I mean, this could bankrupt people. This is not a good scene. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can opt out of the of getting this refund, please do so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So go install TweetBot or Twitterific again. You might have deleted it already. Go install it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Each one of them opens up to a similar screen. It just says, hey, here’s the deal. What do you want to do? If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do nothing, you will get a prorated refund for any unused time on that subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will come from the developers. If you opt out, they will lose less money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So please go install these apps again and opt out of those refunds if you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never uninstalled it. I actually put Twitter freaking to my phone’s dock, which is an area that I don’t use. So it’s just a little
⏹️ ▶️ John museum. Yeah, I can’t. How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you not use like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John it an easy place to reach. It’s the easiest place to reach. I don’t think so. The way I hold my phone, I find
⏹️ ▶️ John that incredibly awkward. I’ve never put anything that I used in the dock, which is, you know, whatever, kind of a shame. It’s always visible, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I can’t reach there easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you like a center grip person, not like a lower grip person? I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess so. I mean, but I find it, I can’t reach that. I guess my grip is just up too high.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I put Twitter frickin’ there, because I just wanted to, you know, it’s a place of honor, and I just wanted to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to see the icon, right? I replaced it with ivory on my actual- It is a really nice icon. On my home screen. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a set to a different, a slightly different than, you know, it’s a customizable,
⏹️ ▶️ John But then when they came out with this thing, like, oh, I’m gonna go do it and say, I don’t need a refund. And then I realized I don’t have a subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’ve on the beta and the beta is just like perpetually
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco subscribed, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that didn’t feel too bad because I think I paid like $150 for a Twitter for Mac. So when they had the Kickstarter,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m good. And I subscribed to Dockinfactory’s Patreon, which you should do as well.
John’s living room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me ask you, John, what’s you doing in your living room these days?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I had to find something to occupy my time while I was trapped in
⏹️ ▶️ John a room with COVID. I’m happy to say that today was the first day since becoming infected that
⏹️ ▶️ John I tested negative, despite testing very, very barely positive for like three days in a row.
⏹️ ▶️ John Today it was absolutely 100% negative. I’m zooming in on that picture. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Nope, I’m 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always shine my phone flashlight on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it, like different angles, like can I see it at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I’m well and truly negative today, that’s great. Hopefully I’ll be negative tomorrow,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still testing a little bit because you gotta have multiple tests. Anyway, watch him for that whole rebound thing, we’ll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I needed something to do with my time. And I did watch a bunch of movies and a little bit of TV and a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube, but I needed something to do that was interesting. And I was already in the midst of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, thinking about this project. I don’t know how it happened. Anyway, this
⏹️ ▶️ John project went into high gear because I had nothing else to do. And this project is to upgrade my sound system. I know we’ve been talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John that on the show a lot and that’s probably why it’s been in the front of my mind. I
⏹️ ▶️ John recently got a fancy new TV and with that I got a fancy new receiver to connect to the TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I got a fancy new Blu-ray player, but one thing I didn’t upgrade was my 5.1 speaker system, which,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it was cheap and old, but well-reviewed when I got it. It was like, I didn’t even know if I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John a 5.1, So I’m like, I’m not gonna spend a ton of money. Let me just get the best reviewed,
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny, inexpensive thing. This was many, many, many years ago. And so I’ve had that
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s fine, but I have upgraded the rest of my system. And now that part of it definitely looks like the weak link.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I’ve been looking for months now into what could I possibly upgrade to that
⏹️ ▶️ John is nicer than this. So that’s what I did during my COVID time. And it’s trapped in my room
⏹️ ▶️ John for days and days on end as I just looked on YouTube and read articles and waded through
⏹️ ▶️ John audiophile forums. Those are always fun, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole nine yards, just going everywhere, trying to figure out for my weird test case. I’ll put a
⏹️ ▶️ John link in the show notes too. I even talked about it on Mastodon to see if anyone had any particular advice
⏹️ ▶️ John or suggestions about my weird situation. Unlike my television shopping, I feel like my
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker shopping is not applicable to most people because it’s so specific to my room, my house,
⏹️ ▶️ John my scenario, my limitations. Whereas my TV was just like, other than a size that fits in my
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, it’s just a big flat panel. If it’s a good TV for everybody, speakers that I ended up getting, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not the best choice for everybody. I don’t even know if they’re the right choice for me, but things are on my way. And so in a future episode
⏹️ ▶️ John of the show, once everything has arrived and I’ve set it up, I’ll give the details and go through my
⏹️ ▶️ John whole process. But for now, I just wanted to chime in and say, I’m COVID negative, yay. And I spent all my time
⏹️ ▶️ John reading speaker reviews.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds fun. I mean, whatever makes you happy, man. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it did, it was surprisingly fun, although also incredibly frustrating. And again, half of
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s on me. See the Mastodon thread to see what I’m dealing with here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like reading about speaker reviews, I don’t know, that’s the-
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not easy, yeah, you’re absolutely right. And it’s so much worse than TVs, let me tell you. Because TVs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like almost everybody agrees on what the objective measures are. There are international standards,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s equipment that will test compliance with the standards, whereas speakers, boy, it’s rough
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. Just, it’s on the one end, you have people who are writing poetry, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, this does not help me. And the other end, you have people who are like, taking objective measures, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no sort of standardization on the, like, what tools you’re using and does the thing that you’re measuring
⏹️ ▶️ John matter at all to the experience of having the speaker? It’s rough. But, you know, more on
⏹️ ▶️ John that when I get this all set up. Because then I’ll be able to tell you if all that BS that I read ended up being
⏹️ ▶️ John helpful or not helpful at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not trying to be funny. I’m genuinely asking, are you looking to stick with 5.1? Are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you trying to go full Atmos? Is that really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John something that’s- Did you
⏹️ ▶️ John saw that- Do you think I have room for more speakers? Well- The
⏹️ ▶️ John challenge I put to people is, where do you think 5.1 speakers should go in this room? And nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John even ventured to guess, like maybe one or two people, because it’s grim. No, I do not have room for more speakers. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John thought about where I could fit one or two more, whether those be quote unquote height speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John or whether I would do side channels, but for now the problem was 5.1. Replace an existing 5.1
⏹️ ▶️ John with a better sounding 5.1. So that’s what I’ve gone with. I have the capacity for more at any time, but for now
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I’m sticking with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this is really on the table for reasons beyond your control, but are you willing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to rearrange the room and like the furniture within the room?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s, I mean, I didn’t want to go into that I’m asking not, but like room rearrangement, we
⏹️ ▶️ John went through all the permutations for room rearrangement like 20 years ago when we moved in. This is it, this is the room.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, I don’t think many rearrangements make things better except for the one where you block the fireplace with the couch and that’s not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, alternatively, you could put the TV over the fireplace.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as you know, that’s not gonna happen as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you use the fireplace?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you thought about removing it?
⏹️ ▶️ John People said that, like that’s insane. No, I’m not gonna, you know, like, I guess the anti-fireplace
⏹️ ▶️ John lobby is big, so I can’t get rid of the fireplace. The fireplace is like literally the best feature of my crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John house. I’m not getting, quote unquote, get rid of the fire. It’s a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John looking thing. It’s a centerpiece. It would destroy the value of my home if I got rid of it. And I like it. I like it
⏹️ ▶️ John being there. I like looking at it. Yeah, no, I don’t really light a fire in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, you have an old home in a nice neighborhood in New England. Nothing will destroy the value of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John home. No, I mean, you know what I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would reduce the value. People wouldn’t. And ours is a good fireplace. It’s not like one of those ones where the people paint it over the brick. Have
⏹️ ▶️ John you seen those? Like at some point, someone got a hangover in the 60s and they repainted over the brick.
⏹️ ▶️ John So bad. No, this is a good fireplace. It is, you know, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John all of our family’s pictures are over it. If you remember when you were here, right? There’s the big mantle, which it needs to
⏹️ ▶️ John be repainted like everything else in my house. But anyway, it’s a very nice mantle. It’s got all our family pictures on the wall above it. And it’s a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John fireplace. And I thought it’s gonna be a big house seller when it comes time to sell it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in the meantime, I like it looking like that. So no, I’m not getting rid of the fireplace. No, I’m not putting my TV over
⏹️ ▶️ John the fireplace. No, I’m not putting one of those giant mechanical mounts where you put the TV over the fireplace and it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey lowers down. That was my next question.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, because then that would be in the way of the pictures and there’d be this big, ugly mount. All of those are out. Luckily, people, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t, mostly took me at my word and said, here’s the room, now this is what we’ve got to deal with. But none of those things
⏹️ ▶️ John are happening. So it’s just a matter of working. And honestly, I wouldn’t want them to, because it’s not a home theater
⏹️ ▶️ John room. This is like the main living room of our house. It needs to function first and foremost as a room where people
⏹️ ▶️ John can exist and, you know, have nice places to sit and just, you know, hang out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they’re just looking at their phones or playing with the dog or reading or yes, watching TV, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not a home theater room. So it’s not like, let’s rearrange the entire room and brick over the fireplace and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John take all your family photos off the wall and put on a giant mechanical arm to put the TV. No, that’s not happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what this room is for. And that’s why it’s a challenge to come up with something that is
⏹️ ▶️ John acceptable to everyone involved within the draconian constraints of a 1930s house.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should just, just move, man. Just remove the fireplace. It’s not hard to remove fireplaces,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You can just remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. I would say just in general, it might be healthy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about the house that you are spending the majority of your adult life in, not as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something you have to preserve for whoever’s buying it next, but instead something that you should optimize for the way you actually want
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, I like the fireplace too. I like looking at it, I like how decorative it is, it feels cozy, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John room. I even like the cruddy wallpaper that everyone in my Hamlet family hates in that room, because I think it is cozy and
⏹️ ▶️ John comfy and it is a comfortable room to be in. I don’t want it to, I don’t want that part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the room to change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Hey man, it’s your house, it’s your rules. I totally hear you. I’m gonna give you a hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time about it forever because that’s what we do here, but your house, your rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it presents an interesting challenge, whether it’s to the fancy Sony HT9, which we’re gonna talk about in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John Or for a plain old 5.1 system with a fancy room correction on the receiver to come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with something that works okay in that environment. Not impossible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but tricky. Tricky indeed.
Tiny bit more on HT-A9
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that HTA-9 baby, I’m sure that’ll fix your problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just wanted one more bit of feedback from MCG, another owner of this system.
⏹️ ▶️ John They say, I have the HTA-9 with the big sub and can confirm this is absolutely fantastic for movies
⏹️ ▶️ John and no complaints when we use it for TV shows. It is at its weakest for stereo music, but tracks in Apple Music with
⏹️ ▶️ John Atmos are great. As far as the complaints around drop hats, I had some initially, but the firmware updates have improved
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I don’t remember the last time it happened and I have an eero router right next to it. Highly recommend these. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the magic of software powered hardware. There’s always the hope that a quote unquote firmware update will
⏹️ ▶️ John fix your problems. And apparently, at least in the case of MCG, uh, this happened. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of the three, three stories and three individual people, one saying you got to warn people off from
⏹️ ▶️ John this one saying I’ve got it and sometimes it drops out, but mostly it’s okay. And one saying, I got it. And it was bad, but now it’s updated.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the truth is, but there you have it. Uh, all of them, the good thing is that all of them say for its
⏹️ ▶️ John intended purpose of movies and TV with fake surround sound with speakers all over your room,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems to work really well when it’s working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s working.
Hot Rod Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a very deep cut, and I promise I’m going somewhere with this, way in the beginning of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you remember, I don’t recall which came first, to be honest with you, but we had the Jonathan Mann theme song that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still hear, and we also had the Who the Hell is Casey song.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey [“Who the Hell is Casey?” by Larry King plays, with a heavy, distorted voice.] Which was written
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by an actual real-life friend of mine, whose name is Larry King. Not the one you’re thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, a different Larry King. Well, this is relevant to you because his band, he is in a blues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey band just for funsies, you know, these people all have real jobs and so on and so forth. Not that being in a band isn’t a real job, you know what I’m saying?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. We’re podcasters for a living.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of anyone who should be throwing stones on not having a real job, I am the last one on that list. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he and his band did a parody of, I forget the name of the original song,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but It’s some like kind of not… almost honky-tonky kind of song,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bluesy kind of song. It was funny, but the original was fine, but they did it in their…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the parody’s Hot Rod Rivian. And so the entire band did their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music video for this song, playing in a field somewhere, with all of the equipment being powered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by an R1T. You know, just plugged into the back of the R1T, into the AC outlets. So my buddy Larry King
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, our sax player has a Rivian. We recorded this all while plugged into the Rivian. About three hours of playing took about 3%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the battery. His tuba fits in the frunk. The video is cheesy. I had nothing to do with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the editing, but I did engineer all the audio. This is worth it. Even if it’s just a few seconds of your time, it is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because I thought it was very well done. And it gave me quite a good laugh. And my friend Larry King,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is the guitarist, is the one standing on the gear tunnel door, which I thought was also quite funny. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is absolutely not required viewing, but it made me laugh. And like I said, this is a deep, deep cut back to Who the Hell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Casey from way back when. link, but all of these things in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also point out that if you’re picturing a tuba, you are probably actually picturing a sousaphone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re picturing the giant thing with the giant bell that goes over the person’s head as they stand and walk with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a sousaphone, not a tuba. That would not fit in a Rivian frunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco An actual tuba that was played in orchestras is a very differently shaped instrument.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s good to hear that it fits in the frunk, but that is less surprising than you might be thinking if you don’t know the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tuba and a sousaphone. Thank you. This has been marching band trivia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You took my joke. I was just going I was going to say, tell me you were in marching band without telling me you were in marching bad.
Yellow is cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I would like to briefly defend my honor, or at least attempt to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The whole of the internet has written to me to explain to me that because I don’t want yellow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am part of the problem and that fun colors can be fun. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun colors can be fun, but there are fun colors and then there is yellow. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other fun colors. Orange can work. Purple, when done properly, can work on a car. Yellow cannot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is the rules. I don’t make the rules. the way it is. But my point is just that just because I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yellow, well, first of all, it doesn’t mean that you can’t as much as I joke. But secondly, there are plenty of other colorful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. My car is now blue, let’s not forget. It didn’t happen to me this time. The white didn’t happen
⏹️ ▶️ John No, blue is not, your car is not a fun blue though. Oh, pish posh. It’s a fine blue. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John dislike it, but it was, no one would look at that color blue and say, boy, that’s a fun blue. They would just say, oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue. Yeah. Fun blues have to be lighter. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. All right. I’ll allow
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’ll allow it. Or like fun in some other way, like, you know, pearlescent sparkly or, you know, turn purple in
⏹️ ▶️ John different angles of light. There’s lots of things you can do that are fun. But your blue is just blue. It’s a very nice blue. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a handsome blue. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right, I will allow it. But my point is just that, please, internet, just because I don’t like yellow doesn’t mean I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like fun colors. I mean- Yellow is one of the most fun
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, objectively.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are other fun colors that you like, but it’s almost like you dislike the funnest to use Apple’s parlance.
