526: Food Comes From Cans

16 Mar 2023

AI in your camera, ops vs. industrial design, watch bands, and pants-storage classes.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show:
  • Marco’s load-bearing pinky
  • We stand in support of trans people, including trans youth. 🏳️‍⚧️
    • Alex Cox’s words
    • Alex Cox’s voice
    • 5calls.org
    • Moltz’s toot
  • Happy 10th anniversary, ATP!
• Follow-up:
  • Press ↑ to see the Apple TV screensaver location. (via Ted)
  • Recording Screen Time password isn’t possible in iOS 16.4 beta (via Gui Rambo)
  • melle points out you can guess the Screen Time passcode ∞ times in some cases. Not good, Bob.
    • Settings → General → Transfer or Reset iPhone
    • Erase All Content and Settings
    • Continue
    • Enter the iPhone passcode
    • Take ∞ guesses at the Screen Time passcode
    • Feedback: FB12006474
  • No-passcode iPhone ain’t so smart after all, says Eric deRuiter
  • Another approach to prevent iCloud passcode changes, provided by Jenny Oskarsen
    • Change your iPhone passcode
    • After you enter it twice, the phone will ask for your iCloud passcode
    • Hit Cancel; your passcode has been changed, but you will need to enter your current iCloud password to change it
• Tim Cook Orders Headset Forward Despite Warnings?
  • To Ship or Not to Ship, Headset Edition
  • Colleen Novielli
  • DJI Avata
  • Destiny & motion sickness
• Samsung’s “Space Zoom” is “enhanced” by “AI”
  • MKBHD’s YouTube Short
    • Correction video
    • 2021 🙂 Moon Crater
  • The Verge’s coverage
  • Samsung’s Explanation
• Post-show: Casey’s Watch band problems
  • Wirecutter picks

Sponsored by:

• Kolide: Cross-platform endpoint security for teams that value privacy and transparency.

Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Pants storage classes
2. Protecting trans rights
3. Happy anniversary… again
4. More ATV remote-touch follow-up
5. Passcodes & Screen Time
6. Sponsor: Kolide
7. Headset: ops vs. design?
8. ATP Membership
9. AI in your camera
10. Ending theme
11. Watch bands

Pants storage classes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I have one of the most disruptive injuries I’ve ever had. Oh?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have a cut on my support pinky. Right where the phone rests.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh! That is not desirable. What was the load-bearing pinky?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That was the name of the episode, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so basically I can’t hold my phone the way I have held my phone forever. Because,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, it hurts a lot. You know, it’s one of those, like, you know, deep paper cut kind of things. You know, it’ll be gone in probably, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe four or five days. but like, man, it’s really disruptive right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is not desirable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Aren’t you one of those weird people who holds their phone in their non-dominant hand?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, because I had a wallet before I carried a phone. So the wallet and keys went

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the right pocket with my dominant

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} hand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Every time, this kills me, every time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Eventually, I added a phone to my pocket setup and so it had to go in the left pocket because that was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco free pocket. So I am a left-hand phone user even though I am right-handed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. All right, well, so now, now that your left hand is injured, you can use your dominant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hand to hold your phone with your non-injured pinky, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh God, it’s all wrong. I’m trying, it’s all, it feels all wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, it’s the hand that you’re good with. Like, it should be no problem, but that pinky under there. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco God, this is, I can’t even, now I can’t reach all my icons. It’s the wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thumb. I’m so firmly in the, the phone in the right hand pockets thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that when I walk the dog, my phone is in my right hand pocket, but I also hold the dog leash with my right hand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I’m gonna have control of the dog. And so I’ve gotten really, really good at taking my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of my right-hand pocket with my left hand and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} putting it back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just go, whoop, whoop. It’s like, why don’t you just put the phone in the left pocket? It’s just because that’s not how the pocket setup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goes. See, the pocket setup, even though you have it set up wrong, the pocket setup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is king. Like that, you can’t mess with the pocket. Once you’ve established a pocket setup, you can’t mess with

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, but you see how I’m adapting? The pocket setup, I’m not changing, but I’m saying, okay, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the normal hand is occupied, in my case with a leash, in your case with a paper cut, use the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hand. By the way, I also am a left dog leash, left phone person, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} problem. Well, your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dog is the size of a chihuahua, so you have no problem using the left hand to control your dog. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you had a dog that was a little bit more, a little bit bigger and a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} bit more eager. A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dog-sized dog, even. Yeah, a little bit more eager to kill varmints, you maybe would want to use your dominant hand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Meanwhile, because of where we live, there’s deer everywhere. Like we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just walking all along the sidewalks, they walk right up to people because some people feed them, even though you’re not supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to, but some people do. They want Lyme disease, they love it. Right. And they’ll walk up and lick your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hand. I’ve touched a deer nose, not because I really wanted to, but because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was in front of my hand. I’m like, oh, let’s see what this feels like. Turns out it feels like a giant dog nose. Boop. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, like there’s like we can walk right past like a family of three deer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Within five feet of us and hops won’t even notice he just walked he just keeps going He just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cuz like, you know as far as he knows his food comes from cans He doesn’t know that it comes from

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} animals. I think he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna be taking that a deer no matter what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no But like, you know, if he sees a can on the ground who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, yeah Yeah, well, you know, I think I’m assuming hops has some kind of flea and tick treatment, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} probably don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so maybe no don’t get so close to the deer because the deer ticks are not your friend.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, no, these are all brand new little fluffy ones that don’t have, they aren’t covered in ticks yet. No, you don’t think so? Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Give them a few months. That comes later in the summer. All right. But no, I don’t, I try not to get that close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The problem is they’re like taking up the whole road. I got to like squeeze past

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them. For the record, John and I have the correct pocket setup. It is phone in the front right pocket, keys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the front left pocket and other randomness. I am a back pocket wallet kind of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey person. I don’t understand how people use the front wallet. Of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} course you are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What is that supposed to mean? I mean, what kind of monster puts their wallet in the front unless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’re walking through like a genuinely pickpocket heavy city, which is something I do extremely rarely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The wallet goes in the back. That’s why you have a little thin wallet, not a John Syracuse slash Costanza wallet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, thin or thick. I don’t want a Costanza back injury. Yeah, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no thickness of wallet that makes it comfortable to sit on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No. I don’t feel like I sit on my, I’m in my PJs as we’ve talked about many times before. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think I sit on my wallet. Maybe I do and I don’t realize it, but my wallet is thin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, back pockets are decorative. I feel like, you know, there’s a class of storage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of pants storage, where it is standing storage only.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s only if you have a Max phone. Yeah, right, like, you know, many people, they will have something in their pocket,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but then when they go to sit down, their routine is to remove that thing from their pocket and like put it on the table

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something. I don’t like doing that. So I am not, I don’t use standing storage only.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just have front pockets that I can keep things in all the time and I’m not a phone on the table kind of person

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’m very happy living that way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or you could be a teenager and apparently they put their phones in their back pockets and just sit with them and they don’t care. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like that’s half the reason why the iPhone 6 bend stuff happens because teenagers just do not care. They’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sit on their phones and just expect everything to be fine.

Protecting trans rights

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We haven’t talked about this in a while, but I wanted to take a moment and just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, remind isn’t really the word I’m looking for, but I guess just to say that I know I speak for all three of us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in saying that we support trans youth, we support trans people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s been really gross here in America for six, seven years now, but even longer than that too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And lately, there have been a bunch of bills that have been introduced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey here in the States, and I don’t think it’s unique to the United States, both fortunately and unfortunately, I guess mostly unfortunately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s been a bunch of bills introduced that are really, really gross and sick and awful. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is becoming kind of a thing, or I shouldn’t even say becoming, it is a thing here. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s the responsibility of people like the three of us, and probably like a lot of the people listening to the show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to stand up and say, this is not okay. And so I would like to say on behalf

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the three of us, this is not okay. I wanted to read to you from fivecalls.org, which we’ll talk about here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a second, but on there, it reads, over the past two years, state lawmakers introduced well over 300 bills

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey targeting trans people more than in any previous period. More than 85% of this legislation focuses on trans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey youth. In addition to bills banning necessary medical care, legislation continues to be introduced that restrict what can be taught

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in schools and exclude trans people from participation in sports as well as restricting their access to bathrooms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I heard about this most recently, um, from a dear friend of the show and host of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Two Headed Girl with their spouse, Matt, um, talking about Alex Cox, who you would also know as one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the hosts of Dubai Friday, uh, Alex wrote a lovely blog post slash recorded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an episode of Two Headed Girl. We will link to both the text and audio versions, uh, where Alex is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey basically saying in a very kind way, Hey, people that look like the host of ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you should do something. We need you to do something. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this happened at around the same time that I saw John Maltz tweet about 5calls.org,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I briefly mentioned a moment ago. 5calls is a really cool tool that I was not familiar with before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that lets you put in where you live, and actually it uses geolocation, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it’ll figure out exactly what district you’re in and say, okay, if you want to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a difference, here is the phone number to call with a telephone link. It’s in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey huge font and it has a little script that you can read and say exactly what you need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to say. And they even, if you want to go for double bonus points, have a link where you can look at the trans-related

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey legislation for your area. So you can say, I am calling on behalf of bill 12345

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it’s gross and I don’t like it. And so I am going to do this tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t have a chance to do it today, but I am putting it out here for the public. You can ask me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if I’ve done it and keep me honest here. My intention is to do it first thing tomorrow morning. But to call my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey legislators and say, this is gross, because you know what, it is gross. And it is up to people that look like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us to be there for the people that don’t look like us. And it’s the least we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can do, for goodness sakes. And so I just wanted to call that out. I don’t know if you two have anything you want to add about that. Please feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey free. But seriously, fivecalls.org, we’ll put the full link in the show notes and listen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to Alex’s episode and or read their blog post because it’s incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the thing I’ll add is on a periodic basis, we also get the opportunity to vote for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who will be in the lawmaking bodies in our country. Don’t vote for anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who supports any of these bills.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Like, I know you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have other issues. It’s the reason this comes up, because the Republicans use it as a wedge issue to scare people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into voting for them so they can get lower taxes for rich people. It’s a perverse system. I understand, right? But you may be like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t like that this person supports the trans bill, but I do like X, Y, and Z. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of the reason they use it as a wedge issue is because people are scared of it and it scares them into voting for them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But on the other side of it, it’s kind of a disqualifier. It’s like, well, I like everything about their policy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John except how they have classified this whole set of humans as non human. That’s kind of hard to overlook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like it should be kind of hard to overlook anybody who supports any of these things that take away rights from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people do not vote for them. Vote for whoever is running against them that has the best chance of winning because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of our stupid two-party system here, whatever. Yes, make the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John calls, all that, but a lot of times you feel like you’re making the calls and it doesn’t matter because you have some stupid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Republican lawmaker you know is not going to change their mind. Vote them out next time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Yep. I mean, if you look throughout American history,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we have a long history of trying to suppress

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people’s rights, trying to cause a certain type of person

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not to exist in various ways, many of them hostile or violent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Lots of different attempts at society to meddle in people’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sexuality or gender identities or other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco romantic or gender-based behaviors that they really have no business meddling in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And over the arc of history, those have all been proven wrong. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ve moved past a lot of them. Every one of those battles was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fought hard and eventually won. And the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who were on the other side of it, who were trying to cause violence to or restrict the rights

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people of certain characteristics that they didn’t like or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those people always lose. And those people oftentimes come to regret

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the positions they’ve had on the other side when they were trying to restrict people’s rights. If you are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe on the fence on issues like this, or if you are on the other side where you want these rights to be restricted, I urge you to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look at the course of history and see how that’s gone for those people. And maybe realize,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, this—whatever reasons you have in your head for thinking this is different, I assure you it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not. You can look back at our history and say, well, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rights of women, the rights of black people, the rights of gay people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Over time, we’ve had to work really hard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco advance those and to work for equality, and we’re still not done, honestly, in all those areas.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But this is the latest battlefront in that area, where we have lots of efforts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco across our country to restrict the rights of trans people, to try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to deny trans people exist, or to try to stop them from existing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those are just as barbaric and and just horrendous as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our past treatment of all those other groups. I urge you to fight this good fight.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is our generation’s, you know, latest challenge in this area. Anything that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco restricts somebody’s rights or ability to be themselves or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their right to simply exist without being harassed or threatened by our society.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We need to fight for that. We need to fight for everyone’s rights. It is no business of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the state what gender identity people want to have. It is no more their business

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as it was to ban interracial marriage or to ban gay marriage or to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco laws against certain people making love to each other, like that, all of those things are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, for the most part, relics of history that we’ve fought very hard to get rid of. This is the latest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco battle. And so all people who care about rights and liberty for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all, you should care about this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. Couldn’t agree more. So please, 5calls.org, particularly if you’re American, I’m sure there’s equivalents

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for wherever you live, because unfortunately this is not a uniquely American thing, although perhaps we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are peeing more aggressive about it than most other places. All right.

