544: Valid in a Marco Way
16 Jul 2023Casey attempts to submit his app to the App Store.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- EV thoughts from Sam Abuelsamid
- Tesla V4 Superchargers
- iPadOS 17 window management
- An extended aside about social networks, federation, and socialism
- iCloud Keychain 🤝 third-party browsers
- Casey’s no-good, very bad day 😭😬
#askatp:- Is Time Machine really useful anymore, anyway? (via Dan Provost)
- Could a third-party ARM chip end up in a Mac Pro? (via Torb)
- Servers love large CPUs; could Apple use Apple Silicon in servers? (via David Loring)
- Could Apple make a hyper-fast “drive” to sorta-kinda expand RAM? (via Patrick Melody)
- Why no dual-socket CPU in the Mac Pro? (via Aryan Aneja)
- Does the Mac Pro really have an “super car” attributes anymore? (via Jan Lehnardt)
- Is the Vision Pro now the “halo car”? (via David Saunders)
- Post-show: Marco’s update
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Chapters
- It has been $INTERVAL
- Hypercritical shirts!
- EV follow-up
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- iPadOS 17 window management
- Social-text format war
- iCloud Passwords browser plugins
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Rejection
- Upgrading to AirPods Pro 2
- ATP Membership
- #askatp: Time Machine still needed?
- #askatp: 3rd-party Mac Pro CPU?
- #askatp: Apple silicon for servers?
- #askatp: Mac Pro RAM-disk?
- #askatp: Dual-socket CPUs?
- #askatp: Mac Pro supercar aspects?
- #askatp: Is Vision Pro the halo car?
- Ending theme
- Coming to America 🖼️
It has been $INTERVAL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been so long since we’ve recorded last. It has been one week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right, everyone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. I love, it’s such an old gag. And I feel like they did this on Wayne’s World at some point or another. But when they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do like the completely ridiculous dub, you know, hey, it’s so great to see you guys. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one week since we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last. I love those gags. It cracks me up every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco time. Hello, Pittsburgh. Right. I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a move that will surprise probably nobody, I have a rip of a Blue Man Group DVD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my plex. Oh, they’re so good. They are so good. I saw them in New York City actually a couple of times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many, many years ago. We saw them in Charlottesville once and they’re like concert tour. Anyway, at the end, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, there’s two of these concerts in my plex and at the end I ripped both of them myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey After one of them, they bring someone up on stage, like an audience member because they want to introduce the band and they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk. And so they say, They say, now we’re going to introduce the band, and blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, blah, blah. Thank you! Insert name of city here. Oh, Dallas! So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the lady up there literally reads, insert name of city here, before she realizes what’s going on. I don’t know, maybe you had to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, we can cut that out, cut that out, Mark.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s fine. Go to it. I was there. So we’ve all seen Blue Man Group live. How does this, I didn’t think it was that common of a thing, but there you have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. Well, wait, really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We haven’t all seen the Godfather part two. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but Blue Man Group, we’re all set there. Thank
Hypercritical shirts!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have important things to talk about, even though we’re talking about it from the future!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have breaking news.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe you mean it was breaking last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last week there was breaking news that apparently hypercritical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharts are back, baby!
⏹️ ▶️ John Every five years. I spent a long time trying to search the internet for an animal
⏹️ ▶️ John that does something every five years like
⏹️ ▶️ John The locusts are like some prime number, like 17 years or something. I couldn’t find any
⏹️ ▶️ John animals that migrated, but anyway, like a fictional animal that migrates every five years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every five years, hypercritical shirts return. What the heck are hypercritical shirts, you may be asking. Well, hypercritical is a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John I did a long time ago. And I think, I guess, after that podcast ended, I
⏹️ ▶️ John made a website that I called hypercritical, hypercritical.co, I talk about it here. This is just my personal
⏹️ ▶️ John website. It’s got a bunch of crap on it. and I post on it occasionally. And then I made
⏹️ ▶️ John a t-shirt to both commemorate slash celebrate the podcast that was, and also
⏹️ ▶️ John just like a t-shirt for my website, which is a thing people used to do in the age of blogs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, right? Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then some people bought them, I was like, oh, that was fine. And then five years later, people were like, hey, I spilled coffee
⏹️ ▶️ John on my hypercritical shirt, or I missed it last time you sold it, are you ever gonna sell them again? And after
⏹️ ▶️ John five years, I said, you know what? I will sell them again. And so I sold them again, and people bought them. And I said, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the thing now. Every five years, I’m gonna sell T-shirts. Which I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you is not a great business plan if your goal is to make money. But if your goal is to make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John people who want Hypercritical T-shirts have them, every five years seems about right. So I put
⏹️ ▶️ John a post up on my website and I have a little, it’s not a vanity URL, it’s a convenience
⏹️ ▶️ John URL. Which we’ve talked about this before on the show and I think this is an important lesson for anyone who has a website. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the URL is hypercritical.co, that’s.co, slash shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason it looks like that, that redirects to nothing, but the reason it works like that is because if I ever
⏹️ ▶️ John have a shirt for Hypercritical, that will redirect to whatever it is. That’s why we do ATP.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John slash store that may redirect somewhere, or maybe a landing page or whatever, because it’s a URL that we control
⏹️ ▶️ John that is short and easy to read on a podcast, easy to type in, and it goes to whatever the most
⏹️ ▶️ John relevant thing is, rather than me reading off a big long URL, rather than me, I’ve seen some people, they use
⏹️ ▶️ John a URL shortener that redirects to their gigantic URL of the thing, a URL shortener they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John control. Those are all bad ideas. Anyway, this will redirect to the post where I talk about the shirts a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that complicated, the shirts, you can buy them. I described it as
⏹️ ▶️ John a really, really slow, non-renewing subscription plan
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to hypercritical t-shirts.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s every five years, right? And if you miss it, you know, They’re not coming back until 2028. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a subscription because I think it’s the same people buying the shirts. Cause after five years, the shirt’s getting kind of threadbare.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the printing is fading in the wash. Maybe you spilled something on it. You know, maybe you got a hole in it or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But don’t worry. Maybe you change sizes. Yeah, maybe you change sizes. Some people have said that their old shirts
⏹️ ▶️ John are surprisingly tight on them now and they can’t understand why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeps happening to mine for some reason. Yeah. It must be the
⏹️ ▶️ John dryer, sure. Yeah, definitely. There are a couple changes this year. People always ask
⏹️ ▶️ John for TriBlend. The reason I don’t TriBlend is I like them to be solid colored, and I know some people don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but they’re my shirt, so it is what it is. But now there are some
⏹️ ▶️ John offerings where it’s solid color TriBlend. This is a first for Cotton Bureau. So you can get white or black in TriBlend,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re both solid colored. And then I also added a new color, pink, which you can think
⏹️ ▶️ John is in celebration of the Barbie movie, which my daughter is very excited about. And she really wanted a pink shirt, So
⏹️ ▶️ John she’s gonna get one and if you want one, you can buy one too. And what does it look like? It’s the little
⏹️ ▶️ John classic Mac pixel art logo that I drew of just the front view of a classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. It’s a weird pixel size. It’s not like a 32 by 32 or 16 by 16. There’s something in between with
⏹️ ▶️ John weird chunky pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it’s got the word hypercritical underneath it in the same serif font that you will see on my website.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it comes in the signature hypercritical color of gold, which I hope they never stop making that.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, about six months ago, I asked our person at Cotton Bureau, do they still have that gold color? Because if they didn’t, I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I would do. But anyway, it comes in gold, but also you’ve got gray, navy blue, black, white, and now pink.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing there’s been a few boxes of these sitting at Cotton Bureau for approximately five years and no one else is using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John this color for shirts.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s a good color for a shirt, I think. No, it actually is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think, have we done, I don’t know if we’ve ever done gold ones. I’m trying to think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we should. If we did it, we would put black on it. If we did like an ATP shirt, we’d probably put black on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had a yellow variant of the ATP monochrome shirt at this past sale, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John But that was banana. Yeah, it was a pale color. It’s not it’s not yellow. It’s a banana It’s that fashion the current it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John currently fashionable kind of like faded dusty color even the pink is kind of a dusty pink, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this gold is more like You know orange yellowish kind of gold thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, uh, if you want to know what the deal is you can read the post It’s not that long. I just wanted people to
⏹️ ▶️ John know and I know you’re out there you’re listening to the show you have a hypercritical t-shirt. Uh, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John getting threadbare, think about buying another one. Or if you missed out on the last time, uh, give it a try. If not, see y’all again in 2028.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put things in perspective, the last time these shirts were on sale, I might’ve had a real job
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Michaela was certainly an infant. And now I am five years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on not having a real job and Michaela is entering kindergarten. So she will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in what? The end of elementary school. The next time these are for sale. That’s terrifying. All right. Well, Please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to hypercritical.co slash shirt and check out the fine fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wares that John Siracusa has for you to purchase. And please go ahead and purchase. It helps John. It doesn’t help MarkerOneEye,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s okay. We like helping each other. So help John. Help John to help you.