⏹️ ▶️ John You dislike the funnest of fun colors. What maybe purple what’s more fun than yellow maybe purple?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have mispronounced ugly many many times You’re pronouncing it as fun, but it’s actually pronounced ugly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco American market cars, I don’t know there was the world I think it’s probably the same but American market cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all available in black white silver Gray dark gray light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray metallic gray differently gray and slightly bluish gray slightly greenish gray slightly reddish gray
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s a million different grays, whites and blacks. So true. And then you’re lucky if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe there’s like a red or a blue and then that’s it. There’s like almost every car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is available in that selection. A whole bunch of grays, whites and blacks and maybe red and or blue.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re willing to pay $200,000 or more for a car, you can get really cool colors.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Each of which is a $10,000 extra. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the point is like I have the opportunity here to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun color. And most cars don’t offer that opportunity. Even my Land Rover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is… I have the Tasman Blue color, which is, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only remotely fun color Land Rover offers. It’s really conservative, though. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very close to, like, a gray-blue, if there were such a thing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very restrained blue, and it’s a very nice color. I think it’s by far the nicest color that the Defender is available in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is very restrained. drained. Rivian yellow, by all accounts and by all the videos I’m trying to watch about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what how it looks in real life actually looks fun and the Rivian blue is pretty fun too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the yellow is more fun and then Rivian is also available in all those boring colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to be boring. I want to like you know how how often in life do you buy cars? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So I don’t know. Well, I mean if you’re you it seems like pretty often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but yeah, but you know for the most part this is a relatively infrequent big purchase,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like to mix it up sometimes. I like to have more color in my life recently, and this is a way to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Corey Pescetti And as I said to you in the post-show, and I think the bootleg might have still been running, I don’t recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was certainly not in the release show, I did feel a little guilty for pooping all over your yellow idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because just because it doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for others. It is very much not my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, but you know what? If it’s your thing, that’s okay. So you do you.
⏹️ ▶️ John should be sued for their picture on their website, which looks nothing like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco any of the photos
⏹️ ▶️ John of this thing in real life. Almost still to the point that I have trouble believing they’re trying to say it’s the same color that all those owners
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures are. But boy, those pictures on the website, worse than Apple, because sometimes Apple’s photos of their subtly
⏹️ ▶️ John like brown or subtly rose colored things are different than in real life. But that, that
⏹️ ▶️ John car picture is nothing like the car in the photos that people take. So I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John if anyone buys based on the website picture and then their car shows up and it’s like big bird yellow and they thought it was going
⏹️ ▶️ John to look like the website, I feel bad for them. They can sell their car to Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also worth pointing out that yellow is Rivian’s accent color. So no matter what color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get a Rivian in, there’s little yellow bits all over the place. And so it makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go with a color that works really well with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is an annoyingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good argument. Right. And I think the second best color they have overall is the blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. But I don’t think the blue works as well with the yellow as I would like it works okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the green looks better than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue because it’s very foresty. Honestly, I think the one that looks the nicest second to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yellow is one of the grays like they have one of the grays that I saw in a review video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually looked very nice with the yellow accents, but it was too boring for me. So I’m going yellow.
How iMazing works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adam one has some feedback in clarifications on I’m azing which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe we were talking about with regard to like backing up I message stuff Adam writes I’m azing doesn’t jailbreak the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it uses a backup file made saved to the local file system of a Mac to extract the data from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from X or to export the software lives entirely on a Mac there are no hooks into the iPhone itself amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is super handy for local backups too if you don’t want to use iCloud it works over Wi-Fi and USB you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can also customer store phones to only have some of the data from a backup file. It was handy when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to customer store to my new iPhone and pull over all my iMessage history, which is not synced via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud, to my new phone while leaving all the cruft from my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old phone. That allowed me to have the best of both worlds, a fresh install and the benefit of specific long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data that I cared about. I think that’s actually a really clever idea, to be honest with you, because I’m still carrying my original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3GS build, if memory serves, from way back when. of the reason I haven’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started afresh is because I didn’t want to lose all that iMessage history because I also have not turned on iMessage in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud or whatever they’re calling it. So that’s a very clever idea. Anyway, Adam continues, when extracting messages from the backup,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can export them out as text files or PDFs that can be super handy for legal cases and business needs. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, it’s pretty buggy and sometimes doesn’t work. So you have to restart the Mac and phone periodically to get things working again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overall, it has been worth having the tool to help me manage my data without using iCloud. So there you Take care.
Apple TV fumbles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John tell me about your Apple TV remote with touch enabled. We’re disabled enable. Tell me about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it one way the other
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah So I had disabled it because I was sick of Thinking that I was actually moving my thumb a millimeter and
⏹️ ▶️ John causing the Apple TV to freak out and it really just wanted to eliminate It as a factor. So now when I hit the center
⏹️ ▶️ John button on the Apple TV remote and it does something ridiculous I can say well, it’s not because of the touchpad
⏹️ ▶️ John because I turn that off It’s a setting and you know Apple TV setting things where you can make it so it just us
⏹️ ▶️ John clicks And I had it that way for a little bit and I was using it and I was, you know, of course swiping on the pad
⏹️ ▶️ John and realizing it doesn’t work and then going to use the little D pad thing. But there is a fatal flaw
⏹️ ▶️ John with this arrangement, at least the fatal flaw when I was trapped in my room with COVID. You know, when I’m trapped in
⏹️ ▶️ John my room, you learned how much my family needs my help to use the equipment in the house because they just rely on me to do everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John FaceTiming me and texting me and yelling up at me, oh, I can’t do this thing on TV. How
⏹️ ▶️ John do you do that or whatever? And here’s a place where I tried to help them remotely and I
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t and so I had to have them re-enable touch. What do you think it was? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no idea. Do they do the scrubbing thing? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that uses the- So much
⏹️ ▶️ John more fundamental than that. Think really, think about how bad Apple TV is. Scrolling?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, okay, here we go. So they were trying to use an app on the Apple TV and of course it doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what happened was the app was so hosed that it was just plain frozen. And you could go back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the home screen and then you could go back to the app and I think they know how to do that. But it didn’t matter because when you come back to the app,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just wouldn’t do anything. It was just absolutely 100% locked up frozen. No button did anything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You could not play, you couldn’t go back, you couldn’t go forward, you couldn’t do anything. They needed to force quit that app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they said, how do we force quit? Force quitting isn’t working and I
⏹️ ▶️ John realized I had a disabled touch. Normally you go to the multitasking switcher by hitting the little TV looking button twice
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you pick the app you want and you swipe up. Did they know that? Cause no one knows that. Oh, they know that
⏹️ ▶️ John because we have Apple TV and they see me do it all the time because these
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the first time an app is locked up on the Apple TV, let me tell you. Or sometimes it just gets into a wonky
⏹️ ▶️ John mode and you need to force quit it. This is force quitting the correct way, which is when the app you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to use no longer works, force quit that sucker and try to get it to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there may be a way to force quit without using the touchpad. In fact, there has to be, there has to be a way. but when
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trapped up in my room with COVID and my family’s yelling at me,
⏹️ ▶️ John just said, just re-enable touch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna guess by the way, it’s probably, I bet when you’re in the multi-tasking switcher and you’re over the app, instead of swiping up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet if you like press or hold one of the buttons, maybe like the play pause button.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had them do that. I mean, I made a couple of good guesses. Yeah, I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John holding up, I tried having them hold the main button down. Like I’d had them try to do a whole bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I would have done if I was there. Whatever it is, after one or two guesses of me trying to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s try this, like the thing you just suggested and a few others, those didn’t work. And so I had to just give
⏹️ ▶️ John up and say, just re-enable the touch. I didn’t bother Googling to find out the answer. I’m sure if there’s a way to force quit without
⏹️ ▶️ John touch enabled, someone will tell us and we’ll put it in a follow-up next week. But there you go. An essential feature of the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV remote that you need touch to be able to do unless you know how to do it without touch,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I don’t. Fun. Force quit, the most important feature on the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m an Apple TV apologist. I feel bad. I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like I’m not. How many times have you had your family trying to watch TV and the app freezes solid?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, all right, I’m gonna answer your question by saying I know for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fact that Declan knows how to do this very dance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Wow. So that, I mean, he is eight now.
⏹️ ▶️ John He needs to force quit everything because he’s a youngster.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right. They just
⏹️ ▶️ John need to go through and just, by a matter of course, it’s like their idle animation. It’s just you put a new device
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they’re bored, they just go, For quote unquote, force quitting those photos
⏹️ ▶️ John of applications last launched a year ago, but it’s really important to swipe those upwards. My parents
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. And they and they say, I know these aren’t running apps. I know they’re just pictures. I just like to not have the pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John there, which as I said in the past, not having the pictures there is a legit user need that is not being met by Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that is combined not having the pictures there and force quitting applications are both the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing. As far as the UI is concerned. Some of them you’re force quitting, but most of them
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re removing pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do people know, by the way, the Apple Watch version of force quitting?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Do people know that? I bet you do. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny you bring that up because I just tried to do this the other day. What was it? I don’t remember, but I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’re gonna correct me, I thought it was hold down on the bigger of the two buttons. I forget what that’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hold on the big button until you get the lock screen, then I’ll hold on the crown for a couple seconds and it kills the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I thought. Maybe I was doing something wrong. Maybe I was holding it wrong, who knows. But at the time it was not working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, you can go into the app switcher by hitting the side button and then just swipe to the left so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it gets a little card out of the way. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey faster way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I knew that one actually. That’s interesting. Huh, well now I’ve learned something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Real time follow-up from the chat room. Apparently force quit without touch enabled is double tap up,
⏹️ ▶️ John like on the D-pad. Tap, tap. Instead of swiping upwards, instead of holding upwards, double tap
⏹️ ▶️ John up quickly. Haven’t tried this, haven’t confirmed, but that is what the chat room says.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I would believe it, but yeah, that’s still crummy. By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did anyone else in the house come down with COVID?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, so far, no. And since I’m negative, I think we’re probably in the clear. So my isolation and
⏹️ ▶️ John constant reading of speaker reviews seems to have worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have done the family a service. I see how it is. All right, some more information about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple TV. I don’t wanna read this cause I like the Apple TV, darn it. David Boeke writes, I wanted to let you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that Apple’s own apps are not immune to bad behavior. I was watching the last of us on HBO via the Hulu
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app and my daughter had to step out of the room. So we paused. I then started watching a show on Apple TV. Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my daughter came back and I switched back to Hulu when last of us was over and I switched back to my Apple TV show and found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the play head was 23 minutes further into the Apple TV plus show than when I left it. It kept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing while I was in the Hulu app. I wonder if they are also getting bad metric data on usage and if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is more widespread.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is another fun thing of like, you know, should an application be able to play when it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John showing anything on the screen? Seems like something that shouldn’t happen. Seems like a
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty baseline level of competence. like the app that is not filling the screen with
⏹️ ▶️ John this image should not be playing but apparently it was.
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Blood-glucose follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have a little bit more about the diabetes and blood glucose monitoring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jengor writes, because I work in tech, I was able to pay out of my own pocket for a continuous glucose monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my case, the Dexcom G6, which cost me about 170 pounds per month, or about $205, or approximately 2,000 pounds, or roughly $2,400
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year. Every year, forever. Yikes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the cost of an Apple Watch that could theoretically do this would be peanuts compared to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the existing ones on the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, definitely. Scott Jen writes, the Freestyle Libre
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continuous glucose monitor costs on the order of $300 and lasts for two weeks and needs to be completely replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it gives you a glucose reading every 15 minutes and has a buffer of something like six hours. So as long as you copy the data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your phone every few hours, you don’t miss anything and it uses NFC. You just tap your phone on it and it copies the data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There They’re also prescription-only in the US, so you may have to pay for a doctor visit as well. The price of a watch is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely worth it to save pricking your finger, get continuous data, or not needing to bother a doctor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every two weeks. For all three, if Apple can pull it off, it’s a no-brainer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the price of a lot of these continuous glucose monitors are really expensive for multiple reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John One, they’re a quote-unquote prescription product that has a market that has
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of regulation, so there’s not a lot of competitors. And two, all those regulations that they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to comply with do end up making the product cost more money because it’s very difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s become slightly less difficult, I think, over time, but very difficult to actually comply to be a certified medical device that could
⏹️ ▶️ John kill people if it malfunctions. And so you pay for that privilege. And then also a bunch of the other ones, they have consumables,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the little patch you put on. Those patches don’t last forever. They last like 10 days or whatever. And if you’re lucky, they last 10
⏹️ ▶️ John days. And then you gotta peel them off and you gotta put a new one in because they just wear out. Like the sticky stuff wears out and the thing, they’re not supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in that long, right? So there’s consumables with things that are invasive, as in they shove something under your skin.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they’re just expensive. All that stuff is expensive because it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John a competitive consumer electronics market type thing. It’s more of a medical device. It’s like if you ever tried to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John good quality crutches or good quality walker or a good quality wheelchair, that stuff’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really expensive too. And that is a much lower bar in terms of compliance and regulation than one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John devices. thing is that we didn’t really mention last time is the thing that Apple is trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John come up with is a thing that would monitor your glucose levels
⏹️ ▶️ John but the they’re they’re not coming up with a way to put insulin into your body without a non-invasive
⏹️ ▶️ John insulin injection system would be even more fantastical so you know based on that information
⏹️ ▶️ John you will need to get insulin into yourself somehow and whether that’s the old-fashioned shots
⏹️ ▶️ John or the fancy insulin pumps that go into your, you know, under your
⏹️ ▶️ John skin or into your body, whatever, and then dispense the correct amount of insulin. That’s still going to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why I still say like the, you know, if you had a fantasy scenario, curing diabetes would be ideal.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t need anything shoved into your body. But eliminating one half of that, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John to not have to shove things into your self somewhere to get blood glucose
⏹️ ▶️ John readings would be fantastic for a lot of people. And then the cost of these are expensive things means that even though a
⏹️ ▶️ John watch would be expensive, it would still be cheaper. My point last time about the cost of the watch is that
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a non-invasive thing in theory that Apple comes up with and Unlike the invasive
⏹️ ▶️ John ones where I feel like not that people are happy to pay them But I think people kind of understand that hey if you’re getting something that
⏹️ ▶️ John shoves itself under your skin and that there’s a bunch of regulations around that because it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John you know It’s a more invasive device than a watch versus the thing you just put on that has some sensors in it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I feel like Apple would be experiencing price pressure because they did come up this miraculous thing people would expect
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be less expensive because it is less invasive, right? In the same way that the blood oxygen monitor you
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy from CVS is inexpensive because the Tekken, it’s not complicated and it’s quote unquote noninvasive.