Happy anniversary… again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then just to put a little bit of a smile on the beginning of the show here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s officially, officially the last time I can say H-P is 10 years old because on the 11th of March

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} 2013.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How many

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} anniversaries have we had? Occasion inflation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We’ve had like seven. Yeah, occasion inflation, right? We have had like 17 10th anniversaries so far. But for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey real this time, this is the last one on my list. It was 621 in the evening

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on March 11th, 2013 that I had tweeted about the Accidental Tech podcast. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for real, for real this time, 10 years. And I will just very briefly say, first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of all, thank you to anyone who has ever listened to the show, even if you have stopped listening and thus are not hearing my words

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right now. I appreciate it immensely. We appreciate it immensely. Anyone who’s even looked at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a sponsor, much less patronized one of the sponsors, anyone who’s become a member at http.fm slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Normally this is where I would say, if you really enjoy the show, go to that URL. But instead I will say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go to fivecalls.org and make some phone calls. appreciate that for this one. But nevertheless, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is because of all of you that have stuck around for 10 years. 10 years! It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bananas. I mean, Adam was a baby. He wasn’t even a year old when the show started. I didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey babies when the show started. It’s nuts to me that we have been going for 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey years. And speaking only for myself for a moment, it is a genuine pleasure that I get to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey speak to you two gentlemen every single week come hell or high water. And for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I hope this continues until one of us or all of us can’t talk anymore. So thank you to you two. Thank you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey especially to the listeners. And you can thank us by going to fivecalls.org and making some phone calls.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I agree with all that, but you’re not allowed to do any more anniversaries, Casey. Moratorium.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So in my family, we have a tradition that birthdays are just the week. It’s like your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco birthday week. Our birthdays have grown over time into just full week experiences.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I feel like this is like our show here. Our anniversary has lasted like two months. Like how long has it been?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} too much, it’s too much. You’ve overdone

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} it. Oh, it’s all right, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will leave it. Yeah, there’s a long cooling off period you need now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I got at least like five more years until I need to start worrying about an anniversary. If we can make it to 15, which I sure hope we do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think you gotta hold off until 20 now. You’ve overdone it so much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Oh, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} dad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re banned until 20. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but 20 is gonna be six months long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah, it’s possible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know. We’re gonna start celebrating the 20th anniversary in 2031. Do I have that right? It’s just going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to be a year long. The future. We’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} All right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, thank you for indulging us for all of the pre-show. I really do appreciate it. And let’s do some follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because I know that’s what you’re here for.

More ATV remote-touch follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ted points out with regard to turning off the what’s the what’s the term, John, for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sensitivity in the remote? What’s the formal term for it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was like touch or touch or click only or touch and click. I don’t remember what the setting is. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, if you turn that off, Ted has found out that if you press up on the end, when you’re looking at an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey TV screensaver, it will show the location. And then instead of swiping, you can press left and right to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cycle through the screensavers, which is cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, this is the never ending follow up of like, I turned off touch of my Apple TV remote, but now I can’t do whatever. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} think this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one we had in the queue was someone said I can’t figure out how to get the location on the screensaver. Apparently you can press up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed.

Passcodes & Screen Time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Then Eric DeReuter writes, it seems that the no passcode iPhone plan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can be defeated by a thief adding a passcode and then using the new passcode to reset your Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ID password. Whoopsie doopsie. That is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amazing. I have not tested this. And here’s the thing, this is gonna be a theme with that we have a bunch of followup related

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to this. Lots of people post things like this and it’s not clear to me that they have actually tested it or they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just surmising this would be the case. And the reason I don’t, haven’t been testing a lot of these is because basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m afraid of screwing something up and locking myself out of my Apple ID. Because a lot of this testing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} is like, remove

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a passcode, then remove this, then remove your Apple ID, then add your Apple ID. It’s just like, there’s no way I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do that. So I’m cautioning people not to just go hog wild

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying all these things that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} hearing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m including him in the show just because I’d like to hear, I think it’s interesting to know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there may be ways around, even that silliest thing of the person who’s on the farm and didn’t have a passcode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s a fun little bit of feedback, but if you think that’s a great plan, maybe think again. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John setting aside all the social engineering things, just practically speaking, it’s apparently not clear to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyone, anyone, anywhere, exactly how the security is intertwined

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Apple IDs and resetting and trusting devices. It’s just so complicated. We all kind of know the default way things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work, but this type of thing of like, okay, well, we’ll get through it in a little bit, but what if I wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have an Apple ID and I wanna have a passcode, But I don’t want the passcode to be able to reset the Apple ID. Is that possible?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And what if I don’t have a passcode? If they add the passcode, suddenly can the added passcode now reset my Apple ID? It’s very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John confusing and very fraught. And I feel like Apple should eventually address this, as we’ve discussed in past shows. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s just one more permutation to make you doubt that you really know exactly what’s going on with respect to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John passcodes and Apple IDs. I mean, the bottom line is what we said before. If you had a really long alphanumeric one, it’s harder to shoulder

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surf. And that’s probably the best defense, but it’s also super annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tangentially related with regard to doing a screen recording

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey while your parent is entering the screen time pass code so you can then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reverse engineer the screen time pass code. Guy Rambeau told me that in the iOS 16.4 beta, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey screen time pass code entry does not show up in screen recordings. Guy writes, I believe that that’s been the case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for any secure data entry for quite a while if the app configures the keyboard appropriately. I just thought that was very funny. That apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that hole is already being filled in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but not the whole of your children’s shoulder surfing you. And we keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that phrase is everyone knows what it means. It’s I mean, can we do the etymology on shoulder surfing? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think it actually is difficult to find out what we mean is someone looking over your shoulder and seeing what you’re doing right. But why is it called

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shoulder surfing? I think it’s like what’s that? What’s the derivation of that? I think it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. Surfing is I don’t know. You can look it up. It’s not it. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the first use of surfing to mean sort of like being poised on the edge of something peering over or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, that’s what we mean by shoulder surfing someone looking over your shoulder and seeing what you’re doing And kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are really good at that because they’re small and sneaky

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mm-hmm. All right, and then apparently you can make unlimited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey guesses for the Screen-time passcode in a particular context. So Mellie writes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can do it unlimited screen-time passcode attempts in the screen-time passcode Whatever within hours

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so you can go to iOS settings general transfer or reset iPhone you tap on erasable content

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and settings tap on continue You might have to enter the iPhone passcode then you’re and you’re asked to enter the screen time passcode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you can enter the Wrong passcode as often as you like there’s no forced pause after six wrong passcodes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is kind of funny I mean, I don’t think that’s that big a deal, but it’s pretty funny nonetheless,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but no, that’s exactly This is an ultimate hole for a child. All right. So first of all, it’s a scary thing to do Like they’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re going to their own device They’re on their own like iPad, right and they’re going like, you know Erase all content

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and settings which is a terrifying flow to start going through right, but they’re just going through and you know You have to enter the passcode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They probably know the passcode to their own iPad. It’s how they get into their iPad, right? So they’re able to do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They are able to go to this. They just have to make sure they don’t go all the way through with the procedure because at a certain point in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John erase all content and settings flow on their own device, they will be asked, oh, you’re not allowed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to erase this because it’s locked with screen time. So please enter the screen time passcode. And in this particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flow, at that point, you can guess as many times as you want. And the screen time passcode, I believe, is limited to four

⏹️ ▶️ ^John digits. Yes. Only 10,000 combos and kids have a lot of time. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And fast fingers like God. I cannot believe like when I see my kid operating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPad or his computer, he’s so fast. Like you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m a nerd. I’m pretty fast at things. My God, I got nothing on my kid. He is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the speed at which he taps things and goes through things and go through screens and everything flies through menus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like amazing. And so yeah, a kid who discovers this loophole and is devoted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to getting the passcode can probably do it within like a half hour. It would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take longer. You can do the time. How long does it take to type in 10,000 four-digit codes? You can split it over multiple days.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the point is, you think, oh, no one will ever have the patience to root for it this a kid would.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Especially because the reward for knowing your iPad’s screen time passcode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is quite encouraging for a kid. Yeah, they are highly motivated. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then there’s a feedback number we’ll put in the show notes, which would potentially be useful to Apple people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if feedback actually did anything other than go to dev null, which we’re going to talk about in a future episode because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have thoughts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, yeah, this person says they filed a feedback and Apple responded that it is, quote, not a security issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How is it not a security issue? Well, that, but how did Apple respond to a feedback? I think that’s even more stunning.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, we don’t, it’s not a direct quote. We’re quoting the person who wrote this, I think it was at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Macedon Post. So anyway, it feels wrong to me. It feels like if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s any place where you’re asked for the passcode, there should be at least like a slowdown, sort of a back off slowdown type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. You can’t just guess forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s definitely a security issue. They just might not care about this area of security enough, which I think is their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem that they should fix, if that’s true. But it’s also possible that like this got to a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bug screener who, you know, wasn’t very good. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a big problem, I think, with the impression that we have of the bug filing process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from the outside, is that it is very, very clear that the level

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of bug screeners that often interact with our bugs, they are not paying attention. They are not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going through like actually reading what you wrote, they’re not actually looking to see what you what you included or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco attached, they’re looking to plow through as many as possible, find any reason to kick it back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to you or close it. That’s it. You know, it isn’t like, you know, Apple, the one brain,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has decided this is not worth fixing. No, it’s Apple has a really crappy bug screening process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that incentivizes and encourages mass disregard of what we say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so that person who saw that bug report had a very, very strong incentive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and probable inertia towards disregarding it in some reason. So if you say, hey, this is a security problem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re looking for any possible reason to say, no, it’s not because they want to plow through as many bugs as possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that day. And that’s terrible and dysfunctional and that causes Apple to miss tons of stuff they really shouldn’t miss.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But that is Apple’s process and that it falls squarely on their management to fix. Steven

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Connelly Save it for the show because we’re going to talk about it not this week, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey soon. Jenny Oscarson writes, it is possible to have a passcode on an iPhone, be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey logged into iCloud and not have that passcode allow you to change your Apple ID password. So the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you do this is you change your passcode. Once the passcode has been entered twice, it will ask for your Apple ID password.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey At that point, just hit cancel. The passcode has been changed, even though you’d canceled. And if you attempt to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey change the Apple ID password from the settings app, it will ask you for your current Apple ID password. I haven’t verified if this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is true, but it sounds good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I tried this and it did not work. Like I was not offered that choice and it did it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just never. So whatever, yeah, for whatever it’s worth, this didn’t work for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I feel like there is with this type of of thing there is there’s stuff that we can’t see and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the stuff that we can’t see I feel like is behind the scenes once you link up your trusted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John device in your Apple ID even if you follow this procedure it still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says oh but this device in this Apple ID like this is a trusted device for this Apple ID so of course

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I will prompt and this this device does have a passcode so I’ll prompt you for the passcode and that’s what you reset it like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think like once they get associated an Apple server side that this phone and that Apple ID are are connected,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that this won’t work. But if maybe you never link them in this way, or maybe you do this the first time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I feel like there’s unseen stuff that we’re, you know, something in some database table or some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John record somewhere on Apple’s side, it was, is thwarting this. And I had the same experience that it didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work for me, but it worked for Jenny. So I, there’s obviously something we’re not seeing It’s beyond just looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the settings on your phone.