EV follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some follow-up. We have some EV related follow-up first from Sam Abulsamedh Who is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the hosts of the excellent wheel bearings podcast? This is a little bit long, but I think it’s worth it. Sam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes the SAE J1772 connector Which is the top circular portion of the CCS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connector predates an ACS The standard was finalized in 2009 and debuted in production 2010
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the gen 1 Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf However, that same connector was designed as an AC charging plug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supporting up to 240 volts As Tesla was developing the Model S, they wanted DC charging support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 400 volts. So they created what is now called NACS to support both AC and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DC charging. The CCS connector was being developed at the same time, but the standard wasn’t finalized until mid-2012,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the same time as the Model S was launching. There are two CCS variants, Type 1 which features five pins in the AC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portion for North America, because we only have single-phase AC here, and Type 2 for Europe where they have three-phase,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 240 volts as the standard has the two extra pins in the AC portion. On top of the EV weight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are heavier, but they don’t typically have larger brakes than internal combustion engine vehicles because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they rely so much on regenerative braking. To John’s comment about not having small, nimble EVs with rear drum brakes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s take a look at the rear axle of the Volkswagen ID.4, which has drums. John, I believe you have some things you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to interject here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say that the ID.4 has not what I would call small or nimble. Also not a very good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, from what I understand, it is not a very good EV. From what I understand, it is not very nimble. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, the Volkswagen ID.4, 108.5 inches. A 2014 Honda Accord, 191.4 inches.
⏹️ ▶️ John but the ID.4 is also like eight inches taller, the same width, and here it comes,
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere from 1,400 to 1,600 pounds heavier than the Accord. That’s not a small difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but neither is 10.9 inches or roughly 28 centimeters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You should do volume. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should do volume, I think, because the car is taller and because it’s an SUV shape, It definitely looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger. But see, you don’t park in volume, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but it’s all low-slung nose, you know what I mean? Where this thing is just a giant thing. This thing doesn’t even have a frunk either, by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Like, VW didn’t, like, they have this short, stubby nose, but if you open up the front
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, you can’t put anything in it, so there’s no frunk. How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it that I’ve just told you your car is almost a foot longer than this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one? And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is almost a foot taller, and it’s 1,600 pounds heavier! Have you ever lost a fight in your
⏹️ ▶️ John life? Well, you should have done volume.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You keep moving the goalposts. All right, we got to move
⏹️ ▶️ John on. What does bigger mean? Bigger doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just mean longer. It could be total volume. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one definition. Although I will point out when I was looking at the specs of this thing, in passenger capacity, my car is bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has more passenger room, and every dimension
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, because it’s a foot longer. No, no, but that’s all filled with the internal combustion engine. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hood on this thing is like, go
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the silhouette of my car versus that thing. This thing has no nose. It’s a little stubby thing because it’s an EV.
⏹️ ▶️ John entire engine in front of me.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And still more interior room.
⏹️ ▶️ John More interior shoulder room for the same width of car. Look at the shoulder and hip room in the back seat.
⏹️ ▶️ John The ID.4 is not a good car. And it is definitely not nimble. And I wouldn’t call it small. And
⏹️ ▶️ John final thing I’ll point out is the Honda Accord is the biggest car Honda sells. Not biggest SUV, biggest car
⏹️ ▶️ John Honda sells. It’s not a small car. It’s big.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s the big one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As long as we agree. All right, I just want to make sure. Moving right along, Sam continues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, before I get back to what Sam was saying, I was not aware of this. Maybe I missed the memo on this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I found this absolutely fascinating. Finally, while the weight does cause more wear and tear on the roads,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s also another major issue that you all overlooked. EVs are not actually emissions-free.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure they don’t have a tailpipe, but they do produce a lot of particulate emissions, which cause a variety of respiratory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey diseases such as lung cancer. The weight and that lovely instant torque that Marco was going on about cause dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more tire wear. When tires wear, the rubber doesn’t just magically disappear. It becomes airborne particulate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter. diesel and gas engines are remarkably free of particulate emissions, but tires and brakes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are now the number one source of particulate matter emissions in cities, and EVs produce more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tire particulate matter than internal combustion engines.” And there’s a short post. Presumably less
⏹️ ▶️ John particulate brake matter though, right? Because again, regen, not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco brakes is not… Oh, that’s true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like your brakes also don’t just disappear to nothing. But I mean, this argument, while this is probably factually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true, look, any time you’re going to be driving a multi-thousand pound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box hundreds of miles as part of a routine part of your life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re gonna cause somewhere in terror to happen. It’s gonna go somewhere. Yeah. If you’re looking at like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should I buy a gas powered car or a clean electric car? Like it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of no contest. Like yes, EVs have a few downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t have to like throw away your gas car that works perfectly fine. But next time you get a car, if you get an EV, you’re probably making a better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choice for the environment overall.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is why everyone is interested in battery technology for EVs, because all these problems that we’re talking about stem
⏹️ ▶️ John from the fact that gasoline is incredibly energy dense, and battery
⏹️ ▶️ John is far less so. So that’s why you need a huge amount of mass to try to provide the same
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of energy as a way smaller gas tank. Because the gas tank in your car, most people don’t even know where it is. It’s so small
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to the battery. Whereas if you get an EV, you know where the battery is. It’s huge, massive, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John heavy. And that leads to more wear on the tires and so on and so forth, right? So battery technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the promise of solid state batteries, which are always 5 to 10 years away. But I think there’s another round of stories about breakthroughs
⏹️ ▶️ John in that. If and when we get something like that, they’re interested in them because they’re more energy dense. They can go through more
⏹️ ▶️ John recharge cycles faster, and so on and so forth. So if we can get better battery tech, that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the cars lighter, and it takes up less interior space. And if we keep working
⏹️ ▶️ John on EVs, we could eventually get to the point where the battery part of an EV takes up the
⏹️ ▶️ John same amount of room is the gas tank in a regular gas car today and contains the same amount of energy.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other alternative we could do, speaking of small, nimble cars, which thus far America at least has
⏹️ ▶️ John not had an appetite for, you can just put a smaller battery in an EV, like Margo’s i3 thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will have less range because it’s less energy dense, but it will also be lighter and more nimble. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have to get over the psychological hump of, you mean I’m gonna buy a car for $50,000 that gets 100 miles of
⏹️ ▶️ John range or gets 90 miles of range? But if it’s like a sports car or just a little
⏹️ ▶️ John fun little commuter, it will feel nimble and nicer than a car with a heavier
⏹️ ▶️ John battery. And most people don’t go on long trips. And in fact, if our charging infrastructure gets really good and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a really small battery, it takes less time to charge. I really hope we do come to that because, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of wishful thinking, because in this country, we keep buying bigger and bigger, monstrous, ridiculous trucks to carry around
⏹️ ▶️ John to people to a grocery store or whatever. Like we’re going in exactly the wrong direction, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, you know, when we’re all dead, some new generation that is wiser than than we are apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John could start buying EVs with better battery tech and with smaller batteries that
⏹️ ▶️ John carry less energy that have a shorter range but are lighter, safer,
⏹️ ▶️ John have less, you know, have no CO2 emissions and have far less particulate matter from the wheels and tires
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re lighter cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I think that that kind of market for like a smaller, lighter, more nimble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EV that will exist, but it’s not going to exist yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s the kind of thing that people, I think, will be comfortable buying one of those after they’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owned another EV. You know, first people have to buy the one that covers their range anxiety better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, you know, when it’s time to buy their next car or a second car down the road,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then maybe they’ll be like, you know what, for this other role in my life or for this next phase of my life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only need 100 miles of range. Because everything… and that will have given it time for the charging infrastructure to get better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things to get faster and everything else. But I think that market is definitely going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to exist, but just not for the first generation of most people having EVs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re talking about in America, though, in other parts of the country, I’m sure that will exist because it probably already does exist because they like
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller cars and they don’t care about this stuff. And also, the thing that’s going to fix it here is not people buying their second EV. They have to die.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then maybe their kids, their kids will get their first. Their kids won’t grow up with the expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John of massive range and five minute fill ups or whatever, like changing the expectations because it’s really hard to change
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s mindsets about that. It’s pretty enlightened to say, well, I’ve got my long range car and my short range
⏹️ ▶️ John car. Again, look at what people are buying. Gigantic quote unquote pickup trucks
⏹️ ▶️ John that have four doors and probably more interior space than my Accord and this tiny vestigial
⏹️ ▶️ John bed in the back where they can make jack. They jack the thing up 500 inches and
⏹️ ▶️ John the you know, a six foot tall person, you can’t see their head when they’re walking in front of the car because the hood
⏹️ ▶️ John is up so high, and they’re just plowing over school children and destroying the roads. And it’s also they can put one bag
⏹️ ▶️ John of groceries in the bed, but they have no bed covers, so it just rattles around and their stuff goes flying out on the highway. That’s what Americans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very true. Sage and Mr. Palmer in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both pointed us to carsized.com, which I was not aware of, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shows it’s comparing the size of your accord versus the ID4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that much taller either. John, it’s taller for the ID4 is taller,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that much taller.