⏹️ ▶️ John It clamps on your finger, but it’s literally just a little light, right? And people are gonna see the Apple Watch and say, I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about titanium. I don’t care about the quartz crystal glass. I don’t care about the fancy processor that
⏹️ ▶️ John can do all these amazing things. I just want the tiny sensor and the algorithm that you came up with and I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay $500 for it. So that’s why I feel like there would be price pressure on Apple to make that innovation
⏹️ ▶️ John available more widely, even though all those same people are still paying, either
⏹️ ▶️ John out of pocket or with a little bit help of firm insurance, way more money for the invasive system, simply because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is more reasonable for an invasive system to cost more because it is more fraught, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ John more complicated. Whereas if you come up with a non-invasive solution, it seems like it should be less expensive, unless it uses
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, whatever crystals from Star Trek to get the measurements. to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dilithium, is that what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There you go. Thank you. And a few other things in the diabetes and glucose monitoring that we heard. We had a lot of feedback from a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who know way more than we do about this, including many people with diabetes, people who have worked on equipment for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diabetes and things like that. And so, you know, obviously, again, our audience comes through really nicely with, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, a lot of very deep specialized knowledge. So thanks for all that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few of the highlights that we didn’t cover yet. there’s many different ways to measure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blood glucose even with the existing sensors. I was wrong about something, I want to follow up, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the continuous glucose monitors, I said they have a half inch needle sticking out that has to stay in your skin the whole time. Turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t stay in your skin the whole time, that it basically inserts a little wire into your skin and that little wire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stays in your skin the whole time but the needle just pops right out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, lots of people will send that information. It’s like, I understand that that is technically correct but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like people’s objection is to, oh, I don’t want a needle in my skin, I wanted a little tube.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was happy, because when my dog had to wear one of those, it was the Freestyle Libra or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when he had to wear one of those, I felt so bad for him that he had this thing in him the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week that it was in there. But he does, it’s just not a needle. It’s just a different thing. Right, but it’s at least not as
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. I know, but the point is, all these things, the reason they’re called invasive is because they
⏹️ ▶️ John shove something into your skin. And yes, a needle helps it get there, and then the needle goes away maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? but the thing is still in your skin. That’s why it’s invasive. So it’s not like when you prick your
⏹️ ▶️ John finger, which is horrible for its own reason, you prick it with a needle, but then the needle goes away and then you just squeeze blood
⏹️ ▶️ John out of your finger, which sucks, right? But the things that go under your skin, whether there’s a needle involved or not,
⏹️ ▶️ John something is under your skin the whole time that’s there. And the whole point is that thing that’s under your skin is very small, very light,
⏹️ ▶️ John not pointy, very slippery. Like it’s made to be as comfortable as possible, but there’s still something under your skin. So
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone was very quick to say, there’s not a needle under your skin. There’s something else under your skin, but forget about that, it’s not a needle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree, it’s better than a needle, but it’s still quote unquote invasive because there’s something sticking into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think one, so there were two big themes of feedback that I found unexpected,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just I didn’t know. So one of them is that those continuous monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not measuring in the bloodstream directly, they’re measuring in like subcutaneous, like skin and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tissue layers. And so it actually is kind of a delayed or like less precise measurement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And secondly, I assume, once I heard that insulin pumps existed and that continuous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitors existed, I assumed that what most, at least type 1 people with diabetes were doing was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having the monitor automatically dose the insulin pump, creating what is called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an artificial pancreas, effectively. And it turns out, based on the feedback, it sounds like that’s not actually that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common. And there’s actually this whole world of hacking, where people are like hacking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the monitor’s radio protocols to intercept the data and run the pump,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly manually, or at least get the data out so it’s less proprietary or whatever else. That’s a whole world that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know about. But basically, if you think about the risk factors here, if somebody with diabetes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives themselves too much insulin, they die. And too little insulin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if you can die from too much blood sugar. You probably can at some point, but at least it has other
⏹️ ▶️ John It has very terrible health effects and it will eventually kill you. I’m not sure if it kills you as fast as overdosing on insulin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has other problems at least, but yeah, have too much insulin and you’re dead. And so this is something that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to be left to a system that is potentially flaky or imprecise. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously huge high bars to clear for anything that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approved for medical use to do automatic dosing. And so there’s the separation of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you going to have monitoring? And if you don’t want to go full artificial pancreas mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which has those big risks, you can have monitoring, but you just use that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like information to decide for yourself how much insulin to dose.
⏹️ ▶️ John This kind of reminds me of the AI copyright thing. Like I really do wonder if that really
⏹️ ▶️ John absolves anyone from any kind of responsibility. It’s like, well, our insulin pump didn’t kill you. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John faulty measurement with some other device from another manufacturer, your lousy pin prick with your little test strips
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, it was your choice, person, to decide to dose yourself with this much insulin.
⏹️ ▶️ John So technically you made the mistake, not us, and our insulin pump isn’t at fault. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then they would say, okay, but then what about whatever system I use to measure my, you know, blood glucose level?
⏹️ ▶️ John The point of that system is it’s supposed to give me an accurate measure that I can take action based on and it gave me a wrong measure
⏹️ ▶️ John or a bad measure. So somebody’s responsible somewhere because it’s not as if the person magically knows
⏹️ ▶️ John their own blood glucose level. you’re using some kind of tool or product they bought from somebody that is
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to be for that purpose. And I kind of understand the pump people not getting into it, because they’re like, hey, we’re just a pump.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just do whatever you tell us. Like, if you typed in these numbers, we’re gonna do that. And as long as we did what you told
⏹️ ▶️ John us, we’re not liable. But somebody’s liable. And so whether that’s the resistance to the closed
⏹️ ▶️ John loop thing, or it’s, you know, like, so I feel like just because the person made the choice to enter
⏹️ ▶️ John that into the pump, if the company that makes the pump also makes the thing that gave them the measurement that made
⏹️ ▶️ John them type that in putting a person in the middle doesn’t like absolve anybody from responsibility. I feel like it’s still just a
⏹️ ▶️ John question of who was negligent here or whose product malfunctioned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and so that’s why I think what Apple is most likely to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they can get this to work and therefore be able to be made into a product feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that what they will probably do at least first and possibly forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is similar to what they’ve done. If you look at like the heart monitoring features and things like that, they’re not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meant for people who have chronic heart problems for the most part. It’s not giving you high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diagnoses, it isn’t giving you a lot of real-time actionable information that you need if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco special heart needs. It is giving you kind of an overview and warning of extreme conditions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think what they’re going to do here is actually design it, again, assuming this feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even ships eventually, actually design it so that it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very useful to a person with diabetes. Because of the inherent imprecision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in what they’re probably going to do compared to anything that’s actually measuring your blood, and combined with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delay that it would probably have based on being being probably based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like the continuous ones where like you’re not seeing everything exactly as it happens, I bet what they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do is delay the stats from it. The same way right now with the ovulation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco detection, they give you ovulation detection like after the fact. They look at your temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pattern over the last whatever and they tell you after the fact, oh by the way it looks like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ovulated or whatever. Remember when they launched that feature last fall with the Watch Series 8,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they called it something like retrospective something something. I bet they’re going to start with that, with this feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they might not tell you right now your blood glucose is this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they might tell you, here’s what your blood glucose was 12 hours ago or six hours ago, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let you build data from that. I’m like, oh, okay, whatever I had for lunch, that probably was a bad idea or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then secondly from that, maybe they will also warn you of extreme conditions. So if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way too high or way too low, maybe they’ll tap you and alert you of that. But I don’t see them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting into the real-time glucose monitoring business in version one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if ever, just because once you realize what that involves with FDA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearance and legal liability and the risk of people’s lives if it goes wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think Apple’s gonna wanna get into that that far. I think they’re gonna wanna hit the more broad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco health benefits of extreme condition monitoring and kind of delayed glucose monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can make different decisions about maybe your diet or your habits or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’re not using this thing to replace a medical device that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you actually need if you actually have diabetes.
Sonos voice-assistant follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, I made a kind of offhanded comment, I almost said yesterday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week, with regard to Sonos stuff. And my impression at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that unless you like add the Amazon lady in the tube to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonos setup, then that you couldn’t call out like, you know, hey, Dingus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play, mute math or whatever the case may be. And I have been corrected a couple of times. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dan Provost was actually the first person to say something. It turns out this is possible, and I will link to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonos voice control information page, like marketing page, on their website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only had the chance to try this very briefly, and honestly it was a little bit hit or miss. But I had thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incorrectly, that all you could do was move stuff between, move music or audio between rooms,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say join audio here and there, or stop, volume up, volume down, etc. But it turns out you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can actually call out a request, and it will do its best to play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that request from Spotify, Apple Music, whatever the case may be. So that is my mistake. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should look into this a little more if you’re at all interested.
⏹️ ▶️ John My poor Google Home had a rare instance of Siri brain the other day. I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, OK, Dingus lights out. And it waited a little while and it said something very
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri-like. It was like, lights out is not available for playing right now or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Something as
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for a song called –
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s got to be a thousand songs called Lights Out. So maybe it just couldn’t connect to the internet or whatever. it was like oh man
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s going on she’s hanging out with Siri too much normally it’s just does what I ask immediately and it gave me a seat
⏹️ ▶️ John and so I asked Siri to do it that’s why you gotta have multiple cylinders because you never know when some
⏹️ ▶️ John cylinder is going to betray you.
ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by ourselves, and in particular, our ATP
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the unedited live recording. It’s more rough audio quality wise,
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads in that either. And there’s little extra bits of content usually the beating an end that didn’t fit in the edited
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iPhone passcode thieves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s see here. There has been, speaking of betraying, there’s been a big brouhaha
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last couple of days after Joanna Stern and Nicole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nguyen, I hope I pronounced that somewhat close to correctly, they wrote a bit of a bombshell article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and as always with Joanna Stern, had a genuinely stellar video associated with it. She’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so good on video. It kind of makes me mad that she can be so good in print and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also so good in video. It’s not fair. But anyway, there’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of reporting done around this, mostly by Joanna and Nicole.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The problem is a lot of people, particularly in bigger cities, particularly outside bars,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly in the evening, particularly presumably after having a couple of alcoholic beverages, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finding that their iPhones are getting stolen, which in and of itself stinks, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s happening subsequent to the thief or part of the thief’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crew, shoulder surfing their passcode. So said differently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I’m out at the bar. I type in my, you know, one, two, three, four, five, a password, a passcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Somebody sees me do that. And then later on in the evening grabs my phone, knowing full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well that my passcode is one, two, three, four, five. This is a big freaking problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that means that the second they get the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can change your iCloud password, they can turn off Find My Phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and many, many other things. They can send themselves money with Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They can go into your banking app, and oftentimes they can go ahead and send themselves money from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Once you have your passcode, they have control over biometrics. They can change the biometrics and remove the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey biometrics, et cetera, it’s really, really bad. So reading from the article,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with only the iPhone and its passcode, an interloper can within seconds change a password associated with the iPhone owner’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ID. This would lock the victim out of their account, which includes anything stored in iCloud. The thief can also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often loot the phone’s financial app, since the passcode can unlock access to all the device’s stored passwords. As
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an aside, this is particularly bad when you’re using iCloud Keychain, which I’m not trying to say that iCloud Keychain is bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you’ve already got the key to your iOS kingdom, then you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have access to this interloper, as I said, has access to your iCloud keychain, and then you’re off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the races. Continuing from the article, a similar vulnerability exists in Google’s Android mobile operating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system. However, the higher resale value of iPhones makes them a far more common target, according to law enforcement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey officials. And a lot of times, there’ll be a story like this, and everyone will get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up in arms. Oh, look at this. Apple is just not even caring, not even trying. I don’t think that’s what this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is at all. I think this is just a crummy set of circumstances. Like I’m all for slagging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple if they are being negligent, but I don’t personally think that’s the case here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. I mean, there’s only, but so much they can do if somebody has grabbed your passcode and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phone. Like I think there, and we’ll talk about some mitigation strategies here in a second, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this is negligence on Apple’s part. And the problem is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as with all things, the more secure you make things, the less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey convenient they tend to be. And some of these fixes that we’ll talk about here in a minute, make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some stuff less convenient. And Apple has to ride the fine line between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making it easy enough for a power user like me, who is maybe willing to have a much harder time doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things or willing to jump through more hoops, versus my parents who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not dumb by any means and are pretty tech savvy for being nearly 70 years old. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, you know, they, they don’t want to have to jump through 3000 hoops in order to do a lot of the stuff that, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a passcode requires. So I don’t know, this, this does not strike me as one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where. It it’s a brouhaha made out of nothing, but it also doesn’t strike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me as Apple being negligent either. I don’t know. What, how should we
⏹️ ▶️ John think about this? I think it’s kind of like a historical hangover. Don’t you feel like, cause I mean, remember when the iPhone first