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Headset: ops vs. design?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s been a little bit of talk over the last week about how Tim Cook’s a jerk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and he just wants to ship because he wants to be remembered, man. That’s what it’s all about. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a report in the Financial Times, which was then summarized, possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not extremely accurately depending on how you read it, but it was summarized by Mac Rumors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That summary says that Apple CEO Tim Cook sided with the operations chief Jeff Williams

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in pushing to launch a first-generation mixed-reality headset device this year, against

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the wishes of the company’s design team, the Financial Times reports. The company’s industrial design team cautioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that devices in the category were not yet ready for launch and wanted to delay until a lightweight AR glass product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had matured several years later. On the other hand, Apple’s ops team wanted to ship an early version of the product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the form of a VR-focused ski-goggle-like headset that allows users to watch 3D videos, perform interactive workouts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or make FaceTime calls with virtual avatars. Tim Cook reportedly sided with Jeff Williams, overruling objections from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple’s designers and pressing for an early launch with a more limited product. Speaking to the Financial Times,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey former Apple engineers who worked on the device described the quote, huge pressure to ship quote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple’s headset has reportedly been in active development for seven years, twice as long as the original iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey prior to its launch. The device is seen as being tied directly to Tim Cook’s legacy as Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey first new computing platform developed entirely under his leadership. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what do we think, fellas?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, Gruber had a good follow-up, sort of punching holes in all the theorizing about the internal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John intrigue about this and how nonsensical this theory is. It’s nonsensical on many, many fronts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John factually inaccurate about this being the first item tied to Tim Cook’s legacy. Doesn’t really make much sense

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Tim Cook would care about this to secure his legacy, which is already secured. In fact, this could screw it up. Like, we’ll link to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Gruber article. You can see all that. I’m not so much interested in whether, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about all of those details. I’m more interested in basically the idea of, do we think Apple should ship

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a ski goggles thing or do we think that they should wait until they have AR glasses? It seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the company has decided that they’re going to ship, I mean, we’ve talked about this for ages. Like the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ve been talking about, oh, it’s gonna come anytime now, is not a pair of glasses. It is a goggly thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe a slim goggly thing, smaller than other people’s, but it’s a AR VR headset

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing of the type that we already see on the market, not a pair of Clark

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Kent glasses that magically show you something because nobody has the technology to do that yet. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the interesting part of the story is just putting a pin on the idea that Apple has decided they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to ship that rather than waiting. That much is clear. And the other little tidbit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that there is a portion of the company that thinks this is the wrong move. I don’t think there’s anything that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does that there’s not a portion of the company that thinks it’s the wrong move. Like it’s a big company with a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John opinionated people. like literally name anything, any product, any decision they’ve ever made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somewhere, some department thinks that that was the wrong thing to do. Some software division, some hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John division, some supplier manager, like someone thinks they should have either not shipped that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or shipped it earlier or shipped it later or shipped a different thing. That is true in any company. So a story

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that says, well, you know, the operations department thought they should have done X and the supplier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manager and people thought they should have done Y soon. Like, of course, that’s just, that’s inevitable, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They try to make it into a more interesting story. It’s like, oh, it’s Tim Cook and operations versus industrial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John design. It’s like, he runs the company. Like, it’s not versus anything. It’s a hierarchy. Like, it’s, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tim Cook doesn’t need approval from everyone below him to do things, right? And there’s nothing, literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing that gets done that doesn’t have someone disagreeing with it or whatever. Like the butterfly keyboard, right? They shipped that for years and years. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think there weren’t people inside Apple that thought, whole departments that thought This butterfly keyboard thing is a terrible mistake.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They just weren’t the ones who got to make the decision for that, right? Anyway, so setting that aside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is interesting to think kind of like, kind of comparing to the car project. Should Apple continue,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have continued to, you know, they haven’t shipped anything yet, but should Apple continue to just work on this problem until

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have something that looks like a pair of glasses or should they basically ship what they have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which presumably is, you know, incrementally better than other ski goggles type things, but it’s not a pair of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John glasses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, there’s so many weird holes in this article. And the aforementioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Gruber article, I think, pokes most of the holes very well. So I’ll leave that to him. Including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the whole thing with this being Tim Cook’s legacy. The Apple Watch was a Tim Cook product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They claim that Steve Jobs conceived the Apple Watch, but the watch came out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco four years after Jobs died. It’s a Tim Cook product. whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever jobs would have conceived there would have been such an early preliminary thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was pretty much a hundred percent executed under Tim Cook so that’s the watches a team

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of product is very successful you know Rupert mentioned air pods is another great example like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is these are not small deals so Tim Cook’s legacy is fine you know if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want to poke holes in his legacy look at other things like his China strategy for instance maybe that’s gonna be a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you know for the products they’ve been fine they’ve had ups and downs they also had ups and downs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco under Steve so you know we’re fine there so as for the particulars of this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s interesting you know reading between the lines here whenever you have an article like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is or you see something from Mark Gurman or from Ming-Chi Kuo it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you’re seeing bits and pieces like what happens is somebody has a source

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somewhere and they get they get some information bits and pieces of information possibly from multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different sources and then they try to put together the narrative that they think this means.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But you often have to separate that out. Like, so often the rumor mill gets good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco information and and like the individual facts of it might end up being correct,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the narrative they spin ends up being totally wrong. So I think it’s worth parsing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of that out and you know and trying to figure out like, okay, what’s the actual information that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this seems to be reporting, not necessarily, you know, the story of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why the reporter thinks this is the way it is or the overarching story that this might be saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but what’s the actual information here? And I don’t think there’s much new here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco except except for maybe that the industrial design team did not want to ship this product at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all, or yet at least. And that operations said, Sure, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna ship it anyway. And I don’t think that you know, and And like, you know, operations here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco under Tim Cook, that’s basically become product design. Like as far as we can tell from,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, vague statements and tips here and there, it does seem like Jeff Williams is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of the head of product direction now, in some ways at least, or for some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco products at least.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, why do you think that? Just because he’s sort of in charge of that project that he’s, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John difficult to tell from the outside, but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I think Gruber made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the point that, The group made the point that like in Apple world, product marketing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is what is also known as, you know, product or product management in other companies,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like emphasis on the product. Like if you think product marketing is just to design the ads for the product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not it. And product marketing still exists and still has powerful people in it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s never been entirely clear to me how this works. And I think it is informal. You know, when we say product, what we’re talking about is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what should we make? Should we make a laptop computer with a giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flashlight built into it? Should we make a giant desktop with 8,000 slots? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should we make a car? Like, product is, in most companies, is like, what should we make?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, we’re a company that makes, you know, I don’t know, like, grills. Should we make gas grills? Should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we make charcoal grills? Should we make grills that we plug in that are electric? Like, what should we make? What kind of electric, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone has to decide what should we make. That’s a product decision. And very often traditional companies have like focus groups

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they do market research and say what part of the market can we make an impact in? What are we good at making? You know, like all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sorts of stuff like what should we make? And then engineering is like how do we make the thing that we should make? And industrial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John design and user interfaces, how should the thing that we made work and blah blah blah. And you can see how it all kind of blends together. But in every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company there has to kind of be the person in charge of what should we make. And in Apple, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not entirely clear who does that job because ideas for products have historically come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from all over the place. You know, in the jobs era, jobs may have an idea, but also I think ideas

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would come from all over the place bounce off of jobs his head and come back down the org chart and they would say we’re gonna make this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re gonna make that whose idea was it to make a watch? That could have been Johnny Ives idea he was big enough when the organ he could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bounce that off. But who decides yes, we are going to make a watch like it bounces all over the place. It’s not entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clear within the realm of individual departments. Who’s deciding what kind of max get made?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Should we make? Should Should we continue to make iMacs or not? Should we make a Mac Pro? Should we make,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should we have SD cards in our laptop? Should we have an HDMI port? Like you can see the decisions that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John influence that all over the place. Should we make a convertible laptop that folds back and has a touchscreen? Should we make touchscreen Macs? Who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John makes that call? In Apple’s org chart, it is not entirely clear where that comes from. And it often

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comes down to individual personalities, you know, or people with particular power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John structures in the org because of historical reasons. sometimes just as simple as like someone, some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John random part in the org chart has a conversation, someone that has a conversation, someone that has a conversation with someone higher up that comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back down. You know, it’s not, it’s not as regimented. That’s part of what makes Apple in any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of good company. Like you can’t have a regimented structure where it’s like, this is where all the decisions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about product get made. And this is where the end, you know, that no one wants to work at that company. And then that kind of company is sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of ossified and just not particularly, I’m going to use buzzwords, agile or reactive to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the market. Right. Uh, But the bottom line is those decisions do get made. Someone said we’re going to do some kind of car

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. And that kind of car thing has changed. Someone’s making that decision. Right. So in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scenario, I don’t think industrial design has ever really been in the business

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of saying we should make a watch, we should make a car, we should make a laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We should make a laptop with HDMI ports and an SD card. Right. But Johnny, I was certainly in the business of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John potentially saying we should make a watch. And Johnny Ive is different than saying the current industrial design team. They’re both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same part of the org chart, but Johnny I was Johnny I right and so that’s why from the outside It’s difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to tell Who is deciding what kind of things Apple should make if you ask anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a particular org structure like ask like Colleen? What’s name calling no via Nova telly no BLE.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sorry. No, no, no Yeah, like who decided that we were gonna make a really really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John skinny 20 Who does I we’re gonna make a 24-inch iMac at all let alone the fact that it was skinny And they’d probably say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well it was collaborative. We knew we were gonna continue make the iMac It’s like, well, wait a second. How did you know that? Was there ever a conversation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of should we make IMAX anymore? Oh, no. You know, like and then who decided it was going to be really skinny. Well, that was industrial design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, this is just it’s a lot of give and take. That’s the way these products get made with the headset type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. Someone decided years and years ago we should be looking to the VR thing. And I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t matter who said that any like if it was operations, industrial design,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engineering, Tim Cook, you know, someone’s sister’s brother’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uncle’s cousin. Like, it doesn’t matter where that idea came from. The bottom line is as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that idea somehow finds its way into executives and they all go, yeah, this is a thing we should look into where Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is right up our alley. Other people are looking into it. We can’t ignore AR VR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We should look into this technology. And we should probably have some kind of skunk works project to do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s probably needed as a decision. And it’s hard to trace back to any single person, maybe. But then at this point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you’re like, okay, we’ve been doing this, we’ve been working at products, industrial design. We said in the past show, there was the rumor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that industrial design said it should be a Stan or Johnny I’ve specifically said it shouldn’t have a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you click onto your belt. It should be standalone, right? You shouldn’t have to connect it to your phone. You shouldn’t have to connect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to your Mac. It should be a standalone device. Why does industrial design get to make that decision? Is it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because, Oh, that’s part of the hardware design in terms of like having a wire going from your head down to the thing? Or is it because Johnny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ive is Johnny Ive or is it some combination of those two things? Right. But that’s the type of decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can imagine being influenced. And here, industrial design may think, boy, having a ski

⏹️ ▶️ ^John goggles thing on your face is clunky. And I kind of agree with them. But then you could say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but industrial design, like, what do you want us to do? Never ship anything until it’s the fantasy version of your head? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not technically possible right now. And we’re not entirely sure when it will be technically possible. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John industrial design saying, we should just continue to work on this for another eight years and not ship anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can imagine that falling on deaf ears within the organization. Especially since as Gruber pointed out, the team that is working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on these goggles is like, you know, hundreds or thousands of people and Juster Design is way smaller number

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people. And yeah, maybe they think Apple shouldn’t ship anything that’s clunky and that gets back to the long running discussion we’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about, you know, should, you know, is this, what are you going to do with this product? Is it going to be flop or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever? But my personal opinion is that they’ve been working on it so long, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need like, they need to ship something to get good at shipping this type of thing. foolish to think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they could stay in sort of stealth mode for 16 to 20 years and then pop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out one day with the glasses, right? Even though they’ve been doing all the groundwork with all their frameworks with AR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John VR frameworks and all that stuff, like they’ve been doing the software side of it, you do need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get a product out to people to learn from your mistakes, which is tough for Apple to be in because anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they put out everyone’s gonna have scrutiny on it like they did with the watch. Oh, if it’s not the biggest hit product overnight, you Apple sucks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? It’s It’s the end of Apple, blah, blah, blah. That’s going to happen with this product. I don’t think it’s going to be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John smash hit. I think, but I think they need to, I agree with Tim Cook, they need to ship

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this. If they have something they think is plausibly useful for some function and is a pretty good,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better version of what’s out there now, they need to ship it to get good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at shipping this type of thing, kind of in case this type of thing ends up being important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the future. And we all kind of think that eventually when this technology gets way, way better, it will absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be important. So don’t sit on the sidelines. Don’t don’t wait until everybody else

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gets all the experience doing this. You know, they I agree with Tim Cook, according

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the story, that they should ship this. I say this despite the fact that I still have no idea what this thing will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John useful for. And I think I’m very pessimistic about the product. But sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s just what you have to do. It’s not an Apple type thing to do. But like in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the realm of the technology, I agree. I believe so strongly that if and when technology arrives to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have this not be a giant goggle on your face that it will be Transformative and incredibly useful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they need to get good at it So as painful as it’s going to I think it’s going to be for the whole org

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They need to ship something that they think is of Apple quality and learn from it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, not only do they need to ship so they can get good at it if there’s going to be a third-party developer story,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then we need to get good at it, too and And most of the developers that I know, which is a complete

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anecdote, but of the developers I know, I think only James Thompson has really fiddled that much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with AR stuff. I mean, maybe others have. Maybe you guys have, for all I know. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey far as I’m aware, it’s basically just James Thompson amongst our peer group. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t have any empty tables in my house to play with.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right, exactly. And so if this is going to be a thing, and if third-party

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey developers care about it, even just rank and file third party developers like us, then we need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey start figuring all this out. And I can tell you, I did really badly in matrix mathematics when I was in college,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot of that involved in AR stuff. So I’m fighting an uphill battle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Any 3D graphics stuff is gonna use matrices, but you don’t have to deal with it in modern