⏹️ ▶️ John six to eight inches. It depends because the four wheel drive version is a little bit taller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Either way. Uh, these are similarly sized cars. Does it give volume? Yes. Cargo volume. Anyway, it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, no. I mean the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, you can just multiply these numbers together. I mean, they’re all metrics. So who knows how you multiply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John them? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I mean, like if you made a shell of the car and filled it with water, you know, what’s the volume of the car. What I’m saying is that if
⏹️ ▶️ John you saw my car next to the ID.4, you’d think the ID.4 was a bigger car. It’s unquestionably taller.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though it’s like, like you said, almost a foot shorter, it just it’s more imposing presence. It’s up higher, the roof is
⏹️ ▶️ John higher, and it’s not a sedan. So the roof goes more or less straight back. And it’s just got a lot of volume. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got double the cargo space, because it’s got, you know, it’s basically a wagon. All these things, all these SUVs are basically
⏹️ ▶️ John gigantic, jacked up wagons with terrible plastic wheel arches. And look at that, look at the hood. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John short and it’s stubby, but can you believe they didn’t put a frunk there? Not a good EV, not recommended. Try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you know, uh, Demuro just put up the review of the EV6 GT,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is their hot rod one. I really want an EV6 GT real bad. I’m not gonna get one because I’m cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it. It’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a little weird looking, but not too bad. But that’s the, if I were to buy today, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I would buy, I think, is an EV6 GT. They are quite, quite fancy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, moving right along. We should talk about Tesla V4 superchargers. I was not even aware of this. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can you take us through this a little bit? Sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an older story from April, but just this was like when they were first coming out. It says, Tesla has only one V4 supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world. It opened in March to Tesla drivers and was recently made available to all EVs. The V4 supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ John is located in, oh, here we go, Harderwijk, the Netherlands, which is just about
⏹️ ▶️ John an hour away from Amsterdam. I’m sorry, people in the Netherlands. I have no idea how to pronounce anything in your language.
⏹️ ▶️ John The V4 charger is theoretically capable of providing up to 615 kilowatts of power, 615 amps at 1000 volts.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that was April. Presumably the V4 superchargers are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to roll out across the entire world. I don’t know how far they have spread since then, but this is the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John To continue, the V4 charging stall is taller than previous generations and importantly includes a much longer cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John That means some non-Tesla EVs won’t have to park at odd angles to reach the charging point and block other stalls.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, and I don’t know where this came from, but it wasn’t from this article. Someone sent us some info that the liquid cooled
⏹️ ▶️ John charging cables that Marco was talking about last time, the Tesla charging cables, are thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and lighter than the non-liquid cooled ones. And we’re talking about on Tesla chargers. They sent a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, it’s dramatic difference. So the liquid cooling, I mean, I guess it lets them use thinner conductors
⏹️ ▶️ John that are then cooled by the liquid. But either way, I don’t know if the V4 ones have that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It may be that they’ve had them since V2 or V3, but ideally what we would all like
⏹️ ▶️ John is V4 caliber superchargers with liquid-cooled cables that are
⏹️ ▶️ John thin and light and long enough to reach all of our charging ports on all of our vehicles that have
⏹️ ▶️ John and ACS charging ports on them.
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iPadOS 17 window management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPadOS 17 and window management. Jason Snell,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, sorry, just Jason, put up a toot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey window management in iPadOS. And I didn’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the context of how we got here, but watching this little video in this toot is quite funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, to describe what it’s showing. So Jason’s moving around a window.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s got a small Window in front of a bigger window and so he clicks on the bigger window and on the Mac the bigger window would
⏹️ ▶️ John come in Front of the smaller window completely hiding it like this once the bigger windows in the front the smaller windows totally behind it And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t see it, but iPadOS is trying to help out the user a little bit They don’t want to end up in a situation where
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody in the iPad goes where’d that little window go? I don’t see it anywhere part of it I think is because
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad probably has less window management tools than the Mac like I don’t know if they have something like you know mission control
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever Or a command tilde to cycle through windows Although I think they probably do. Have you
⏹️ ▶️ John tried that on your keyboards and your iPad? Just command tilt to cycle through windows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta figure out how to get a second window and then I gotta figure out how to get rid of it. Yeah, well
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, what the video shows is when the big window comes in front of the small one, the small one peeks
⏹️ ▶️ John its little head out of the side and says, here I am. It’s like the small window moves on its own. You didn’t move the window, but
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as you brought the big one in front of it, the small one pokes its little head out and says, don’t worry, I’m still here. And if you move the big window
⏹️ ▶️ John to the side, it pops out the other side and says, I’m still here. Look, here I am. Here’s a centimeter of me if you wanna click on me. I’m still here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it tries to keep itself visible, which is helpful, but also kind of weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of the reason I put this thing in here. By the way, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the real time follow-up, it does not do command tilde. Oh, well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least not, I don’t have stage manager on, at least not in the regular weird split everything stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I can’t tell if this is stage manager because I don’t see the little things on an angle.
⏹️ ▶️ John put this in here, it was also a Mac OS Sonoma has some window management stuff for widgets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it does do it in stage manager.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go. Although it’s full of keyboard bugs. It launches you in a Safari window,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then hit Command L for the address bar, and it goes to some other weird thing in the other window.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you got it’s, ugh.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this on the beta or on 16?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this is on the release version of 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just iPad, keyboard, and multitasking. They’re extraordinarily buggy, and they always have been.