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, there wasn’t even a passcode. You just slide the little thing on the bottom and it unlocks different age,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, right? And then for a long time when they had the passcode feature, it was short
⏹️ ▶️ John and most people didn’t use it. And we’ve kind of worked our way up from there. And I feel like, well, first
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, this vulnerability has existed for ages. This is not a new thing or whatever. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the reason it’s existed is because they ended up in a situation where the passcode, this thing that, you know, first there
⏹️ ▶️ John was nothing, then there was passcode and then passcode got bigger. And then, you know, we just built up this whole big security infrastructure,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the passcode was always there. And I think just, they just let it go. You know, things that were
⏹️ ▶️ John okay years and years ago, like having no passcode, were allowed to live too long. And I think the thing that was
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to live too long here is that the unlock code from your phone can do
⏹️ ▶️ John just one or two too many things. Because yes, it unlocks your phone or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that you can do stuff like change your Apple ID password from your phone without
⏹️ ▶️ John knowing the old Apple ID password, as long as you know the passcode, seems like a bit much. And you could say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s actually good because people forget their Apple ID password and they can change it from the phone. Like I understand the utility of that feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it seems like something that sort of accidentally happened because the keys to your iCloud kingdom
⏹️ ▶️ John where your passcode was when they added iCloud to phones and then you had your passcode to unlock it. And it just
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed like, well, why would we make them enter their password? They’re already on their quote unquote trusted device and they know their passcode. So we shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ask them for any more, right? But certain things are irreplaceable. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that really gets me about this is not even so much people stealing money or sending stuff like this. because a lot of the times,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can go through fraud, you can have a file fraud request with the bank and, you know, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a credit card or whatever, yeah, you might lose some money, but in general, it’s actually more difficult than you
⏹️ ▶️ John think to like, take huge amounts of money from someone without having given them any recourse, especially in the
⏹️ ▶️ John age of credit cards and all that other stuff, right? And even with debit cards, like it’s hard to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John large amounts without, uh, you know, firing up a flag or having your bank stop it or whatever. The thing that really
⏹️ ▶️ John kills me about these, these, uh, thefts is if someone gets your phone and can use your little
⏹️ ▶️ John passcode to change your Apple ID and to lock you out of your Apple ID. And often, if they lock you
⏹️ ▶️ John out, and you know, even if the if the thief gets caught and arrested and goes to jail, wherever you may still never get your Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID back, because the whole point of the security is that Apple kit doesn’t have a magic internal key to unlock all your stuff. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John change your password, and or they deleted everything from your thing or whatever, like you may never get that Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John back. And what’s associated with that by the photos, your family photos was the
⏹️ ▶️ John person that video was like, lost their phone, and they lost like, like 15 years worth of photos, right? And for most
⏹️ ▶️ John people, that’s the only place they have them. I know if you’re listening to this show, of course you have 17
⏹️ ▶️ John of your iCloud photo library and it’s on backups and it’s on a time machine, it’s on your Synology, it’s on an external disc,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve backed up the back place, but you’re not like most people. Most people, it’s literally just quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote on their phone. They think it’s safe, it’s like, oh, I dropped my phone in a lake a year ago and I got a new phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John all my pictures are still there. And that just gives them this amazing confidence that their pictures are safe. Well, if a thief gets your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and they change your Apple ID password, you may never see those photos again. If you don’t have those photos anywhere else,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s it. They’re gone. They’re still there in some, you know, S3 server somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re protected by a password on iCloud account that you’re never gonna get back. And that is terrible. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is not replaceable. You can’t file a fraud, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John request or whatever with your bank to say, hey, someone stole my thing. No one can give you those pictures back.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yes, that’s why you should have backups, But also that’s why the sort of iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID takeover is something that should not be possible by shoulder-suffering somebody’s one, two, three, four
⏹️ ▶️ John unlock code. Because that’s a bridge too far. Yes, they can take over your phone. Yes, maybe they can get into your
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, although the good banking apps will require face ID and won’t let you use a passcode. Yes, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll get into your passwords or whatever, but they’re in this type of situation where it’s a race then
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to quickly change all your passwords or log everybody out of all your things or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John none of those things are as, they’re all annoying and terrible and can really screw with your life, but none of those things are as
⏹️ ▶️ John valuable as your whole lives with the photos of all your kids. Like people who are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John much younger than I am, the only photos they have are digital photos. And all those photos are on their phone and they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John making backups because who the heck make backups? Or they think the iCloud is their backup. Well, guess what? When someone owns your Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can’t get that Apple ID back ever, all those photos are gone, gone. If you’re lucky,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you have a Mac where you have a local cash copy of them. And if you’re lucky, you know how, someone knows enough to how to get them
⏹️ ▶️ John back without, you know, getting locked out of your Apple ID when it tries to sync with iCloud. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s grim, right? So I feel like the passcode on your phone should
⏹️ ▶️ John not allow you to be owned that hard. It should, particularly, you should
⏹️ ▶️ John not be able to take over an Apple ID because you know one, two, three, four,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the sort of the authentication where they say, well, it’s two factor, we’ll send you a thing. Well, they’re gonna send
⏹️ ▶️ John it to your phone and not, you know, not SMS, Apple has their own like two factor thing. Like that’s going to let them
⏹️ ▶️ John get through too. But I feel like you should have to know your password to, uh, reset your password.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I’m sure someone who works in Apple support is going to say, we can’t do that. If we did that no one would ever be able to reset their password
⏹️ ▶️ John because like they forget their password and they want to use their phone to get out of it or they want, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there needs to be an easier way. So I feel for Apple in this situation, but, and one more
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, This is why touch ID and face ID are great because they let you not
⏹️ ▶️ John have to enter your unlock code. They can’t steal your face or your fingerprint as easily. So far, thieves haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John figured that out, but shoulder surfing your one, two, three, four is trivial. Right? In a crowded bar, you have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea who’s over your shoulder, your screen’s lit up or whatever. And it’s like, why would anybody type in their passcode?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, what if you’re wearing a mask? What if face ID doesn’t work because you’re wearing a scarf or a hat
⏹️ ▶️ John or someone’s like, especially in the age of COVID and all these masks, even though yes, Face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID supposedly works with a mask, sometimes it just doesn’t unlock, sometimes you just wanna check out the grocery store and it doesn’t read with
⏹️ ▶️ John your mask and you just do enter passcode and you type it in, right? Being shoulder surf is more of a risk now than before,
⏹️ ▶️ John but all of those technologies, Face ID and Touch ID and improving them and making them work with masks is a mitigation
⏹️ ▶️ John against this kind of attack because it is harder for run-of-the-mill thieves to do that than it is
⏹️ ▶️ John for someone to look over your shoulder and see your passcode. So I feel like what Apple has to do here is
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’ve already been doing, which is keep working on methods of authentication that are not typing in a stupid code
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s too short or whatever, because no one types through a long one, we’ll get to that in a second. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John also, if at all possible, make it so that you cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John solely with the phone and one, two, three, four, lock someone out of their Apple ID for good by
⏹️ ▶️ John changing their Apple ID password. Like that’s how you lock somebody out. If you change their password now, they don’t know the password,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you do, they’re never gonna get back in again and all their photos belong to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think what we can do in the short term is raise awareness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this vulnerability because, like I was on the talk show and I said some of this already, so forgive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me if you heard both. What came as a huge surprise to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that you can change an Apple ID password if you have the passcode to a logged in phone. That,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had no clue that was possible. And there’s a mitigation of that, which we’ll get to in a second. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s good that we know that now. Because I think most people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you’re going through John’s history of the universe there of like before we had passcodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people don’t fully realize how much is at risk if somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes over your entire Apple account and has one of your logged in devices. Like there is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much at risk now in your life if that happens that I feel like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to treat that pretty carefully, we have to guard that very well. The same way we would guard like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the possessions in our house. You know, like, hey, lock the door at night. You know, that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But most people, I don’t think, treat their phone with that level of security.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And especially their passcode, because most people just think if you know the passcode, oh, I guess you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get to like play on my phone without me knowing it, if you steal my phone also. But you don’t also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you are going to be able to take over my entire Apple account and also lock me out of it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s useful, like what I’ve done in this, in response to this, of learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, is I’ve gone back to an alphanumeric passcode, like a password,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I had left it during COVID because I kept having to go grocery shopping with masks, and this was before Face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID with mask support, and so it was a huge pain in the butt, and so I switched back to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numeric code for that, but now I switched back to the password-style code because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one, it’s more secure, But number two, and I think this is the bigger one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m entering a password into a password field, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of just automatically, inherently, treat it like something more secure physically to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world around me. So I’m not gonna like type in a password into my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that I think other people can easily overlook, you know, look over my shoulder and see it, or see it from across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the room or whatever. You know, I might hold the phone closer to me. I might just not do it for that time just put it back in my pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and do it later. You know, I would take better physical precautions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of automatically or habitually, when something looks like a password as opposed to this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a six digit code that you type on these giant buttons. And it’s so easy to do that you do it a million times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a day. You know, most people who I see typing in their passcode, you know, on a routine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basis, usually it’s people who don’t routinely let Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Touch ID work for them. Either it doesn’t work for them or they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly go to type in the passcode because it has failed them in the past and they don’t trust it anymore. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when your passcode is really easy and it’s just a couple of numbers to type in, it’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get into that habit. If your passcode is a password that’s non-trivial,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you’re going to be much more likely to rely more on the biometrics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever possible. And you know, if the biometrics aren’t working for a long time, you’re having to type in your password all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe instead of just abandoning a face ID, maybe you’ll like retrain face ID and like reset it, or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Because that’s a that’s a huge problem. I don’t know if Apple’s ever going to really get,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, everyone to trust the biometrics. But one of the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things they can do is make the biometrics work for more people. And I don’t just mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it possible to work, I mean, make them compelling, so that there are fewer and fewer people over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who refuse to use them and just type in their one, two, three, four every time they open their phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if the passcode has, because of the amount of power the passcode has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that again, most people don’t realize, but the amount of power the passcode has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple needs to really try as much as, and I know they do, but as much as they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly can to try to make sure no one is sticking with typing in 1111,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 1000 times a day in all kinds of places in public every single time they take their phone out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why the face ID with mask is so important. Like, yes, it was we talked about when I did it does decrease the security,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s less of a face that you’re identifying or whatever, but it is still preferable to
⏹️ ▶️ John people typing in 1234. Right. And alphanumeric passcode like that is in our list of mitigations here. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the first one on the list. That’s a definite mitigation. It’s harder to shoulder surf, whether it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John of your body posture, like Margo said, just because of the plain fact that presumably your alphanumeric passcode is not 1234.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just making it alphanumeric doesn’t solve any problems other than giving you a tiny keyboard to type on. You actually have to make it longer
⏹️ ▶️ John and more complicated. Of course, nobody wants to do that. So this is the most difficult solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you go with the Marcos solution, it’s like, oh, it’s a perverse incentive. I hate it so much I will avoid it whenever possible
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll use biometrics. As we talked about in the past, apparently old people can’t use Touch ID because
⏹️ ▶️ John their fingerprints are too non consistent, which is rough. But I think face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID should work about as well for everybody, including older people.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you know, but again, it’s just a question of like, Oh, what it failed me once or twice. And now I give up on it because it’s newfangled because
⏹️ ▶️ John people blame themselves, especially people who are less familiar technology, they blame themselves, they think I’m doing something wrong, it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John me feel bad when I stare at this rectangle, and it just blinks at me and gives me some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of error that that I don’t understand. It makes me not wanna do that because I feel like I’m failing. I’m failing to use the device,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that doesn’t feel good. And it’s like, well, you know what? I could type one, two, three, four every single time. It’s I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John familiar with the touch pad button. It’s a technology that was created in my lifetime when I went from rotary dial to
⏹️ ▶️ John touch tone dialing. I made that transition when I was 30 and now I’m comfortable with it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even gonna bother with Face ID. And it is Apple’s challenge to get those people on board. And every time they make Face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID faster for it to work on more angles, it to work with a mask on, like, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John all an attempt to get those people on board. You’re not going to get everybody all the time, but that’s why I commend Apple’s efforts
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to make Face ID the go-to option, despite the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that, like I said, I think they should clamp down on the power of the passcode, which I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like is just sort of an inherited advantage, because in the beginning that’s all there was, and now there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ John more, but the passcode has retained its power. It’s retained the keys to the kingdom, and maybe it’s time to think
⏹️ ▶️ John about taking them away. The second mitigation here is use a different password manager. This is for
⏹️ ▶️ John the mitigation on people not getting your passwords. It doesn’t help with your Apple ID because again, the passcode is going to give you access to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But if you don’t want it to have all the passwords to all your different websites, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use Apple’s iCloud keychain because once they get into your Apple ID, they have access to
⏹️ ▶️ John your iCloud keychain, which is where your passwords are, and they can look them all up. I mean, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John could shoulder surf your one password password as well. But again, And presumably that’s harder depending if you, you know, presumably you have a long
⏹️ ▶️ John alphanumeric thing for that. That is an advantage of having, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, having sort of a, not putting all your eggs in one basket. The disadvantage is that it’s a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated than, and potentially more costly than using the Apple solution. So I’m glad Apple builds
⏹️ ▶️ John in iCloud Keychain and I’m glad they continue to enhance it and, you know, support the
⏹️ ▶️ John timed authentication code stuff and cloud syncing and eventually pass keys. All that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John but if someone cracks your Apple ID, they own all that stuff too. Yay.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the final thing that you can do to mitigate this, which is what I’ve actually done, and I think pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much everybody listening to the show should do, because there’s not a lot of downsides and it directly addresses the vulnerability
⏹️ ▶️ John is, we’ll get to this in the after show, I suppose, but to use this screen time feature, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John a feature to try to limit people, presumably in a family, how much time
⏹️ ▶️ John they spend in various applications. You can add content restrictions. It’s like, oh, this is for kids. so they’re not on YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John late at night. Ha ha, what kid would do that? But as the family
