533: The Beach Is the Beach

04 May 2023

Rapid Security Response, cryptexes, more on e-readers, and the modern arcade.

Episode Description:

The ATP Store is BACK, baby! Order your merch ⚠️ before Saturday, 6 May ⚠️.

• Pre-show: Marco has e-reader pre-show follow-up
  • kobo sage
  • PMN Caecilia
  • Calibre
  • what if?
  • Pragmatic Programmer
  • Tao Te Ching
  • 1984
• Follow-up:
  • Mac Pro Believe art update (thanks, Cristofer Cruz)
  • Quick Callsheet Recap
    • Someone help Casey with focusing a .searchable() text field, please!
    • Introspect for SwiftUI
    • Marco’s SwiftUI error message
  • Emil Jensen’s 2FA iOS shortcut for iCloud keychain
    • prefs:root=PASSWORD&search=2fa
  • CarPlay
    • Rental cars (via Milad Cerkic)
    • At what cost? (via Dave Nicholls)
      • The Verge in 2019
    • Ford CEO doubles down on CarPlay
  • More nostalgia via Michael Hannemann
    • The Fool’s Errand
      • Infinite Mac
    • Metal Gear Solid
    • Eternal Darkness
• Rapid Security Responses & Cryptexes
  • Adam Engst at TidBITS
• #askatp:
  • Will consumers actually buy a 15” MacBook Air? (via Ben)
  • Is HDR and Dolby Vision worth it? (via Torstein)
  • What are our thoughts about standing desks? (via Nick from Toronto)
    • Fully Jarvis
      • 60” × 27”, Stone, Unpowered Grommets, silver legs, 3 stage, programmable handset, with cable management
    • Fully Jax Dual Monitor Arm
    • VariDesk
    • Fog Creek’s desks (2008)
    • Uplift
• Post-show:
  • People love their cars, too
  • Marco went to Dave & Busters
  • MAME

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

Chapters

1. Very very quick follow-up 🖼️
2. ATP Store 🖼️
3. Sponsor: Hullo Pillow
4. Callsheet
5. SwiftUI
6. Sponsor: Trade Coffee
7. Follow-up: 2FA codes
8. CarPlay
9. Fool’s Errand & Eternal Darkness
10. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
11. Rapid Security Response
12. #askatp: 15” Air flop like 14 Plus?
13. #askatp: TV HDR worth it?
14. #askatp: Motorized standing desks
15. Ending theme
16. Post-show: Dave & Buster’s 🖼️

Very very quick follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have pre-show follow-up from my pre-show last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco week about e-readers. It’ll be quick, I swear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So a couple of little things. We got a bunch of feedback on our e-reader episode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or e-reader pre-show last episode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It felt like an episode, didn’t it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, I had gotten the latest Kindle Oasis, but apparently the latest Kindle Oasis is from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like 2017 or something, And the newest Kindle that’s any good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is allegedly the new Paperwhite Signature Edition. This is the first Kindle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as far as I’m aware, that has a USB-C port. Although maybe the new Kindle Scribe, the handwriting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one, that might have it. I didn’t look at that one. It’s a little too big for me. But anyway, so everyone said try the new Paperwhite.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is much more modern and it’s faster. Because one of my key complaints about the Kindle Oasis

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it just takes forever to do things like wake up from sleep or navigate to a different book or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it takes forever. It’s very, very slow. So people said, try the new Kindle Paperwhite, it’s much, much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco faster. I got it, it’s not. That’s it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s also because it’s Paperwhite, it has no page turn buttons, and the shape makes it generally less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco convenient and less comfortable to hold. And you gotta like, you know, dodge a touch screen and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Another small bit of follow up, John Himmelberger wrote in to say, the Kindle Oasis has an option to disable the touch screens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had said I would love to only use the page turn buttons and not worry that if I brush my hand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco against the little tiny edge of the screen that it would turn the page inadvertently, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it occasionally did. This is an option. However, what it does is completely disable the touch screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all touch screen functionality until the next time you hit the power button and put it to sleep and wake it back up

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} again. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s not a great option. It makes it difficult to do lots of things. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not a great option. I will say the Kindle Oasis, having spent more time with it, I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco respect it as a device, but I wish it was, I wish the software was better, and I keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco running into problems where like it’s not gonna, where it’s forced to justify my tech and everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone, the entire world, starting from Jason Snell, but you know, the entire world after Jason,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco said, just try a Kobo, you will like it better. I decided,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine, you know what, if this many people are saying it’s better, I should probably look at it. You know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Just today, my Kobo Sage arrived. It’s a little bit larger,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s an 8-inch screen instead of a 7-inch screen, so a little bit bigger size class than the Kindle Oasis and Paperwhite.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I bet I’ve had many sized, a little more square, but it has picture-in-buttons. It’s one of two, I think, current

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco models from them that do. I had said last episode, one of the things I miss when I’m not using a Kindle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is I like the PMN Cecilia font that Kindle uses. Well, two things. Number one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone said if you want to upload your own font to a cobo you can you can put your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco own if you have just if you have like if you buy a font and have like the otf or ttf files you can put them on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a cobo and use that so i thought that’s great so i instantly bought cecilia um

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my cobo came today it has that as an option already whoops

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so that’s i mean look it’s a good fun i’m happy to have it for like you know desktop publishing needs and stuff because i

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do occasionally do stuff like that but so it’s nice I’m glad I bought it but anyway it already has that as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an option so that’s wonderful I’ve used the Dropbox integration on it as well you can get a folder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on your Dropbox for Kobo and just like drop EPUB and PDF files and stuff in there. Oh that’s neat. It works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great it’s awesome. The one thing I had said I wanted something to have Instapaper

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco potential and Instapaper’s Kindle functionality is pretty rudimentary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s not in the greatest shape. Well Kobo does have native

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the device, the Pocket app. I haven’t gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco desperate enough to use it yet because there was some bad blood between me and the Pocket guy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back in the day. I didn’t like him very much. I’m sure he’s a fine person, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we didn’t compete well. It was not a healthy environment. And so it was kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the way John won’t buy anything that Microsoft makes. Like I kind of feel like I really don’t want to use Pocket.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m using a Microsoft mouse right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} All right, fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I bought Windows 10 and XP, I think, I don’t know. Maybe NT,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, a lot of my Windows I got from work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, you still don’t buy an Xbox at least. That’s true. Yeah, but anyway, so, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so that’s an option. We’ll see if I get to it. But overall, I read a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this afternoon and the evening with the Kobo versus the Paperwhite versus the Kindle Oasis.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Kobo is the nicest. Everyone was right. It is the nicest. It is the best reading experience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Even the buttons are better than the Kindle Oasis buttons. I think the Kindle Oasis buttons, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know how when Apple does something reluctantly and you can always tell?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Kindle Oasis buttons are there because Kindle customers, having previously been accustomed to buttons in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco previous Kindle models, like the first few generations of Kindles all had buttons. You know, people having been accustomed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to that kept complaining to Amazon, hey all your new Kindles don’t have buttons anymore and it makes it worse. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Amazon said fine we’ll put buttons on the most expensive model and you can buy them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you want to. It was very reluctant move I think and you can tell because the buttons are crappy buttons on the Kindle Oasis.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In particular they like snap. You know how like when you click a button it goes like it’s like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s like a loud… Here I’ll play it, here this is the Kindle Oasis button.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Alright, this is the Kobo button. It’s a much softer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more squishy click on the Kobo button, which is nice because when you’re reading in bed or something, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Kindle is actually kind of loud. The buttons are kind of loud. And so, the Kobo is better. But the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Kobo just, it’s way faster. It wakes up from sleep way faster, the menus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are faster, everything about it is faster than both than both the Kindle Oasis and the new Paperwhite that allegedly is fast,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Kobo is way faster. It is way better setup, way easier. The one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco major downside of the Kobo, unfortunately, is that their native storefront for their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ebooks, for the few things I looked for so far, it both has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco less selection than Amazon. Like, one of the books I wanted is literally just not there at all. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco went to Amazon, like, oh yeah, there it is, they have it. And the Kobo books oftentimes were more expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s kind of a bummer that like I kind of figured it would be more like buying music where everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of has the same catalog for the most part and the prices are all basically the same. No, that’s it isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that way. The Kobo storefront it has less selection and is more expensive and that’s no fun. But you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy from the Kobo storefront to read books in your Kobo though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, so as long as I can get a DRM free ePub or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people use Calibre to strip the DRM and stuff so. That’s the way. I haven’t I haven’t installed Calibre

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in probably 15 years. It’s still terrible. Yeah, it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good then. If you install it today, you will install at least 17 more versions by the end of the week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just take your whole Kindle library, get Calibre working, spend a weekend on it, rip off all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the DRM, and then throw them all to your Kobo world and don’t look back, I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so my current plan, both of the Kindles are honestly within the return windows. The Paperwhite,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they sent me the wrong one. I ordered the without ads one, and they sent me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ad filled one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you mean special offers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, which by the way, that makes it wake up more slowly. So the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} paperwhite.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Special.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I hadn’t seen a Kindle with special offers since when they first came out, like probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco eight or nine years ago. I had the very first one that had that, and it would literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just like the sleep screen, like the lock screen on a Kindle, you know, E Ink screens, when they’re asleep, they can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco display something. It just stays there with no power being taken to keep it there. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, when Kindles first came out, they would have artwork of like, here’s a bunch of pencils, you know, or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or, later on, there became an option to put the cover image of the book you are reading

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as the sleep screen on the Kindle, so it looked like the book, which is kind of cute, and that’s how I keep the Oasis.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But, so the special offers now, it has this big, recommended for you thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, on the front of my Kindle, it says, Five ingredient whole food plant-based cookbook easy recipes with no salt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oil or refined sugar 250 reviews five stars You know something like okay. Well first of all I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is kind of up my alley however I really and and then to wake it up you have to hit the power button

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wait Wait now. It’s awake. Oh, it’s not awake swipe to unlock then swipe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wait wait now. I’m back in my book That’s how long it took to get back in the book all right now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pick up the Kobo It’s been asleep for a little while hit the power button I’m back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like that’s it’s so much faster. It’s so much nicer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like so anyway, thank you everybody and especially Jason for recommending Kobo for all these years on all the Six Colors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco articles that yes, I have read actually I’ve been following them for all this time. Thank you to everybody who recommended

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this and I think I am going to stick with Kobo for the time being. I do miss the Amazon ecosystem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in terms of you know, its selection and you know, the pricing is not gonna bother me too much because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t read that many books. If when I do buy a book, it’s an extra $5 or $7, fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it is kind of a bummer that I can’t find everything there. So I will probably venture into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the world of Caliber and all that crap. And I wish I didn’t need to, because honestly, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pay more for the better experience. But you can’t fake availability.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’ll have to dive into it for that. But otherwise, it’s a really good experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far. I’ve had it for less than a day. So I really, you know, maybe, maybe, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try it yourself or, you know, give us the appropriate amounts of grains of salt that it deserves for having had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it for less than a day. But so far, it’s really nice. It’s even, it’s more comfortable to hold. Like it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything about it is better designed and more considerate of the user and performs better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everything except for the store availability. Everything else about it is better. There’s better text controls, there’s better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options. And again, I’ve had it half a day. I haven’t even discovered everything about it yet. It’s already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much better. I’ve had Kindles for a long time and I’ve had many different Kindle models over the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years, including the very first one and actually the very first three. This is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much better than all of them. Hands down, so much better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Out of curiosity, perhaps we talked about this last episode and I just completely blanked on it, but what are you expecting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to read? Are you reading novels? Are you reading technical programming books? Like what is the target

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey content in media that you intend to consume?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco number one the most common thing I read is web articles which I don’t love that about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco myself but that is the most common. Whenever I want to read a book I prefer to do it this way. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I very rarely read fiction but nonfiction so like you know when like when there’s like a Steve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Jobs biography I you know I read that on the Kindle. I’m currently reading the What If series of books

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by the XKCD guy Randall Monroe which is just delightful and they’re actually really good on E-Ink because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco his art style is black and white line drawing and so it looks fantastic on e-readers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then I wanted to go back and re-read some old programming books that I read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I was young, like early in my career, like The Pragmatic Programmer, that kind of stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Go back and read some of those again now that I have a different mind, different perspective, more experience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I kind of wanted to go back, honestly, you asked so I’ll bring this up. I really enjoyed the Dowdy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ching back forever ago. I read the Stephen Mitchell version, which I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people who are actually experts in this area have very mixed opinions on whether that’s like the right version to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco read. I don’t know anything about it, so if anybody out there has like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good version of like, okay, if I don’t read the Stephen Mitchell version, what other one should I read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a Westerner trying to understand this? I would love that. So stuff like that, you know, just kind of, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I maybe I was thinking I’m re-reading 1984, which I know they had a funny thing with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Kindle a while ago, where they remote pulled it off devices, which is the best book to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possibly do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} That’s amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But anyway, so you know, so like I kind of, I wanted to get back into reading more than I have been, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is almost none, and kind of rebuild that part of my attention span, and this is a good way to do it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I do have something fun to read, this is how I prefer to do it anyway. So that’s kind of where I go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with that. So it’s not a lot of novels. That’s fairly rare. It’s a lot of nonfiction stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s right. My reading is effectively the exact opposite. I very rarely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey read for pleasure. I very rarely read any sort of nonfiction, which isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to say I’m right and you’re wrong. Not at all. It’s just that’s not where I tend to look. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have had a Kindle, I think I mentioned last time. I’ve had a Kindle for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a few years now since Stephen Hackett kind of bequeathed one to me, so to speak, or handed it down in the much same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way that you handed all of yours down, except when Steven sent mine, he was nice enough not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to use it as simply packing material and instead, you know, used actual packing material to brace