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} code. Like, you know, it’s all below the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco surface that you’re dealing with here. No, but am I gonna have to buy like a new blank desk to test?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, somewhere in my office I need like an empty table.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It must be made of wood, and it must be

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} nine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey feet by three feet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, that’s the AR stuff, but the VR stuff is like, you know, gaming is the obvious application, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if there’s any kind of thing you want to do, people want to listen to podcasts where they see a 3D projection of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chapter art, people don’t even know podcasts have chapter art.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I mean, but people, I mean, look, people probably will want to listen to podcasts in this thing, and that’s what, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, look, I’ll tell you, like, as a developer, I could not be less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco excited about this for the moment, just because I’m right in the middle of this giant rewrite. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last thing I wanna do is get a new platform dropped on me that I have to support right now. Maybe next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year would be a little bit better. No, I mean, I think if you, going back to this article just for a minute here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, even though I just told you, be careful what narratives people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weave from rumors, and meanwhile I’m about to weave one. But I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what the story here might be, because when you look at a leak or a rumor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you gotta figure like, why did the leaker share this information with a journalist?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And oftentimes, it’s, they have an ax to grind. They’re trying, or they’re trying to get something changed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they’re upset about or something. Trying to get some decision reversed or made or whatever. And if you look at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this story, you can pick up bits and pieces from other recent changes and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things at Apple, some of which have been good. It seems like the industrial design department

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is losing its authority a little bit in Apple. And it’s coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from a pretty high place. Like the Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive, and then later Tim Cook and Johnny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ive era, really had industrial design having tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of influence and control over the products. To the point where, you know, we’ve heard stories from people about how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, industrial design, like, wouldn’t let them ship something until they like, you know, centered a screw,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or they would force them to, you know, fit the internals of this product into this little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco skinny enclosure, even if like it really could have been a lot better with like a few more millimeters,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they would be like, no, you have to fit it in this these dimensions. This is our design period. It seems like industrial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco design had a huge amount of influence that could basically dictate what they wanted, and the rest of the company

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would have to fall in line. And in the last few years after Johnny’s departure, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe as part of Johnny’s departure, but in the last few years, that they seem to have lost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of of that influence. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think it’s not just his departure. Yeah, it was not just his departure. It’s the things that were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done that could could conceivably be laid at the feet of industrial Zion like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right now, I like the butterfly keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, but and well, that’s not maybe not necessarily industrial. It was that’s it. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hard to tell from the outside. Look, you can see you can look at things like the 2013 trashcan Mac Pro, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco butterfly keyboard that the whole series of 2016 to 2020 MacBook Pros that people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really, you know, had a lot of practical problems with or features that were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John removed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gets into what I was saying before about like who decided that the laptops wouldn’t have ports anymore and they would just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have USB-C shaped holes. Like that is a product decision, but it seems like, again from the outside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it seems like it might have been heavily influenced by industrial design. I think the keyboard thing is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John necessarily clear that that was laid at the feet of industrial design. Maybe the fact that they had to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that keyboard to begin with could be laid at the the feet of industrial design, but keeping shipping it for six years, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was not industrial design. But anyway, that’s why it’s so hard from the outside. But I have to say that like the influence is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not just because Johnny left, but because whatever the organization as a whole was doing, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outside world and the market has decided this is not what we want from Apple products. Like the laptops we complained

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about for ages, that they were too thin and had too few ports and had too little utility and people didn’t really like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the touch bar. Whoever’s decision that was in Apple, If any of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can be laid to the feet of industrial design, industrial design should have some of their power taken

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away because they made a lot of bad calls. Maybe that wasn’t industrial design. Whoever’s fault it was, some part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Apple organization made some bad calls about product decisions, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What feature should this product have? Should it have an SD card slot or not? Should it have HDMI port?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Should it, you know, how thin should it be? How important is battery life? Even the iPhones you could say, with the iPhone 6

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it was getting thinner and thinner and they were bendy and the battery life was bad. At some point, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as an organization changed course and said, we’re gonna make the phone sticker and make the batteries bigger. That’s a better product

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decision, right? And even though we can’t attribute blame for any individual

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one thing, because we don’t know what’s going on, is reasonable to conclude that industrial design had a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John influence over, because we know kind of their ethos, the Johnny Ive ethos of like minimal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a lot of external features, very small, thin, simple. We can see that and we attribute

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that to industrial design And we think, at least on this podcast, that a lot of the decisions were not the right ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so yes, Johnny and I have left as the big personality. But also, industrial design, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should be a give and take between engineering and industrial design. Like what you said before, industrial design says, now here’s how much space you have. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not going to change our design. Engineering shouldn’t be 100% overruled by industrial design all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the time. It has to be a give and take.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I think what we’ve seen in the products over the last few years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is more of a give and take between what is good engineering,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what your customers want and what serves them best, and what industrial design wants to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco visually and form-wise. We’ve seen that be better balanced in the last few years in the product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s why we’re all so happy with all the recent products, because they’ve done such a good job

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of rebalancing that, because it had gone too far in one direction, and now it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco become more of a give and take. And if you look at this article, It kind of just sounds like there was somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the design team who leaked all this, who was just, who maybe was just resentful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they didn’t have ultimate authority anymore, or they didn’t have as much authority as they

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} used to. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this case, it’s not like they had… In this case, if you said, okay, fine industrial design person, what do you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do? Because we can’t ship the thing that the industrial design thing is wanting here. We should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ship glasses. Well, we don’t have glasses. Nobody has that. It’s like saying, well, we should ship a self-driving car. Well, great, but nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has that. So what they’re saying instead is, we should just not ship anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I hear Tesla’s gonna release that like just right around the corner, right? Any minute now. Any day. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} that’s their

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} position

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, we should just not ship anything. And that is a position to have, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John after however many years, was it seven years in development or whatever? Someone somewhere has decided that they think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that there’s some use of this product. It has reached a point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where presumably it is like one of the best headsets on the market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John given its price, because you would expect that from Apple, right? They’re good, this type of thing, okay?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the question is, should we ship that or not? An industrial design person might think, I hate this product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would never use it. I don’t think it’s particularly useful, blah, blah, blah. It’s me. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, we’ve all kind of said the same thing, but I feel like from Tim Cook’s perspective, if you believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that this type of product will eventually be important when the hardware catches up with it, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is somewhat important for Apple to get good. And you could say the same things about the iPhone. I was like, well, Apple didn’t ship a phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until they had totally nailed it. Yeah, but they did make the Newton, right? Like, it’s not that I’m saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this headset is gonna be the Newton of AR VR stuff. Like you have to kind of get good about making small electronic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John objects with screens and touchscreens and pens. Like Apple, before the iPhone, Apple, it’s not like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had never shipped anything like it before, right? And it’s the same thing with everything Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has done. And you know, the iPhone came from stuff they were doing internally with like tablet type stuff. And even though the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad came later, they repurpose that technological experience to a shipping product, and eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got good enough to ship the tablet, blah, blah. I agree with most people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that this type of technology will eventually become important when the tech catches up. So I think it is important for Apple to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this experience. It’s just awkward for everybody involved to kind of agree, I mean, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they don’t internally, but from the outside, we feel like they’re gonna ship a product, and it’s not really gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be, we’re gonna be doing the show being like, oh, I don’t think I’m gonna buy one of these. I have no use for it. It’s not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me like it doesn’t really apply to my application. Blah, blah. We’re going to say all these things. But from Apple’s perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they think they have a product that somebody might want to use, you can’t just develop this internally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for 16 years and just arrive on a day’s ear. It’s like if Apple had never made a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer and never made a Newton, they would not have been able to make that or the iPod. The iPod is a great example. The the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the the experience they got building tiny electronics with the iPod and and I would say the Newton even though

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it wasn’t that tiny were important contributors to the institutional knowledge, even if it’s just the knowledge of how to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suppliers and assemble things and blah blah that made them more able to make the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I Think this type of in the best-case scenario. This headset is that type of product where?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It will give the organization some important experience of getting this thing into actual users hands and finding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out what they what they did wrong Because internal testing especially they’re super secretive internal testing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re like so such a small number of people ever see this is is never going to be sufficient for them to figure out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they’ve really got this right, if they’ve really made it comfortable, understood the problems, have they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John solved the motion sickness thing? Are people gonna use it for what they think they’re gonna, look at the Apple Watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They had all sorts of ideas of what people might be interested in using it for, but they needed to put it out on the market and find out what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people actually did wanna use it for, and then they corrected course, and I hope that’s what happens here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think also, you know, hardware does not just come out of nowhere. Hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does not develop out of nowhere. hardware develops out of a process over time that is funded by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a market that’s buying it. And so if we want to get to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco AR glasses future, there needs to be a market that leads us there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that funds all of the hardware development along the way to get there. We need to start buying components

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now that are kind of in the ballpark of the stuff we want and shipping them in products

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to create that big market so that more suppliers put more time and money and research into those areas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to develop the smaller and smaller and better and better versions of those things. These things don’t develop on their own. Like look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the world of tiny camera sensors that used to be basically non-existent or terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Once the smartphone came out, that market exploded. And now like there, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people poured tons and tons of money and research into making awesome tiny optics and tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cameras and tiny camera processing things because there was a huge market of phones that had crappy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cameras that wanted better cameras. And that market is now massive. It developed because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the market was supporting it along the way and having a huge amount of demand and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically rewarding people who would invest into making those components better. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re not gonna get from VR headsets, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then 10 years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from now, AR goggles or AR glasses. There has to be a market along the way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cause those components to be iteratively developed over time. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you do have to kind of release this thing, you know, in, in the sooner term rather than the later term. Like you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just, you can’t just sit back and wait and say, all right, in 10 years, we’ll take advantage of the components that exist then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco without having done anything in the meantime to make those components exist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And because Apple’s competitors, it’s not like, well, if Apple doesn’t make the market, nobody will know somebody else might do make that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John market and be iterating and be selling. And then when you arrive with the glasses, everyone is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John locked into Facebook, meta headset, whatever thing like the competitors are also moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this direction. So it behooves you to not sit it out because if someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else gets momentum and is actually selling hundreds and thousands and millions of these things a year and then you arrive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 10 years later with your thing, it’s got to be so much better than theirs. You know, so anyway, it’s it’s still a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this market is still a big question mark, But it’s like, unlike the car, it is so straightforwardly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aligned with everything else that Apple does that if this becomes a thing, Apple needs to do this. And there are synergies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with everything else that it does. Screen technology, wireless technology, SOCs, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the silicon stuff, 3D, GPUs. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John completely out of left field. So even if they never shipped a product, they would be getting some benefit. And it’s interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to compare it to the car where it seems like the car program, they have never been at a point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they had something that was even plausibly shippable. They didn’t have a car they wanted to ship. They didn’t have self-driving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they wanted to ship. They didn’t have a thing they were gonna sell to other car makers. Like they were never, I don’t think they’ve ever even been at a decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point like this, which is like conceivably we could ship this as an Apple product, but should we or not?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The car stuff is like, what are we even making here? Too many shovels, too many reboots.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And kind of like the VR thing, like you were saying, Margot, like Apple does have a lot of money and they could just pile money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do things for years and years. they have huge amounts of money hiring huge amounts of people, you know, resets,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah, blah, blah. Apple has the luxury of doing that. But you know, it’s not the it’s not the ideal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scenario. Like I remember the story about how much money it cost to develop the original iPhone. It was like 150

⏹️ ▶️ ^John million dollars or something absurd, absurdly low in case that’s not clear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you know, the number of people and the amount of money and the time they spent to develop the first iPhone compare that to the number

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people amount the money and time they’ve spent on either the AR, VR headset or the car, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what do they have to show for it? It’s not looking good for those projects. Like it’s not saying that you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple should do this, they should sink money in many years into this type of stuff. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would be much better if they could get to a point where they have a product that people might want to buy to help,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, fund this to help to help to help start the iteration loop because the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your internal iteration is not as interesting is external.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So which one of us is going to take the fall and get this if

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} it comes out?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was thinking about that. I mean, I’m assuming it has to be Marco. I mean, I have to get it if there’s a developer story. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exactly. I feel like Marco for sure. I feel like I’m the least likely just because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure that if I’m any kind of ARV or thing is going to make me motion sick. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s true. Like no matter what.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I’m a little afraid of that too, because the Oculus thing that we have makes me a little motion sick. And Also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can’t see it very sharply. And whatever reading glasses thing I need to make it work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t, like I even, I didn’t talk about this in the show, but I actually briefly got a FPV drone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a couple months back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} What?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I ended up returning it because I really, Wait, which one? The DJI, Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The little one with the guards around the things. You have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to explain to people what that is because they don’t know that FPV is first person view.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s, yeah, so it’s a type of drone, I mean, it’s a camera drone like any other, but it’s optimized for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using like with goggles and kind of flying it in first person view like that. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more of an immersive thing. Cause like, I love like my favorite thing to do with my drone is just like fly around and look at stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like I don’t really need the footage for much of anything. I just like flying around and looking at my town and the ocean and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, it’s like, I like that. And so I thought, you know, here’s a new kind of drone with a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of screen situation. You know, I also wanted to get away. Like I, my old drone was the kind that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco uses the phone as the screen and controlling app and you like stick it in the controller