⏹️ ▶️ John organizer or whatever they call it, or even as an adult, you can enable screen time on your own
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. Whether it’s to try to train yourself not to use Twitter too much, which we talked about in the past, it’s not much of
⏹️ ▶️ John an issue anymore. Or whatever it is you wanna do. You can set up screen time on your own phone and put limits on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And it’s like, well, why would I wanna do that? What’s the point of that? And you know, it might be a fun thing for
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do for to shape your own habits, but also you can add
⏹️ ▶️ John a screen time passcode, which is mostly you would think that’s mostly there so the kids can’t go to the settings and screen
⏹️ ▶️ John time and like disable their descriptions because they don’t know your screen time passcode. Well, guess what? Your screen time
⏹️ ▶️ John passcode can be different than your phone’s unlock code. So what you do is you go into screen
⏹️ ▶️ John time, you enable it in setting screen time, and then you set a screen time passcode
⏹️ ▶️ John and make it different than your phone passcode. I think it’s limited to four digits. So it’s not great,
⏹️ ▶️ John but set a screen time passcode that you will remember and make it different than your phone lock thing
⏹️ ▶️ John on your own phone. Now, obviously, like what’s the point of that? You can always unlock it, because if you get annoyed by something, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John setting, you can just go into screen time and disable the passcode, because you’ll type, it’ll say, okay, you want to turn off the passcode, type it in and you’ll type
⏹️ ▶️ John it in and it will disable it. It’s not to stop you, it’s to stop the thief. And then the final thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you do is in setting screen time, go to enable content privacy restrictions.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like the big switch at the very top of the screen. And then after you turn that on, all the options below
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the screen will be enabled. Scroll, scroll, scroll until you see an option called account changes,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you wanna change that to don’t allow. So you’re using screen time to stop your
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote yourself from doing one specific thing, which is making changes to your account.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once you do that, then if the thief gets your phone and they unlock it with your passcode
⏹️ ▶️ John that they shoulder surfed, when they go to change your Apple ID password, it will say, uh-uh-uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John screen time says you’re not allowed to make changes to your account. And if they go try to disable screen time, it’ll say,
⏹️ ▶️ John please enter your screen time passcode, which they did not shoulder serve from you because why are you ever gonna be entering your screen
⏹️ ▶️ John time passcode ever because the only restriction you put on it is account changes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, there may be ways around screen time restrictions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Clever Thiefs will figure it out. Clever Thiefs will get your stuff no matter what. Like, it’s tough. But like, the run-of-the-mill thief
⏹️ ▶️ John will be thwarted by an additional four-digit code that they don’t know. And so until and unless
⏹️ ▶️ John it becomes well-known how to get around this particular restriction of screen time, you can stop someone from totally
⏹️ ▶️ John taking over your Apple ID by enabling screen time, setting a passcode on it, and then turning off account changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and by the way, when you do this, when you set the thing, it will prompt you and it will say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you wanna be able to use your Apple ID to unlock screen time in case you forget the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen time passcode? It’s not obvious from the UI what you have to do here, but it’s like, oh, it’s making
⏹️ ▶️ John me enter my Apple ID. Isn’t that just gonna, because once a thief has your Apple ID with your passcode, can’t they just
⏹️ ▶️ John disable the screen time thing that way? What you have to do is you have to hit cancel when it prompts you to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like you’re saying you’re canceling the whole operation, but you’re not. You’re just canceling this part. When you hit cancel, it prompts you and
⏹️ ▶️ John it says, are you sure you wanna have a screen time passcode and you don’t wanna have a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to get around that screen time passcode with your Apple ID? Because if you forget the screen time passcode, it could be bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. So like, don’t, you know, write it down somewhere. Don’t put it in iCloud Keychain where the thief can
⏹️ ▶️ John get it because they own your Apple ID. Put it somewhere else. And you just hit cancel on
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And it prompts you and you have to put like skip or whatever. And so then you’ll have a screen time passcode
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not in your iCloud Keychain. Don’t put it there. Don’t put it in a secure note because they can unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John that with your passcode. Don’t put it in the notes app, put it somewhere else. And it’s only four digits,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it could save your butt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I did all this this morning when I saw the show up in the show notes. Um, I have tried to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put fairly straightforward descriptions and, uh, of how you do this in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes. Um, and so in the show notes that you guys can see, sorry, the, the one I was talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about earlier is the one only the three of us can see. So anyway, uh, we have stuff in the show notes for you folks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, um, hopefully that will be helpful. I mean, again, you know, it’s where, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is your threat threshold, right? Like if you don’t go to bars, if you’re never around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, you know, then maybe you don’t need to do all these mitigations, but I don’t know. I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am, I’m not a bar going kind of fellow, but nevertheless, you know, I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey returned to using an alphanumeric passcode. I had been using one for a couple of years, maybe even a few years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I, it was in the last year or two, maybe it was during the mask thing. Like Marco was talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. I really honestly don’t remember, but at some point I went to a six digit passcode. Well now I’m back in the alphanumeric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and then I did all these screen time protections as well And then I’m not an iCloud keychain person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it But I am a one password kind of person So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously that’s what I’m using for all of my banking passwords and things like that. So I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better protected now Than I was before but yeah This is this is alarming and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s tough because what is Apple supposed to do like there are instances where people forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their Apple ID passwords. And then what are they supposed to do at that point? From Apple’s perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have a device that has been logged, you know, you have logged into that device, so to speak, you know, you’ve, you’ve unlocked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the device. Why not let the person do that? You know, why shouldn’t they let them change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their own Apple ID? And obviously we just described why not, but it’s, it’s a tough, it’s a tough nut to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crack. And I don’t know what the right answer is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And if you have a Mac, by the way, like basically the passcode to your Mac is the password to your Mac account. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ John still change your Apple ID password if you forget it from your Mac because you’ll enter your it’ll prompt
⏹️ ▶️ John you for your Mac password and I think you can do it from the web through various techniques as well you have recovery codes like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of other ways around this even if you do this this is just protecting your phone so if someone
⏹️ ▶️ John shoulder surfs your Mac account password and it’s an admin account you’re also kind of owned as well that
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like is you know a little like again if you’re in a coffee shop on your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John typing in your Mac’s password and someone shoulder surfs that from you and takes
⏹️ ▶️ John off with your laptop you have a similar problem, maybe a similar mitigation, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, thief suck. Be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco careful out there. Yeah. Also, I wanted to issue a small correction to what I said in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk show. So I guess this is auto follow out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I, you know, we’re talking about this, and I was saying like, you know, it normally I, I feel like my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bank app is fairly safe because I use Face ID and because I don’t store the bank password in one password.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I thought that that was safe. But then I realized, Oh, no, that’s not safe. Because if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your if you have the phone’s passcode, then you can just type that in instead of providing face ID. Well, it turns out that’s wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes. So that when you know when when the app developer is storing something in keychain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the you know, using the keychain API’s, we are able to set different security levels and flags
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it to for like, you know, what kind of how much security it needs, what certain behaviors be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it require certain things to be unlocked, what happens when the phone locks, you know, stuff like that. And apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the modes that app developers can choose to use is you can require the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biometric face ID or touch ID, but not offer a fallback to the pin code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, if somebody changes the registered face or the fingerprints
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have those not work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s that’s what my bank does. Because every time I get a new phone, I realized I can’t use any of my bank apps and no enter my pass. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it does. There’s no prompt for it. It’s like, like, oh, face ID is totally disabled. You gotta log in the long, painful way
⏹️ ▶️ John by typing in a bunch of stuff and answering a bunch of questions. And then at the very end of that process, it says, oh, and by the way, now that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve cleared all these hurdles, do you wanna use face ID? And you say, yes. Every time I get a new phone, I have to do that. And yeah, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no passcode fallback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in this case, that’s a very good thing because that means that if you go through these vulnerabilities, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if someone steals your phone and knows your passcode, but doesn’t know your bank password, and you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store it in iCloud Keychain, then this will prevent them from being able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get into an app like this if it’s configured this way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Joke’s on them because my bank account has such low transfer limits that they’ll only be able
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to steal a very small
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of money before
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they get locked out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And also, and this is why at the end of that process, when you are telling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your bank account, please use Face ID, this is why it then immediately scans your face. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it’s saying is not, trust any registered face on this phone. What it’s saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is trust this face and it scans it and then it trusts only that face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same thing for Touch ID if you have a Touch ID device. So that’s very good to know and so it’s not, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attack surface is not as bad as I initially assumed but it’s still pretty bad and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so definitely start thinking of your phone PIN with the same level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of security that you would treat your Apple ID password with. If your phone pin is less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure than your Apple ID password, really ask yourself if that’s the right move for you going forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and really consider making your phone pin a nice password.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking about Apple needs to have, because I was thinking about what would happen if this happened to my phone and they got it
⏹️ ▶️ John stolen from me, even if I had the screen time password on, right? Kind of like on
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone and on the watch, there’s these various features where you hold down the side buttons and it goes into emergency mode or the watch
⏹️ ▶️ John will call the police if if you’re in a car accident and you’re not conscious and you know, like all those things they have for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in case of emergency, here’s how you initiate the, it’s emergency time procedure
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone or the watch. But there is no such user-friendly procedure that is
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to find or know or do quickly under pressure for,
⏹️ ▶️ John my Apple ID is about to be owned. Log me out of all devices, you know, lock everything down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Us as tech nerds could eventually figure out the right things to do, in the moment when you’re panicking,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not so easy. Like, where do I start? What do I go to? Should I go to the web interface? Should I open Safari? Should I, you know, go on my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad? Should I go on my Mac? Should I call somebody who has access to like, we kind of know what we’d
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do. Change all your passwords, lock everything out, go into all your things that says, log me out of all devices. But
⏹️ ▶️ John do you know how to get to the log me out of all devices in your iCloud thing quickly? Or would you just go to iCloud.com and
⏹️ ▶️ John like log in and like frantically look for something, right? I feel like there should be a big red button, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone has been stolen. like whatever Apple wants to call it, right? And no, find my iPhone is not that
⏹️ ▶️ John solution because I don’t care about where my iPhone is. I care about where, you know, access to, you know, the keys to
⏹️ ▶️ John the kingdom. Lock down all my iCloud key chain stuff and don’t allow anybody in if they don’t know my Apple ID password.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because again, you haven’t, like, your Apple ID has not been compromised in that they don’t know your Apple ID password.
⏹️ ▶️ John You never typed that in anywhere. All you did was type one, two, three, four. That’s what they shoulder surf. So I would love the big
⏹️ ▶️ John red button that says lock down and everything. From this point on, Nobody can
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything without knowing my Apple ID password. If they know your Apple ID password, you’re further screwed, but you know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only so much you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the problem though is that you probably wouldn’t have the time to take those actions. Because if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you think about it, you’re outside of the bar, these people have already shoulder surfed your password. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they grab your phone, they run around the corner or whatever, and or as they’re running, they are going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and changing your Apple ID password. Meanwhile, you’re saying to someone near you, oh, hey, can I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use your phone right now? Yes, hand it to me, quick, unlock it, go.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why it has to be a big red button because the big red button should be, press this button, it should be something as easy
⏹️ ▶️ John as pressing the side buttons on your phone or whatever. It should be really easy to do and you should be able to do it on behalf of somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John else by typing in their Apple ID. Because locking down your Apple ID should be non-destructive. Anyone could do it to you
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally or whatever. It doesn’t stop anything from happening, it just raises the bar that now your
⏹️ ▶️ John passcode is no longer sufficient to do all the things that it had the power to do, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I get that. But even still, like, even if the three of us are out, and let’s say somebody runs with my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone, and we know each other, we’re friendly. Even if I said you give me your phone right now, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chase them chasing
⏹️ ▶️ John down all that running you’ve been doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t run that much anymore. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a foot race at that point. I feel like you just don’t let them escape.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But But my point is just like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John wouldn’t have the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seriously, I wouldn’t have the time to to grab your phone out of your hand or have you unlock it and hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to me and do a whole login and so on and so forth. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think- You could do it on your watch if you had an Apple watch on or if you had a Mac laptop that was logged in. Like I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it’s a foolproof solution, but I’m saying it is so difficult to even know where to begin now, even if you did
⏹️ ▶️ John have access to the thing. And as for the thieves immediately doing it, nah, you know, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John probably got a, you know, 60 seconds to 90 seconds before they get anything done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you used Find My recently? And I know that you’re not necessarily advocating Find My,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe that, yeah, maybe that’s the thieves would be worried about turning off Find My and not worried about like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, owning your Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Cause they don’t want,
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole thing is they don’t want your photos. They want the phone to resell and they want to buy things with your money. Like that’s what they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what you can, it’s a, you’re taking advantage of the fact that the cares don’t overlap as much. The things that
⏹️ ▶️ John the thief wants, the things that you want to protect are actually different. You want to protect your Apple ID and your photos. He doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care anything about your Apple ID. Mostly doesn’t care about your photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I would also like to protect my money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. But your money, you’re mostly going to get back, like, you know, or at least some of it, but money is, money
⏹️ ▶️ John is replaceable And they’re not going to be able, because again, because of the limits on most of the banking system, it’s not like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be able to drain your life savings. Like that only happens in the movies with rich people. They can’t get that much, unless
⏹️ ▶️ John your life savings is a thousand dollars, in which case you have other problems. But they’re not gonna get all your money. They’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna wanna use credit cards, which are fraud protected. If they use your debit card and your Apple Cash, they’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ John get most of it, but even then there are limits and the bank will eventually flag it. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John But your photos and your Apple ID, that’s what you care about. Because in the aftermath of this, We say, well, all those pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John that you had in your Apple ID, you’re never going to see them again. And by the way, you got to start over with a new Apple ID and no, you can’t transfer any of your purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that forget about the purchases or whatever, but the family photos, I feel like that is the most valuable
⏹️ ▶️ John thing on your device. And other than looking, looking for naked pictures of you, The thieves don’t care about that.