⏹️ ▶️ John Supposedly, StageMender and iPadOS 17 is better and gives you
⏹️ ▶️ John more freedom in the placement of windows. And in MacOS Sonoma, there is a thing for placing
⏹️ ▶️ John widgets on the desktop. And it reminded me of the app that I said I would make if I ever could,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I ever made another app. It would be a window management app, but unfortunately the APIs for doing window management
⏹️ ▶️ John on Mac OS are really poor and you have to ask for accessibility permission to get any of them. And trying to be in the Mac App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store with accessibility permission is kind of a pain and yada, yada, like there’s no clear path for me doing this. But what I’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted out of Mac OS for window management is kind of like the other two dinky little apps I’ve made,
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely aimed at my particular tastes for window management and probably nobody else’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because what everybody else seems to want is the things that you can get from like Moom or
⏹️ ▶️ John Rectangle or Hammer Spoon or any version of Windows in recent years where
⏹️ ▶️ John you take a window and you’re like, I want this to be the left 50% and this window is the right 50%. I want those ones to the upper right
⏹️ ▶️ John corner or upper left corner, you know, full screen in the middle, full height, you know, dividing the screen up into
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces and making windows fill fractions of the screen I that does not
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what I want at all I’m glad for people who like it can have in fact is built in the operating system to do stuff like that as well
⏹️ ▶️ John All right What I want from window management is essentially kind of like what you get in Graphics
⏹️ ▶️ John apps when you turn on grids and guides like in a good vector program where it will snap to other window
⏹️ ▶️ John objects But also snap to edges, but also snap to the center, but also snap to a grid So I would
⏹️ ▶️ John want snappable grids and guides with configurable margins between everything So
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of like in a graphics app where you snap to the upper left corner upper right so on and so forth it would Leave margins and instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows snapping directly to each other It would lead to margin between them and it would be configurable for how much margin you want around the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John How much margin you want between windows so on and so forth? So if you look at well, you can’t look at it because I don’t have a video
⏹️ ▶️ John for it in the show notes But when you all get Sonoma and you start dragging widgets to your desktop You will see that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac OS does this thing where it says hey, so you’re dragging a widget near another widget It will put this little outline
⏹️ ▶️ John and says if you release now We will snap the widget to be essentially aligned with that other
⏹️ ▶️ John widget while allowing a little gutter to be between it I think it’s the first time I’ve seen Apple do something like that
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like yes, you’re getting closer Now just do this to all the windows and make it configurable So that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’d have to be able snapping for tiling snapping for a budding, you know Because all these things I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want my windows to fill half or a quarter of the screen I don’t want to divide it up like it’s a piece of pie I want to size
⏹️ ▶️ John them the way I want them But once I saw it in that way I like them to be able to be aligned to each other in a few patterns One of
⏹️ ▶️ John them is cascading tile from upper left to lower right one of them is a budding with but with margins and
⏹️ ▶️ John with leaving You know uniform modules between everything and you know, it’s just basic snapping stuff I know there
⏹️ ▶️ John is window snapping in Mac OS, but they snap right to each other. They don’t leave room for the drop shadows They don’t leave margins on anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John So I figured I would throw that out It’s not like I’m ever gonna make this app because I think it’s basically impossible to make an Apple doesn’t care But since
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s kind of going in that direction I want to encourage them the thing you did with widgets You can do something
⏹️ ▶️ John even better than that for every single order window on the operating system Just don’t make it the default it kind of annoys me that
⏹️ ▶️ John the dragging snapping behavior in Mac OS since like Sierra or wherever They put this out The default
⏹️ ▶️ John is to try to like, you know, not let you put one window or the other like, you know And they butt up against each
⏹️ ▶️ John other I don’t know if people even know this because nobody moves windows They just do everything the whole screen But if you take a window in Mac OS and jam
⏹️ ▶️ John it up against the edge of another one It won’t slide underneath it for a second It will kind of stick on the edge before
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes underneath and that’s the default and to defeat that you have to hold down A modifier key. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John should be the opposite I think the default should be freeform and modifier key should activate all this dragging stuff and then
⏹️ ▶️ John If I made this app it would have like you see in the graphics apps those cool like on a retina
⏹️ ▶️ John display a hairline thin Guidelines like the affinity apps do like a like a
⏹️ ▶️ John red one for vertical and a blue one for horizontal on a green one like They have different color coding things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be really cool if Apple actually included like deep hooks into window
⏹️ ▶️ John management in macOS, but they sort of really don’t.
Social-text format war
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, iCloud keychain integration is coming with third-party browsers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this was covered in Mac Rumors and a friend of the show, Ricky Mandello, I think actually tweeted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not tooted about this, but Ricky wrote. No, that’s a toot. Oh, was it? Okay, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can we, by the way, this is the stupidest time period. Like when we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these different like Twitter-like services and still Twitter itself that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep having to try to bounce between and figure out what’s going to like win and Oh God, what a pain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the butt. Like, I just, at this point, like, you know, we were talking about last week about format wars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with charging connectors. Now we have this stupid social network format war between all of these Twitter-like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surfaces, all of which seem to have certain promise in certain ways and might have a decent future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain ways. Like, at this point, I kind of just want one of them to win, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one that wins, if one is going to win right now, would probably be either Facebook’s thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Twitter itself. but I’m getting so tired of everything being so fragmented.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have to check all of them. Yes, it is annoying, but that’s why we’re rooting for the ActivityPub ones because then what
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t want is another proprietary one to win because we’re just gonna go through all this again. We want ActivityPub to win if that
⏹️ ▶️ John can somehow happen. And then you don’t have to worry about it after that because you get to use the client you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can use a single, like the whole idea is like, what if there was a meta client that lets you read all the services? Well, that is never gonna happen with
⏹️ ▶️ John proprietary services. Twitter won’t even let you have a non-meta client as in just a client
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I know Meta is overloaded now, but Twitter won’t let you have just a third party client that just reads Twitter, let alone
⏹️ ▶️ John a third party app that reads Twitter, Noster, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Threads,
⏹️ ▶️ John like no, they don’t want that. But ActivityPub gives that promise, because if you have an ActivityPub client and an ActivityPub
⏹️ ▶️ John actually becomes widespread and open and interoperable, then you’re done. Kind of like you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John pick which web browser you want and read web pages with many asterisks on Chrome only sites
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So again, I think the web and email and those other things, the platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t have owners, are the best examples we have of how this can work. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can talk about all that we have, all the bad things about the web and all the bad things about email, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still way far ahead of Twitter or Blue Sky or
⏹️ ▶️ John Threads or any of that stuff. So fingers crossed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the good thing is there is this period of tumultuousness, I guess tumult is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the term. I speak for a living. As
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter imploded and left this huge vacuum of demand for similar services,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously there was gonna be a whole bunch of stuff that would spring up at once. And we’ve already seen some, like I think post,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we can safely say that not only is dead, but I would assert was never alive.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of ones that we can’t even remember the names for yet. We’re talking about proprietary services that were not built on an Elmer’s
⏹️ ▶️ John standard, they were trying to be the new Twitter. They weren’t run by Facebook or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would even go as far as to say, I think Blue Sky is probably dead because I think most of the energy that was going to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now going to threads. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John of like- Although Blue Sky is in theory also a decentralized protocol, it’s not an activity pub, but in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly is a decentralized protocol. And it actually has better decentralization in some ways than
⏹️ ▶️ John activity pub. But right now, A, that’s just theoretical. They’re not actually decentralized. And B,
⏹️ ▶️ John they may have lost momentum now that Facebook has come in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, they definitely have lost my like, because everybody who was looking for like a more user friendly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more Twitter like Mastodon, they all went to Blue Sky. And now they’re all like, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threads. And they went, they all went over there. So I think, I think Blue Sky is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John And Blue Sky is still invite only. That’s the funny thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, I think that was a huge strategic error. But anyway, Blue Sky, I think is done. Post, Nostr,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think those are all done. I think we’re going to be left with, you know, these three silos of whatever’s left for Twitter, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still big, you know, so whatever’s left of Twitter, and Mastodon and whatever else is working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with activity pub and threads. And I don’t, and I consider threads as I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last, last week, I consider threads and activity pub to actually be fairly separate because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still don’t even trust that they are going to integrate with it. And as we said last week, if and when they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrate with activity pub from threads, I think it’s going to be a not what anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually wants. and it’s not going to be adding a lot of value to ActivityPublic, it’ll try to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be mostly taking value from it. And so it’s not gonna be what we imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when if we hear, oh, this big social network’s gonna go into ActivityPublic, I don’t think it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that for us. So anyway, I think we’re actually gonna be in this world of like, Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and threads will be the big dogs in the room, you know, and then we’ll have our little nerd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of Mastodon, which is gonna be kind of like desktop Linux, but this time we’re actually using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’re going to be here for a while, and it’ll be fun, and it’ll be nerds. But I think the mass market will go between those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other two services.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still holding out hope that Twitter will continue to decline and not hang around.