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dock. And that’s always been such a pain in the butt and so I never wanna do it. So I’m like, all right, this is a whole standalone thing. First

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all, guess what? Yet again, this is a brand new product from DJI,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a brand new product from a high-end hardware maker. And you have to charge three things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get it to work. You have to charge the drone battery itself, this special battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pack for the goggles that goes in your pocket, sound familiar? Battery goes in your pocket, runs a cable up to your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goggles around your head. By the way, that sucks. Like having that cable in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pocket, like this is why, if this is what’s rumored for the Apple headset of having a big battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pack that you put in your pocket and have a cable that runs up, oh man, I can’t wait to not need that anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, it’ll just be a wireless power delivery. It’ll slowly bake your internal organs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yes, that’ll be great. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yes. But anyway, so first of all, the little hand controller, that’s the third thing you have to keep charged,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Has a USB-C hole, but does not accept USB-C power. You gotta use a USB-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cable for that, and only that. And the other two things support USB-C. That’s a brand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new device from DJI. Doesn’t support USB power. Cause they didn’t do that one resistor in the stupid hand controller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, I ended up returning it for a few reasons, but… Chief of which was that…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just couldn’t see very sharply in the thing. Like, it was very hard to use, because… They have adjustments,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can, like, adjust it. I tried wearing glasses in it. I tried adjusting all the diopter stuff and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything, I just could not get it to a point. And I had the same problem with the Oculus. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can see the middle sharply, but not the edges. And it’s a little bit motion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sickness-y for me, and so I can only spend like a minute or two in it, and I don’t feel good afterwards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I have that worry with the Apple thing, for sure. As we are going into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the VR world here, It’s worth considering that this is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as universally accessible a technology as the phone And and I think we should have much lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expectations for its eventual adoption as a result

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well I mean, it’s not as it’s not as accessible yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Because the problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of motion sickness they’ve been working on that for years And they’ve been getting way better than they used to be every event

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a lot of it actually has to do with Technological limitations we can’t get the frame rate up this high we can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get a screen that is this responsive right? A lot of things we know would work better, like, oh, the lag,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Lag is really bad, right? We can’t make the lag any lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than it is now. Those are things that we know will help, we just can’t do them yet. And then there are the things we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even know will help yet that people haven’t developed. Like there’s a story I linked to ages ago, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it again, about what the developers of Destiny did to fight motion sickness in their game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they thought about it a lot and they did a lot of stuff. And this is just a plain old first person game where you’re looking at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a screen, but you can get sick from those as well. And the things they’re doing, nobody who’s playing the game even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notices because it’s the type of thing you wouldn’t even occur to you unless you were a game developer working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this. Those type of things, we don’t even know what all of those are yet for AR or VR headsets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Setting aside the technological stuff that we just can’t do, I’m sure there’s stuff that we haven’t even realized.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like things about the UI, because a lot of the stuff in Destiny is like, you know, what does it look like when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John throw a grenade or shoot things or whatever, or if your character jumps, What do we do with the camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to not make you motion sick? And then with these goggles, it’s like, okay, how do we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John present an interface? Whether it’s an AR interface where you’re decorating the world or whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a VR interface, how do we present that interface in a way that does not make people sick? Setting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aside just the glasses themselves, like how do we present something? How do we let them look at a virtual screen? How do we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John present a UI? We don’t even know the answers to those questions yet. They need to put this out in the real world and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figure that out. Kind of like, you know, you can make your guess about what’s gonna be a good UI for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the phone or the iPad or whatever. When you get out in front of people and people try it, you learn things and you try again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like motion sickness is gonna take that same thing. But unlike a clunky UI for notifications or something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or lack of copy and paste, this one actually makes people sick to their stomach. So it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a harder sell, to your point, Marco, that if someone has a negative experience to convince them, oh no, it’s better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now, and convince them to try again, versus, oh, notifications are better in the new version of iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and there’s gonna be people, like maybe like me, who, like, hey, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing just doesn’t fit me in some way. Like, for some reason, this is not comfortable or usable for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And there’s gonna be a lot of people like that for anything that goes in the eye. I mean, look at, I mean, look, Casey, you have weird eyes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We all have weird eyes in different

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Some are weirder than others. I think Casey, you know, is the king of the weirdness here. But like, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Well, yes and no, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t take offense to what you’re saying, not a bit. But in a way, my eyes are not that weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as long as I have my contacts in it. I’m not like John in this case, I think John has weirder eyes only because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} contending.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, that’s true,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} but you’re contending with,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m turning 41 just a couple of days. It’s, it’s getting bad. Uh, but no, I, I, I don’t need any,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey uh, anything on my face in order to see. I was going to say, well, but I’ll just say as well as I possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can. Whereas John is going to have to figure out what to do with his glasses. Can he keep them on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is there special bespoke

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} lenses? One

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the rumors of the Apple thing is they have and a lot of these AR VR headsets have like a mark I was talking about the diopter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adjustment which is you know, just a lens in there You know cameras have that in there and their viewfinders and stuff, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the rumor of the Apple ones that they have like a a Particular accommodation for like prescription type lenses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and again in theory Apple is the company that could do that Well doing it well as expensive if you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to adjust for your astigmatism and everything you do like it’s you have to get very expensive fancy custom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lenses to slot into your headset. And if headsets become really popular, people will do that. It will be worthwhile.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Same way people get glasses for their computer. I’m wearing my quote unquote computer glasses right now, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a prescription custom tailored by my eye doctor to be most relaxing for my old man eyesight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking at computer screens. But I have different glasses for driving. If AR VR becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John popular or VR headsets become popular and Apple Apple will eventually have to accommodate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John prescription lenses of a, you know, of a fancy expensive kind that is custom to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people so they can comfortably spend X number of hours per day in their VR meetings or whatever, if that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John market ever emerges.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. And so the, you know, you just, you know, stepping aside from our like weird eye contest,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I, I’m, this is an area that I think is significant. It’s a significant challenge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in, in the goggles kind of space because, you know, there is such a wide array

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of different eyesight needs that people have that’s, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I think this is that’s a major challenge to any product and that’s eyesight is just one part of it as you know to mention

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco motion sickness and motion perception, you know, there’s there’s all sorts of different other possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco challenges that like, you know, a phone is you know, phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aren’t universally accessible, but I think they are significantly more accessible than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than goggles will be and and that’s going to be something that we have to contend with and maybe version one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t fit very well for a lot of people like you know air pods were like that I mean air pods version

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one like a lot of people liked it I couldn’t wear them a lot of people couldn’t wear them and they came up with the air

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pods pros and then the different set of people could wear them I happen to fit into that set I was very happy but some people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then couldn’t wear those you know like and and you know the look at the most, the closest,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most recent product to this for like fit and comfort reasons might be the AirPods Max,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which are another thing that’s kind of heavy and goes on your head. But they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco super comfortable in my opinion either. And so, these are hard problems to solve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in product development. And it might take a while before this product line

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is even able to be mass market, even setting aside the price and desirability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aspects of it. Like maybe physically it can’t be mass market for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And not only that, but if this is as expensive as people are saying it will be, and I mean, we heard this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about the iPad, right? Like everyone thought it was going to be a thousand plus dollars for the first iPad and it was like 500 bucks, which is still,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, a lot of money, but, but nevertheless, uh, if this is like a multi thousand dollar, like for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey funsies thing, I don’t know a lot of people that have a couple of grand, including me for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the record, that have a couple of grand just burning a hole in their pockets that they just really want to throw in the direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of their nearest Apple store. Like, uh, it’s not the sort of thing like a phone, which has become

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like a critical part of everyone’s everyday life. It’s not even like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an Apple watch, which I would argue is not at all critical, but something that many people, including me feel like is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something you want to have on you pretty much always. This is just a toy right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now, or I mean, unless they have some compelling use for it that I’m not thinking of. But this is a, it appears

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to be just a toy and a couple thousand dollars for just a toy. That’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of money that I don’t think all that many people like in this economy, you know, I don’t know that all that many people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have a couple thousand dollars just looking to be spent on something that is very unproven

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and may or may not even work for their bodies. Like you were saying, like it’s a big ask.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, really the best time to release it would have been right at the beginning of COVID when everybody was like trying to figure out, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more interesting and stuff they could do without going anywhere. Like that would have been perfect. They missed that opportunity,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it wasn’t ready yet. But if they make a compelling case for this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s a huge if, and we’ll talk about that, I’m sure, for many months, but if they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make a compelling case for this, I think there is a market for it. It’s not gonna start out as a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big market. It doesn’t need to, but there is a market. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna be easy to make a compelling product of this type.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s why I think it has taken them so long and they still haven’t shipped. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think it’s about necessarily the industrial design aesthetics or anything. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s more likely that the product just really hasn’t been compelling enough yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that maybe they have internal disagreements about is it good enough to ship yet or not?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not necessarily should we even bother with this category of XR headset

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at all, but do we have enough here to make it worth shipping version one or have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we not even reached that yet? That’s probably the actual debate. And, or, you know, does the industrial design team,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, object to being overruled in certain ways or object to having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be a little more collaborative and a little more give and take in other ways. But you know, for this actual, for this product by itself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s kind of on shaky ground until very, very recently as to whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they even have something worth shipping at all. And if they think they finally have it and we’re about to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get it, well, I’m damn curious to see what they have deemed worth shipping.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because again, I don’t have the imagination or the foresight to be able to see for myself, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is gonna be amazing. Like, I haven’t seen that yet. But I’m wrong a lot, so maybe they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have something amazing and we just don’t know it yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The long pole in this project has gotta be software at this point. That’s what the rumors have been. So I feel like I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John willing to take at face value the industrial design objection outlined here, which is basically we shouldn’t ship

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a goggly product. It’s not that this goggly product isn’t good enough or not ready, because I think the thing that is not ready about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this, and the thing that has been delaying it, is the software side of it. And that’s very often the case, because the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side of it is difficult, and really defines the experience. The hardware part of it, you can make as good as you can make,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the hardware part of it is mostly a trade-off between price and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technology, and you have to kind of do that balance. And I feel like that’s where industrial design and engineering are bouncing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off each other, trying to come up with the best goggle they can get, iterating it over year after year. And Industrial Design might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still disagree that they’ve got something shippable. But the objection of this article is like, we shouldn’t even do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this until we can make Clark Kent glasses. And I feel like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a position to have, but I think it’s the wrong position, and I think it’s kind of tantrum-y. It’s like, we should wait until we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have flying cars. Can we make just a regular car first? Not that I’m saying Apple should make a regular car, but it’s an analogy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wish it wasn’t so. I wish it could be just an analogy. But alas, Apple is rumored to be investigating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that as well. So anyway, we’ll see, but like, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if we’ll find it when they ship something, because if they ship something and we’re like, oh, you know what you just said, Marco, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even if you agree that Apple should be in the goggles market, these are bad goggles that will say that when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they come out and then we’ll retroactively say that must have been the debate or whatever. But this story is very straightforward in trying to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we shouldn’t ship a thing like this. We should wait until we make glasses. It’s like, OK, whoever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has that opinion. That is an opinion to have, but I think it would be the wrong move for Apple and apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the company is going to ship something.