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#askatp: Gigabit internet service
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. And Pitar Petrovich writes, a few days ago I saw you flexing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mastodon about your symmetrical residential gigabit fiber connections. And since I’m in the process of renewing my contract
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my local ISP, I wonder if it’s worth it to pay extra for such a thing, or should I stick to the cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey packages with lower speeds? What are some of your use cases that are worth the extra monthly cost? How often is your link fully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saturated? This is a great question and I strongly implore you to consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who it is answering this question because I cannot fathom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a more nerdy group to answer this question. And so your needs and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our needs may not mesh and that’s okay. But for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I absolutely think that almost anyone could really benefit from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half a gigabit to a gigabit downstream speeds. As a silly example, and I actually forgot that this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Ask ATP questions for this week, but I was downloading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Xcode beta, which actually I think has fixed a problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my forthcoming app, which I’m really excited about because something was woefully broken. And I guess it was broken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal to Apple stuff because then Apple fixed it, which is great. But anyways. Welcome to SwiftUI. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, it’s so true. It was SwiftUI and you’re exactly right. Well, anyways, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was downloading the New Mexico beta and I had tweeted, tweeted, whatever you want to call it, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, look at this. And according to iStatMenus, you know, John’s favorite app, I was downloading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 103 megabytes per second, not bits, excuse me, 108 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per second. I’m sure that’s probably not exactly right, but it was probably close and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that That is really freaking fast. So I don’t get those speeds that often.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I typically top out at like 50-ish megabytes a second if I’m downloading something somewhat large.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, I thought it was extremely cool that I was grabbing this humongous Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey download that quickly. So on the downstream side, basically anytime you’re downloading anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big or you want it to be here immediately. So I don’t know, say if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to play music from Apple Music or Spotify or something like that. Having a really, really wide,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so to speak, download pipe, I think that’s convenient to almost everyone. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think is as cut and dry is having an equally large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upstream pipe. For me, I love having it because I’m a weirdo and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do weird stuff with my internet connection to keep it PG. And by that I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a VPN running out of the house. I have WireGuard on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Raspberry Pi. I also, for redundancy, run Tailscale, former sponsor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And whenever I’m not at home, like whenever my MacBook or my devices are not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at home and are on foreign, if you will, Wi-Fi, even Wi-Fi that I trust, like my parents,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, I still automatically connect to the Raspberry Pi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via WireGuard because then it’s like I haven’t even left the house. And that means all of my internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey traffic, including just regular web browsing, looking at Mastodon, et cetera, that’s still coming and round tripping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through my house. And if I had a really slow upstream speed, I would feel it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even remotely. And even leaving that aside, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am a devout Plex user. I won’t talk too much about it, but suffice to say you can stream things from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other Plex users in certain circumstances, which means if somebody wants to stream something from me, it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a large upstream pipe. whenever I need to upload anything, like if I’m uploading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the recording this evening, that goes faster. And it just, basically when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a big, huge, symmetric gigabit connection, you wait less for everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is great. Like I enjoy waiting not very much. And so when I don’t have to wait as much,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes me happy. So that’s my two cents. I don’t know, let’s start with Marco. Did I get this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right or do you disagree?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s pretty much it. I mean, when you hear internet speeds, keep in mind those are bits,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not bytes, and so divide by eight. And so, like you were saying, you got a little over 100 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per second download. That’s pretty close to the theoretical maximum, which is 125 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a gigabit connection. When you have a faster and faster internet connection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not gonna be downloading everything at that speed, because you are going to be dependent on the server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you are talking to, and its ability to send things to you at that speed, and through all the different things that are in between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and it. So many things will not be faster, but many things will because increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this world, we are being delivered things from CDNs who will have things being served to you from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly close by, relatively speaking. And so anything served by a CDN, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very large Xcode download, we’re not serving that from California. That’s being served
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to us from somewhere closer, unless you are in California, in which case you are probably having it served from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco California. But for the rest of you, anyway. So there’s a lot of things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that where anything served by a CDN that’s close to you will usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go maximum line speed that it can get to you. And that’s gonna be pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly different when you’re talking about a large multi-gig download. I mean, these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything is huge. Every app on your phone is hundreds of megs. When you watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming TV, you’re streaming hundreds of megs to gigs. for like to watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one TV show. You know, you’re streaming a movie that’s probably multiple gigs throughout the stream.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, just sitting down watching Netflix at night, like you don’t even realize you’re streaming gigs of data. If there’s more people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your house or if you’re trying to do more than one thing at once, like right now we’re recording a podcast. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is using nothing. This, you know, this is using, you know, hundreds of kilobytes per second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably. What the fat pipe means is that I don’t need to tell the other people in my house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while while I’m podcasting, hey, don’t download anything right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s not at risk at all. Like, it’s just rock solid. And that’s the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit you get with very fast connections. Things are just so rock solid, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much headroom, as Casey was saying, like there’s so much headroom in the transfer speed, that even when you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using all of that bandwidth to download something from a CDN that’s really big, like even when you’re not using all that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still getting benefits in other ways, besides just, you know, not being,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you aren’t constantly downloading 125 megabytes per second, but you are getting other benefits. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the upstream, like one thing I noticed is when I am uploading a podcast, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens on a fairly regular basis, it’s going to happen in about 14 hours. And when I’m uploading a podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m uploading it to a CDN. And and so it goes faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s simple as that, like it doesn’t doesn’t go a gigabit, because I’m not the CDN is not that close. But I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes faster than when I’m in Westchester. And there I only have 150 megabit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connection, which is very fast, at least it was very fast when I got it installed, you know, 12 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, I noticed the difference whenever I’m back there, I notice when I go from a gigabit to 150.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I notice it’s not like it going back to dial up or anything, it’s still a very fast connection, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are areas, certain things that I do notice. And it’s again, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a huge deal, but having a faster connection is a noticeable luxury.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s really nice to know if something is being slow, it’s probably not your fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s at least it isn’t your internet connection. You know, there might be other things at play there. And I would also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point out the utility of gigabit connections is highly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dependent on being wired with Ethernet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true. All the all the new WiFi standards, they always advertise these peak speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can get that are either, you know, hundreds of megabits or even some of them advertise capabilities of being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above a gigabit. In practice, the real world speeds are almost never that high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to basically be on top of the router and have no no interference from anything else nearby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be under you know, ideal atmospheric conditions like there’s so many variables to Wi Fi. If you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expecting high performance out of Wi Fi only devices or you know, devices that that are usually kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of via Wi Fi, you might not see as much of a real world gain. And so maybe it might not be worth it to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for wired devices, that benefit is very much there. And also just make sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have a pretty decent modern router that has gigabit upstream port, and that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough grunt CPU wise and memory wise to actually maintain like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the NAT tables and all the buffers and everything to actually you know route and process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that fast of a connection. And you know if your ISP supports that connection usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worst case scenario you can just use the router they give you because usually that they will give you one that can handle that kind of connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re selling that kind of connection. But you know if you if you’re stuck on like some old you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WRT54G you know maybe this is the time to upgrade it. So make sure your other stuff can handle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But if you are wired and if you have a good router,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will notice differences.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the biggest sin in ISP things is sometimes related to technology, sometimes related to finance,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes both of the incredibly asymmetrical connections where they give you a decent download speed and then a total garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John upload speed. Not just garbage compared to the download, but just not good, period, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll get 150 megabits down, two megabits up and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not acceptable. It’s the cable is the worst in this regard. So I would argue strongly for symmetrical because
⏹️ ▶️ John your download speed’s probably gonna be okay and if your upload speed is the same as your download speed that’s a symmetrical connection
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s good. And the main use case for that is when you do FaceTime with people or whatever video conferencing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John your upload speed determines how you look to them. I know because I FaceTime with relatives who have a crap internet
⏹️ ▶️ John connection and their upload speed is terrible and they look bad because it will
⏹️ ▶️ John squeeze their video over their tiny crappy connection. It’s like their wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad, but bottom line, if they were wired in, their upload speed is like one or two megabits and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get a really good high res 4K image with sound in that size
⏹️ ▶️ John pipe apparently. They look bad because their upload speed is bad. So that’s one of the things to
⏹️ ▶️ John think about. The reverse side of that is, if you are watching Netflix and you have a really
⏹️ ▶️ John slow internet connection, really slow, right? or if there’s a problem with it or your Wi-Fi is bad, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix will still work. The picture will just look worse. They use adaptive algorithms to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your bandwidth type is smaller, we will send you more heavily compressed, lower resolution video.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you wanna get what you’re paying for, especially if you’re paying more for the stupid 4K Netflix, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John however much that costs extra, you’ll need an internet connection that can handle that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to the point that both of you made, that can handle that even if you’re in a household with a family
⏹️ ▶️ John and your kid is downloading a torrent of something and someone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco else is watching a
⏹️ ▶️ John different video like you need to be able to accommodate not how much it will take for you to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k Netflix but for everyone in your family to be doing whatever it is that they’re doing on the internet at
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time. That is still way below a gigabit to be clear. You do not need a gigabit for that. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John does argue for not getting like that lowest speed thinking well I’ll just wait for downloads
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t be that big a a good deal, it will actually impact your quality of life in the common areas people do,
⏹️ ▶️ John watching streaming video and doing FaceTime with people, because you will look worse to them and your video will look worse. So
⏹️ ▶️ John at least pass the minimum bar. And in terms of saturating a gigabit, a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John it is impatience, like, oh, if you, I can afford to pay for it and I would be impatient. So yeah, downloads will go
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, but not as often as you would think. It’s very few things that you can get that will
⏹️ ▶️ John fill a gigabit pipe. Apple from a good CDN will, Steam will, Most peer to peer
⏹️ ▶️ John things will, I think Steam is actually peer to peer, but it’s a short list.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, and probably not on that list is one that people don’t think about that I just had an encounter with recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John game consoles. Most good modern game consoles will download
⏹️ ▶️ John something for you while you wait. But when a game is coming out, like the new expansion of Destiny just came out,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will not make it available for download until X number of hours before the release time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if your internet connection is too slow to download it during that window, everyone else will be, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s face it, they’ll be in the login queue. But anyway, let’s pretend the login queue doesn’t exist. Everyone else will be playing their fun new game and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still waiting for your download to finish. While I was stuck in my room in COVID, my PS5 downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John an 80 gigabyte Destiny 2 expansion. Goodness. Right, and I, because I came down, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, the Destiny 2 expansion is coming out tomorrow, I better start my download. I turned on my PS5, which was in rest mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was already there. Nice. Would that have happened over less than gigabit? Probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I wouldn’t wanna be waiting on the download to finish because of my slow connection. 80 gigabytes is big, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff is distributed through a CDN, and granted, it’s a crappy CDN, so it probably wouldn’t saturate a gigabit, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anyway. Waiting for, the reason we complain about waiting for Xcode to unzip itself
⏹️ ▶️ John on XIP itself is because for us with gigabit connections, that takes longer than the download. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s part of that stupid complaint that we have. It’s not that unzipping takes a long time, it’s that our downloads are so fast. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you need a gigabit for almost anything, but boy, it’s nice to have. I would just argue for sufficient
⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth and symmetrical bandwidth. And how much is sufficient? You can do some back of the envelope math
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, okay, with four people in this family, if they’re all watching 4K Netflix, we need 20 megabits down
⏹️ ▶️ John and 20 megabits up or 15 or five or whatever, you know. The other thing about bandwidth is,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you have a decent ISP and if you’re offered symmetrical or anything, your ISP is probably better than most.
⏹️ ▶️ John The cost difference between, you know, five megabits, 20 megabits, 50, 150 and a gigabit,
⏹️ ▶️ John they want you to pay for the more expensive one. It’s not proportional. The 100 megabit service does not
⏹️ ▶️ John cost one 10th the thousand megabit usually. And so they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to herd you up market to pay for the maximum price. So the 100 megabit will cost $20 a month and
⏹️ ▶️ John the thousand will cost $50 a month. And that’s a good deal in terms of price
⏹️ ▶️ John per bit. And then once you can get over that hurdle of $50 a month, if you can afford it and you’re not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John taking money away from your grocery fund, it’s a nice quality of life upgrade. But in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ John just look for symmetrical and don’t assume you can get away with a really small connection in both directions
⏹️ ▶️ John just because I’m only ever gonna watch Netflix because you’d be surprised how much the things in your house are doing while you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John watching Netflix. Oh, one more, I forgot. Online backups.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I wanna use an online backup service, but it told me it’s gonna take me 17 days to upload my Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it would take slightly less time. And again, most online backup services will not use a gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ John connection. But if your upload speed is garbage because you have cable and it’s like one megabit up, it’s gonna take
⏹️ ▶️ John forever to do your first backup of your two terabyte Mac that you just got, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or whatever. So that really helps. And it’s not, you know, you probably don’t need, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need a gigabit, but 500 megabits, 200 megabits. So whatever your backup service
⏹️ ▶️ John is willing to take from you, it can really cut down on the pain of online
⏹️ ▶️ John backup. There’s a lot of people say, I was gonna get online backup, but then I went for a free trial and it told me my initial backup would
⏹️ ▶️ John take 30 days and I can’t handle that, right? If it takes 15 days, seven days,
⏹️ ▶️ John that can really help. Again, even if it’s not gonna saturate your eGibbet, so think about it.
#askatp: Mac battery limiters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max slaves rights. Do you use tools like al dente or battery to manually limit the charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level on desktop MacBooks? So I want something like this in my life very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very badly And when I saw this in our, you know internal show notes, I went and I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Battery, which I presume John linked and I gotta tell you I would it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not work for me Like literally did not work. Not not that’s not the euphemism version of did not work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get literally did not work Maybe I was holding it wrong. I don’t know And uninstalling it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was was not really working exactly as I expected. It is all open source I don’t think anything nefarious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going on here But it didn’t work for me and then even if it had worked for me after I installed it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I noticed that there’s an issue on github saying oh if you clamshell your Mac, it doesn’t work properly Super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not try al dente I feel like there must be some like easier tool to do this or even do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by hand on the command line It looked like battery was using SMC or something like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John does that coconut battery thing do this? I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that one. But yeah, I want something like this because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, I can’t attest whether this is true or not, it is said that you should keep your battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at about 80% generally speaking and not charge over 80% unless you know you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really going to need it. We’ve talked in the past that there’s a way, I should actually figure out where this is because I was just looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this the other day and it’s buried in the most unusual spot. So there’s a way to tell macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, don’t charge above 80 unless you think you really need to. So if you go into settings, not preferences, mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, but settings. I think this is on by default on new Macs, by the way. It might be. Settings, battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then, oh, this is so infuriating. So if you go into settings, follow along if you’re in a position that you can. Settings,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery way on the left, about maybe two thirds the way down.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a battery item, Casey, what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey should I have? Oh, you’re the worst. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, well, for those of us who can, on the right-hand pane, you’ll see the old battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low power mode, only on battery is the way I have it set, whatever. Battery health, the chart, options.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, clearly it’s going to be in options, isn’t it? So you click on options, put hard drives to sleep, or hard disk to sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impossible, wake for network access, optimize streaming video. Okay, that’s not it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, where is it? Do you happen to know where it is, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hold on, I’m hit, oh, I found it. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me, tell me how much sense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this makes. Go ahead. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna guess, but I’m not seeing this on my screen, obviously, because I don’t have a battery. Is it in control center? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in the battery thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ll send you a screenshot real quick. Give me two seconds. You have to click something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a button or doesn’t look like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first of all, when I clicked, when I opened up the settings app and I scrolled down and clicked battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right pane did not actually change to the contents of the battery pane for about three or four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds. Oh, cool. There was no beach ball, no spinner, like it just was still showing the general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tab for like three or four seconds, just no feedback whatsoever. Great app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great app settings, Pete, settings team. This is great. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. I’m so glad this shipped. You know, this totally was ready to ship to all your customers. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So don’t don’t tell us where it is yet, Marco. John, can you figure out where it is on the screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John The little eye on the battery health? Yes, it is. So in battery health, I know about the secret
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes. I’ve spent too much time in system settings. If you see a tiny little eye in a circle that doesn’t look like a button and there surely
⏹️ ▶️ John is nothing important stuck under there. It’s probably just information, a little eye, just info. There’s no settings under
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but I, but how
⏹️ ▶️ John there be a setting? It’s only information. If you use system settings on a MacOS Ventura,
⏹️ ▶️ John you quickly learn the stupid little eyes is where that whatever setting you’re looking for is hiding and don’t try to use search because 50% of the
⏹️ ▶️ John time I won’t find it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So if you click on the secret eye, I really like that. You click on the secret eye, you can see battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey condition, maximum capacity. Oh, there’s a toggle optimized battery charging to reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery aging your Mac learns from your daily charging routine so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for use on battery. Can
⏹️ ▶️ John you search for battery condition now and see where the search sends you? Because I bet the search sends you to the screen you just put a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ John of, not the one under the eye. Because I don’t think search can send you to this. I think search will just send you to this thing with the graph
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, look, I was helpful. See, I searched and I found it. You search for battery condition and I sent you to this page
⏹️ ▶️ John where the words battery condition do not appear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As far as I can tell, it is not available in search anywhere. I’ve tried searching for optimized charging, charging battery charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not returning any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey results. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but what’s interesting, though, what’s interesting those, I typed in battery condition and search. And the first option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is battery. The second option is battery health with a subtitle of battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is it’s in that’s the secret I think you want. But when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you click on that line item, it just brings you to the battery. I don’t think I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John those things that pop up models, there’s no there’s no direct sort of deep linking way to
⏹️ ▶️ John get to them. So not only are things poorly arranged in system settings, not only does search fail a lot of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are certain parts that search cannot reach because you can it cannot take you there. It
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can type it in. And even if it knew about it, it’s like, well, I know about it. But I’ll just as this happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to me all the time, I type search, and it brings me to the results page. And I’m like, why did you bring me to the result
⏹️ ▶️ John page? I don’t see what and then you’d have to like scroll through the result page and find all the little eyes and click on them and find a
⏹️ ▶️ John pie symbol in the lower left corner and click on that. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is bad. Anyway, so I don’t use any of these if somebody I I mean, maybe battery works for everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but me, but if somebody has a reliable answer, especially if it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, open source, I’d love to see it. So please feel free to write me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now that we did all that searching, why is what’s built into macOS insufficient? So like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is the default now. If you get a Mac laptop, whether it’s a default or not, if you can find the setting that we just dug for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can tell it, hey Mac, even when you’re plugged into a power cable, don’t charge to 100%.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you get to 80%, just stop there. And then there’s a thing in the menu bar where you can say, hey, I’m about
⏹️ ▶️ John to leave, go to 100% and fill over the next 30 minutes, it’ll bring you up to 100% and then you can leave. But I’m pretty sure that’s the default. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that default, only charging to 80% unless you say otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ John is all really I’d ever want personally, not that I use laptops, out of a laptop in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of battery health. It’s what all of our phones do when you plug them in in the nightstand, they charge to 80%
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they wait like an hour before you wake up and charge the rest away or whatever. Your laptop, if it’s plugged in all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time, it will never go to 100, it will just stay at 80 unless you tell it, hey, I want you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, oh no, it does not. Because Apple’s algorithm or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to figure out whether or not you need to go to 100, at least in my experience, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it errors on the side of, oh, let’s go all the way to 100, baby. It errors to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that side. And so I really don’t need to be above 80 almost ever. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact, I would vastly prefer if there was a way for me to say, just always stop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 80. and I will tell you when I need more, but I can’t do that. And so right now my battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is sitting at 100% and I really, really wish it wasn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, mine too. I have the same problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have my laptop is always plugged in. It’s one of the kids’ laptops hanging here and I never see it above 80.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s literally always plugged in, but it never goes above 80. I don’t know, maybe this is a bug. I can’t tell if it’s a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John or not, but I’ve always felt like this 80% feature is too aggressive and it just literally, every time I look at the laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 80. It’s always 80, because it’s always plugged in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I wish I had that problem because I have the reverse where it is always 100 and I really wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t. Yeah, what are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do? So anyway, so I guess, John, you can’t help us with, you know, what do you use?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use one of these, I just rely on the built-in things and before the built-in things, I just let it fry my batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Delightful, how about you, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never used these apps before. I, like John, I would just let my batteries slowly melt
⏹️ ▶️ John before this. You want to own laptops long enough for the batteries to go bad. So the solution is buy a new laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John every six months. Just drop it in the shredder, get a new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s exactly how it works.