⏹️ ▶️ John For sure, it’ll continue to exist as long as the LMS cares to make it exist. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they continue to decline. I hope they are not seen as a peer to threads. I hope they just fade away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, threads and the activity pop thing, I really, I’m still holding out hope that they do actually, because like I said
⏹️ ▶️ John last show, they can actually federate and they’ll still have 90% of everything. Like it doesn’t hurt them
⏹️ ▶️ John that much. The thing I am excited about activity pop, I talked about this when we first
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about the second round of Mastodon stuff and I think people misunderstood me. I was like, oh, newspapers should
⏹️ ▶️ John start their own Mastodon instances and stuff like that. And they’re like, oh, newspapers can’t moderate stuff and blah, blah, blah. And I think people
⏹️ ▶️ John misunderstood me. What I was saying is newspapers and or any kind of thing, governments, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John should start their own mass on instances. And the only people on it are employees of the newspaper. The only people on
⏹️ ▶️ John it are the people who work for that branch of government. Because it always just, Twitter, in that moment
⏹️ ▶️ John in time, everything was on Twitter. Brands were on Twitter, the president was on Twitter, the government, warnings
⏹️ ▶️ John about hurricanes, like official crap was on Twitter. Why is government stuff like it? We communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John out to the world, we have the emergency broadcast system on television, and also we’re tweeting about it on a proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John service from a company that we don’t control, owned by a bunch of other people that eventually sells to Elon Musk. That’s not tenable.
⏹️ ▶️ John The beauty of decentralization is, government, make your own damn servers. Like the DMV server where I go to
⏹️ ▶️ John renew my license, it’s not running on like, you know, Facebook pages for crying out loud. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have their own website. It’s not a good website. I’m not saying the government’s not great, but like, and for newspapers,
⏹️ ▶️ John like journalists getting kicked off Twitter and getting censored. Newspapers, start your own massive instance.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only people on it are your own employees, and you will not have moderation problems because you can just fire them. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, it’s literally, it’s an instance just for your own employees and they can post about their stories
⏹️ ▶️ John there and they can keep from, you can defend them from people harassing them there because it’s a small instance that you control
⏹️ ▶️ John and they will do what you say because you are literally their bosses and it’s their work account. Like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John so there’s a story like, I forget, I was gonna say the Netherlands, but every time I guess the Netherlands, it’s not them, it’s Sweden. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John some country somewhere recently put up a mass on an instance because they were tired of posting
⏹️ ▶️ John official messages on Twitter. And so now they have complete control over their message to, I guess, the tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John portion of their population that are computer nerds that are on Macedon. But that’s the future I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John see. I don’t like seeing, I don’t want like threads to win and then every, you know, Tide
⏹️ ▶️ John brand detergent and the National Weather Service and the BBC and
⏹️ ▶️ John customer support for Delta Airlines are all on threads. They should be on their own instances,
⏹️ ▶️ John federated with every other instance, findable by anybody who joins any instance in the Fediverse using
⏹️ ▶️ John the client of their choice. You could say it’s just like the web where anyone can view any webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John using the browser of their choice as long as it’s Safari or Chrome or maybe Firefox.
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, still better than us all using Internet Explorer 6 forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, I think the ship has sailed, not on Internet Explorer, I mean, well, that ship sunk, thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, but I think the ship has sailed on expecting organizations and governments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and media organizations and things to actually use their own domains much of anything. I mean, they were on Twitter for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these years and didn’t think that was a problem. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, but governments do have their own web pages. They have.gov web pages, so they do have their own domains.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think logically, I’m with you, that, you know, logically it seems like it would be just like web domains or email domains where, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you, you know, you follow people at their website or whatever. But I think in reality, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the benefits and ease of centralized services. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re mostly going to just bounce between centralized services for social products for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the foreseeable future?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it could be a centralized service run by the government, but that would be socialism, Marco. So we can’t have that.
⏹️ ▶️ John is individual departments can set up their own instances. I think it would be fine because people would just
⏹️ ▶️ John search for like IRS and they would see irs something something.gov and they would know that’s the real one. And you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of annoys me, like the verification, like Instagram has verification, which is not really verification, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Twitter has verification that is no longer really verification. But one of the of the beautiful things about Blue Skies, it has verification through
⏹️ ▶️ John domain stuff, and so does Mastodon. And so if you know a domain
⏹️ ▶️ John that you say, okay, well, only, you know, IBM, control IBM.com, and this account is verified with
⏹️ ▶️ John IBM.com, I believe this is the real IBM account, that works for governments, because you don’t get a.gov
⏹️ ▶️ John domain unless you’re part of the government, and it’s pretty easy to tell IRS.gov that’s probably the real IRS. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that is a level of verification that we’re already used to with the web, and yes, you can be spoofed and so on and so forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the web browsers have been working against that forever. But it’s way harder to spoof than it is to
⏹️ ▶️ John get a blue check and change your name to IRS on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is, but we’ve, as nerds, we’ve always had these challenges of like trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to communicate security and authenticity to the general public in some kind of easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand, clearly visible way. So that way people don’t get phished and stuff like that. As a practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we technologists have mostly entirely failed at this mission. And I’m not sure it’s a winnable mission.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we’ve tried different things like, you know, having the lock icon in the address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar and check the domain. And we even tried those extended verification certificates that would show the business name in the address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar. We tried all these different things to say, look, look, it’s just the domain. You’d have all these, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, phishing emails and phishing scams that would have these big long domain names and they would work anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because no one’s really looking at that. Whereas I think the Twitter verification check mark, the old one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back when it was real, actually worked really well, but that required like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human review, like human verification, and it kind of requires a global namespace of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you say you’re, you know, that if you have somebody named John Syracuse with a blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check mark, you better be sure there’s only one John Syracuse that most people are looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s another guy with the same name in a podcast, unfortunately, who also was verified back
⏹️ ▶️ John in the, just like me back in the real verification days. It’s tough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least he didn’t invent follow-up, but still, like, Like, that system was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human and accessible, and I think largely successful.
⏹️ ▶️ John But run by a private company. That’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem, yeah, but I think we’ve seen over and over again, as technologists,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really hard, slash maybe impossible, to design systems that show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this is the real person or the real business that you think you should be talking to, and don’t go over to this other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website with this other domain name.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was the same on Twitter, though, because we think the blue check mark was useful back in the old days, but in the old days, people casually
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining to Delta Airlines had no idea about the blue check mark, didn’t even know where to look for it, and their client had no idea what it
⏹️ ▶️ John meant. It is not obvious, and so they would just complain to at Delta, and if someone else had at Delta, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John get messages, and if they were phishing, that that plane was phishing and saying, oh, send me your credit card so I can send you a refund from your ticket,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would get phished, right? Like, it’s, same situation everywhere. I think on the web, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John same deal. Like, I tried to renew my license, and I entered my credit card, and decided it wasn’t the real DMV, it was a scam, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John In some respects, there’s no getting around that. Like when you look up the address to somehow to find out where the
⏹️ ▶️ John DMV is to go get your license renewed and some shop is set up that looks like a DMV, but it’s not really, and they take your money,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like it’s always possible to get scammed. What level of technology you’re at, if you’re in medieval times,
⏹️ ▶️ John or if you’re, you know, wherever you are, you do have to somehow navigate the world
⏹️ ▶️ John to distinguish inauthentic from authentic. Not doing it at all, like Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, hey, anyone who pays $8 can get the one and only system we supposedly have for quote unquote verification is terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anything remotely official and under the control and systematic
⏹️ ▶️ John like domain names or whatever is better than nothing. And I think domain names like people
⏹️ ▶️ John do eventually find their way to the real websites to renew their license, right? Some people probably get scam.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people probably get fished. But in the end the only thing that lets people know that they’re the real DMV is Google search
⏹️ ▶️ John results. And the fact that people who scam them, the government probably finds them and has them
⏹️ ▶️ John arrested because it’s a big enough deal to shut them down. Same thing with Delta Airlines. If you’re pretending to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John Delta Airlines website, if you’re pretending to do customer service to Delta Airlines, they’ll find you because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re financially incentivized to get rid of you. The App Store, if you put up a scam threads app,
⏹️ ▶️ John you only get 300,000 downloads before Apple gets rid of you. So it’s not a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John system, but some system is better than nothing. Did you hear about that by the way? That there was a threads by Instagram app
⏹️ ▶️ John that went up on the App Store and 300,000 people downloaded it. Oh my God. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey did not hear this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because how could AppReview stop that? It’s not like they’re going over
⏹️ ▶️ John a fine-toothed comb looking for violations,
⏹️ ▶️ John to that in a little bit. We got really sidetracked on the iCloud keychain follow-up, so we should finish that. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco where we got a lot of?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, that was my fault. Hard to believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey We got a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of stack to pop. I was going
⏹️ ▶️ John say that’s Margo’s fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Totally. All right.
iCloud Passwords browser plugins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Ricky wrote that macOS Sonoma brings Apple’s password manager to Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other browsers using their extension stores with the iCloud Passwords Browser extension. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running the macOS Sonoma public or developer beta, you can try it right now. You can autofill passwords in one-time code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey save new passwords, and right-click QR codes to set up code generators. We’ll put a link to the Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extension in the show notes. Edge apparently is coming soon. Ricky continues how this works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is the existing iCloud’s password browser extension that Apple ships for Chrome and Edge in conjunction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with iCloud for Windows works out of the box on macOS Sonoma. We don’t have support for Mozilla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Firefox at this time, but it’s a request that Ricky understands.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s great. Like that, you know, I use Chrome and Safari and my passwords
⏹️ ▶️ John are on iCloud key chain, but also Chrome has its own password manager and some passwords end up in there
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s kind of a pain. It would be nice if they all were integrated into one place and it sounds like with Sonoma,
⏹️ ▶️ John will be able to be able to use that Chrome extension from Apple.