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Kindle. But nonetheless, I quite prefer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reading on the Kindle in part because there’s a light

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on mine, so I can read in bed, which I do quite often, even after Aaron is asleep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And also because, as I mentioned last episode, my eyes are garbage, particularly when I don’t have my contacts in, so I can make the font hilariously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey big. So I’m right there with you with preferring some sort of e-reader. And although I don’t have any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey particular need to upgrade my Kindle at this time, it sounds like the Kobo is the way to go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, and also on the screen front, I’m glad you brought that up. All modern,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like nice e-readers have some kind of screen lighting thing. And when these first came

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out, they were kind of rudimentary. They’re a lot better now. The Kindle Oasis

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one is way better than the Paperwhite one in terms of, It’s a little bit more even light, although they’re both very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even, but the Kindle Oasis one seems better at the, like, automatic shift to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco warm-toned lighting and automatic brightness control. It just, it seems nicer. I can get the Kindle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oasis to look nicer than the Paperwhite in that way. The Kobo, I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not yet read with it at night because, again, I’ve had it for half of a day, but so far, um, that the little bit of testing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have done with it, it’s also really nice. It is, like, Kindle Oasis level of nice, as far as I can tell so far.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, again, just super impressed with the Kobo. But, oh, and one other thing. The E-Ink screens,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they all now, because they are all now touch screens, and because they now have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this lighting layer, and I think the way it works, I think they have perimeter LEDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all around the perimeter, and then there’s this thin film over the screen that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco helps diffuse the light in an even way. So you don’t actually really see the points of light, although the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco edges of the screen look a little bit brighter than the middles. middles but like the nicer ones will have a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of LEDs to kind of help spread it around you know nicely so it looks fairly even. Two major

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco changes since the early days number one the screens are now mostly flush with the front

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you don’t have like the little bevel in causing shadows or collecting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dust or hairs and stuff along the edges which is nice compared to the earlier ones. Number two that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco film over the over the top of it makes it slightly shiny I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that. I wish they were a little bit closer to matte because E-ink looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so paper-like in so many ways and that’s one major way it doesn’t. But I think that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco symptom of that film on top that has the touch and lighting layers. I think if you actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look at a raw E-ink screen on a model that does not have touch or lighting, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of rare in the e-book world these days but still exists, you can still buy E-ink devices and screens for Raspberry Pis

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and stuff like that, they look better in that one way. They don’t have this kind of like glossy film over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them. So you kind of have to tilt the screen at certain angles to not have that little tiny bit of glare

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on them. But you know, it’s fine. Like in reading, it’s totally fine when you do that, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wish you didn’t need to. But that seems like it’s kind of an inherent thing with this trade off right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, oh well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Anything else for your follow up? That’s it? brief follow-up to your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey brief pre-show. Less than 20 minutes this time!

ATP Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, it is that time. It is the last time that I am going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sit here and tell you it is ATP store time almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said the bad word almost said the M word, but I caught myself. It is the ATP store time Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to buy adenosine triphosphate. No, it is to buy merchandise ATP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey merchandise. Yes. I said it John. I don’t care. You can buy your stuff your clothing at ATP dot-fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slash store Hey, listen, as I sit here right now, it is Wednesday evening

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and this coming Saturday evening, so probably within 24 to 48 hours of when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hearing this, it will be closed, the store will be closed. So I will remind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you one final time. If you’re walking, stand off to the side

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where you’re not in the way. If you’re driving, signal, because you’re not a jerk that doesn’t use your signal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, signal and pull over or think about what you’re going to do when you get where you’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and go to ATP dot FM slash store and buy you some awesome stuff. I’m so scared to say the M word now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You’ve ruined me. Buy some awesome stuff. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say merch. It’s just not called the merch store because it has a name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So sorry. All right. So the merchandise slash merch slash stuff that you can buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Mac Pro Believe shirt, which we actually have a little bit of follow up about that, believe it or not, but we’ll get there in a minute. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can buy the Mac Pro Believe shirt in various color, the shirt themselves can be various

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey colors. And then we also have the classic ATP6 colors logo, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on top of various colored shirts or black, depending on what color shirt you buy, it’s either white

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ink or rainbow ink. Then we also brought back the Pro Max Triumph shirt, which is available

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a rainbow of colors on either black or white tee. And we also brought back the polo. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are welcome, those of you who have a real job and want to look a little snazzy for it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey buy yourself an ATP polo. It’s really, really nice. And we also brought back the ATP hoodie. As far as we know, we also still have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey smattering of the original red inside mug

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} available. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think the mugs are all gone now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Breaking news, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} mugs are gone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You waited

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} too long. Yeah, there wasn’t that many of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They’re all gone now. The mugs are not available. So anything else, all of that other merch slash merchandise slash stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can buy at atp.fm, excuse me, atp.fm slash store. That’s where you can go, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, if you’re a member, Do you get any special perks for the ATP store?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t answer you. I have to double, I want to double check on the mugs. Hang on a second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Important things happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, the mugs are, I was trying to read the like the admin dashboard where it showed how many there was and it was confusing. But if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go to the mug, you’ll see that it just says, let’s see, it says, bring it back. Yeah, they’re both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gone. Okay, yes, members, if you’re an ATP member, you can go to your member screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually just go to atp.fm slash store and there you’ll find all the links you need. And you can get a discount code for 15% off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you’re not a member, you can become a member, get the discount, and then forget to cancel your membership.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I highly endorse this approach. Also remember, as we discussed in the after show last time, that if you are a member, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go to your member dashboard or whatever we want to call it and find a link to the call sheet test flight, which is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for members. So you can check that out as well. But we’re not talking about that right now. We’re talking about the store. So again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is currently Wednesday. What day of the month is it? It is the third, Wednesday the third. You probably won’t hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this until Thursday the fourth or maybe even Friday the fifth. At the end of the day, Saturday the 6th, your time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is up. I don’t want to hear you say, is it too late? Yes. If you have to ask, it’s too late.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So htp.fm slash store. We love you. Please love us back and buy some merchandise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We would really appreciate it. John, we have some follow up with regard to merch. This is a new thing for us. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this has ever happened before. So please tell me about the Mac Pro Believe shirt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So someone named Christopher Cruz wrote in with some with a devastating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John email, devastating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, in Christopher’s defense, it was not written to be devastating. It was written in a happy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey helpful way. It just so happened to be devastating. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} so I’ll read from the email

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here, talking about the Mac Pro Believe shirt, right? And there’s, we have what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we call a dark version of the shirt, which means that the shirt itself is dark. Anyway, so Christopher says,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the dark version of the shirt suffers from one of my graphic tee pet peeves, the same artwork being used

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for light and dark shirts with with only an ink color change. This treatment results in the dark version of the shirt appearing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inverted. If it’s not too late, it may be worth considering adjusting the artwork for the dark shirt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now here’s the deal. We’ve been doing the T-shirt things for a long time. I’m very often the one who does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the artwork for them. When it’s something like the ATP logo, where it’s got the letters ATP,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So you got a white T-shirt, you wanna put ATP on it, you write ATP in black on your white T-shirt, no big deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you’re like, but what if I want a black T-shirt? Can’t put black ink on a black T-shirt, but we did do that once, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, you’d want to put white lettering. So I’m gonna just take the ATP that was black on the white t-shirt and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change it so that now the ATP is white on the black shirt. Problem solved. This has been our MO for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of our shirts. You know, depending on how dark or light the shirt is, usually we go with white ink.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If it’s a monochrome thing, we go with white ink on the dark shirts and black ink on the light shirts. Easy peasy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did exactly the same thing with the Mac Pro Believe shirt, which is again, some artwork that I resurrected that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had done way back. I did it on the white shirt first because that was what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I originally intended. And so we got to have one with some dark color shirts too. And for those, I’ll just change the ink color

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to white ink and it’ll be fine. And we rolled out the store and we said, everybody come and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy it and blah, blah, blah. And then this email came and I was like, wait a second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Christopher is right. Oh my God, he’s so right. So here’s the deal. The Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro, word believe, sure. black ink on the white shirt, white ink on the black shirt,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where it’s great. The picture of the Mac Pro itself, that’s not text. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a physical object. And unlike text, physical objects have a physical reality. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not just an abstract concept. And the physical reality of the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that the little holes in the front of it, those are the dark parts. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the white shirt, everything works out. If you look at the white shirt, you can see, oh, here’s a Mac Pro, and look at all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John holes in the front of it. and inside the holes it’s dark and spooky. And so black ink is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} used

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the holes. But when I made the one that goes on the dark colored shirt with white ink, I just inverted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. And so what that meant was with the white ink on the dark colored shirt,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the holes had white ink in them. The holes were bright and the case was dark. I had one person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say it actually kind of looked like the Mac Pro was black and it made him wish for a black Mac Pro. But the thing is the Mac Pro is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John black, it’s silver. It’s light colored and the holes are dark. I was like, oh my God,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he’s so right. And I was like, what are we gonna do? We already shipped the store or whatever. So I just spent like an hour and a half

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making the corrected version. And it’s not that easy to make the corrected version, especially when you don’t use the vector

⏹️ ▶️ ^John programs that often like I know enough about vector programs to know what should be possible. I just don’t know how to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it. So there I am in the new version of Affinity Designer trying to figure out how to do the conversion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of all my vector things. I eventually figured it out. I knew it was possible, but it was just tricky. Although an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aside here, I did find a reproducible bug in Affinity Designer 2

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s like, well, who cares, you got a bug. It was stopping me from doing the thing. What I had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do was I had to select the stroke and select a command in Affinity Designer called expand stroke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s no way I could avoid doing this. There was no other way for me to do it. Every time I selected expand stroke,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they would crash instantly. And I had to do this for like 50 strokes. And I was like, what am I gonna do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, I literally don’t have a workaround. Like I need to expand the stroke. And I just, every time I select the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John command, the app immediately crashes, just instantly. So eventually I figured out just from futzing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around that if I like, like I was looking at the crash log and it was like a seg fault in some shared memory segment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like, oh, shared memory. I know this from my server side days. There’s lots of crap you can do to perturb what’s going on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in that memory region. So I was like zooming in and out in the program, you know, scrolling around,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing all sorts of stuff. And one out of every 10 times it would work. And so there I was, I would launch the program,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Select, expand, stroke, crash. Launch the program, select, expand, stroke, crash. But one in every 10 times it would work, and then I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hit save, and then I would just repeat that process. So anyway, eventually I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. You should have tried this on Tina’s computer. I bet it would have worked better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I actually should have done that. If I hadn’t been so heads down into doing this, I should have brought other, because like something like an architecture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change, or like, because it was one of those things where it’s like some kind of memory corruption or buffer overflow, and it’s just the luck of the dice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whether whatever bad was happening, it was harmful or not. And it was harmful like almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the time, but not all the time. I should actually save the file and give them a reproduction or whatever, but I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just like, I don’t have time to reproduce this. I just need to get done with it. So the upshot is, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, I contacted the people at Cotton Bureau, I said, hey, we want to update the shirt. We think this one looks better. It’s basically the same design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It just looks better. It doesn’t look like it’s inverted anymore. And they were nice enough to swap it in for us. So if you ordered

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac Pro dark shirt, everybody who ordered it is getting the good version. Nobody is getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the bad version.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} If

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you liked the bad version because you thought it looked like a black Mac Pro, sorry, but that’s not what we were going for. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just supposed to look like the actual Mac Pro and now it does. One final thing I will add that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did notice, so people don’t write it and tell me about it, I did notice, but I think it’s actually better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this way. If you two can look in the show notes where you have, it might be chapter art for this thing if you’re looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the podcast. But anyway, look in the show notes please and take a look at the quote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unquote good versions, both the light and the dark one. Do you see what else is wrong with the good versions?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is the shimmer

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} not right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No. On the handle? Now I did that intentionally as well. I could have reversed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the handle. I think the handle looks better this way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Okay. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I mean, other than the fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it looks like aliens on the top row, which I’ve said to you and others have

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} said as well. Yes, many people have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco said

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, the real Mac Pro really does look like aliens. So I think that’s accurately drawn.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, it totally is. This image is drawn directly from Apple’s, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Are the holes not, like is the polarity of the dark and light

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in inside each hole, is that backwards?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} If you had a real

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Pro in front of you, you would know this. On the real Mac Pro, the alien eyes, those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are the parts that are dark. And so I did one like that. The problem is if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you do it like that, like this is an example of like, I think the shirt looks like what people think the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks like, but that’s not what the Mac Pro really looks like. What it really looks like is the eyes of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John alien are dark and the other ones are silver, but then you don’t have a good way to differentiate the silver thing. So I’ll show you what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like with it, with it the other way. I’ll just put this in slack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I feel like you wouldn’t be able to see like where the holes begin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don’t like this as much for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looks more like the Mac Pro, the way that you’re showing us now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it doesn’t look good on a t-shirt. Correct, yeah. Yeah, so this is the artistic license

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where we are, you know, the problem is it’s line art and there’s no real good way to show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where the holes begin with a line because there’s not a line there. There’s just literally an edge, but we can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do subtle shading like that. So it turns out that was a happy accident where I did realize that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other way would be more accurate In fact, I had one the other thing you don’t know is there is a hexagonal grid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John behind the eyeballs And I have that hexagonal grid in my vector file and that just makes it way too busy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But technically speaking that’s correct So consider it an iconified version of the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is what is on the shirt is not technically accurate but it is spiritually accurate. Accurate. So there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have it.