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AI in your camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So there’s been a bit of a brouhaha over the last week or so. Um, it was not about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple. Uh, it was instead about Samsung and their space zoom photos, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey may or may not be enhanced quote unquote by AI. So what the heck am I talking about? So in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Samsung S 20 ultra, which has one of these periscope style lenses that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey uh, that we’ve heard for years, the iPhone is getting this year. This is the year. Well, they actually have one. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it does a 100x zoom and I think some of that is digital, some of that is optical. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not entirely sure and honestly it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this conversation. But people have noticed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that these phones take just absolutely stunning images

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the moon. And somebody on Reddit started looking into this and they wrote, many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of us have witnessed the breathtaking moon photos taken with this latest zoom lens starting with the Samsung S20 Ultra.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve always had doubts about their authenticity as they appear almost too perfect. While these images are not necessarily outright fabrications,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey neither are they entirely genuine. Many people believe the moon photos are real. Even MKBHD has claimed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this in a popular YouTube short that the moon is not an overlay like Huawei or how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do you pronounce that? Is it Huawei? Yeah. Okay, sure. Huawei has been accused of in the past,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but he’s not correct. And eventually he, by the way, put up a full on correction video,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which we’re going to talk about here in a second. But what this person did was absolutely fascinating, and I’m probably going to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the terminology wrong, but the gist of it is they took a picture of the moon and they blurred the snot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out of it so you could barely recognize it as a moon. They put it on their computer screen, turned all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the lights off, went across the room or whatever and zoomed in on this moon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that has been blurred. So it is a picture of the moon, but the source material

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is blurry because the only thing being shown on the screen as a blurry image. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey image that came out from the camera was this very crisp image of the moon where there were details

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that did not exist on the computer screen. Again, the source was blurred. It’s not like it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hard to see. It literally was blurred. There was no more detail to be had because the original

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was blurred. Well, somehow that blurry original got sharpened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with mega air quotes into a very accurate picture of the moon, which seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then that what’s going on is the phone is just filling in a picture of the moon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and calling it good. And so what MKBHD’s follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey video starts asking, and I thought it was a really, really, really good question,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and maybe I should turn it over to John and we can channel a little, you know, robot or not, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MKBHD asked, what is a photo? You know, in short, and he does a very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good job of explaining it, but in short, is this a photo? Like if they really, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you are taking a picture of the moon and the phone figures out, okay, what should the moon look like from where you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey standing at this phase of the moon at this time and so on and so forth, and it becomes effectively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a picture of what you would see if you had better equipment, is that still a photo?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is that cheating? Is that okay? And it was a really interesting question. So, John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is it a photo?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think this question is less complicated than people make it sound, which is the main reason I wanted to put this in here. But a few

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes before that, which I haven’t seen brought up in many places. One is that we do have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and have for many years various techniques to take a blurry image and quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John retrieve detail. Right. So a lot of people in the Reddit thread are like, but it’s blurry. You can’t get detail that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there. we do actually have ways to do that, especially if you have some knowledge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of some constraints. So for example, we’ve seen the thing where if like, oh, be careful when you blur

⏹️ ▶️ ^John text on a screenshot or something you post because you can take the blurred text and reverse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that blur to get out the original images, mostly because we know what letter forms look like. And we, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is a more constrained problem, but that is not outside the realm of reason. And that is not any kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, it’s not like, you know, when you’re unblurring text, It’s not quite the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing as we’re talking about here. So I think this, you know, look, it’s proof. They must be just taking a picture of the moon and slapping it on there because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no way you can get this detail back. I think we could using pre-existing pre quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John AI algorithms. I hate that phrase because it has nothing to do with AI really. But in the past and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technologies that existed in years past, I think it is actually possible to unblur a picture of the moon and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get something reasonable. But setting that aside, that doesn’t appear to be what they’re doing here. The other interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing is this whole thing about Samsung messing things with the moon has come up even just on Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John several times in the past years. There’s an older one that was, I think, from several years ago, where this person’s experiment was they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John took a picture of the moon and they drew a smiley face on it in gray paint in like a paint program. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they took a picture with their Samsung camera and the Samsung camera dutifully made the smiley face look like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a crater-y smiley face. Because the Samsung camera knows moon is supposed to be crater-y,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it knows that that’s a moon, and so I will crater-ify it. And Samsung

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has an explanation of this. I originally had a link to their Korean forum post about it, but they have an English

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one. There’s a Verge story here where it says Samsung responds to fake moon controversy and Samsung explains. They basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just say, hey, we use AI image processing and we do this and here’s our pipeline and blah, blah, blah. What they basically say is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our camera recognizes that you’re taking a picture of the moon, it knows it’s a moon, and it uses quote unquote AI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to quote unquote enhance the image, which is what everybody is saying. So getting back to Casey’s and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MKBHD’s question, What is a photo? When I see this, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s definitely a camp that I see reacting to these stories

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you say, OK, well, anytime there’s a new technology, people complain about it and think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s unnatural and shouldn’t be used and unholy and old ways are best.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s an abomination. But eventually those people die and we just get used to it. It becomes the new normal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I’m here to tell you that in this specific case, This question

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of photos versus, you know, enhanced photo or augmented photos is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the type of thing that is going to, like, wipe away the old thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is a new thing that will be in our arsenal and become very important for the future, but we will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never get to a point where nobody has any interest in taking a quote-unquote old style photo, and I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John explain why. So this is this is a related story that was in the New Yorker, believe it or not. It was talking about chat GPT,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to explain to people how it works and what it is and it isn’t. And it is actually very relevant to this moon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing in an interesting way. So I’m going to try to summarize this rather than read it, because it’s kind of long. But the bottom line is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone was using a Xerox photocopier and they were photocopying floor plans and they photocopied it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the photocopy had the wrong measurements, like they had measurements on the wall, like this wall is five, this wall is 10, this whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And when they would photocopy it, the photocopy would have the wrong measurements. It made all the walls the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John length as one of the walls. And it wasn’t supposed to be a square. It was like there were different lengths, right? Which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like the weirdest bug you can ever imagine. You’d be like, is someone playing a practical joke on me? Not only is it a weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bug, but it’s also like potentially super dangerous. What if you’re making like plans for like an airplane or something, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John space thing, or some safety, like a bridge or like, when you make a Xerox, you know, using the proprietary

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eponym, when you make a photocopy, you kind of expect the paper to come out to be a copy of the one you put in. And if the one you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put in said, this is five feet, this is 10 feet, this is 12 feet, and it comes back and they’re all five feet. You might not notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that because why would you even check that, right? And so the explanation, I’ll read this because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is slightly detailed, right? Here’s the explanation of what was going on. Xerox photocopiers use lossy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compression format known as JBig2 designed for use of black and white images. To save space, the copier identifies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John similar looking regions in the image and stores a single copy for all of them. When the files decompress, it uses that copy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John repeatedly to reconstruct the image. It turned out that the photocopier had judged the labels specifying the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John area of the rooms to be similar enough that it needed to only store one of them, the one with the value 14.13, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it reused that one for all three rooms for imprinting the floor plan. That’s a good thing. The fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that ChatGPT rephrases material from the web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their ideas in their own words rather than simply regurgitating what she reads. It creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So the saying that ChatGPT does a similar thing. It finds the occurrence of this, seems like it’s a good stand-in and repeats

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, right? The moon, same deal. I recognize that’s the moon. I know what the moon looks like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t have to pay any attention to what your camera took a picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of. And honestly, the camera, the Samsung camera, it’s just a blurry white ball at that point. Like it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no way to resolve anything if that 100 X zoom is not making any sense out of the moon. But I know that it’s a moon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so I will take the one copy that I have of the moon and apply it using AI technology to your image,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? The reason this is not going to become the accepted norm and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wipe out quote unquote old style photos is the same reason this photocopier is never going to be acceptable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John By the way, Xerox fixed the bug, right? When you take a photo or when you make a photocopy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very often you’re doing it, you have a job that you want it to do. In the case of the copier, you want it to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an exact duplicate of the paper that you put on it. You don’t want it to change the measurements. That’s very bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because your whole point is I want it to be an exact copy. Sometimes when you take a picture of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John moon, you just want a pretty picture of the moon and that’s fine. But sometimes when you take a picture of the thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want a picture of the thing that is in front of you. You don’t care what some computer thinks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that thing in front of you probably looks like or has looked like in the past or will look like in the future or would look better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as you want to know what that thing looks like now. Sometimes not all the time, but sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is the job of a photograph. So I think there is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John future in which we accept. cameras routinely replacing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that are in front of them with things that think so they are because sometimes that’s not the job

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we want a camera to do and that’s why I think and you know this thing with the moon who cares

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not particularly important but like say you’re taking a picture of a bunch of people and you’re on vacation and take a picture of your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John family and it knows that you’ve taken a thousand pictures of your family and it says well little Timmy’s head is blurred so I’m gonna take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Timmy’s head from another photo and AI I map it onto there. I don’t think that will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John acceptable to people in general, because what they want is Timmy’s actual expression

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at this point, not an AI warped version of Timmy’s face, composite of all Timmy’s faces from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John past photos mapped onto his face in this photo, right? Or whatever the threshold

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, maybe the little Timmy people will want that, but at a certain point, the job of a camera and the job of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a photo is to document what is actually there. And I’m setting this aside from like, okay, but what about image

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enhancing and sharpening and blurring and saturating colors. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is a line between I’m taking the information that’s there and trying to make it a little bit clearer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John versus I’m basically doing an image map and not an image map, but you know, like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John avatar things we thought of before, where it recognizes what it is and knows what you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and takes all of its knowledge of that thing and sort of, you know, I don’t, I don’t want to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John map because it’s not like it’s texture mapping. It is doing AI image processing, doing stable diffusion, like it’s it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not what we want to do in most cases and so I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not sure whether this technology is appropriate for cell phones or whatever and by the way on the Samsung phone you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turn this off and on so it’s not like you’re stuck with us but I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at least some of the time the job we want a camera or a photograph

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do is to record what’s there in the best way possible not to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up something and the photocopier is the most extreme example and chat GPT is a similar type of thing where it’s like, well, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seen stuff like this before. And I know you actually want to know the answer. But I’ve seen enough similar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that are plausibly the answer that I’ll just show you those. And sometimes that’s fun and interesting and useful,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as long as you understand what it’s doing. But sometimes you actually want to know the real answer. And it’s kind of super important. So I wouldn’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John NASA asking chat GPT about like, how far away is the moon, right? Because you probably get an answer. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it might be right. But really, you need to delve farther into that. Similarly, I wouldn’t want someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking photos in, for example, submitting them as evidence in a criminal trial when half the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff in the image has been AI replaced by some computer’s idea of what it probably should have looked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a complicated topic because we are so accustomed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cameras capturing what we’re pretty sure they should be capturing based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on what they are seeing. You know, when Apple does its deep fusion process, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is literally AI detail generation for pictures that they’ve been doing for years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s like it’s this exact same kind of thing, just done a little in a little bit more subtle ways with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit more finesse. But it’s the same. It’s the same technique. Roughly, it’s like they see like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this looks kind of like a hair. I’m going to sharpen it to make it look more like a higher resolution hair

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or sweater fiber, you know, than what the sensor actually captured.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that might be wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But they don’t have like, they didn’t train it on a huge database of a million pictures of hair and saying, hey, when you see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something that’s a hair, rather than trying to sharpen it, because we apply this sharpening algorithm to things that we think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are hair, instead, take all your knowledge in this giant trained image set of all pictures of hair

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ve seen and just synthesize a picture of hair that is more or less the same shape as that picture. In the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way that you can take like, you know, steel artwork from somebody where they draw you as a superhero and synthesize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco’s face plus the superhero drawing that somebody did and end up with a superhero drawing of Marco. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing has Apple has done at that point, up to this point has been trained on other images

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and uses that to synthesize. Instead, it’s maybe perhaps been trained in other images to recognize this is hair,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is not hair, but hasn’t gone the extra step or like this is sweater, this is not sweater, hasn’t gone the extra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John step to say, okay, in addition to that, take your giant database of knowledge of what sweaters look like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and synthesize an image of a purple sweater matches this purple and more or less looks like a sweater. And that’s where I feel like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line is drawn, where it is, where it is creating based on other images versus just taking what you have there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recognizing it, and then applying essentially image processing algorithms to sharpen, blur, enhance, saturate,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I believe that’s correct, that, you know, that their approaches have not seemingly been like synthesis driven

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from a trained, you know, large model kind of thing. I think it has been more just like, you know, smarter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco versions of, of, you know, sharpening and stuff like that, and interpolation. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m pretty sure that’s right. But that’s honestly a very fine line that I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the whole industry is going to just waltz right over over the next few years. And none of us are going to notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or care. It’s just going to become the new normal. I mean, people expect the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cameras they take with their phones to just look good and look right. And people reward that by buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those phones that have those cameras and using those apps that generate those effects. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the technology, in general, of like AI synthesized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco photo processing is already out there in mainstream apps. I mean, like there’s all this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff going on on TikTok with like all these filters that work on live video and people are like, you know, making themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look like the teenage version of themselves or movie stars or like super high glam version of themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They all fail comically on me, by the way. But like, there’s this and these are all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these algorithms that make people look good. And this, you know, people have been doing this on Instagram and Snapchat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for years, of, you know, things that kind of like, you know, basically make it look like you’re wearing a lot of stage makeup,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, they kind of like fog your face out and, you know, smooth over any blemishes and make, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make you look like a movie star all the time. And you got God forbid, you ever have a pimple on your face, we’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hide that right over, you know, there’s all this of this stuff going on, that’s all way more complex

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than Apple’s Deep Fusion stuff. It is using AI-powered decision-making in a lot of those things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is synthesizing detail or changing things outright that were not there in the picture.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s becoming commonplace. It’s super commonplace. Tons of people experience photography