Sponsor: Kolide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Collide. And if you work in security or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IT, which let’s face it, as many of you, and if your company has Okta, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really for you. Have you noticed that for the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you read about have something in common? It’s employees. Hackers absolutely love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exploiting vulnerable employee devices and employee credentials. And it doesn’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this way. Imagine a world where only secure devices can access your cloud apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In that world, phished credentials would be useless to hackers, and you can manage every OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even Linux, from a single dashboard. And you can get employees to fix their own device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security issues without creating more work for IT. The good news is, this is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantasy. You don’t have to imagine this world, it’s real. You can start using Collide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and it ensures that if a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device isn’t trusted and secure, it can’t log in to your cloud apps. Simple as that. Visit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collide.com slash ATP to watch a demo and see how it works for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, collide spelled K-O-L-I-D-E.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to watch that demo and see how it works. Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Rejection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I got good news and I got news. I, let’s see, what is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Start here. Before you start with this, I want you to start by reminding everybody what your app is and what it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So I’m working on an app that I’m calling Call Sheet. Call Sheet is the unofficial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pitch is imagine if IMDB wasn’t a pile of ** and imagine it was made by someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who actually gave a **. And so what it is, is it lets you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco look up- This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the most Casey introduction ever. Just two swear words. I’m telling you about my app, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to swear the whole time. All right, I’ll try it again. I’ll try it again. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cut that out. No, it’s fine. You’ve got to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you. People are getting the
⏹️ ▶️ John gist of it. I just want people to know what kind of app it is. You look up movies and TV shows, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the app does not make you swear at it. In fact, the app is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opposite. It’s an anti-swear. It makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and it makes you swear at all other apps for being so slow and crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ve talked about this app many times on the show. And people have sent feedback. In fact, if you’re an ATP member,
⏹️ ▶️ John they all got access to the beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still do for now. For now, that is still true.
⏹️ ▶️ John And during this entire time, everyone’s like, I think once you describe the app or once
⏹️ ▶️ John they try it, they understand this kind of app. Other apps like this exist. The IMDb app exists. IMDb exists. We’ve all
⏹️ ▶️ John been on the couch and watching the show and saying, what is that guy from? And you want to look it up. And yes, you can go to the website to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, or you can use this app. And if you imagine what the app would look like, or the IMDb app or whatever, it lists a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of TVs and movies, and it shows like, here’s the show you’re watching, and here’s the actor, here’s George Clooney, look at
⏹️ ▶️ John his little face, and he was this person in this thing, and he was in ER, and stuff like, that’s what this app does. At no
⏹️ ▶️ John time during the discussion of this app, and we’re all like, how are we gonna price it? What are we gonna do with it? Did
⏹️ ▶️ John any of the issues that Casey’s about to describe come up? Because everyone’s like, that seems like a normal app, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, we didn’t say like, well, Casey, are you sure an app like this is a thing that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed in the app store? But like this, like this is an existing kind of app, right? You’re just making a good version of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So I submitted it Tuesday morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we are currently recording, uh, from the past slash future, I don’t know how it works anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. It’s weird. Uh, we’re recording on the evening of Thursday, the 13th of July.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, yesterday overnight, sir, I guess two nights ago overnight. So it was yesterday at 1 57 AM New York time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I received my first of three rejections. This rejection says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guideline 3.1.2, business, payments, subscriptions. We noticed that your app did not meet all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the terms and conditions for auto-renewing subscriptions, as specified in Schedule 2, section 3.8b of the paid applications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agreement. We were unable to find the following required items in your app’s metadata. A functional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link to the terms of use, or EULA, end user license agreement. OK.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is exactly the type of thing we were talking about. Like, oh, doing an app purchase and subscriptions is annoying. You always forget
⏹️ ▶️ John something. So rejection number one, exactly what we thought it would be. Some detail of the subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase flow, which you didn’t have much experience with. Oh, you forgot to dot an I.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. Now, the thing that kind of bothers me about this is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, leaving aside the fact that I was unaware of it, which that isn’t an excuse, but I mean, it was not something that I felt like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a common piece of knowledge. And I’m going on the assumption that if I look at 3.8b
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the paid applications agreement, it will say something about how I screwed up. That being said, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple seems to have wanted was a URL for my terms of use and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially the privacy policy. I just put both in after this rejection. But they want that in the apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey description. Now of the three of us, Marco, you have the most experience with doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any sort of anything with the App Store. Can you remind me, is it possible to click a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an app’s description in the app store?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, never has been. Right. This, I’m telling you, this is why,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I guarantee you, you ask any developer out there who has an auto-renewing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription as part of their app, I guarantee you every single developer has had this happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, which is, again, like it’s fine, it’s just, I don’t understand the motivation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind it. I’m assuming it’s some esoteric legal thing that they had to put in, But why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you put an unclickable URL into the App Store description? What are you going to do, take a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it and use the, what is it, lookup or
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a thing that lets bad app developers, what they do is they see this and they rub their hands together.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh boy, oh boy, I’m going to put in a URL that’s so long and Byzantine that no one will ever be able to type it correctly. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John guess. I mean, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good thing is nobody reads app descriptions, so it doesn’t really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they truncate them on the thing anyway. Like, no one even knows that you can expand that text to look at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it’s fine. And honestly, as much as I was kind of like, what the what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nevertheless, this is the whole point in putting out a build. Like, if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ended up releasing the build that Apple still has, it would be fine. The screenshots weren’t exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I wanted, which is going to come up again in a minute. But I was waiting on a really good friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of mine to get fancy, snazzy versions of the screenshot squared away. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole point of this was just trying to get through the App Store once, just to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make sure I have crossed all Ts and dotted all Is. And so I think, John, you said a minute ago, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was this rejection. I did not cross a T, and I did not dot one of my Is. OK, fine. I still don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand why this is a thing, but sure, OK. So I resubmit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they replied. I resubmitted sometime yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning. I forget exactly when it was. But yesterday, 4.13 PM, App Review writes, hello.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you for your efforts to follow our guidelines. There are still some issues that need your attention. If you have any questions, we are here to help. Reply to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this message in App Store Connect and let us know. Guideline 5.2.2, legal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your app includes features for streaming TV channels, the content of which may be copyrighted. The use of third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copyrighted materials requires documented evidence of your right to use such content in your app. Your app and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its contents should not infringe upon the rights of another party. In the event your app infringes on another party’s rights, you are responsible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any liability to Apple because of a claim. And then it goes on with next steps. They provided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a screenshot. The screenshot is a season, season two specifically, of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show Mushoku Tensei Jobless Reincarnation. And it’s a list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of episodes, two of which have screenshots. The other, what is this like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other 12 or so do not. That is their justification for the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that apparently you can play video in Call Sheet, which was an extremely interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing to read because I am the only author of code in CallSheet, and I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever doing anything with video. You mean
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a streaming television app, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It is not, as it turns out. Did your
⏹️ ▶️ John description neglect to mention that you can’t watch television shows using your app?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently it did neglect to mention that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because- Did
⏹️ ▶️ John you accidentally say that you could watch television
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shows? Nope, sure didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John is like- Did you describe your app as a video streaming app anywhere, put it in that category or anything like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not. And the best part about it is you can’t even watch a trailer in the app. Like that’s something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hypothetically I would like to do at some point, but today, impossible. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video playback of any sort.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is why people hate app review because it’s like they’re spending enough time to look at all the little details of your app,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the person who sent this rejection has no idea what your app is supposed to do. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John literally, it’s not like they stumbled upon video in the app because it’s not there for them to find. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently didn’t read your description or understand what you’re claiming the app supposed to do, nor did they