Sponsor: Hullo Pillow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Hullo Pillow. Have you ever tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a buckwheat pillow? This is totally different from like fluffy feather or fill

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or memory foam pillows. I tried this a long time ago from a podcast and my wife immediately stole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it and so I didn’t get much time with it. And then a couple years ago I started having neck and shoulder problems and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco switched to the Hullo because the way it supports your neck is totally different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s kind of like a giant bean bag full of these buckwheat hulls, so it feels almost like you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sleeping on a supportive bean bag instead of a squish foam kind of feeling. What’s great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about it is not only is it very supportive, but also you can move the fill around. You can kind of form it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco however you want it to be that moment or that night or whatever. And so it’s so much more supportive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s great. It was wonderful for my neck problems. I think it really helped me a lot, honestly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s been wonderful. I love Holo. Other benefits as well. For instance, because it’s full of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco loose packed hulls, it stays very cool and dry compared to pillows filled with feathers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or foam. So it doesn’t retain heat. It’s really nice in the summertime, honestly. And you can also, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco customize it to whatever level you want too. So if you want a lot of support, a lot of height, you can do that. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unzip the bag that’s inside of it and just pour out or add more buckwheat hulls. They sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bags of it if you want to refill it or really stuff it full even more. It’s wonderful. I’m so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happy with my Hullo pillow. I strongly suggest you try it. There’s so many other benefits.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s made in the USA. They donate 1% of their profits to the Nature Conservancy. Like, it’s just, it’s a great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco brand selling great pillows. So, here’s the deal. Sleep on it for 60 nights.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If Hullo is not right for you, just ship it back. They’ll give you a full refund. See for yourself at hullopillow.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash ATP. If you try more than one, you get a discount of up to $20 per pillow, depending on the size.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Every order is shipped fast and free. So once again, check out Hullo today. HulloPillow.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash ATP. Thanks to Hullo for sponsoring our show.

Callsheet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let’s talk about call sheets. We briefly mentioned, or I briefly mentioned earlier, that if you are an ATP member,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey atp.fm slash join, then you can get on the beta until the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app is released. I don’t have a timeline for that quite yet, but hopefully soon. Once the app is released, the test

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey flight will be shut down. A couple of quick notes. First of all, a few people have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey asked, hey, I’m getting challenged for a subscription. what happens?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, first of all, you shouldn’t be because I am trying to rip all that out and it will go back in later.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey My whole paywall situation is a mess right now. But if you are on the test flight, you can go ahead and tap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the, I don’t even remember what it costs right now because I haven’t looked at it in forever, but you can tap whatever button that’s there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for subscribing and it will churn for a second then there’ll be an Apple provided

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dialogue that says, you know, something, something, something, you won’t be charged for this. And it’ll say the word sandbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey somewhere in the dialogue. As long as you see the word sandbox and should say you won’t be charged for this. You can go ahead and send it through. You still have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to enter your real password, but you can send it through and it’s not gonna charge you. That will not carry over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the real version. You will have to subscribe, if you so choose, once the app is in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app store proper. Sometime in the next day or two, I hope to rip out all the paywall stuff until I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can properly sit down and re-implement it the way I want to. But just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey FYI, you are free to spend as much money as you want because I will see none of it and nor will Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey More importantly though, everyone has been really, really kind, and I really, really appreciate it. I think of all the feedback I’ve gotten, and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey been quite a bit, and it’s almost all been extremely kind, and I really, really appreciate that. I think there’s been like maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one or two people that are like, this sucks, which I’m really happy with. Like, I am super happy with that level

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of happy to unhappy, and that is not a challenge. If you don’t like it to tell me you don’t like it, you can keep that to yourself. But I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to thank everyone who had sent in a little bit of feedback. I really appreciate it. I am still,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, working fast and furious. Breaking news earlier today, my friend John, who is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the authors of the excellent app channels, former sponsor, he pushed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me to implement a URL scheme for Call Sheet, which I have done. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you fancy putting stuff into a shortcut, I’m not sure why you would, but hypothetically, you can open up Call Sheet from a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shortcut. And in his app, Channels, I don’t know if it’s available to everyone yet, but coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey soon, you will be able to open stuff in Call Sheet if you have Call Sheet installed, which I thought was super rad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Thank you to John for that. But I do have a call for help. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are familiar with SwiftUI and have used SwiftUI’s searchable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey modifier, this is what I use on the main screen in order to allow you to search for stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Everyone has told me, and it’s justifiable because they’re all correct, hey, this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what a lot of people call floating action button, basically, if you haven’t used the app, as you drill into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey movies or shows and actors and actresses and so on and so forth. As you do that, there’ll be a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey magnifying glass that kind of floats in the bottom right as a kind of escape hatch that will jump you back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the search screen. And everyone justifiably expects that when you hit that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it will scroll to the top of the search results screen, it will highlight the text that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey already there, and it will show the keyboard saying, all right, what do you want to search for now? Completely reasonable. Completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reasonable, I wish I could do it. But as far as I know, I can’t because SwiftUI doesn’t give you any kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of control or ability to focus the search field. So if I’m wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey please tell me. If there’s a way to do this with only mild hacks, please tell me. I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t want to have to pull in, what’s, I forget the name of that framework. Is it introspection,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like that? There’s some framework that’s very popular that lets you dig into the UI kit stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Oh, you don’t want to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Exactly, well, I think I’m going to have to if I want to make this work at all, but I don’t want to pull in an entire library

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just to do it. You know what I mean? Like I’d rather just do this by hand if need be. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you have a way to make a SwiftUI search field as implemented by.searchable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you have a way to focus that, and even better, if you have a way to highlight stuff in the text field there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey please let me know. Please reach out. I would love to know a solution to this because it drives me nuts. It’s driving everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey else nuts. I totally understand why it’s driving everyone nuts, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. So that is my plea,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my call for help, if you know anything about.searchable and can give me a tip on that, please let me know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Because I would like to know this before I have to complain about it in the lab at WWDC when they’re probably telling me tough nuts you can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, but all in all, things are moving forward. I’m getting to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey point that I need to steal a copy of underscores no new features,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time to ship banner. But I keep coming up with things that are surprisingly easy to implement.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and so I keep doing them like the URL scheme earlier today. So somebody stop me, otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m gonna keep doing this forever. But my hope is, you know, I gotta fix a couple of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that are kind of urgent. And then maybe early next week, I’m gonna conquer the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey paywall stuff and make that look and work the way I really, really want it to. So that’s what’s going on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in call sheet slash fluke up land. I don’t know if you two have anything to add any questions, but otherwise we can move right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey along.

SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The one thing I will add is your issue with the search box thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, this is SwiftUI. This is the brand new cutting edge way to have a buggy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco frustrating search box. But UIKit programmers have known for a long time the joys of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things like UI Search Controller. And before that I believe it was called UI Search Field. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have been a few different versions of this over the years. And they have all been just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco absolutely miserable to deal with. deal with. All different layers of different kinds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of bugs, different lacks of customization, different types of hacks required to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it good. It is the whole UI search controller family of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco features to put that search box into the navigation bar or near the navigation bar in an iOS app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over the entire lifetime of iOS as a platform have just been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco horrendous to use for developers. And so this, if you’re running into a little gotcha

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or a small shortcoming of the newest version of, you know, the SwiftUI version of this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m simultaneously, you know, disappointed once again, but also completely unsurprised

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that that the stupid search box once again is causing problems for iOS developers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, and the funny thing about it is in the defense of SwiftUI for just a moment, it was literally, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, putting at the end of my view, I did this a couple of weeks ago, but you know, I put it at the end of my view, dot searchable and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey putting and connecting it to a binding to a string. And that was basically all it took. And then magic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey happened, which was awesome. No joke. It was awesome. The problem, and this is Swift UI from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey top to bottom, doing that really hard thing in a basic way was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cake. It was so easy. It was astonishingly easy. But the second

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you want to make it do anything else, then you’re up a creek and you have to go diving into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey UI kit. Cause I mean, maybe there is a way to do what I want without diving into UI kit. I suspect I’m going to have to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey spelunking into UI kit world, which like you grumbled about earlier and I completely echo it. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t want to do that, but this is one of those situations where I might have to, because it’s, I’m breaking the expectation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of everyone that uses the app. So it might be where that juice might be worth the squeeze, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s, just that’s the worst thing. Marco and I were kind of fetching about SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey before the show. You know, in so many ways, it is so amazing. I love it so much. But, you know, you were fighting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hilarious errors earlier today. I was, I didn’t happen to toot about it, but I was also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fighting differently hilarious error messages earlier today. It’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey amazing what one can accomplish with SwiftUI. And I like to think that, you know, call sheets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey looking pretty good. It’s not amazing, but it looks pretty good. And that’s in part because I’ve had help from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a bunch of different people. Hey, you should tweak this, do that. Most especially, I want to call out friends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the show, Ben McCarthy and Craig Hockenberry, both who have given me a lot of really great, really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actionable feedback about this. But even still, even the stuff that I came up with, I can make look pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good. I was never that way with UI kits. So there’s so much great stuff about SwiftUI, but golly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the second you want to go off the beaten path, you get punished. And that’s where I am right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, SwiftUI, my experience continues to be, wow, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really like this much of the time. This is definitely a great way forward.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Doing things any other way now, like if I have to go back and modify some UI kit code in smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things that I’m working on, it feels like I’m going to the dinosaur age. It feels

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so primitive and clunky compared to what I can do in SwiftUI. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco speed at which I’m able to try different ideas out in SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is so absurdly fast and satisfying and productive. It is by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco far my favorite way I’ve ever made UIs before. Not even close. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by far my favorite. And I’m investing fully in it for the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. Couldn’t agree more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Comma. However. Yeah. Yeah, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco full of sharp edges and it’s like many Apple products. Many Apple products

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are amazing and the best in their class and yet have some sharp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco edges. Not physically of course, usually. You know, Johnny Ive was sure to sand down all those sharp corners

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and… The

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} chamfered edges. That’s right, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s fortunately not in the physical sense, but there are so many little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sharp edges on SwiftUI, some of which are just outright bugs like Apple products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Many of which are design decisions that are just very opinionated like Apple products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And many of which are just shortcomings they haven’t gotten to yet like Apple products. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it fits in perfectly to be the new way to build things for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple because it really fits the attitude. And most of the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s great. And again, I don’t want to switch to anything else. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you hit one of those walls, oh boy, it’s fun. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco far, you know, and again, UIKit had tons of those things too. They were just different. I mean, in many cases, very different. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what I have found for whatever it’s worth over the years, oftentimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would slam into a UIKit wall and I would say, no, it has to be the way I want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have to be able to achieve the behavior or appearance that I’m going for here. And so I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco build some kind of ridiculous hack that would make it happen. Over time I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have come to realize I have regretted almost every time I’ve done that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the way I’m building it now is I’m trying as much as possible, which is hard with SwiftUI, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m trying as much as possible to avoid needing to do hacks like that. To try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to keep things simpler and more fluid, more dynamic, more stock. And if SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not letting me customize something to just say, Oh, well, I guess I won’t customize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that thing, as opposed to, well, now I have to rebuild UI table view or whatever, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, like, instead of jumping immediately to let me let me force my way into this behavior that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I want, even if it’s going to require 10 times the code saying instead, you know what, I’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ll just accept that and move on to a bigger problem. Part of that is maybe just me being old.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I think part of that also is hard learned wisdom. I’ve done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this a lot. Currently, Overcast’s current screen structure, which is all you have to see in UI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kit, it is really hard to change anything about it. It’s super hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it’s really convoluted, really complex code, because I was really picky about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exactly every detail of how I want this to look, how I want this to work. I want to be able to put this up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here and put this icon over here and put this bar up here. And it is so complex