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that way now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, but that gets back to what is a photo, though? Example of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this, that’s people doing it intentionally for fun. is a fun thing to do. You know you’re doing it is a fun thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do. Right. But like the case where it becomes routine, where like you take a picture of your family on vacation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then you get back home and you realize the photo misidentified one of your children thought it was kid A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instead of kid B and synthesize kid A’s face on top of them. And you basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a ruined a ruined photo. Right. That’s the type of thing where where the first time that happens to someone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people are going to hunt down that setting and say, don’t do that anymore. I don’t care how if that person’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photo was like it was too dim and it wasn’t sharp enough. I don’t want you putting the other kids face on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. I know my kids look similar. Lots of kids look similar. We’re all, you know, potentially genetically related to each other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so I can see how you can make that mistake. Kind of like how you know, the apples, you know, face recognition

⏹️ ▶️ ^John makes a mistake. But once once people realize that it is drawn, it is synthesizing a face on top of a face,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you do that intentionally to make yourself look glamorous with makeup. Fun. Someone does that to your family photo, and it puts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the wrong kid on top of thing. Not fun, not acceptable. And that will never be acceptable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? It will never be acceptable to any error rate in accidentally, even forget about putting the wrong kid,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it made your face look like one of those, you know, makeup filters or whatever. I don’t even think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s acceptable as a standard thing. You always have to have the ability to capture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what is there without synthesis. And I don’t think that’s gonna be, might not even be the majority case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you will never eliminate that case. My argument is that this kind of technology will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never wipe out the need to record what is actually in front of the photo, the camera’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lens in the best way possible, because sometimes that is the job of a camera. Sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s the job of a camera to look good or be fun or whatever, but other times it is, traffic cameras,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for example, that take pictures. It is not the job of the traffic camera to synthesize license plates,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? It’s just not the job, right? And it’s not acceptable for that to be the job.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can use AI to enhance the image or whatever, but if it says, oh, we’ve fed it a library of all the license plates and we’ll find the license

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plate that it looks the most like and replace it. And then we’ll use that in court to say, like that is an example of like, that is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the job we want this. You know, if you can’t get the good picture, get a better camera, but I don’t want you guessing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it what that license plate was and replacing it like the Xerox copier did with a very crisp picture of a license

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plate that is actually somebody else’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh man, I just had the terrifying thought of what’s gonna happen when police officers realize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they can change their body cam footage. That’s awful. But anyway, I think you’re right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that like, there will always be a role for basically, you know, unprocessing or less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco processing cameras that are not trying to be too smart.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not less processing, it’s where that line is. The line between enhancing what is in front of the camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the line of synthesizing based on your knowledge of like millions of photos. Like that is, I feel like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know how to define that line in terms of vocabulary because we’re too new in that thing, but there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a line. I know it’s fuzzy and difficult to define, but it does exist. And that I feel like is what we’re all going to work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out as a society of like, what do we call that line? Where is it? Maybe legally that line will be worked out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that division does exist. It is not just a giant smear that we just have to accept that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is just gonna be the way all photos are. It’s not going to be. And so we do have to find out where that dividing line is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, no one is gonna ask us. See, we’re not gonna be asked where we wanna draw this line.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’re not gonna be asked, should this line exist and where should it be drawn? Here’s what’s gonna happen. We’re gonna keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going on the path we’re going And already, I think we’re already here now, but say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a few years, we’re gonna look back and realize, for most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people, they’re gonna look back and realize the vast majority to the entirety of all pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have from the last X years have been processed in this way. And it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might be subtle things. They might look back and say like, hey, this picture of my kid,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it may be in the actual picture, the kid had like one eye like half blinking, so like one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco eye was like half closed. and maybe the AI camera that they were using at that time was smart enough to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco open it up and make it match the other eye. But maybe that kid has like, maybe that kid’s eyes, the two eyes look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different from each other in some way normally, and the parent might not notice immediately, but then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you might be looking at the back of the picture, and be

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} like, wait a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minute, you know, little Johnny’s green eye is supposed to be green there, and it’s blue, because his

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other eye is blue. That’s weird. The camera made something up that wasn’t there, but we’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be at a point where we’ll be looking back and realize, oh, actually all of the photos we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now, all the photos we’ve been taking, all the photos we are taking now, have all had synthesized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco detail added to them that wasn’t really there. And that decision has already been made for us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by the market or by our own usage and not even realizing that we were really doing it necessarily.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s like baking in a filter to all your pictures during the Instagram era. You look back from pictures you have, say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the fall of 2010, and they all have like weird color and low resolution.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s like, oh, that’s because we were all playing with Instagram and that’s just what we have then. But this is what people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are doing. This is the apps people are using. These are the filters people are choosing to use. This is the camera modes people are choosing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to use. These are the actual cameras on our phones that we are all using. Like, it’s funny, I recently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had a chance to play with a modern little point and shoot because Gruber got one and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tiff wanted us. We were looking at them, we were playing with it, and got a chance to shoot some pictures with like a modern,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice, standalone camera. and the pictures looked incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, turns out, stand-alone cameras have gotten really good recently. And I looked back at my iPhone pictures, and they all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look a little bit artificial compared to the same, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would shoot a picture with my iPhone, and then take this cool little real camera and shoot with it, and the iPhone pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were more easily taken in low light and stuff like that, but the real camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pictures looked better, and they weren’t necessarily like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco massively higher resolution. They just didn’t look over processed iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pictures. When you, when you see them like compared to regular camera pictures, they look really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over processed, over sharpened, over, you know, blurred. And like to get rid of noise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they look a certain way. It’s interesting. Now, like I’m looking back at all my pictures and for the last few years, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco vast majority of my pictures are iPhone pictures. and I kinda regret

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I don’t have more real camera shots. At the same time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t want a real camera because I will literally never bring it around. Because one thing I realized, so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ended up getting one for Tiff for an occasion, because she really wanted it, and she’s taken it a couple times.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I thought, maybe I’ll take this out sometime. Maybe take it out for a walk or take it out when hanging out with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco friends. And because I haven’t used a real camera regularly so long,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t feel like I felt weird taking it out of the house. Because now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you see somebody taking a picture with a regular camera now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s almost like they’re taking out one of those big old Polaroid cameras, just ch-chunk. It looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so ridiculous to see somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} today

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} taking out a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} big

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} camera.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} It does! I disagree. Because everyone just uses phones now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How many people do you know who use a regular camera anymore? So it actually, like, I felt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco self-conscious even like taking it outside. It felt so weird. Because that’s, because the world we’re in now is we’re all just using our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phones. So my point is, even though our phones take worse and less accurate pictures a lot of the time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I feel like that’s just the world we’re in now. So it’s, that’s what everyone’s doing. That’s what, that’s what, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if people have access to regular cameras, they usually won’t use them and most people don’t have access at all anymore. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think this is the world we’re in no matter what. the world we’re in synthesizes a lot of data

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that wasn’t there or a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s not, it’s just taking, it’s just an exposure bracketing and it’s combining and it’s like, it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} line we’re talking about. That’s what it starts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with. Right, well the cameras we have, the cameras we have not done that. I don’t think there’s gonna be a scenario, I’m not as pessimistic as you are, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suddenly we’re gonna realize that all our children’s faces are replaced 20 years later. Like we’re already talking about this and it’s just the moon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? I think it will be a thing that people are aware of. What they choose to do and what they choose to turn on and turn off is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to be a market decision, But I don’t think it’s going to happen unaware. And what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mostly talking about is tiny little camera sensors that have such terrible raw output

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we have to do this to them to make them look reasonable, which is why all phone pictures look like they’re kind of impressionist paintings if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John zoom in on them, if you quote unquote pixel peep on them. And yeah, real cameras are better because they have much bigger sensors. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just no getting around that. Technology hasn’t advanced to the point where we can do that. So we’re doing the best we can with these tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sensors because like you said, people mostly just want to take pictures with their phone. But but our phones, with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exception of the Samsung thing on the moon, are not have not crossed that line that I was trying to define before, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is do what you can with this camera output to try to make it look reasonable versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ve seen a bunch of images of people before, including a bunch of images of what you think are these people. Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that came out of the camera, combine that with your knowledge of what this person actually looks like to replace their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John face, to make it look better. And that is the line, the line where you’re where you’re not. You’re mostly taking the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John input to as a recognizer, Like what you want to know is this the moon or is it not the moon? Is this Timmy or is it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not to me? Is this a shirt or is it not a shirt? That’s what you’re using the sensor data for. And then you’re saying, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John given that we know that’s Timmy and that’s a shirt, use all your knowledge in your AI model of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Timmy and shirts to put a good looking Timmy in a good looking shirt there. And that whatever that line

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, that is the line that once we pass over that, that there’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be a split between cameras for the purpose of, you know, if people like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the default on all cameras, fine. But there’s going to be another thing on the other side of that, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay, but sometimes that’s not the job of a camera. And when it’s not the job, we need to, A, know that’s happening, and B,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not use that feature. And that’s the traffic cameras, or for some people, they’re cameras of their family. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John consumers will, I feel like consumers will be able to make an informed choice about this, because,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you pointed out, people know about this stuff. The TikTok filters that change your face or whatever, everybody knows about that. They know it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exists, they know it’s fun, they know how to use it. when it comes to all of our phones in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a way that’s more mass market than taking pictures of the moon on this particular camera with 100X zoom,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people will know about it and then people will make their own personal decision. My main argument here is this will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not sweep across all photography forever because there’s always going to be the job

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a camera to record what’s in front of it and that job will not go away, it will just become more marginalized, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And how marginalized? How many people will want this enhancement versus not? We don’t know that yet. It’s probably gonna be the generation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John after us that decides or whatever. There may even be like a fad where everybody has it enabled in their cameras, kind of like Instagram

⏹️ ▶️ ^John filter, and they know it’s enabled. Like people didn’t would not understand it was enabled and they regret it later. It was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, I shouldn’t have taken all those pictures with the Gotham filter. I thought it was real cool, but now it’s just blurry and I can’t see anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right. That may happen because fads happen or whatever. But in the meantime,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the traffic cameras simply cannot. They can’t do this. Like and there’s probably going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be some court case over it to decide it. You know, we’re into legal things or someone’s going to say, I have this photo and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it shows you, you know, stealing this package from my porch. And we’re like, that’s not me. And it’s like, this is your face. And it’s like, well, your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera was trained on my face because I’m your ex-boyfriend. And you know, like, you can see how these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can roll out, right? But I think, I mean, again, I think the fact that we’re seeing this story and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this same story has come up years and years in the past and it’s just about the stupid moon, because who cares,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John means we will be on top of this. And, you know, I don’t know how it’s going to turn out in terms of how many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people want this feature on their camera or even who puts it in, I feel like this is the type of feature that Apple would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hesitant to put in, where Samsung would be like, oh no, we’ll totally replace your family’s face. We’ll replace your family’s face

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in their prime. Yeah, no, we’ll make you look great. And some people will want that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you know, that’s a consumer choice, not an inevitability, like in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a dystopian inevitability, which is like no real cameras will ever exist again in the end.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Collide, and our members. You can join atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash join and become a member right now to help support the show. Thank you so much,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we’ll talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental And you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Auntie Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse It’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t mean to Accidental, check

⏹️ ▶️ ^John podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey long

Watch bands

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have an illness and it’s not COVID this time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time. You’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} a fever. I know. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John prescription

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} is more cowbell. I get that one. I know. Is more watch bands. The only prescription

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is more watch bands. Yeah. So I, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I bought the series eight or whatever the most current Apple watch is, I’ve already lost track.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Eight or Ultra. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ordered, eight, not, sorry, not the Ultra. I am way too thin-wristed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for an Ultra. I wish I wasn’t, but my wrists are way too tiny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So am I, I wear it sometimes anyway. I feel like, I’ve actually, I’ve made up my workout watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and like living with two watches at the same time generally sucks. There’s a bunch of things that are annoying about it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s great for workouts because I flip it around so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the crown and the button are on the, the like inside of my arm, instead of the facing the outside. So like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I, if I’m like, have like, you know, a weightlifting glove and it hits the button, it doesn’t activate Siri. And I totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco turned off the action button because that’s now facing the outside. And with those two changes, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wonderful as a workout watch. Um, but I don’t want to wear that all the time because it’s way too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big for me. Still. So I’m flipping that my series seven, but anyway, sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, no, no, not at all. I wish I had the self-confidence to just not care, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and just wear it. Well, I mean, I don’t have an ultra, but just to wear one anyway, but I don’t have that self-confidence.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So here we are. Anyway, when I ordered the Series 8, I received with it, I don’t remember the official color, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I will call a blue, a Solo Loop. The Solo Loop is the silicone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rubber, so similar but not exactly the same as the sport band that is the de facto