#askatp: Ads for scammy games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And a friend of the show, Brian Hamilton, writes Instagram ads for scammy mobile games are annoying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but despite the horrendous UI predatory in-app purchases and oddly creepy character design,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the puzzles look kind of fun. Drawing a shape to save the dog or dropping water onto lava to clear a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level could be fun if the apps are well designed and the monetization made sense. Why aren’t good iOS game devs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making this brand of time-wasting Instagram friendly game? I don’t really know, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be I would guess because there’s no money in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there’s so many answers to this. OK, so the first one is advertisements are meant
⏹️ ▶️ John to be enticing, kind of like we’re on a movie or on a movie or TV show. They’ll show you what they think
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best or most enticing part of that movie or TV show to get you to want to see it. Same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with games. They will show you something that looks like it’s fun. Perhaps the most fun part of the thing. Maybe the advertisement
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t even representative of the actual gameplay. You don’t know. It’s an ad. So that’s answer number one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Answer number two, The companies that can afford to pay designers who know how to make fun things
⏹️ ▶️ John are the ones that are fleecing everybody with creepy in-app purchases,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? That’s the one. That’s the answer. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where all the money is being, that’s how they can afford to make those enticing ads. It doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John the games are necessarily fun because they are junked up with, you know, anti, you know, mechanics
⏹️ ▶️ John that are not friendly to people and these things that psychologically find ways to extract money from you,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So it doesn’t necessarily mean the games are fun, but it means that they had the potential to be fun and fall that cruft
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t be removed because those companies can hire all the game designers. And by the way, that itself is a skill.
⏹️ ▶️ John Knowing how to extract the max amount of money from people is a thing that people get good at. And they get
⏹️ ▶️ John good at it because they are highly motivated to get good at it because there’s a lot of money to be extracted and it is an efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John machine for extracting money. And so the people who are good at it are highly paid and it’s a virtuous cycle, not from our perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John but from theirs, where lots of people become very good at this and get paid a lot to do it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John those skills get built up. I think there are fun games that don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but you don’t see them with enticing ads on Instagram because the only people who do those type of things are the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s whatever it is, I forget the acronym, what is it? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the cost per user that they acquire or the amount of money they expect to make from a person
⏹️ ▶️ John who downloads their game has to be high enough to make up for the amount it costs them to show that
⏹️ ▶️ John ad to those people. And with these type of games, I think like we have an amazingly addictive
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanic. We, once you, we are hooks into you, on average, we will extract X number of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John from you over the next six months, which means most people will get $0 from, but five people will get $1,000 from, those are our
⏹️ ▶️ John whales. And so it averages out. And so that’s why we can have these enticing Instagram ads. And that’s why we can pay these game
⏹️ ▶️ John designers to make it an ostensibly fun game that really is just a secret puzzle box
⏹️ ▶️ John to extract money from you. So my main suggestion would be don’t believe everything you see
⏹️ ▶️ John in ad. games aren’t actually that fun. And my second suggestion is that’s where the money is. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sad. And it’s, you know, it’s a double-edged sword. Like, you know, so not only are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ads that you’re seeing only the ones who could bid up those prices. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you’ve never bought app install ads, they’re really expensive. Like a typical installation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from an app install ad, depending on, it depends heavily on the category that you’re in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But usually you’re above a dollar. Sometimes you can even be multiple dollars per installation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, depending on the category, the competition, and everything. But not every installation even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco results in somebody ever running the app. Not every person who runs the app will ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run it more than once. And so once you start multiplying out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, well, if only so many of these installs are actually real and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco result in somebody opening the app ever, and then actually result in that person ever coming back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future, you know, the… you end up getting into like many dollars per active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user of the app. You have to have a very, very high average user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value to make that worth it, to make it… to make you not just lose money constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you could make that profitable, you have all the incentive in the world to spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infinite money on customer acquisition by buying more ads. is because if you have a balance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there where you are making money, where you are spending less per customer than you were bringing in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then there’s no reason for you to stop buying ads. You will buy as many ads as you can buy at those prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until your money runs out, which if you’re doing it right, it won’t. And because these ads are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive and because so many people are bidding on them who have these money-making schemes, that’s all you’re gonna see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re only gonna see the people who have these big budgets so that they can spend more on ads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outbid other players or other competitors and still make a profit. So you’re only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna see the games that are really fleecing people for money. And then if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quote good developer and you’re making a game that’s a little more traditional and a little more respectful of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people and not trying to just fleece them and play psychological tricks to get all their money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you’re trying to do things like quote the right way, it’s really hard for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find a market for your game because all of the ads are being bought and bid up by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those other companies who were doing things the other way. So it’s very hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get noticed in the iOS game scene and to succeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making good, respectful apps. Because as much as we want that to not be the case, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as we want, and as much as Apple always talks about how great the App Store is for all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small businesses and everything, and the discoverability is so great in the App Store, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value of all that has gone way down over time as there’s just been more and more and more competition. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not going to be found in the App Store very easily if you don’t spend money. And if you’re a game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer, who you’re spending money against is just so ridiculously hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to compete with, unless you are also doing the same tricks they’re doing to get super high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco valuations per active user. And so if you’re making games like the quote good way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just can’t compete and you can’t and you won’t ever find an audience for your games in all likelihood.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So people who are trying to do things that way typically go elsewhere or give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up or or, you know, go to the dark side.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why game consoles are so refreshing. These are sort of the AAA game market, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller than the mobile game market in terms of dollars. But the reason we don’t call
⏹️ ▶️ John those ones making all the money triple A is because we realize they’re just like very often money extraction
⏹️ ▶️ John devices and less an attempt to make the best game you can make. And in the world of console and PC,
⏹️ ▶️ John among the smaller market of people who shop there, the exploitive mechanics
⏹️ ▶️ John are looked down upon. Like, you know, for even like Destiny, the game that I play, lots of other sort of multiplayer
⏹️ ▶️ John online games, even ones with subscriptions or whatever. The thing that customers hate the most is what, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John drizzly called pay to win, where if I pay you more money, you’ll give me a more powerful sword that I can beat people up with.
⏹️ ▶️ John and users will not accept that within the top tier AAA things. They will
⏹️ ▶️ John only pay for, and they’ll pay a lot for, cosmetics, things that don’t affect the gameplay because they consider
⏹️ ▶️ John it unfair for someone with money to be able to play to advance in the game,
⏹️ ▶️ John like to get better items, to get more in-game money. Like they don’t accept that as, you know, any
⏹️ ▶️ John money that can be used to make you more powerful in the game. It’s like if you had a poker game and you would pay to get like
⏹️ ▶️ John a better hand or something. Like nobody likes that, right? And they’ll gladly play for cosmetics forever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the cosmetics don’t affect the gameplay. And if the cosmetics even remotely affect the gameplay, they will complain. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve talked about this before. There was a Destiny cosmetic that made the barrel of your gun like an inch or two longer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a totally different skin for your gun, but the point is the barrel was a little bit longer in game, like two or three
⏹️ ▶️ John in-game inches, right? Person’s holding a gun, the barrel’s a little bit longer. That affected the range
⏹️ ▶️ John of the weapon by two or three inches, and people were in uproar about it because the range was measured from
⏹️ ▶️ John the front of the model,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Oh my God. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were an uproar, they’re like, it’s pay to win, it’s pay to win. Those antibodies do not
⏹️ ▶️ John exist in mobile gaming. They’re all pay to win. They’re like, oh, get an extra life, get a thing where if you die, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John resurrect yourself, buy more gems, like they’re all pay to win. Now granted, most of them are multiplayer or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s how different these markets are. The quote unquote AAA market, where you gotta pay 70 bucks for a
⏹️ ▶️ John game plus $80 for the fancy version, and you pay that every year, or you pay $15 a month to play World
⏹️ ▶️ John of Warcraft or whatever, those markets filled with people who play those games will not tolerate
⏹️ ▶️ John garbage mechanics like that. That shook out of that market. People tried all sorts of things and they said,
⏹️ ▶️ John we do not wanna play a game where other people with money can play to get a bigger sword to beat me up with. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John sell us horse armor. And so that has been the way forward in AAA, whereas in
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile, it is very different. So it makes me strangely comforted to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay, again, at least $100 a year, probably more. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t really buy that many cosmetics for this game with millions of players that cost millions upon millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars to make that I think respects me as a game, as a gamer,
⏹️ ▶️ John way more than, you know, the free to play application with a bunch of gems or pouring
⏹️ ▶️ John water on lava that I can get on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Collide. And thank you to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. you can join at atp.fm slash join. and we will talk to you
“Accidentally Podcasted”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was an accident,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was an accident Accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasted Accident, it was an accident
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidentally podcasted John Syracuse, a wise old soul
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Since then he’s born a smack bro Marco Arment, he’s a product man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Selling them off just to backseat him Casey! Who the hell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Casey? Who the hell is Casey? It was an accident, it was an accident
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Accidentally podcasted Accident, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an accident Accidentally podcasted It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an accident Accidentally podcasted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it? Did you get it?
Kids evading Screen Time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do either of you, I mean, John, your kids are a little older now, obviously, but Casey, I’m curious,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you or John, did you ever impose time limits on your children’s iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for screen time or for YouTube?
⏹️ ▶️ John JCW I did, even though I very quickly recognized the futility of it, which is, I’m sure, what you’ll describe. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey D’Alessio Yeah. So, I mean, remember that Declan is eight. He’s in second grade. Mikayla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in her last year of preschool. She’ll be in kindergarten next year. She’s freshly five.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The kids have my old iPad Pro, they had an older iPad before that, and Declan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has like an iPhone 10 that does not have service. It’s a Wi-Fi, it’s effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPod touch. And yeah, I literally have screen time as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Apple stuff that we were talking about earlier in the show. I have that enabled for his iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he seems to respect that. He isn’t really into YouTube that much these days, Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the way that like, you know, I think we will be soon. Oh, no, no, no. I don’t, I don’t argue that this time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will come, but it hasn’t come yet. Um, although I did find it interesting that he was trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to draw some Pokemon recently and he turned to YouTube videos to instruct him on how to do that, which I was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of proud of him because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, totally, totally. I’m not, again, I’m not sitting on any sort of high horse. I am not trying to be smug. If I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am coming across that way, that’s not on purpose. Uh, I know my time is coming. Uh, but all of this is to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point, you know, we don’t, we don’t let them use the devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for very long each day and it’s a typically pretty well defined times and that’s just the way it’s always been.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they understand that. And we haven’t really restricted that much because they’re just not aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet of what there is that they could be doing, you know, even, and I’m not even talking about naughty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, but like, I don’t think Declan has really gotten to the point that he thought to himself, well, I’m just going to cruise YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and watch random junk. And again, that time is coming probably sooner than I’m comfortable with, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re not at that point yet. So he hasn’t gotten to the point of like trying to do nefarious stuff to get around any sort of limits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything like that. I take it though, because Adam you said is in fifth grade. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, he’s almost 11. He is at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that point now, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so… And and with the with the huge disclaimer up front here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Parenting stuff is always fraught. Everybody has different opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what is an appropriate amount of screen time and screen permission for children and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your opinion is different than what I do, that’s fine. You do what you want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m going to do what we think is right for our family. You do what’s right for your family. Okay, so our kid, he’s almost 11.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He has his own iPad. He’s allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly unmonitored YouTube watching, but within limits. Because, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, look, you know your kid. And we’ve expressed to our kid numerous times to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s tired of hearing about it, the difference between like good stuff and bad stuff he can see online, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s appropriate for anybody, and what’s appropriate for children versus not appropriate for children.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve never had any reason to not trust him to self-regulate that. whenever we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do watch something that he’s watching with him or at least we might overhear it from like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across the room if he’s like somewhere we can’t see it, it’s always been pretty safe stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we don’t feel the need to be very aggressive about our YouTube filtering. We do limit the amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time though, the overall iPad time, again, using the built-in screen time feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we limit the iPad to only certain hours of the day so that he can’t like, you know, wake up at two in the morning and just play with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his iPad all night. You know, so that’s obviously something you don’t want to encourage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we have certain hour bounds that you can’t use the iPad between, you know, X and Y. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, YouTube in particular is the only remaining thing that we actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a limit of, I believe it’s one hour a day that it’s currently set to. This is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the best reason in the world, but this is the reason we have. I felt like watching YouTube was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passive of an activity, and I would rather he play a video game where he’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something than just watch YouTube for hours and hours and hours. I also didn’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was enough good high quality content for him to watch on YouTube to consume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many hours a day. And there are times like weekends where sometimes, you know, if it’s like a rainy weekend day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he might be on his iPad for many hours that day. And so we didn’t want to, you know, it was important to me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limit YouTube YouTube to to help promote more active or more creative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco activities like games or drawing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you ever think about what it’d be like when you were a kid if your if your parents tried to limit you to one hour of TV a day and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m speaking as someone whose parents did try to do that and boy it was like there was no technology to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m saying parent parenting wise it seemed like really kind of you know
⏹️ ▶️ John swimming upstream. All of my parents draconian TV limits they lasted for a little