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I stopped touching it for a year and then lost the ability to ever touch it again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I I’m much, much more heavily now leaning into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco simplicity, flexibility, and Swift UI is great for that. Like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s not it’s not great in terms of like, you know, with UI kit, if if something wasn’t quite what you wanted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you had more options to hack it than you do with SwiftUI. SwiftUI is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it puts up taller walls. It’s a lot harder, like certain things you just can’t hack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like it’s like, oh, you want to customize the way this thing looks or behaves? Too bad, you gotta drop down to UIKit at best if you even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have that option. But overall though, like, you know, I’m learning, I’ve learned over time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minimize the amount of convoluted, complicated UI customization.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and SwiftUI is really good if you want to stay on the default path. And if you want,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heck, even for customization, in many ways, many things that you can customize with SwiftUI were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco extremely difficult to customize in UIKit or impossible. And so many things are actually way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easier to customize. But like, I’m not saying you shouldn’t customize, you know, looks and feels and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here and there. What I’m saying is, when it gets hard, just bail out and just don’t do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So when something gets complicated, like, like, Oh, well, I could change this animation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be this other kind of animation that’s nicer. If I write this whole component from scratch, and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco move this thing over here and have all these weird modifier exceptions and everything. It’s like, Okay, well, or you can take the regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco animation with this one line of code that looks 80% as good and move on with your life. What my customers want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from me is not that one perfect animation. What they want from me is all the features they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep asking for that I can’t do because I’m buried under the weight of my hacky UI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I couldn’t agree more. And, you know, you said earlier, am I just getting old? I don’t know. I think for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey age is barely distinguishable from pragmatism or pragmatic. You know, like as you get older, you just realize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that a lot of the things that we think are worth it, you know, I made the, you know, play

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on words earlier, you know, the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze anymore. That it’s just not worth it getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the last 20%, as you had said a moment ago. You can get 80%, you know what, that’s sufficient.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey In this particular circumstance with the search thing and the floating action button, the only reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m even considering dropping down to UIKit and trying to do some of that just absolute nonsense is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is such a fundamental piece of the app and I’m breaking expectations. Well, I would argue Switch to UI is breaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey expectations, but to a customer that doesn’t matter. The point is that my app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is breaking their expectation. It stinks that I’m hearing the same feedback over and over again, and nobody’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey being mean about it. They’re not being turds or anything. It’s just, hey, why doesn’t it, when I hit the little circle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey magnifying glass thing, why doesn’t it show the search box? Isn’t that the whole point of the magnifying glass? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah. Well, then isn’t it just basically a Home button? Well, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s not what I want, but that’s basically what it is. And so, yeah, it’s frustrating. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, ultimately, almost all of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Peak of View was UIKit. Very little was SwiftUI. And this was written when SwiftUI was new.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Almost all of Masquerade is SwiftUI and very little is UIKit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so far, literally all of CallSheet is SwiftUI. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the things that’s been nice to hear, which is, I think, in no small part because of how freaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fast the movie database is, but so many people have commented, wow, this is so fast. I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey also helped by the fact that IMDb is slower than DIRT. But, you know, all of these factors are coming together, including that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey SwiftUI is pretty quick in my experience. all of these things are coming together to make my app look really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really fast, which is awesome. And so there’s, and certainly I’ve been able to write it much quicker than I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would have UIKit. I’d be, you know, on, I started CallSheet in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey late January and based on the accomplishments that I have, you know, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would be in probably January of next year, if I was writing this all in UIKit, you know what I mean? Like it would have taken

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me so much longer. And so, in so many ways, I’m so happy with SwiftUI, But golly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s so difficult when you want to do something that just isn’t officially supported.

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Follow-up: 2FA codes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Amel Jensen writes, I use the following shortcut to add and add the tag of hashtag

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 2FA in the notes field for the iCloud keychain entries that have two factor codes. That way I only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see the sites that have 2FA. This doesn’t work on Mac OS of course because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sad, but nonetheless you can do, and we’ll put this in the show notes, prefs colon root equals all uppercase

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey passwords. I don’t know if that matters or not, but it is all uppercase here. ampersand search equals 2FA.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so if you are diligent about putting that tag in the notes field for your iCloud keychain entries, then here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a quick way to get to two-factor codes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is related to what I was talking about the Google Authenticator. I still use it because when you launch the app, all your two-factor things are just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right there. But if you go to passwords and settings and iOS and iCloud keychain, you see all your passwords

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then you have a search field and you have to search and blah, you know, it’s kind of annoying, right? If you do this, if you go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or diligent about going through all of your passwords that have two-factor, which is not easy to find because, you know, it’s a chicken

⏹️ ▶️ ^John egg problem. You can’t find them because you have nothing to search on, I think. But if you do this, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you create a shortcut that opens that URL that we’ll put in the show notes, that prefs colon root equal, blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Then now that shortcut will take you to, immediately to, into the settings app,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into passwords, into a search that just shows you the passwords that match 2FA. You still have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dig into one to get the two factor code. So Google Authenticator is still faster because they’re just right there and you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tap on them and you’re done. this is one extra tap, but it is pretty good, especially if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not already overwhelmed with the number of passwords, or you kind of know which ones are two-factor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was trying to implement this, and I was like, hmm, which one of these 700 passwords have two-factor? And I just picked a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the top of my head

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I knew, but there’s so many more that are in there that I’m kind of buried, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} it was a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea, and it works, and there probably is a way to do it on macOS, I just don’t know the, there is like a URL scheme,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think, for getting into system settings or whatever, I just don’t know what it is.

CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mellad Sertic writes, having CarPlay available in rental cars is essential

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me. In just a few minutes, I can connect my phone and have all my favorite apps and features ready to go. This includes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Waze, music apps with my playlist, excuse me, and communication apps like WhatsApp and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Zoom. Without CarPlay, I’d need to spend time learning and setting up the in-car navigation entertainment system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Additionally, privacy concerns arise when people forget to clear their profiles from the car. This was an excellent point. The only thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that chaps my bottom about this is, If I remember right, and I understand why,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but if I remember right, every single car has a different home screen in CarPlay. And so if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I were to plug into the Volvo as opposed to connecting to my Volkswagen, all of my apps have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey been rearranged and resorted and so on and so forth, which is really frustrating. I get why they do that because for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some people, that’s a feature, not a bug. But for me, it’s a bug, not a feature. Nevertheless. Is that why that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey happens? Yeah, it’s per car. I’m almost sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, because I’ve just noticed that it just randomly shuffles up my stuff sometimes. and I never really figured out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just assumed it was a bug the same way it randomly shuffled my Safari tabs every time I reboot my computer. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no, no, no, it should be consistent within one car. So if it’s getting reshuffled,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then yes, you did find a bug. But as you go between cars, each individual car should remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey its own car play home screen. Does that make sense?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’ll have to pay more attention next time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. So but leaving that aside, I think think Mellad’s point is absolutely accurate and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I feel the exact same way. Now, granted, I am not in a position that I rent cars very often, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is real nice. Also, it’s super nice if I’m driving Erin’s car, like just by myself, which doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey happen often, but does happen. I don’t need to like have my phone as a secondary Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey device on her car. I don’t need to do anything. I mean, yes, her car does support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like profiles and things, and I might be able to associate my phone with only my profile and my physical key and so on and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so forth, but it’s so much easier to just plug in my damn phone. And then suddenly her infotainment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey system is my infotainment system. And so, yeah, I couldn’t agree with this more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Dave Nichols writes in all the discussions around CarPlay and the manufacturers not providing it, I’ve heard lots of comments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey relating to the manufacturers wanting to make money from subscriptions, but I haven’t heard anyone talking about the cost of CarPlay to the manufacturers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is this because Apple provides it for free? That seems unlikely. Is there any indication of the cost in their push

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for services revenue? Has Apple increased that cost lately, perhaps on the back of all the new features

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that they’ve announced? One of us, and I’m assuming it’s John, put in a very helpful link from 2019

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to The Verge where they said, Apple says it doesn’t charge automakers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a fee to use CarPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would imagine there’s got to be some kind of like certification process.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Right. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey exactly what I was going to say. And that can’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easy. But it’s different than having like a per car fee.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, like maybe there isn’t a fee per vehicle, but I’m sure you have to like pay Apple to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certify you and stuff like that, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I would imagine so, but that’s a one-time cost and that’s nothing to car makers. So I guess the question

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, you know, if Apple was Oracle, they would say we get a percentage of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the total sale price of every car you sell, because that’s how Oracle does business.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. So yeah, I thought that was interesting. And as, you know, Marco was saying, I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the cost to implement it is not cheap. The cost to certify it is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not cheap, but in the grand scheme of things, I don’t know. But way cheaper than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to do it all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yourself. Also true, also true. Ford also has announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or said, I shouldn’t say announced, has said, I think it was today that this happened. There was an interview with Joanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Stern and Ford CEO Jim Farley said, quote, 70% of our Ford customers in the US are Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey customers. Why would I go to an Apple customer and say, good luck? And this was obviously with regard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey GM saying exactly that. Farley continued, in terms of content, we kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of lost that battle 10 years ago. So like get real with it because you’re not going to make a ton of money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on content inside the vehicle. It’s going to be safety, security, partial autonomy, and productivity in our eyes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that relationship for content is between you and he was talking to Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, between you, the Wall Street

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Journal, and the customer. I don’t want to get in the middle of that, but Tesla and other companies are in the Caribbean believe differently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they want to have complete control over the interior experience. Now this is me talking, I get that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but again, I just don’t think that even a software company

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey masquerading as a car company, like Tesla, like Rivian, and admittedly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have not spent an absurd amount of time with either of those infotainment systems, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, as a devout carplay person, I would be hard-pressed to imagine a way in which I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey prefer Tesla or Rivian’s setup. But I don’t know, Marco, tell me I’m wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I tried the Tesla in-car stuff for years. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s fine, you know? It’s totally fine. It is not, however, great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is better than anything else I had had before that, but it’s not great. The reality is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people want CarPlay, they want Android Auto, they love their phones. That’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So often, we’ve learned this lesson over and over again, don’t bet against the smartphone. people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco love their phones. And it’s not because we’re sheep or being fooled or addicted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s because they’re really good. And CarPlay, while it is not perfect, while I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t love everything about CarPlay, it is way better than everything I’ve tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from anybody else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} It’s way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better than the stuff in the car. Here’s the thing, even if CarPlay wasn’t very good,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because look, it’s not amazing, It is still your phone, you’re updating the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that every few years, the software is updated every year, it has all of your stuff on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So the address book has all your places that you go. You know, the voice control has up-to-date location

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco information. If you want to use, you know, different navigation apps for whatever reason, you can do that, they’re all built

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in. Compare that to a car UI. A car UI is, at best, okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when it’s first developed. In most cars, it is never updated, or in the case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Tesla, it’s updated sometimes that makes it worse. So, you know, but most cars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s never updated at all. The hardware it’s running on is never updated for the life of the car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so, you know, after, you know, five, six years, you know, you’re running an old computer in there. And you know, if you try to, if you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more modern expectations of what things should do, well, too bad. It does what it does, it does what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it did when you bought it, and that’s it. Or maybe, you know, in the case of Tesla, where you are getting regular software updates,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re still running on the same hardware, so it’s gonna have limitations after a while, your phone is constantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco getting better. And so again, going back to the car, you’re in your car, you wanna like, suppose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want to get some real-time traffic information. Well, your car might have an internet connection that has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, it might not. It might have an internet connection for a little while, and then maybe a few

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years into owning it, maybe it doesn’t have it anymore for whatever reason. You know, maybe your Tesla free trial expired

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for their data service, and you don’t wanna pay X dollars a month for your car to have cellular. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe the cellular provider or the cellular technology your car uses, like maybe your car uses a 3G

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cellular modem and then the 3G towers get shut down as we go to 4G and 5G, then that’s broken.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, that would be my Volkswagen. My Volkswagen went through exactly that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All of these problems are avoided when it’s your phone projecting a video stream

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a screen in your car that can be as dumb as possible. CarPlay, again, while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is not amazing, it is always going to be better than what the car makers make. The car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco makers, they don’t want that to be the case because number one, they want control. And then I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, number two, they see revenue potential when they can do it themselves. They don’t want for their car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be just showing someone else’s screen and having Apple make all the money from the app store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and get all the cool data and have the car maker have no money and no data stream that they can monetize in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other creepy ways. Note though, that the reason why the car maker

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wants to do this themselves and not have CarPlay, those are reasons that benefit them more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than their customers. And sometimes only them, and not even their customers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at all. It’s very clear what customers want is CarPlay. Manufacturers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ones that don’t offer that, it’s gonna hurt them because most people offer that, most manufacturers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offer it. So now people have been accustomed to it. Many people in the car market have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CarPlay’s been out long enough and has been common for long enough, that many people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have owned or used a car with CarPlay by now. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as people, you know, like if GM goes through with their plan to pull it from future EVs, there’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of people who are shopping for those future EVs and who see, oh, it doesn’t have CarPlay, what the heck?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they’re gonna bail out of that purchase and buy something else. And so I think the cat’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out of the bag here. I don’t even like cats, but the cat’s out of the bag here. We’ve been spoiled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by CarPlay now, and we want it. Tesla is gonna, you know, they’re gonna do what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re gonna do. Who knows what they’re doing over there. Rivian, I think, will add it. It doesn’t seem like it’s a top

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco priority for them, but I bet they will add it. And GM, I bet they’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to change their mind on this once they see the impact it’ll have on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their sales.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We shall see.