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey default watch band. It’s a stretchy, you know, silicone rubber. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is just a single piece of material. There are no clasps, no joints,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nothing. It’s just a piece of rubber that you plug in on either side of the watch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and that’s that. To take the watch off or to put it on, you just stretch the rubber out. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey designed to do that. The problem I have is it’s designed to do that for somewhere around six months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And every time, I’ve had like two or three of these, every damn time it snaps in two.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I should send this thing—I don’t know Dr. Drang’s real name, much less his actual address—but I should send this damn thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to Dr. Drang so he can do a full analysis on the failure of this thing. suffice to say, I think I just stretched it either too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey much or too far or whatever, but about a week or maybe two weeks ago, I noticed, oh no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh no, there’s a little cut.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s the end. And that’s the end. And so I tried to like, to, to very gingerly like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pinch right on either side of the set of the small cut. So I’m not putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey excess pressure on the cut itself. You know, I’m like trying to brace it and it just, it, it took only a week or two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to give up the ghost. And so I am back to slumming it like an animal with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my sport band, which I actually, I like this one too, as much as I joke, but I like the, I like the solo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey loops more, I just wish they lasted. So, uh, Apple, can you please

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey make that make me not break this? Maybe the problem is, is that my wrist to hand ratio is not good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so I have to stretch it too far to get it over my hands, but it needs to be tiny to be on my little teeny tiny wrists.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I just want one that doesn’t break, please. And of course, I went to the Apple store. I went to the Apple store and I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey look, this is out of warranty. Like, is this the sort of thing that you guys would replace?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And two different occasions on two different, with two different copies of this band, they were like, no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I said, okay, thanks. And I walked out. Didn’t argue, not a bit. But I just want, I just want this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing to last and it doesn’t. And it makes me sad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You got to learn how to do that thing you see people do when they’re escaping handcuffs on like a TV show or a movie

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} where you make your hand really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really small to get there. You got to figure out how to do that. You need better hand flexibility to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it really small, so then you’re stretching out less. And maybe grease up your hand first.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s also true. Actually, if it’s wet, or if I’ve put on my beloved Cetaphil, as we talked about a couple months ago, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey does make it easier. And I guess if I was more religious about that, it would have been okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Although

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do wonder if the lotion might be corroding the band. There’s some

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} material stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You gotta grease yourself up to get it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on. But I’m saying, if you get that stuff on the band, I don’t know what the band is made out of, but maybe that reacts poorly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with it and makes it like brittle over time or something? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe, I don’t know. It’s just, it’s tough because I love the band so much. There’s no seams, there’s nothing. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} piece

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of silicon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} And there’s the silk coat. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, I know this is not, I mean, Apple’s watch bands are expensive and everything, but like practically speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unless your watch band is made of metal, it is basically a wear item for watches. Yeah. I mean, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it’s just that they get real smelly over time, like if you have like a leather band or something, the expectation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it will last forever is not great. Six months is too short to be clear, but like 20 years is probably too long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a leather band that you wear every day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, I mean, I understand what you’re saying, but all of the sport bands that I’ve had,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think I’ve ever thrown any, well, that’s not true, half of them I had to give up because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey went from the big watch to the little watch because of my aforementioned teeny tiny wrist. But I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I still have them, they’re still functional, they don’t smell bad or anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, you know, the plastic-y stuff they use is certainly more durable than,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, a thin leather band, or at least absorbs smell less, let’s say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John These shouldn’t have snapped after six months. That’s clear, especially given how much they cost. And I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wondering what the problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right, it’s like 50 bucks. And I mean, I could go and get another

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one, although I don’t really love the particular colors that are available. As it looks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there is Sprout Green, which I like the name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, there’s a really nice yellow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s sprout green, which I really like the name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, the yellow thing, because I saw something, what was it, some other celebration of yellow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in something. It was, oh, it was like Gus Mueller posted like a pizza grill that was yellow. And I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was thinking of Casey, but I said, you know what? Casey just said he doesn’t like yellow cars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Not that he just likes yellow everything. He likes yellow lemons. Like, it’s not like he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John against yellow in all forms. He just doesn’t like yellow cars. So I just want to make that clear, because I feel like it’s unfair

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to think that Casey is going to hate all yellow everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, of course, I mean, I actually I don’t mind the canary yellow solo loop, but now, you know, I have to go for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the gag, you know, that’s why I’m here is to lean into the gag. And so all kidding aside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t mind yellow. I think yellow cars are awful in almost every circumstance, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yellow in general, like you said, no problem. But anyway, so there’s a sprout green, great name. Green is a little loud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for my taste. Canary yellow, olive solo, is fine. Purple Fog,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which actually isn’t bad. Let’s see, Starlight Solo, which is like a creamy and Storm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Blue, which looks to me to be gray, at least on the screen here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any of those colors. So this is going to, this solves the problem for me because even if I was willing to plunk down $50

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey twice a year or thereabouts to get a new Solo Loop, which I’d think about, I don’t particularly care

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for any of these colors. So I’m just going to stick with my blue sport band and call it a day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I just I love these things so much. I wish they lasted longer. Maybe I should try the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Solo Loop and give that a shot. But they’re a hundred

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bucks. If these things are going to break after six months, why don’t you try like a third-party knockoff? Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re bad. Are they real bad? I mean, it’s going to… But maybe it’ll last more than six months. Or if it only lasts six

⏹️ ▶️ ^John months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Or if it’s only 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bucks, you know, right? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} If

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like 10 bucks every six months, who cares?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve had a couple of Amazon brand, Amazon no-name brand Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sport bands, and they’re noticeably lower quality in every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possible way. And you’ve got to figure too, what kind of rando

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chemical you put against your skin all day long. You might want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get that that from somebody who has like a brand name that isn’t a string of random characters,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, just in

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, but yeah, it’s the reality is like the regular sport bands

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the with the pin buckle last a very long time. Like, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. They last freaking forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They last, yeah, they’re basically invincible. They just, they get, they eventually will get discolored if it’s the lighter colored one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s, yes, that is very true. But that’s, I mean, that’s just what happens. Like, if you’re gonna wear something white

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around your wrist, I know from experience, every single day, it is gonna get dirty at some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco point to the point where it’s very hard to clean. And eventually you will have permanent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco staining on it from your jeans or whatever. That’s just what happens. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch bands, as John was saying. Watch bands are basically a wear item.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The rubber ones do last a lot longer than things like cloth or leather. Even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco metal bands, like bracelets, they wear over time, but in ways most people don’t usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco care about. Usually on watch bracelets, they’ll become a little bit looser, the links

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco won’t be exactly as next to each other, they’ll start getting gaps between the links.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you hold the bracelet, it’ll flex a little bit, it’ll sink down, it’ll curve downward. That kind of thing happens with metal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because there’s a bunch of moving parts and pins and everything. But any metal band you get for an Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is going to outlast the Apple Watch that you are attaching it to. But that’s not true for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco leather at all. Leather lasts usually a year or two, depends on how sweaty you get and how much you tolerate it being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stinky. But yeah, leather is moisture dependent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cloth also, cloth will get moisture. Like when you’re looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the woven loop that you set up at $100, those things are extremely comfortable. They are very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very nice. The lighter colored ones are hard to clean. You can clean them, but they’re hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to clean. And they do hold moisture to an uncomfortable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco degree for me. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco definitely don’t want to be exercising in them

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’ll just kind of be, it’ll be moist for like hours afterwards. Like just being held against your wrist, that’s no good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So for general all around waterproof use,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s either metal or rubber. Like those are your best choices for a watch band. Rubber is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco obviously a little more comfortable, usually cheaper than metal. Metal is a little bit nicer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looking, more expensive, more rigid, and longer lasting. But those are your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options. Whether it’s worth 50 bucks every six months for you not to have the buckle, that’s up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, yeah, and I just don’t think it is. And I’m not an every year watch person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I would say, I’ll just get the Solo Loop every time I get a new watch, and that would at least give me one a year, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m on like a two to three year cycle on watches, so that’s not really gonna fix my problem anyway. I don’t know, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey listening and you found a knockoff that is less than $50 that you think is pretty good and doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey make your skin like burn off or anything to Marco’s point, send me a toot at me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is a phrase I didn’t think I’d ever say, and mastodon and let me know. Don’t send me an email, please,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I get too much email. But send me a toot, just send your flatulence my way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and let me know what you prefer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco To me, the answer is just get the sport band with the pin buckle and be done

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} with it. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I’m doing. Like I said, I mean, I’ve got several of them at this point, so that’s what I’m doing. It’s not that I mind it, I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really love the no buckle or no clasp or whatever the term I’m looking for is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that version. I love that so much. I was looking at the braided solo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey loop, which is what you suggested, and leaving aside the water retention issues, which for me would be a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey big issue. I just, again, I’m not in love with any of these colors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m sure they’ll change in a couple of months or three or four months, whatever, but I don’t love any of these colors either. So no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey matter what, I don’t think I’m buying anything anytime soon. Except maybe, actually, I would rock the Pride one for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But other than that, I don’t really like any of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Pride one’s nice, actually. That’s the one I have of that type. The rainbow

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s really nice. Got tons of compliments on that when I was wearing that. But they do get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dirty real fast. because they had part of the, let me put the page, but yeah, part of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco design is some white or beige threads and those get dirty very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, because I have the Nike Pride, Pride Edition Nike Sport Loop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have. Maybe I should bust that back out because I haven’t worn that in a little while. And that one’s pretty good. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not amazing, but it’s pretty good. And that has nothing to do with the Pride thing. It’s just I don’t love that particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey band material, but it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, if you’re gonna get a Pride band, I think the braided silhouette loop is the one to get. But yeah, you gotta

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco run some dish soap and scrub off the light colored threads like every few weeks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It gets pretty dingy pretty quickly. But when it’s clean, it looks amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, so somebody linked in the chat, and I know that the three of us have very mixed feelings about wire cutter these days, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there is a very, very comprehensive wire cutter post with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all various flavors of watch band that they seem to like. So I’ll take a look through this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I’m not trying to talk to you too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would also, um, I would caution you on sizing in particular. Well, there’s a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things that, that the third party watch band world usually falls over on. One is material quality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, you don’t realize how nice apples materials are until you try other people’s and you’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, this is kind of crappy. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve done that a couple of times. I like them. I did a, I think I have knockoff Milanese, which wasn’t bad, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then I tried the official Apple one like months later. Oh, oh, that’s why it’s so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey money. You know, that makes much more sense now. There was a couple other materials, I forget what else on my head,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but a similar thing where it was like, oh, that’s why the Apple one is so much money, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so there’s that. There’s also typically the lug

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco attachment area, like how it attaches to the Apple Watch. I’ve had issues with third-party

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bands with poor quality, like those, like the three little like line segments that latch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those don’t work well. They’re like slightly misaligned or slightly the wrong size. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t quite latch in right. And it kind of gets jammed or it won’t go in. I’ve had that issue with them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Also the ones that have metal attachments and then like, you know, usually like any kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of third party leather band will have like, you know, some kind of like little metal lug that will go into the Apple watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then the band comes off of that. Those often are not great matches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the Apple watch metal. And so it’s kind of, that’s like a, either the color’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrong or the finish isn’t right or the quality’s different, so the metals don’t match and that always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looks bad in my opinion. And then the biggest problem I’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is sizing. That, you know, and you seem to think you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco small wrists and I think our wrists are pretty similar sizes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I actually, I think so, I think you’re right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of the great things about the Apple Watch Sport Band is that it comes with a short version.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It used to come with both. Now when you buy a sport band, you pick whether you want the small, medium, or the medium large

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco set. Used to come in both and you’d just have to throw away whichever end you didn’t use, which was terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m glad they changed that. But anyway, so I used the small-medium pairing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I tried, I had a third-party band from Nomad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It only comes in one size. Most third-party bands are one size fits all or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was so ridiculously long. there was so much excess that I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to like tuck under, it almost reached the other end of the watch. There was so much excess. Like it almost went

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the way around, almost like lapped my arm. And I tried like cutting off the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco excess and then it just looks and feels bad. Like, so it’s just, there’s no good option. So that’s another

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, like, you know, third party bands usually the fit is not as good if you have a smaller wrist because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they only make, you know, one size for everybody. And that ends up being very large to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accommodate as many people as possible on the large end, but what that means if you have a smaller wrist is you’re gonna have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of excess and it’s gonna look bad or not quite fit very well or whatever. So there’s a reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why Apple makes their watch bands and charges 50 bucks. Like, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty good. And in the watch world, they’re very good compared to what everyone else is making,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both Apple Watch and otherwise. And so, you know, they earn their price. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t feel bad paying 50 bucks for a sport band every so often because they’re just really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good.