⏹️ ▶️ John while but eventually they they gave in because kids whine just too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think what it comes down to, what it came down to back then is like, there was really not a good way for our parents to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily limit that. As you said, like, you know, here we can do it pretty easily with screen time. It’s, it’s- Can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we? So. Oh no. Now screen time, it has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of, you know, weird little gaps. As far as I know, there’s not many like totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco egregious ones. Oh, there is one that I wish they would have an option to turn off. there is this concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of one more minute. If you’re past your time limit on an app or on the iPad in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you try to launch an app, it’ll show this big white screen time, you know, you’re out of time screen, and there’s a button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the bottom to like enter the screen time passcode if you want to extend it, or you can ask for more time, which sends your parents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a notification and you can approve it remotely. But there’s also this button that says one more minute. Every limit you have exceeded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re allowed to hit the one more minute button to get one more minute of that particular app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that interval. Suppose we are trying to watch a movie, you know, me and Tiff, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to watch a movie right after, you know, we wanna start like right after he goes to bed. Sometimes, in order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to facilitate this, we will offer him 15 minutes of YouTube time on his iPad in bed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then we’ll go, you know, pick it up at that, you know, after that point, and usually he’ll be asleep. But if we, like, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set a timer, and he might have, but we think, okay, well, he’s past the limit, it’ll only be 15 minutes, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the one more minute hack works individually with every app. And he might have like 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps or more. So what he’ll do is he’ll do the one more minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, YouTube or whatever first. And then when that runs out, he’ll go do one minute of something else. Then when that runs out, he’ll go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do one minute of something else and he’ll go through. And so you can easily have like a half hour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of extended iPad time beyond what your parents thought you were able to do, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just keep hitting one more minute. So that’s one issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so as far as I know, I don’t think there’s any other like giant holes. Like if you say YouTube, you know. Oh no, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Oh, well, please don’t tell him. But anyway, so. He’ll find them on YouTube, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry. I know. So, the other day, and he’s a very honest kid. You know, he doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, lie and hide stuff. He’s, like, so the other day, he said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found a way around my YouTube time limit. It doesn’t work very well, and it’s slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you want me to tell you about it? Now, what would you say if your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kid says, But first of all, the honesty of this kid is awesome. He
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t just sneak around and do it. He’s so excited that he found a way around it that he wants to share the information.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is pretty funny. We’re obviously a nerd family here. Everything’s open source, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would you do if your kid asks, I found a way around this. Do you want me to tell you about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? Yeah, unquestionably, yes, I would like you to tell me. But first and more importantly, I really, really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciate the fact that you honest about it, and you’re not hiding this from me, you know, that’s really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important. You’re putting that idea into his head. You mean I could have hidden it? Oh gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Parenting is hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Parenting is hard. But no, I mean, I think that’s, I would say yes, please, but you know, it’s really important to me that you understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I appreciate the fact that you were honest about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, of course, had to ask him a clarifying question. Because I said, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, Well, hold on a second. If you’re using a way around the limit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s two things you could be doing here, one of which is bad. I don’t want you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going around limits in order to see something you shouldn’t be seeing. That’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re cheating the system to just get more time, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I said, no, don’t tell me. Because I’m like, my job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as your parent is is to try to impose reasonable limits. And your job as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tech savvy kid is to try to find ways around them. And if I figure out what you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I close the loophole, then that’s too bad for you. But I’m like, I actually don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know yet. Okay. That was a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, I was like, what’s he doing? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, I was like, I locked down, I took off Safari, figuring like if there’s some website that’s like re-hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube videos on their own domain, maybe he’s watching it. Because normally, you know, The YouTube.com domain is protected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco via the associated app domains thing, so that’s protected already. And web views are protected,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like, okay, so what could he possibly be doing? So we took Safari off, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was trying to figure out, like, what’s he doing? How’s he getting around this? You know, some other app maybe? Like, is he watching stuff? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow, is Netflix on his iPad? I don’t even know. I don’t think so. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was trying to figure out what this was. The other day, I see him watching a video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he has this big smile on his face, looking at me is like, do you want to know how I’m doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will tell you it is not anything to do with watching on a different domain or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching in Safari or watching in a web view. What’s your guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is he? So, I had heard, I think a couple of years ago now, that kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would iMessage each other and they would use the little postage stamp player within iMessage, you know, the rich
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preview, if you will, in order to watch the video there, which sounds fricking terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know, if you’re a kid, you don’t really care. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. Yeah, that was that was the main exploit was you here’s the reason it was a great exploit is because
⏹️ ▶️ John for kids who had phones, very often, and sensibly, the parents would make I message
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the apps that’s enabled 24 hours in case you couldn’t use a text you and you can lock it down to say, hey, they can only
⏹️ ▶️ John text family members, but they would text themselves and from within because they’re in the family
⏹️ ▶️ John and from within the message they texted themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, there it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John get you can get actually a full size player eventually. I think they might have closed that one, but that was one of the most popular ones
⏹️ ▶️ John was texting yourself links to YouTube videos you wanted to see after everything locked down. You could do that even after downtime,
⏹️ ▶️ John lockdown everything, like the whole like everything on the phone is off, except for a specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John set allow list of people that you can send messages to. And that is limited to only your family.
⏹️ ▶️ John Boy, this phone is so locked down. I’m sure there’s no way they can get no, they would just message themselves because they’re part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the family. That’s awesome. The second one to the chat room is talking about is
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of very often not particularly great applications have
⏹️ ▶️ John a ways for you to get to YouTube from within the application. Someone in the chat room said it was a periodic table
⏹️ ▶️ John application like a chemistry class.
⏹️ ▶️ John could get to YouTube from within. You’re like, oh, yeah, you can use the periodic table application as much as you want. No time
⏹️ ▶️ John limits on that. And then you can get to YouTube from that. And lots of apps had a way to do that basically by
⏹️ ▶️ John having you know an embedded web view and that is using an older Technology that’s not stopped by screen
⏹️ ▶️ John time That was the other common exploit is You can stop the YouTube app and you can stop the YouTube domain
⏹️ ▶️ John and Safari But you don’t know what other apps are doing especially older cruddy education apps that may
⏹️ ▶️ John be part of their school The word gets around hey if you you know in the school’s periodic
⏹️ ▶️ John table app you can watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube forever That’s also not what he was doing
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, don’t tell them about those because they’re probably still open. Like that’s the thing that I learned when I was learning about all these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are exploits. You can’t do anything about them as a parent, like technologically speaking, and Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably not going to close them because they’re not that big a deal. Like that’s that’s kind of my my meta position on
⏹️ ▶️ John this entire thing is technology can help you do stuff like this. But in the end, enforcement
⏹️ ▶️ John of parental limits is exactly the same as it has ever been, which is it’s a fantasy,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, not a fantasy. It’s a, it’s a sort of a contract between true people. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are tools that can help with it like clocks and doors and houses, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, screen time limits. But in the end it is a sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John a relationship negotiation between parent and child. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John matter how many tools are in the mix there. And so rather than framing it as a technological
⏹️ ▶️ John chicken egg race, which Which is a fun thing to do or whatever, like in the end the actual limits you’re dealing
⏹️ ▶️ John with are the same limits you say like, you know, a curfew. Curfew doesn’t cause a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John metal claw to come and grab your kid at 11.30pm and bring them back to your house. Curfew is just a thing that you tell
⏹️ ▶️ John your kid and no technology is going to change whether they, you know, come in under curfew or
⏹️ ▶️ John can see where their location is and find my friends or whatever, that does not make them come home any faster. What makes them come home
⏹️ ▶️ John is the relationship of trust you’ve hopefully built with your kid and an agreement that 1130 p.m.
⏹️ ▶️ John is a reasonable time when we all agree that that’s when you’re gonna come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home. Yeah I’m trying to think of what Adam could be using to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah so I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how he described it was it doesn’t work very well and it’s slow. He
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to get better exploits because the ones I just described didn’t have that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know I was thinking like it’s slow is he like somehow transcoding the video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was gonna say he’s got like ISH and he’s out his YouTube downloading it or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is he like running shortcuts to like pull the video with a shortcut and then convert
⏹️ ▶️ John like doing share play from a different machine
⏹️ ▶️ John that would probably also work by the way Adam yeah don’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good thing isn’t listen I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this is so adorable he was screen recording
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them as they play making his own copies to save in his photo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so he was I was transcoding them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he says, then I just watch them again after I haven’t seen it in like a month, so I forget what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an efficient use of resources. I mean, don’t you pay for the YouTube premium where he can just download them in the
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube app? Yes. I mean, it might be harder to get them out of the YouTube app, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco screen recording,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s, given that that’s a tool that kids, surprisingly a number of kids know about, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t remember if I have ever screen recorded my iOS device, but once I think word gets around among
⏹️ ▶️ John kids this is a thing that you can do for a variety of reasons. And that becomes a tool they use to do everything. Like for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John my daughter does not know about saving images. Anytime she sees an image that she wants on her screen on her iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John she screenshots it. And I keep telling her, that’s not full resolution, but she doesn’t care. She
⏹️ ▶️ John care. It’s got all the Chrome, it’s got your status bar. You’re, you know, she doesn’t care. I’m like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just hold your finger on it and hit save image. It’s like, nope, screenshot. So I feel like screen recording YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John is right in that same alley of like, hey, I know about screenshots, I know about screen recording. And if there’s something that I see
⏹️ ▶️ John on my screen that I want, if it’s stationary, screenshot, and if it’s not stationary, screen capture,
⏹️ ▶️ John screen recording. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the plan. Home taping is ruining YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very clever. I have to give him credit. That is very, very clever. Not fast, but very clever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s such like the perfect kid solution to the problem. It’s like, it’s something that, you know, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking way too technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and way too sophisticated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, no, this is actually an ingenious thing that I would never have thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look for this or I would never have considered this possibility because I have adult brain. I’m thinking of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adult ways to do it that are totally different. You know? And he’s like, no, you can just do this. And then I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch it again later.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John VCR for your whole iPad. Anything you see on your screen, you can just record it. Live streams. Live streams.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, and the thing is, I don’t know how many resources it’s taking. Obviously, he’s got hand-me-down
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads that probably have lots of storage in them, but then in terms of it being slow, it’s like is the frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rate the same? It’s recompressing it. It’s like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and he has iCloud photo libraries. He’s on the family iCloud plan, so like the storage space doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s on the family plan, slowly filling. It’s like, hmm, it seems like Adam’s using a lot of data lately. What are all
⏹️ ▶️ John these things? Adam’s photo library is a terabyte? What? What? And then it’s not like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John should see if he’s like naming them, like putting metadata on them, or is it just a question of you look at the thumbnails and find, because the thumbnails
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t, I guess that YouTube, the practice is putting text in the thumbnail, So he probably you don’t need anything except for just to be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to see the you know, the little video thumbnail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well also and like I don’t like I I thought you know after he told me he was so proud and I’m so proud of him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Figuring that out and all but and I’m like, I don’t think I have a problem with that. I talked to Tiff I’m like, I think that’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuz he’s like he’s just making better use of the YouTube time. He already has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s not getting more New video time so I’m like I don’t think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually even a problem that I need to do anything about like I’m just gonna I’ll let him keep
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. And obviously YouTube, and on the topic of YouTube time limits, YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John is obviously way more scary than television was when we were kids.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is very analogous in that there are, there’s actually tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of value to be had on television, on YouTube, just as there was on TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also way, way more garbage and scary things as well. And that’s what comes down to a question
⏹️ ▶️ John of your kid. It’s like, well, I’d rather have him doing something creative, like playing a game. But what if he was watching a video
⏹️ ▶️ John learning how to do math? Which obviously is a ridiculously fantasy scenario, like, oh, my kid is gonna choose to watch videos
⏹️ ▶️ John about math. You’d be surprised what kids get up to. I am always surprised when my kids tell me, hey, I
⏹️ ▶️ John learned about X, Y, and Z because of a video I watched. Now, granted, it was between 100 other videos that are just junk food for
⏹️ ▶️ John your brain, and hopefully not a bunch of Nazis preaching to them, right? So it’s scary,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m not saying don’t monitor it, and I’m not saying, like, don’t, you know, be careful about it, but there is tons of value to be had.
⏹️ ▶️ John Way more, I had to watch PBS, and there was like three shows that I liked, and they were on like once a week,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if it was a crappy episode of Frontline, I was just gonna skip it. And they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uphill both ways in the snow. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John Educationally, YouTube has so, I still watch them. I watch, when I went down the SR-71 rabbit hole,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m watching all those real engineering videos where the Irish guy tells me about fusion
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. Like, there’s so much. I would have killed for this as a kid, right? And you know, they’re of
⏹️ ▶️ John varying quality, but a lot of them are entertaining and engaging to kids. That’s why you get kids who are like, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I know all about the War of 1812 because I saw an animated YouTube video about it. Like you voluntarily
⏹️ ▶️ John watch an hour and a half video on the War of 1812, it’s like, yeah, it had stick figures and it was funny. That does
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. Yeah, that’s part of what he’s watching. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. So like, I do feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John one hour of YouTube is probably insufficient. And also I would say mindlessly playing
⏹️ ▶️ John an infinite runner or like Plants vs. Zombies is less stimulating than watching
⏹️ ▶️ John the video about the War of 1812, but better than watching the video about,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, becoming a Nazi or white supremacist or whatever, right? So it’s dangerous, but I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube is basically television for these kids, and it is a television that has higher
⏹️ ▶️ John highs, lower lows, obviously, but also higher highs than our TV did. Like, we just have to watch reruns
⏹️ ▶️ John of Happy Days, which was not intellectually stimulating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to think, like, you know, when I was a kid, like, I was mostly, and when I was watching TV, I was mostly watching, like, you know, Saturday morning cartoons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a lot of, like, you know, Ninja Turtles and, you know, Animaniacs and that kind of stuff. And it’s like, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much value that
⏹️ ▶️ John had. Did either one of you watch the Computer Chronicles? Because I think that’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey example. Yes. No. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think I did. Or Motor Week. Casey must’ve watched that, right? I still watch it. Are you kidding? I watch
⏹️ ▶️ John it every week. There you go. All right, so here’s two shows. They were obscure, they were on PBS stations, but it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you mean there’s something on TV about computers, you bet your butt I would watch Computer Chronicles.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would record Computer Chronicles on my VCR by programming it to record if I wasn’t gonna be home for it because it was literally
⏹️ ▶️ John the only time there would ever be anything on television that was about a thing that I was interested in, computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube has everything anyone is interested in. You’re interested in model trains, you’re interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John doing makeups, you’re interested in building your own canoe out of, whatever you’re interested in, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John on YouTube. It is an amazing cornucopia of stuff. And kids
⏹️ ▶️ John are curious about things and they have their own interests and they can find things about that on YouTube. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like allowing kids an age appropriate amount of access to
⏹️ ▶️ John that, like, I think is one of the better things that you can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John facilitate your children to discover. You know, if they’re not finding the good content, help them find it. If they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wasting their time watching things that you think aren’t useful, give them the time that they need to do that to just be
⏹️ ▶️ John kids the same way we watch garbage stuff or whatever. but if you’re viewing YouTube as
⏹️ ▶️ John universal evil, I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. TikTok, maybe jury style, but even on TikTok,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’ll be some person who’s up on screen giving you a musical rant about the war of 1812. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John could happen, but I think TikTok is a little bit more garbagey. And by the way, kids discovering YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ John the next much worse stage is them discovering TikTok, so watch for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, Marco’s on TikTok, he knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I get a lot of information on TikTok and some of it’s even true.