Fool’s Errand & Eternal Darkness

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then finally for follow-up, Michael Hanneman wrote in, speaking of classic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mac OS and holding the mouse down on a menu to freeze all other activity, John might remember the game

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fool’s Errand. Do you remember this, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I certainly do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey In it, there was one puzzle that you could only solve by exploiting this behavior, because otherwise the target

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey moved too fast for you to click it. This was intentional. Do you want to explain this? Or I’ve read about it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve never experienced it. So do you remember this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just what it said. So if you use the Mac, you know, even if you aren’t technical, you did have to notice after a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John certain point, you know, everything else stops when I hold down the, especially if you have like a game or something and you went to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John menus, right? And so this, Fool’s Errand is the type of game,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I forget what the other one was, that was the sequel to whatever million people were writing to tell me, but there’s a bunch of games that were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like this, that were kind of like puzzle games. And they did a lot of sort of fourth wall breaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that they understood they were being played on a computer. So like the menus of the game were part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the game solving type thing. They were very clever. Oh, three and three. It was, I think, from the same people. A amazingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good puzzle game. Um, and so, yeah, this one was like, you’d get that itch. You’d like, this is impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t do it. I can’t click it too fast. You know, especially because people weren’t really good with the mouse back then. You probably could maybe get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it. I couldn’t do it, but anyway, you’re like, well, you know, in my experience using this computer, if I want everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to stop on the screen, I just pull down the menu. I wonder if that will work. And the answer was yes, it would. And that was the way that they intended

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you to solve the problem. We’ll put a link in the show notes and you can read about it. You can probably actually find this on one of those, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, Mac software garden things and run it. And in fact, if you just go to like infinite Mac dot infinite Mac dot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John org, I believe is like the launcher for system seven that app system six that up. They probably have this game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John installed in their games folder somewhere, if you dig for it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is pretty cool. Then Michael continues almost as amazing as the PS one game where you couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey beat the boss unless you switch the controller cable to the other ports that you could no longer read your mind slash memory card.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. This really ticked me off because I had a PlayStation one and I freaking loved

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Metal Gear Solid. I have no recollection of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or. So I don’t know if this is a confused recollection. I also did not play this game on the PS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, but I remember reading about the feature in the future. I remember reading about it, I believe was a Metal Gear Solid.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you was when you’re battling a character called Psycho Mantis and he would freak you out by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John telling you the player things that he guessed about you and what he was doing, what the game was doing when he was reading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the memory card to see what other games you have played.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And so Psycho Man is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna be like, oh, it looks like you like Castlevania. And you’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} how do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they know? He know that. I don’t think Castlevania is a good example, but anyway. And then, you know, kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually figure out, oh, the only way he could know these things about me is because he’s reading the memory card. I don’t remember the fact that you had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John switch the controller cable to another port so he couldn’t read your memory card or whatever. But again, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John experience these first hand. But this is another example of fourth wall breaking in a game. The other one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I did play through all of that was fun was Eternal Darkness on N64 or GameCube.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, I’m getting old, I can’t remember this. It’s gotta be GameCube, right? Either one of you ever heard of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Eternal Darkness? I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} heard of it. I’ve heard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Perfect Dark. That’s a very different

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} thing. Oh no, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s what I’m thinking of. That’s the golden

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} eye that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} wasn’t golden eye, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Eternal Darkness, it was a sort of, I don’t know, like puzzle type, kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like Resident Evil-y kind of thing. But it also did some fourth wall breaking because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you, the character in the game, would take like psychic damage from these creatures,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of, you know, Lovecraftian horror type things. And they would make you start to, make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your game character start to lose their mind a little bit. And they would do fourth wall breaking by making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it look like your save file had become corrupted or like stuff that would make you flip out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a game player. You know, the game would trick you into thinking it’s malfunctioning or there’s a bug or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something was erased or whatever. And it was, it was very effective. I mean, at least the first time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially if you hadn’t read a game magazine, because it was plausible to think that really was happening and you would be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’d have the incredible anguish of losing all your progress because your save file was corrupted. I don’t remember if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s an exact one, but if you go look up Eternal Darkness, if you want to be spoiled on the whole game, and see all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the things that it did to you during the game, it was a lot of fun. Sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a blast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It sounds traumatic. You also get your character gets squished by a giant lobster claw at one point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s my most vivid memory of Return of Darkness.

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Rapid Security Response

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We have received most of us our first rapid security

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey response from Apple. Um, I don’t know if anyone has declared what specifically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they were trying to fix. Maybe they did, and I missed it, but too rapid,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} no time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Exactly. Um, screw it. We’ll do it live. Um, so yeah, so Apple has decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s some sort of bug that was bad enough to justify using this rapid security response

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey framework that they’ve been working on for a while. This has been used in betas for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off and on for a while, perhaps just for the purposes of testing. I don’t know if they were actually fixing anything or not, but this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the first time that like real honest goodness iOS users got it. I did it today and it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stunningly fast. John, how could that be so quick?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. So first in the show notes, we’ll have a tidbits article by Adam angst, uh, where he goes into lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of detail about this. If you have applied this, which Casey has, and I have as well on one of my Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} and I’m actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and both of them, actually. You’ll notice that the version number of your operating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system, instead of just having three numbers with dots between them, now has a letter at the end. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the releases were, for iOS, it’s 16.4.1a,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and for macOS, it’s 13.3.1a. And as the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John name says, this is supposed to be a feature of iOS 16 and macOS Ventura and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPadOS 16 as well to give updates faster for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crucial situations or for urgent situations. And the update

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did run really fast for me on the Mac. And same thing on the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like it ran so fast it made me wonder if it had actually applied it. Yeah. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Adam talks about in the article the goal of rapid response and his estimation. I don’t know if this is straight from Apple, but either way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re trying to make the installation time shorter because no one likes their phone or their Mac to be sitting there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for 20 minutes doing an update, it’s just too time consuming. They want the download size to be smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if you’ve noticed with all our gigabit fiber connections, we maybe don’t notice how big downloads are all the time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but a lot of these updates, even if it’s just like a point update, 13.3 to 13.3.1, that update can be surprisingly big.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you don’t have a fast connection or if you’re stuck on cellular or something on your phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it can take a long time to download or it can burn through a lot of your data. So that’s not great. And then, you know, people are a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit hesitant to install updates because they’re afraid it’s gonna break something. And you might be thinking, well, how does this help with that? It updates

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an update. I would be just as hesitant, right? Well, I’ll get to that in a second. So to deal with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John download size and installation time, they’re using a technology that was introduced,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think in Ventura called Cryptexes. This has been in our show notes for many months, probably since Ventura came out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It stands for cryptographically sealed extension. I know we’ve talked about this before, but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ventura and I think a couple of operating systems before that, you could something called a sealed system volume.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It used to be that the operating system was on the same disk as your user data, and it was just a disk,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and use Unix permissions to protect the files. Then eventually the operating system was put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into a read-only partition. So it was mounted read-only, and the operating system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was there, and then your user data would be elsewhere. In its current state,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what Macs boot from, and I don’t actually, I don’t even know if this is, but the deal is in iOS, not even address it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but on the Mac, what Macs boot from is something called a sealed system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John volume, which is a read-only snapshot. So it’s not even like, you’re not booting from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a read-only mounted disk, it is a read-only snapshot of a disk. You’re booting from a snapshot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that it’s cryptographically sealed and that every single byte of data on there has a cascading series

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of checksums that lead to like a master checksum. And if any, in theory, if any one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit of data anywhere on the entire sealed system volume changes, the checksum will be invalid and the Mac won’t boot from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. So it’s kind of a way to ensure that the operating system is known, good, and it’s the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for everybody. There’s no variance, you can’t get in there and muck around with it. If you do go in there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like mess with stuff, they will invalidate the signature and you won’t be able to boot from it anymore. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why in this day and age, for the most part with some caveats, the old

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of cure of weird problems of like, let’s just reinstall the OS, shouldn’t do anything. because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing that you’re booting from is supposedly cryptographically proven to be exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John intact and exactly what is expected. There is other stuff elsewhere that’s not part of the sealed system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John volume, however. In particular, I think when they first shipped this, they had a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of other parts where they’d put things like Safari and shared caches and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s because updating anything in the sealed system volume is a major pain in the butt. Even if you’re only updating a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit of it, I think the problem is that what it has to do, first of all, it has to reboot and it has to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boot from something else so it can get the volume that has the sealed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system volume snapshot on it and mount it read-write and then modify it and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recalculate and reapply all the checksums and seal it back up and then make a new snapshot and then reboot again and then reboot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the new snapshot. And that is time consuming. Like no matter how small change you make, just the overhead of doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that takes a surprising amount of time, even if you change like one file. So that’s not great. So to try to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John help with that, they have a system called Cryptexes, which are kind of like little tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sealed volumes. They’re basically like little images that are cryptographically sealed. Again, every single byte on them is as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John checksums and every directory all the way up to the top level one. So you’re sure that it contains what you think it contains.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And in those Cryptexes, they make them smaller, you know, so one of them has like Safari

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside it or whatever. So you can update Safari more quickly. What the system does during boot is it boots from the read-only snapshot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the sealed system volume, And then it takes those cryptexes and sort of loads them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and overlays them in kind of NFS overlay parlance. I don’t know if that helps anybody, but like it overlays them, it graphs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them onto the sealed system volume. So it’s a series of smaller cryptographically sealed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that are grafted onto it, making one complete system. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faster to update the cryptexes because they’re smaller, they have less stuff in them and resealing them and making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure all the checks on the right takes less time than doing it on the big one. So rapid security response

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things, they’re cryptexes and they’re small-ish. And since

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re cryptexes, what that means is if you were to look at where all this stuff is, you’d see the sealed system volume, you’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see, essentially, I don’t know if it’s like a disk image or whatever, you’d see the thing that holds Safari, you’d see the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that holds shared caches and stuff like that, and you’d see one for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the rapid security response, the one we just had. And what that means is that it’s really easy to remove

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these things. And you can actually remove this, I don’t quite know what it is, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remove a rapid security response thing. So on your Mac, if you go to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John general about and then click on the magic little I in a circle, which everybody knows on the admin system settings on the Mac, you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to click on because everything is behind there. You will see that the last rapid security response that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in there, and there’s a button that says remove and restart. And that will basically just delete the Cryptex

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s not, it doesn’t, unlike an update to your operating system where it actually modifies your operating system, like it overwrites

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the old versions of the files, Cryptexes are separate and they get grafted on top of your operating system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if you just delete the cryptex when it’s booting and doing that process where it grafts them on it won’t find that one and so On grafted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on and so that’s how that update will be removed I guess they do this just in case they screw up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John real bad because the whole idea of rapid response is like oh There’s there’s a security problem We need to get this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing update out as fast as possible go go go right and they go go go real fast and they put It out in 24 hours

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all they screwed up somehow. There’s a bug or whatever So they don’t hose everyone’s systems. These things are removable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not sure how that would manifest if you’ve really hosed your thing Maybe you can’t even boot to the point where you can remove it. Maybe you’re able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remove it from recovery I’m not entirely sure but this is how it works on iOS as well if you go on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS and go to settings general about and into the version you can remove the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Rapid security response that you just installed In terms of the sizes you can look in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Tibbets article They vary depending on the OS, but like one of them was as small as like 53 megabytes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for an iMac That were installed in a minute and a half That is unheard of in the modern era

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of doing Mac updates where every single update is like 800 megabytes and takes 20 minutes to install so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hopefully everybody went through this and applied the update you do have to reboot for this one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in theory They could distribute a cryptex that didn’t require a reboot I suppose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it’s not like urgent that you you know reboot immediately and I don’t know Maybe they could graft it onto the running system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John volume or something not entirely sure But the reboot like on my phone the reboot was so fast again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought it might not have installed the Mac reboot I could tell it was installing something but it didn’t sit there for an hour with like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little white progress bar on a black Screen, so I give the system a cautious thumbs up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still kind of confused about the removal thing, but it’s a it’s a feature that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is made possible by the technology that they use kind of like all the APFS features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that enable really easy, you know, user facing features like snapshots, that’s because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the underlying technology. And so Cryptex is this weird thing where they have these cryptographically sealed little turds that graft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John onto the other thing, allows stuff like easy removal of OS updates. And I think that’s a good thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Well, I feel better for having known that. Do you want to do some Ask

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ATP?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Let’s do it.