⏹️ ▶️ John use your app to determine what it does. It’s not a video streaming app
⏹️ ▶️ John at all in code, in description, in reality. And to get a rejection
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is incredibly frustrating because you feel like, you feel like someone’s got to just a dartboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re, they’re like reading a book and your app comes in and they’re like, I don’t know. Let’s say video streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s kind of what it felt like. And so I am upset. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write back, and I try not to swear and use kind words, and say in so many words,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, my app doesn’t play video. Can you be more specific about what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you talking about here in so many words? So I replied. Again, this was 4.13
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yesterday. I reply at 5 o’clock. 5.25, I get my third and final so far rejection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hello, thank you for your response. We did not find any streaming contents within your app. However, upon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey further review, we noticed that your app is not in compliance with the following guideline, 5.2.1, legal intellectual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey property. Your app includes content that resembles Disney slash Pixar material without the necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey authorization. Your app and its contents should not infringe upon the rights of another party. In the event your app infringes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another party’s rights, you are responsible for any liability to Apple because of a claim. They helpfully provided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screenshots to me. These screenshots are my own app store screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I provided to them. One of them is the movie page for Spider-Man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Across the Spider-Verse. One of them is the person details page for Ming-Na Wen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one of them is, as I’m loading, oh, the Discover screen that has Elemental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amongst many, many, many other movies on it. So I wrote back to them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in so many words like, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The IMDB app exists, and I’m pretty sure they don’t have bespoke agreement. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did it in a very nice way, but they don’t have bespoke agreement for with Disney and Pixar for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is the issue that my screenshots contained it? Because I still think that’s dumb. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this, but… It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very likely that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey issue. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so here’s the thing. So I, I said, you know, is the issue the screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t contain the content? Because I mean, I understand. Well, I don’t entirely understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but I can get, I can get behind that, but I don’t understand the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s written right now. And actually what I said verbatim is, hello again. First of all, let me request
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again that perhaps a phone conversation would make more sense here, question mark. My phone number here in the United States is yada, yada,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yada. I am happy to discuss. That being said is the issue of the screenshots, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I hear it was, I assumed because I’m a dummy. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably since they seem to be looking at this reasonably quickly, you within half an hour to an hour of each of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey replies, surely they’re going to call me, aren’t they? So that I wrote in at 531.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I thought, you know, I’ll get on the phone with somebody. We’ll spend 5, 10 minutes hashing this out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’ll either tell me I cannot have Disney Pixar anything anywhere, or maybe they’ll just say it can’t be in the screenshots.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And whatever the case may be, I will work through it. And we’ll reach some sort of verbal understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between me and App Review. So that was 531. Yesterday at 552, hello. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciate your response and have scheduled a call with an Apple representative to discuss your app’s review. Okay, cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey An Apple representative will call you on the number you provided in the app review information section of App Store Connect within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next three to five business days to discuss your app. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s about right. I mean, you’re lucky they’re calling you at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I was like, yeah, you are lucky to be getting a call, but here’s the thing. Like, so that third one,
⏹️ ▶️ John now we’re kind of getting somewhere but I would still be super mad about that because like, oh, so that one
⏹️ ▶️ John you sent about streaming video, that was just your first lazy guess. It’s like when you’re talking to one of those large
⏹️ ▶️ John language models and they sell you like two plus two equals five, and you say, no, two plus two equals four, not five. The response
⏹️ ▶️ John is always, oh, I’m so sorry, you’re right, I was mistaken. I thought that two plus two equals five,
⏹️ ▶️ John but when I look now, I see that it’s actually four. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not allowed to stream video on your app, and you say, my app doesn’t stream any video. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, you’re lucky your turnaround time was fast in this, because imagine there were days between that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because it was busy or something, right? It’s very, very true.
⏹️ ▶️ John My app doesn’t stream any video and they say, oh, you’re right, I’m sorry. When I look again, I realize your app doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John stream any video. It’s like, when you look again, oh, sorry for the mistake. You can understand how I would make
⏹️ ▶️ John that mistake since I put the minimum possible effort into my job of doing app review. But now that
⏹️ ▶️ John I look again, that’s not actually the problem. Actually, the problem is this. And the problem they’re talking about, maybe as
⏹️ ▶️ John far as we can tell, based on their terrible writing and complete vagueness, makes sense because
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know what the legal situation is with doing cover art for things like that. You know, we’re not lawyers, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how this thing works out or whatever. But you’re in the situation that I think everyone when we were discussing this app was,
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, well, apps like this already exist. So probably this is a thing you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to do because like you said, Casey, it’s not as if every single app that is like a tracked client, because I have 50
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, right? You know, the one I use is television time, which is different from then TV time, which is different than
⏹️ ▶️ John TV forecast. There’s like a million apps that do this and they sync with the track service. Every single one of them show cover
⏹️ ▶️ John art for every TV show you think. Letterboxd chose cover art for all the movies
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in the entire thing, like every movie that’s put out. Do we think Letterboxd and Tracked
⏹️ ▶️ John and Television Time and TV Time and TV Forecasts all have individual licensing agreements
⏹️ ▶️ John with every single movie made in the entire world for every single year for the entire history of movies
⏹️ ▶️ John and also into the future? No. So we assume it is possible for a single
⏹️ ▶️ John developer to make an app like this without a team of lawyers to obtain rights for everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, because again, like TV forecast is a single developer, just like Casey. And that app
⏹️ ▶️ John is filled with cover stuff. But still, Casey’s never made an app like this. For all he knows, there’s some sort of process you have to go through.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they could describe that in the response and say, here’s the deal. Imagine. You can’t have it in your screenshots.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t have it in your screenshots. You can have it in your app, but you have to do this. You have to like explain. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the reply you sent Casey is totally the reply that any sane person would send or any small child would send too,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Jimmy’s doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John How come Jimmy gets to do it? And you know what the response to that is if you’ve ever been a kid. The response from
⏹️ ▶️ John any teacher or parent or also any corporation is, we’re not talking about Jimmy right now. Right now, Casey, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about you. The App Store always does that. You cannot tell them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John App over there does the exact same thing. They’ll say to you, we can’t talk about App over there. That’s proprietary.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s between us and them. I can’t reveal anything about us and them. I can’t tell you whether they
⏹️ ▶️ John did buy the rights to every movie in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I can’t tell you whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t. We’re talking about you now, Casey, and your app. So just look at me, look right here at me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t look at those other apps. Those other apps don’t matter. Maybe they’re older apps that we just allowed to exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they gave millions of dollars to someone who works for us. Maybe we needed to do a deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Maybe we had a handshake agreement with Bill Gates. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe Netflix is getting a better rate, but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about what Netflix is doing. Don’t worry about what Amazon is doing. Don’t worry about what all those tracked
⏹️ ▶️ John apps are doing. We’re talking about you now. And it’s so frustrating because it’s like, is there a common set of rules
⏹️ ▶️ John or is there not? You could go over to Matt Comey, who does the
⏹️ ▶️ John TV forecast app and say, hey Matt, you got your thing through app review, right? And he’ll say, yeah, I did.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it was fine, that’s what he did. And you can say, Matt, would you mind joining me on this call
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, here’s another part, look, we can talk about Matt. He’s right here on the call with me. He said it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fine. He was ready to talk. He says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John why did my app get through and you won’t let Casey’s? And Apple would be like, I’m sorry, I can only talk to one of you once. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John very uncomfortable having you both on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco those calls like for crying out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, is this their first day on the job? Are you allowed to have apps on the app store that show covers for movies and TV
⏹️ ▶️ John shows or are you not? And if you are, explain how that’s supposed to work. I am so mad
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. I can’t, I’m just going ballistic because like what is the purpose of app review? What are they
⏹️ ▶️ John even doing there? There are so many apps like this on the app store. You should not be going back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to get a call in three or five business days about the existence of you even having an app like this because
⏹️ ▶️ John there are so many of them out there. What the hell is going on? I’m so angry. I’m so angry with you, Casey. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John been this angry for you. Your documentation stuff, it’s like whatever, bad docs happens all the time, I understand. But this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s madness. I’m sure it will get resolved and I’m sure it will be fine, but the maddening thing is, why do we have to go