#askatp: 15” Air flop like 14 Plus?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ben would like to know before the iPhone 14 plus came out This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the large size, but not Pro version of the iPhone 14 There was a lot of optimism about consumers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wanting larger screens without upgrading to a more expensive Pro model so far That hasn’t panned out. Do you think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that a 15 inch MacBook Air will be different or the same story? I I think that a 15 inch MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Air assuming it’s not prohibitively expensive, you know Assuming the expenses commensurate with the larger screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it’ll sell really really really well because I think a lot of people People don’t necessarily fancy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey themselves professionals by the Apple definition. You know, they don’t need an SD card slot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Maybe they need an HDMI port. I don’t know. But I think a lot of people would want just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the same MacBook Air, but bigger. So I think I would assume it would sell. But I mean, obviously, all of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us said that about the 14 plus, who knows? Marco, what do you think about that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So coincidentally, 100% coincidentally, I told you that I had to get more test devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for my test device fleet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} And I said I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco purchased a really cheap iPhone SE, mostly for Adam’s watch pairing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had also purchased an iPad mini. And the third and final device that was part of that purchase was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an iPhone 14 plus. Of course. Of course. So no one bought them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I did. I found a good, just like the other ones, I found a good deal on Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a refurb. And yeah, I am now the proud owner of a 14 plus. I got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I gotta say, it’s surprisingly not bad. Like, first of all, it is surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lightweight for its size. It weighs roughly as much as my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco non-Plus 14 Pro, like, you know, regular size.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It gives me hope for the future, you know, Pro phones that are gonna switch materials. Maybe they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be lighter. That would be nice. Anyway, so, yeah, it feels good in the hand. It’s a totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine device, but you know, I haven’t really used it as my phone because it’s been my test device and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it will continue to be my test device over the summer. So anyway, moving on to the actual question about the 15-inch MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Air, whether that will be kind of, you know, land with, you know, kind of as a dud,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or actually be popular and successful. And frankly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s going to be a really big hit. So when you look at the Mac lineup, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is this massive price gap between the MacBook Air, which almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone buys, and anything with a bigger screen than 13 inches. And meanwhile, if you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the world of PC laptops, look at what people are actually using,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially for work. But you know, just look around what people buy for PC laptops. Yes, 13 inch laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are very common, but so are 15 inch, roughly class laptops. Like those are also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very common. There’s a lot of people who, when push comes to shove,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they want a Mac, and they want, you know, a big screen, some of them do jump

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the way up to the very pretty premium price of the 16-inch MacBook Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but many of them don’t. Many of them either settle for a 13-inch MacBook Air and just say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, I would like this to be bigger, but this is what I can afford or justify, and therefore that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or they go and buy a cheap 15-inch PC because it’s a lot cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The 13-inch MacBook Air, now that we have the Apple Silicon era, it is in many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways like one of the best computers Apple has ever sold. It might be the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all-arounder for most people that they’ve ever sold when you factor in price and value. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if you don’t, the size and weight of it and battery life are just so good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s such a great computer. If they can broaden the appeal of that form factor without increasing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco specs of everything so high that they need to charge like $2500 for it, that’s going to get a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people in the door. Now, also look at when businesses buy computers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This I think, you know, people are looking at this as like, why would consumers buy this with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the M2 chip when the M3 is around the corner? It is not about that at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know who’s going to buy these? Businesses. Tons and tons of them. they’re gonna buy these by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the carton, like whatever unit Apple sells them in, businesses are gonna buy these like crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because businesses want to give all their employees a laptop, Apple’s been making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty good strides in that area in a lot of industries, and they usually have to just buy the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Airs, but you know, it turns out people do like bigger screens sometimes, and businesses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually, especially businesses, really have a hard time justifying MacBook Pro prices for a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco employees. You know, certain, obviously if your work involves heavy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computer usage in ways that the pros actually are meaningfully better, that’s a different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco story. Most corporate laptops bought for most employees don’t need that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of power. Most of them just need to be able to browse the internet in a relatively safe and nice way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with decent, you know, decent battery life, and relatively low cost, and as big a screen as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re willing to put on it. That’s what most people want. All that set aside, by comparison, if you look at the iPhone 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Plus market, the 14 Plus, I know from having just bought one, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having waited a long time for a decent deal to actually pop up, the 14 Plus is expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is barely cheaper than the Pro phones. The theory I’ve heard from enthusiasts about the 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Plus is that it’s not so much about this year, as in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco future years, they’ve never brought a plus or max sized phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down to like the last year’s phone price slot. They always just discontinue them and replace them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the new one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} This is presumably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna be the first one in all likelihood that they will drop by, you know, one or $200 over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the next year and, you know, make that the cheaper phone. So the full story of the 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plus has yet to be told. But also if you compare it to what it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the cheaper version of, it’s not that big of a price difference. Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you look at the 15-inch MacBook Air, if we, we don’t know where this is going to land price-wise, but I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guess somewhere around like $1,600, you know, something in that ballpark probably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s going to be substantially cheaper than a 16-inch MacBook Pro. And also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for most people’s needs will be just as good, unless you really need those like big heavy-duty stuff. So I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re gonna sell a ton of these things. And good for them, because the MacBook Air is awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And to make a bigger one, to enjoy that same, even if people are like, oh, you should put the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M2 Pro in it. No, they’re not going to, they don’t need to. They can just make the exact same computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as the 13-inch MacBook Air, but bigger. Exactly the same in every other way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it will sell like crazy, because it’s a great computer already.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No one cares if it has the M2 or the M3 in it. They’ll sell a ton of them no matter what, and it’ll be awesome.

#askatp: TV HDR worth it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Torstein writes is HDR and Dolby Vision worth the trouble HDR can have overly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bright scenes white Subtitles ruin dark scenes and blinds you in a dark room ABL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey triggers several times during one movie colors can look over saturated Oversaturated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and the format war war between HDR 10 HDR 10 plus and DV fragments can content

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Not to mention the different DV profiles, which is a hot mess I prefer SDR 10 bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as it’s more pleasant to watch in a dark room and looks more accurate color-wise. What are your thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t care.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} John, what do you think? Oh, but you will care eventually. I’m sure. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t already. So here’s the thing with the Dolby Vision HDR and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all that stuff. If you believe in the march of progress that video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is traveling down, the idea that the picture looks more and more realistic over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time, it’s inevitable that the next step in realism of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your television set is related to brightness. Because if you think of your television

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as like a frame, like an actual hole in your wall, and then through that hole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is whatever you’re seeing on television, it doesn’t look like that now. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looked out your window and you saw a boat on the ocean, or a sunset, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know a space battle is harder to I imagine, because that’s kind of very fictional, but anything, anything real world,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, a family sitting on a blanket on the beach. If if it was not a television set, but was just a hole in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your wall and through that magical hole, like a portal in the game portal, you could see a family on the beach

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you were in a dark room. You would be totally blinded because the bright

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side of the beach and you’re in a dark room. That’s not a fun experience, but that is, quote unquote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John realistic. So we are traveling down that road to realism. And the things that contribute to that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously, you know, 3D parallax, blah, blah, which we’re not doing. It would be very difficult to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Resolution which we’ve been doing a little bit and we’re kind of getting to the point now at normal viewing distances on a 4K TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The pixels are probably too small for you to see. And dynamic range. What’s the darkest, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the brightest? Color reproduction, right? If it was actually just a hole in the magical portal that showed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you a beach, you don’t have to worry about those things. The beach is the beach. It’s got the colors that it’s got. Like it’s, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got the brightness that it’s got. But there are lots of real world scenarios where looking at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that is being depicted, whether it be a sunset or a beach or,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, even just an interior of a store with fluorescent lighting, from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the perspective of sitting in a dark room would be too much for you to handle. So part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the job of the creator of media with this new technologies like HDR is to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figure out how to present what they, what they’re presenting. They could choose to have a really dark scene and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John next scene be on a beach with maximum HDR brightness. They could do that for effect to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make the audience squint and go, ah, because maybe that’s what needs to happen at that point in the show. You’re cutting to someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who’s in the desert getting baked and you want the audience to squint. But if you don’t want the audience to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John squint, don’t take them from a long dark scene into full HDR brightness, because they’re gonna squint.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s what I think creators of media are learning now is how do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I use HDR to further the story I’m trying to tell?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How bright do I want things to be? Which things do I want to be right? What kind of effect do they have? Moderated by,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of course, well, I know what it looks like here on my $30,000 mastering monitor in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video suite, but what is it gonna look like in real people’s houses on their crappy TVs that aren’t calibrated, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a difficult problem, but lots of people who experience HDR and find it off-putting some of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that could be the people who made that didn’t give enough thought to how this was going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to feel to watch. Some of it could be people are making media to try to make you feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, that’s way too bright or oh, that’s way too dark and you just don’t like it. And what you’re saying there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is I don’t like the artistic choice you made. You could not like the artistic choice someone made and you think the story is dumb, the acting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is bad or also this, you know, the color grading is weird or they did the HDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a way that I didn’t like. That’s the thing. I am a believer in giving creators

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these tools because when used well, it makes for a more impactful, more realistic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking picture. And I think that is valuable. That’s why we all ood and odd over HDTV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it came out. That’s why we like 4K. And yes, that’s why we like HDR because it gets closer to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being realistic. But in all media, you don’t have to make it look like it would look if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was a magical portal. You can choose to make it look how you want it to look further

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your story and things being awe inspiring and realistic looking or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more like reality is sometimes what you want to happen. And so that’s why I think these tools are essential.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s why I think it’s we only need we’re going to get more of this. And as we get more of it now, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the tools become more powerful, creators will have to be careful up to I don’t think we’ll ever get to this point, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they’ll probably pull back but up to the point where if you go outside on a sunny day, and you look up at the sun, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John burn your eyeballs out. Hopefully, we won’t ever have a television that can put out the light output of the literal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sun, because then if a creator made a bad choice and put the full sun in the middle of the picture, you’d look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at it and it would burn your eyeballs out and little kids would go blind because they don’t know to look away, right? So let’s not do that, okay?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But somewhere between where we are now and that, I think we can have to continue traveling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that road because there are still situations, for example, when you have an HDR capable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John television in a very bright sunny room and the sun is shining directly on the screen and you can’t see the picture because it’s washed out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because the real sun is more powerful than your television set. We’ve got a ways to go, but I, I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel, I feel the pain of the person who wrote in about this, but I think, uh, you kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of can’t stand in the way of the march of progress, but that march is filled with people, uh, making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad mistakes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey As always.

#askatp: Motorized standing desks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Nick from Toronto, I’m sorry, Toronto writes, do you guys have any thoughts or opinions on these motorized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey standing desks? I’m moving and can’t bring my current desk with me, so I’m exploring options. Heck, I’d even like to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hear what you guys think about your regular desks. I had a somewhat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey infamous glass desk. It’s actually in pieces behind me because I recently upgraded to a standing desk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I had thought over spring break that we were going to be going past the closest IKEA to us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey One of the few problems with living in Richmond, Yes, you heard me, you two. One of the few problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of living in Richmond is that the nearest IKEA to me is 90 minutes away on a good day,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which sucks. But I thought we were going to be driving by it, and so I’d asked for opinions on Macedon a while back about, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, I forget which model it was, but is the such-and-such IKEA model of standing desk any good? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really didn’t want to hear anyone talk about other options, because that’s not what I was asking. However,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey everyone said that the Fully standing desks are excellent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that didn’t really matter to me because I was pretty much decided I was getting an Ikea one, but then somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said, Oh, and by the way, fully at the time, I don’t think this is true anymore, was having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a steep discount because as it turns out, Herman Miller has bought fully. And so now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fully is just a line of Herman Miller stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But weren’t they a sponsor a long time ago?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh, fully might’ve been actually. Yeah. Shoot. I’m glad you called that out. They were, I think you’re right. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but this was, it was forever ago of memory serves,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} but anyway, yeah, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was not recent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. So all of this had nothing to do with the fact that they previously sponsored, but thank you, Marco, for pointing that out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But anyway, so everyone and their mothers said, buy a Fully. And then somebody said, oh, and by the way, it’s cheap right now. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all I needed to hear, baby. So I ordered myself a 60 inch by 27 inch. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey care what that is in metric, but a relatively large stone colored

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sit-stand desk. And I freaking love it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think that you necessarily need to buy this exact desk, although I have put a link to it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the show notes. But if you can find a sit-stand desk that doesn’t wobble a whole ton,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am in full support. Since I got this maybe a month ago, I have been sitting and standing on and off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all day long, and I love it. I cannot stress enough how much I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enjoy having a sit-stand desk. An alternative to this, by the way, shoot, what is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it, VeriDesk? Did you see these a lot when you you were at work, John, do you know what I’m talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All sit-stand desks tend to look the same to me, so I don’t-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, no, no, no, no, no, this is something else. This is a Vari.com, V-A-R-I.com, and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do these things, VariDesk desktop converters. And what it is, is it’s an impossibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey heavy thing that you stick your monitors and your keyboard on, and then that thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} sits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on your desktop and lifts up. And if you can’t get a sit-stand desk, it’s actually a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good like second choice option. And I had that when I was working most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey recently at a real job. But yeah, I really like my Fuli. But before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I move on and give you guys a chance to talk, I love this desk and I got the one that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can program, which I think Marco years and years ago had said, you gotta get one that you can set your particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey heights that you like, couldn’t agree

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That matters a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lot. It makes a big difference. But with that, with the desk, I bought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fuli’s Jax, J-A-X dual monitor arm. Holy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey crap, this is the best monitor arm I’ve ever gotten because my studio display is a VGA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mount, my 5K Ultra-Meh, I took off the stand, so it’s now effectively, did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I say VGA mount? I’m sorry, a VESA mount, or VESA, or whatever, however you pronounce it. Anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so both of these things are on the Fully Jacks dual monitor arm. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the best monitor arm I have ever used. I’ve never had any of the fancy-schmancy like XDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ones, so I can’t speak to those. but just for regular old visa-visa mount

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stuff, this arm is so freaking good. I love my sit-stand desk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I love this, the freaking monitor arm even more. It is so good. So definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey check that out. And it’s not a bespoke thing that would only work with a Fully desk. Like you might wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey check this out even if you have a different style desk because it is that damn good. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think they have a single monitor version as well, if I’m not mistaken. But yeah, full support of a sit-stand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey desk. again, prior sponsor Fully is my pick from my experience of, let me check my notes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one standing desk. But I do really like it nonetheless. Now, Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think you probably have the most experience with this, even more so than me. Mine is just recency bias. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thoughts, corrections, where did I go wrong?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think you pretty much got it. So yeah, so number one, I love standing desk. The electrically raising and lowering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind is great if you can do it. I have used them on and off for a long time now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over a decade. The good thing about it is that I’ve used I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco three in that time? No, just two I guess. But I’ve seen more here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and there and heard other people’s stories. And universally seems to be they’re all pretty good. Like if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just find a standing desk that you like the look and dimensions and price and features

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of, you’re probably good. It’s not something that you have to really get too picky

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about. The first one I had when I was back when I was a Tumblr, that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we visited the Fog Creek offices and… Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I bet that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice! It was really nice and they had they had just gotten these amazing desks and and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I asked Joel Spolsky like hey can you tell me the name of these? And it was back then it was the kind of thing like you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he did he was he’s awesome I love Joel and you know we we had to like go through some kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco commercial furniture dealer to get them like it wasn’t something you could just like order and have it shipped normally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like from a website. It’s like, you know, you have to like find the dealer and all this stuff because it was like commercial only use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That was probably 2008 or something like that was a long time ago. Things are very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different now. Now everybody can get them. You can get them delivered. Ikea sells them like there’s a million, you know, as you said, like there’s there’s so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options. That one that I got that we got back then we ended up, we did get them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Even, and then when I when I left Tumblr, I asked if I could take my desk with me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And sure, and David said, sure. So I remember I drove my Honda Accord

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into Manhattan one weekend and unloaded this desk from my office building from downtown

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Manhattan, or midtown Manhattan, rather.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That must’ve been fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, fitting it into a Honda Accord required some degree of disassembly, but it worked. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I still have that desk. I have that in one place,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and in the other place, I have, I got one for the beach from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this company, Uplift. They’re a pretty popular stand-in desk maker. I am super happy with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it as well. It’s super heavy duty. They have a bunch of different options. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have the Uplift V2 regular stand-in desk. I don’t have the one with the big crossbar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think, hold on. Yeah, I don’t have the one with the big crossbar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had to look. It’s super sturdy. It doesn’t wiggle much. It’s rock solid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they have a lot of different wood options for the top, which was important to me. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanted to get nice, decent wood and have it match the room and everything. So yeah, Uplift I can recommend.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But really, as Case mentioned earlier, the one feature you want in a standing desk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is position memory. Chances are, if you use a standing desk, you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to be standing all the time or sitting all the time. you’re probably going to have like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one set height that you like to sit at and a different set height that you like to stand at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and if you don’t have memory on the control panel you have to just you know raise and lower each

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time and kind of guess where you want it to be and that’s infuriating because it’s always like a little bit off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you’re not quite it’s this way oh maybe raise it up a little bit and then oh is this right now it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco put a piece of tape on the wall save some money they don’t yeah and this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is one thing like if you if you get like any decent standing desk, usually it comes with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco memory now, except for the very cheapest models. Even the ones that have an option not to have memory,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the option to add the memory is usually like 100 bucks or less. Add it, trust me, take that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco option. You want that option. It radically changes how nice it is to use in practice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But yeah, otherwise, it’s a great thing to use. I used to have some back issues

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, you know, I had to stand for a while. That’s why at Tumblr, I initially like faked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it with like some Ikea bookshelves held up by Coke cans on my desk. It was a whole thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it’s a nice thing for for, you know, the way you work to be as comfortable as possible and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and whatever your body needs, you know, listen to it. And if you need to stand for a while, stand for a while. And if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you get something that’s electrically raising and lowering and has memories, it makes it very easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to switch back and forth depending on what you need at that moment or it’s more comfortable for you or what’s more healthy or whatever. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco strongly recommended. Uh, yeah, I’m a big fan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, John, I’m a little surprised that you didn’t advocate dangling a tennis ball off the ceiling, like garage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey style to figure out what the standing height would

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} be. Tape

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the wall is less intrusive. You don’t need the, you don’t need the tennis balls because you can’t put it against the wall. You got to have it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hit the windshield. So it’s got to be in the middle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} but yeah, not just two pieces of tape on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wall. We’ll do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. All right. So what is your desk situation? Did you ever have at any of your jobs, a standing desk? I presume

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had the option for one, but I was never really into it. A lot of other people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I work with did have them, and eventually they were basically standard issue to everybody. I think I’ve actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John might have had one at a certain point, but I never moved it. So is it really a standing desk if I never actually raise it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Although even just as a regular desk, it’s nice to be able to pick the height that you want the sitting desk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be at, even if you don’t use it as a standing desk. Because most desks you can pick from like one or two possible heights and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you can adjust with your chair height, but then if And if you have short legs and your feet are dangling, then you need a foot rest. And it’s just this whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing where being able to adjust the height of the desk is nice. But no, I never really used one in a standing position at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work. At home, I have a plain old, boring, non-standing desk. It’s very, very old.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But when my wife, we made her a little office down in the basement for her to do more working from home

⏹️ ▶️ ^John during the beginning of the pandemic, I believe what she got, I was trying to look this up while you guys were talking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty sure it is the Uplift desk. I mean, a lot of standing desks look similar, but I’m pretty sure it’s Uplift. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very popular brand. I looked at the pictures and I’m like, yeah, that’s her desk. I’m pretty darn sure. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John she uses that down there. Not sure if she sit stands with it or not, but again, I think she appreciates the fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that she’s a shorter person, that she can adjust the sitting position to be what she likes. And it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is standable. And I think we did get it with memory. I don’t remember. One thing I will say about sit-stand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John desks is they’re heavier than you think they are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yes. Yep. Very heavy. Good

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} ones are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway. You know, they come, this one came disassembled then I had to bring it down to the basement to assemble it and I’m bringing the boxes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down, I’m like, what is in these things? The leg parts of them are very heavy. And this gets to what I think is one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most important features of a sit-stand desk unrelated to the standing. Because of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way they’re designed, especially like the uplift desk or whatever, there’s just two extremely heavy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John legs and with little feet on them, but there’s nothing else. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no sort of intrusion into the area where your legs would be. There’s no back thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no legs poking in, there’s no bar going across. It is just complete open space

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the metal is so heavyweight that they don’t need anything. So you can get a huge standing desk, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deep, very wide. It’s just gonna have the two legs with no bars. And that always annoyed me when I was shopping for computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John desks in the really old days when sit-stand desks weren’t really a thing. You’d find a lot of them that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did stuff to where your legs are. You know, they have that supports or braces or struts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or stuff like that. These things usually do have some sort of overpriced cable management thing that they’ll sell you to go under the desk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Those are okay. You could do your own cable management for a lot less money, but sometimes it’s convenient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have them, but they’re a little bit janky. But anyway, I do appreciate how incredibly solidly constructed these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are. Like they seem like way overkill. It seems like you could have a dance party on the top of this desk and it would be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just so heavy, right? And the motors are nice and smooth and quiet. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, I also endorse the Uplift Desk, but personally I haven’t used them. I don’t know, I just, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe I could get used to it if I had to, but it’s just something about sitting feels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right to me when I’m using a computer. So that’s what I’m doing. You know, and my desk,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my desk is really old, but it does, you know, I just want a really big, you know, flat surface for my desk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can imagine replacing it, and if I did replace it, I would get a sit-stand desk. Because at this point, like, if you’re buying an expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John desk anyway, and you’re looking for a high-quality expensive desk, even if you don’t care about standing at all, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easiest way to find it is to buy a sit-stand, because you know they’ll be solidly constructed because they have to be for all the motors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everything. And you can get them at all sorts of shapes and sizes, all sorts of finishes, and they’re very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John solid. Again, my experience is only with all of the, whatever brand I had at work, which some of them might’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uplift, but I know a couple others were different brands. And then the Uplift one that I bought at home and every single standing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John desk I’ve seen in the past decade has just been a plain, good, solid desk. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thumbs up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Squarespace, and Hullo Pillow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at atv.fm slash join. We appreciate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that very, very much. Thank you so much. 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, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental, they didn’t mean to

Post-show: Dave & Buster’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was using Casey’s app to look up the year of this Movie earlier marker when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re talking about the car play thing. You’re like people love their phones Mm-hmm, you remember saying that so this is from the 1992 movie singles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which actually has a podcast connection In in that movie, which I assume neither one of you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saw or has even heard of nope, correct, okay In singles, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a kind of a Gen X movie. It’s a dumb plot where some girl has picked between two guys Who are both jerks anyway?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the people is this nerdy guy and he’s like in the Pacific Northwest somewhere, probably Seattle, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of the base of the movie. Anyway, he’s proposing that they should add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a train to, you know, for public transportation to some metropolitan area and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he calls it Super Train. You may have heard from Roderick on the line. He’s like, Super Train, we’re gonna put in Super Train and it’s gonna,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, here’s how it’s gonna be so great, it’s gonna help make commuting much faster and reduce traffic and blah blah blah, Super Train, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And everyone who he showed it to, like the people who are in power, would look at it and go,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, people love their cars. And that was the refrains of the whole movie, that people love their cars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No matter what he said about Super Train, it was always people love their cars. And now here you are saying people love their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phones to the car makers, and the car makers are like, wait, in the 90s people loved their cars. Now you’re saying they like their phones?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They love their phones? They do, they do love their phones. They do love their cars, but not for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer app platform media things. For that, they love their phone. For cars, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the whole wheels and rolling and moving from place to place. Stick to that. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, you went on an adventure recently, it looks like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I sure did. So- Where’d you go, bud? We decided for various

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kid birthday party reasons, the birthday party for my kid this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spring happened at Dave and Buster’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, is this the one in Times Square or near Times Square or something?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco God, no, no. There’s a couple on Long Island. It was one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of those. You’ve heard of the App Store and Casino Games for Children?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Welcome to Casinos for Children.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s kind of what I’m getting at. So, all right. So it had been the last time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was in a Dave and Buster’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, it’s been forever for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. I mean, I think it was when I lived in Pittsburgh in like 2004. Oh, wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s even more forever than what I’m talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I’ve been occasionally to like arcadey things in the intervening time, but not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much, like once or twice total. And so it’s been a while.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I was surprised by a few aspects of it. So those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of you who don’t know, if you’re not like Americans or whatever, Dave & Buster’s is a chain of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of arcade sports bars, I guess, like, is that how you, Like, there are these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big arcades that also have bars and food service for adults, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s mainly like a giant arcade. So they have arcade games, and then they also have games that give you tickets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you can trade in for garbage toys at ridiculous rates. Just like skating rinks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and stuff like that in the past. So anyway, the kid part of it went totally great. It was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we rented a room for, it was a multi-child party, and it was great, and it went very well, and they were good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that. But what was interesting is we got to see like what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco modern arcade games are and certain things that have changed and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certain things that haven’t. So number one, what I wanted to do first, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once all the kid stuff was settled and the adults had a little bit of time to walk around and play the games while the children were doing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same thing, first thing I wanted to do was I wanna play freaking Guitar Hero. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco love Guitar Hero. I don’t have any modern version of it on any system you know, nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco makes plastic guitars anymore, so let me go play Guitar Hero. I queued up the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Guitar Hero song, which is Black Magic Woman by Santana. It was such a frustrating experience, because first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all, you know, you don’t really use coins and stuff anymore in these kind of arcades. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get like cards or, you know, RFID thingies, and you scan them, and it deducts from your credit balance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or whatever. So, you know, first you gotta like, you know, go buy a card, put, you know, $25 or whatever on it, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then you know you go to the games and you know they they express the prices in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco arbitrary units so it’s like this this game costs nine nine what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how many how many what’s around my card god knows like you know so first of all they’re obfuscating the price so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you pay more that’s that’s great you know we’re off to a great start right also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the cards come in intervals of twenty-five dollars but there is almost no way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to spend exactly that because the the prices are not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} divisible correctly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you end up with like $3 or $2 or whatever of unused credit that you just kind of can’t use on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything, so they get you there, of course. See also, every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iOS game that has in-game credits that you buy, like this is, Nintendo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too, this is a popular scam. So okay, at least I know I’m getting scammed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I go play Guitar Hero, I beat my little card against the thing, and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of gets me and then it just doesn’t work. And then it’s like, beep it again, and I’m pretty sure I paid twice for my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one game that I got. And then I play the game, and, you know, Guitar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hero has like the five fret buttons that you play the game with by pushing those buttons, and one of them just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco outright doesn’t work. And I’m like, okay, I’m pretty sure I don’t suck this badly, like I’m not missing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every green note. Like, certainly, like, the ones, those are really obvious,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can hit those, and I’m hitting all the other ones, and every, so the game was like, you know, partially broken,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was hard to play, it double charged me, I’m like, okay, here we are, off to a great start. But you know, I’m putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a good face because, you know, it’s my kid’s birthday, I’m not gonna like, you know, I’m not gonna like act upset or anything, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, I’m already like irritated slightly. Now, there are some games that I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were pretty impressive. I was surprised how few new games there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were since last time I’d been in an arcade. And I think it’s different now because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now, like when arcades were a thing when we were growing up, you didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great video games at home or in your pocket constantly. Now, everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has great video games everywhere. Like they’re so commonplace and on such like common hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that everybody already has, you don’t need to go to an arcade to play a good video game. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco already are playing good video games in other forms. What the arcade serves is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weird novelties. You know, the multiplayer, you know, two or four player link up racing games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Those are always fun, I love those. Although, again, even those, it was like Mario Kart

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Cruisin’ USA, or Cruisin’ World, whatever the Cruisin’ USA franchise is up to now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe, and like a bike thing, and that was about it. So I thought that was kind of interesting. There were a couple of like, you know, gun shooting games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One thing I had a lot of fun with was, They now, there’s this category of game where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the screen is a whole bunch of really little bright LEDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they use it to show like old games. Like I played Space Invaders

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this way. And so you have this giant, it looks like you’re playing on a scoreboard for a sports stadium.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a micro LED, but it’s not so micro. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} when we talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John micro LED TV, that’s what we’re talking about. But then they use that in sports stadiums, but you’ve got, you were playing the non-micro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was playing macro LED version of Space Invaders. It’s interesting because like first of all it’s Dave and Buster’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it’s like You know a big arcade. It’s very dark inside. There’s like you know it’s it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost pitch black and it’s lit only by the lights it looks almost like a You know an old-style

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Vegas casino of like you know no windows anywhere. They don’t want you to see the outside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco world So it’s very dark and it’s lit up pretty much only by all the games and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their big displays and everything. So it looks a lot like a casino. It sounds a lot like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a casino. And… So anyway, so I, you know, these games,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they ranged in quality, you know. So I had a lot of fun playing Space Invaders with my kid. They had like two different guns,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you’d both sit down, you’d play together, like co-op Space Invaders on this giant, like, eye-searing, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, sports scoreboard display. It was kind of cool, like that was very novel. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had the carnival games where you get the tickets if you’re able to throw all the balls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and knock over all the things, or skee-ball and stuff like that. But it’s like, you get the tickets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was gonna say, did they have skee-ball? Because the day that skee-ball leaves those places, it’s really the end of an era.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They did have it, but all the kids were like, this is not as good as the others because you have to score

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too much to get the tickets. And so, here’s what happens. We paid whatever it was per kid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so that the birthday kids had these wristbands with RFID thingies on them and so they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unlimited like video games but they had a limit on how many like ticket

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things they could get. They quickly ran through the video game part because it was unlimited. They quickly like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of exhausted themselves of their value there because they’re all you know they’re all these kind of shallow arcade games

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you know there was only you know they’re all made to play for 90 seconds and then you move

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they they burned through those fairly quickly and then it became time for the ticket games. Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in casino gambling you pour money down the drain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you are motivated by the chance of maybe making some money and it’s really I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not a big fan of the destructive nature that has on a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I recognize that’s a pretty you know that can be a pretty dangerous thing a pretty harmful thing to society when it goes wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you know I’m kind of sensitive to like should we really be teaching children

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this mechanic. And this is what this is part of the reason why I’m so down on a lot of App Store stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because when you look at you know the way the way the App Store gaming environment is, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of simulated gambling or oftentimes even sometimes real gambling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I don’t I don’t love that we somehow consider that a separate thing. You know I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think if we’re gonna look at gambling as a society and say this should be you know tightly regulated and it’s kind of a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and some places don’t even want it at all, I think we should apply a lot of that same scrutiny to what we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have children play on their phones and iPads. And I think Apple needs to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be substantially more strict than they are in that way. But it’s hard for them to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that strict when they’re making so much money from it. But anyway, it was interesting, though, when the kids switched

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over to the ticket games, the ones like, okay, well, you put in your money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or you use your credit, and then a ball falls from the top, If it hits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this thing you win and everything it’s like carnival games Everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is slanted against you like there’s little tricks and gotchas and deception

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Like kind of cheats that they do So that like oh you’re definitely gonna miss this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clown thing that you’re throwing the ball at because it has all this hair sticking out The side that makes it look wider than it is or like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you got to hit it really hard Otherwise, it won’t fall over and the ball would just bounce off or you know like stuff like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, he played this like kind of controllable Plinko. It looks like Plinko from The Price is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, but you drop the thing down and you’re trying to get it in the center slot, but you can like turn some gears along the way to kind of steer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. And amazingly, he got it in the first time. But he couldn’t get it in ever again after that because you can look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at like, see the design. It’s like, oh, they’ve actually angled everything away from this center

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hole. So that like, it’s, it’s, every, every single thing was designed that way. It was like, oh, this is deception.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is a trick. This is playing on people’s perceptions. perceptions, this is cheating people, like every single thing like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was crazy watching some of the kids, you know, some of them had like a healthy balance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of like, oh, they they’d try it once, like, ah, this stinks, and they move on, you know, some of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looked like gambling addicts. Like, I’ve seen people like in Vegas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco casinos, the kind of people who were like, sitting at a slot machine for a really long time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just kind of mindlessly pumping money in. And that’s how they they spend their entire day just slowly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco losing money and it’s not a good thing to see. The look that those people get in their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco eyes, they’re kind of like glazed over, like giving up, like I got, but you gotta keep going because you might win.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s what I saw in a lot of these kids’ eyes. It was scary. On one level, I’m like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this has kind of always been this way. And maybe I just didn’t see it when I was younger, in these places more often.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco On another level, that doesn’t make it right. It’s it was it was really just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of like yeah I don’t I don’t think this is a good thing and the psychology

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that it’s training us to have It made me really uneasy the fact that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is like a thing that is ostensibly for children seeing actual children like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be taken in by the by like The the scam and the addiction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of of that of those feelings it was it was kind of messed up But yeah, it definitely made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me think, like, man, I do wish Apple would be better on the App Store about that stuff. Because I don’t think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right, or in good taste, or in keeping with the brand they want to have, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple makes so much money off of casino games for children in the App Store that use real money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and plan people’s psychology to basically set it on fire. All the stuff, like the loot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boxes, and all the weird gem conversions, and all this stupid stuff. Like, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ripping people off. and Apple knows it, but they make so much money that they convince themselves not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to care. And in my opinion, that’s not good enough. They should do better. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know better. I know the people there know better. I know that they care about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their brand. They care about what it represents. They don’t wanna be a mindless casino for children, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they are, and I really wish they would do better. I wish they would have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the courage. There it is. To actually stand up for that and say, you know what?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even though we’re making a killing by taking a third of this kind of dirty money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s going through us, maybe we’d be better off overall for our brand and for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our customer experience and for what’s right in the world to maybe put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more strict controls on a lot of that stuff and make it a lot more honest and a lot more consumer-friendly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But they won’t do it. I wish they would.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it’s been a long time since we’ve had an Dave & Busters And I remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I was really little, my grandparents, actually, they still lived there. They lived in a little teeny town

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey outside of Scranton, which you would know is the place that the office takes place, the American office anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They lived in this little tiny town outside Scranton. And I remember that there was a arcade there that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was called Family Fun Center. And it was one of these sorts of things. It was like a lowbrow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey version of Dave & Buster’s where you had a really crummy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Chuck E. Cheese Where most of the games, they had regular arcade games for memory serves. Most of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey games are these ticket dispensing things. And I would put like, I wasn’t given infinite money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but you know, left my own devices. I would put infinite money into these different games like skee-ball

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and a bunch of others in order to try to win. As you had said a little while ago, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey world’s crummiest prizes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Oh yeah. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey were so bad and so awful, but I would rack up those tickets. And I remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey family fun center would give you like laminated cards, like about the size of a credit card if you had like a thousand tickets and I would like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would gather up all my tickets and I would, you know, I would cash them in and so far as like I would get my little card

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that said, Oh, I have like, I would have 2000 ticket cards and whatever, whatever. And I’d save them up in like the three or four

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey times over the summer that I’d go to visit grandma and grandpa. Like I would go to family fund center and earn some more. And then eventually maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one day I would have enough for like the prize I really, really, really wanted. And you know, you could get like a game

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey boy if you had 11 trillion tickets, but you would have had to have spent like $13,000 to have earned 11 trillion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tickets. It was a mess. But as a kid, I mean, I loved it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Gosh, I love that place more than almost anywhere in the world. And I loved when we went and visited grandma and grandpa because a lot of times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we would go into Family Fund Center and get to play for a couple hours. And I loved it so much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mentioned on the last show, I was happy that I was born when I was in terms of the various technological

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arcs and the internet and everything that I got to see them when they develop. This is one instance where I’m glad I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was born when I was, because I got to experience video arcades before they got crappy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I didn’t get to see them transition into being crappy, and I didn’t get to experience the crappy. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my video arcades were coin-op video game machines that you put quarters

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into, not tokens, but real life quarters, and the video games were really good. And at that time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the best video games you could find anywhere on the planet were arcade games, which made sense for the time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they were incredibly expensive. Like those machines, like a Pac-Man machine did not cost the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as an Atari 2600, not even close. Like they were very expensive. The big giant CRTs in them alone were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expensive, plus circuit boards and the fact that they were custom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And maintenance, like you have to have people come service them because they would break all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but they made tons of money in quarters, right? So the reason, you know, anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the point was like, you’d go to the arcade because you couldn’t see that stuff at home, all right? And they’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try to make home versions of arcade games and they were worse, right? And so you were willing to plunk the quarters into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John machines and play them. Yeah, and they sounded like video arcades, they looked like them, and you know, they’re just, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, that experience is burned in my brain. And when they got bad, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had stopped going to video arcades. Eventually the industry learned you can make more money by selling people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John games and home consoles, and that’s kind of why the games look like the way they do. The graphics on them are not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as good as they are on your phone, right? They’re just not, right? these huge machines and the graphics

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are terrible. That never used to be the case. It used to be the case that the best graphics in the world were on these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John extremely expensive arcade machines, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Unless you had a Neo Geo.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s true. Well, that came from arcade stuff. Yeah. Neo Geo and a couple of other

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It basically was an arcade machine that you took to your TV and you paid about as much for it as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When it flipped, I think, was around the Dreamcast era. Somewhere around the Dreamcast era, there was one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John console that was essentially, They made an arcade version of a console board

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instead of like the other way around. And that’s when you knew it had entirely flipped and the arcade was no longer going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be the place where the best games were. It was good. Their best games were gonna be on console and PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the arcade was gonna be whatever junk was left over. There was that middle period where they tried to share the technology and they did. There was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a whole bunch of consoles that, I think mostly from Sega, that were like, it was literally the same hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the arcade and in the home thing. But then, honestly, I don’t even know what’s in those arcade things. Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it just like an iPhone SE 2 inside there, playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the games? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these days,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, it’s probably like a Raspberry Pi or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s the other thing I was surprised you didn’t mention, that the other variety of things I see in modern quote-unquote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arcades, is essentially mame cabinets, right? Like just, I don’t know how they get away with it, but it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, here’s a bunch of old video games, probably not really licensed, but who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cares? And what it looks essentially like a mame cabinet, kind of like your big star

⏹️ ▶️ ^John space invaders thing out of wall but without the big screen. I was like, oh great, I came to an arcade so I could play,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, emulated video games for my youth on a crappy screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I hate those places, but yeah, no, I was there for the brief shining moment when they were good and then I left.