⏹️ ▶️ John through this? And I understand you’re begging for a voice call, because you’re hoping you’ll get a human on the end and you’ll be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to the human and perhaps curse at the human and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are you doing? Even me, I don’t, well, I mean, I want to do that, but I’m not looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like, you know, have some sort of confrontation, but I just want someone to, I want someone from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AppReview or perhaps Marco to just say, look, this is what we’re looking for or not looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, do the following or stop doing the following.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or what you want to hear from them is you want to hear them to affirmably say, I understand what your app is, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would make them say it to me, say, do you know what my app is supposed to do? Can you explain it to me? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to start from that foundational knowledge of you look up movies and TV shows and see who’s in them. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see actors and you can see shows and episodes and movies and what like, have you ever used IMDB? Have you heard of
⏹️ ▶️ John IMDB? It’s like that, but not sucky. Then now we can talk about, okay, are apps like that allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John on the app store? Cause I totally think they are cause there’s 50 million of them. Okay, what do I have to do to get
⏹️ ▶️ John my app that’s like that through to the app store? Just tell me and I’ll do it. Yep, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you. Here’s probably all you have to do. Complaint one, they misunderstood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what your app did thought of stream video. Oh, well, you got you got some, you know, more on with no time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re not dealing with the same person every time here. And I’ll let you know, of course, not there’s no continuity of care. We right. Number two, rejection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is only about your screenshots that resemble Disney Pixar material. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just looked while john was ranting. I just looked at TV forecast, TV time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and letterboxd apps and in the App Store and what is in their screenshots. None of them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not an expert on a lot of these things. So maybe some of are Disney Pixar properties, but none of them appear to have any obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Disney Pixar shows in the screenshots. Humorously enough, TV Forecast has Ted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lasso in one of its screenshots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey but that’s not Disney Pixar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s Apple. So look, you have three to five business days, you have a while, especially since there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a weekend in the middle here. I would say during that three to five business days, resubmit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact same build or change just the build number and resubmit it again with different screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t contain anything specifically from Disney or Pixar.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why Disney or Pixar gets special treatment.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It always has with Apple, that’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, I understand Pixar for the Steve Jobs heritage, but Disney, because Disney owns Marvel and TV Forkast
⏹️ ▶️ John has Across the Spider-Verse in its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screenshot. Oh, well, you can tell I don’t know many properties, but like…
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t know who owns what. Disney owns everything. Disney owns Marvel, Disney owns Star Wars, Disney owns Pixar,
⏹️ ▶️ John they own everything. It’s very difficult to do a screenshot of a media app without including a Disney property and TV
⏹️ ▶️ John Forkast totally does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, wait, I’m looking at Letterboxd on the App Store. The very first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screenshot on Letterboxd is Ant-Man and the Wasp, Quantumania, I don’t know how to pronounce it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a Disney property because it’s Marvel. The very first screenshot, front and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey center, focusing on one movie alone, Ant-Man and the Wasp.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is Marvel, that is Disney.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever it is, so I would say, either be less obvious about it or don’t do Pixar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That can’t be, I am not as obvious as they are. they’re more obvious. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. So what was in your screenshots from Disney and Pixar?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a tiny, tiny, tiny little poster from Elemental that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco one of like literally 30 posters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There you go. That’s the problem. That’s the problem. I guarantee it. They’re looking for high profile Pixar stuff, I bet. So look, resubmit it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with screenshots that don’t have any Pixar stuff in it and maybe don’t have any like super big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name Disney stuff like Star Wars and see if that’s all it is. Because I bet that’s all it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be, but I also don’t necessarily want to lose, like, even though I want to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this through, I, there’s no real urgency behind it. Like, of course I want to get the app out, but there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediate urgency behind it. Right. And, and I kind of don’t want to lose the thread of this whole rejection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and conversation and whatnot, because I want to, I want to follow through and see, I’d like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for them to define for me what the hell they’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John If they could communicate with the English language, they would have said, you can’t have any Pixar or Disney properties
⏹️ ▶️ John in your screenshot. So just redo your screenshots, but
⏹️ ▶️ John That aren’t Disney or Pixar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then this would have already been taken
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey care of. That’s two
⏹️ ▶️ John sentences. You know how simple it is to say that? It’s so easy to just explain, like to say because
⏹️ ▶️ John like, why did they put Disney slash Pixar? Are you saying that I can have my screenshot? Is it first of all, is it just a
⏹️ ▶️ John screenshot? It’s like you said in second. Is all I have to do to pick, you know, you’re allowed to have. They should have said
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s OK for you to have the posters for movies in your screenshot. So we have special rules for Disney and Pixar. So any property that’s owned by
⏹️ ▶️ John Disney and Pixar, and yes, I know Sony kind of owns Spider-Man, but they’re doing the thing with Marvel, so it’s messy. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John just tell me what to do in English language. It would take you literally three sentences to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Instead, now we have to schedule a call because you don’t know how to write an email, you don’t know how to communicate with the English
⏹️ ▶️ John language. They’re just wasting everybody’s time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They know how to communicate. They know that they should communicate as little as possible in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco written form. This is why, so these phone calls, I’ve heard mixed things. Now, I haven’t had an App Store phone call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since a while back I think it was over the magazine I forget what it was anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had one of those phone calls where you get like the agent Smith guy calling and I don’t know if he I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later learned this one guy made all those calls and he was apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like a really like hardcore I think he was an ex I think was a veteran of the military
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he was like he was able to do it super dispassionately and keep everything cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep everything from getting elevated I I had a couple of those calls early on in my career,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were really quite something, because it was like talking to a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stern lawyer from California. So you couldn’t get him to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco budge, and you would ask a question, and there would be a momentary pause, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he would very calmly basically just say the same thing over and over again. He was able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never put Apple in any kind of uncomfortable situation, never admit more than necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You would call and say something like, you know, let’s see, let me read your exact line here. Your app includes content that resembles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Disney Pixar material without the necessary authorization. So you would say something like, okay, well, but look, do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand that it does this and then pause your app includes content that resembles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Disney Pixar material like it was that kind of conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John and you would say so. So can I include content that’s not Disney Pixar and what he would say is pause.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, your your app includes content that looks like Disney Pixar and that we rejected because of that. So please do
⏹️ ▶️ John not include that in future submissions. Okay, so I won’t include that. I’ll do that, great. And he’ll say, thank you, that’s what we want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But can I include other movie posters? And you would say, well, I can’t tell you anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John your submission until I see it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco please submit it and then we’ll tell you what’s wrong with that one. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just wasting everybody’s time to prevent different legal exposure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It actually is not 100% of a waste of time because when you learn how to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple people, you can start reading between the lines a little bit. Because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually what you have to do because they won’t come out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Give me a non-answer if I should resubmit with different posters. Right. It’s like a trap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And usually, usually as long as you are, keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco civil and polite and everything because you gotta figure like a lot of the people you’re talking to are not gonna be doing that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as you keep civil and polite and everything, you can usually figure out what they actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want you to do even if they don’t come out directly and say it, they’ll talk around it enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re basically screaming, how much more obvious can I be while still keeping my job?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, exactly. Although I would consider calling him from Canada with one-party consent recording.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You know, it’s funny you ask that. I would not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. I would definitely not do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, if in the heat, in the depths of my anger about this yesterday, I might’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked up Virginia’s laws and Virginia is a one-party consent state. I’m just gonna throw that out
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, running for the press never helps, Casey. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do that. I would I would not I would not do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no. All kidding aside. I do not plan to like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only reason I would record it is not to be like, Oh, do gotcha, whatever. But just because honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John because when you have calls like that, and I’ve had them as well, not for the App Store, but for other reasons, you often find yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John forgetting what was actually said. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know what I mean? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John an on answers like erases your mind. So it is actually useful to have a recording that you can play back
⏹️ ▶️ John to yourself and say, What did they say? Because again, like Marco they’re basically saying, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you the sentence that would help you, but I’m trying to help you while still keeping my job.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bingo. And when they do that, sometimes it’s hard to tell, like, did I imagine that? And so if you could
⏹️ ▶️ John play it back and say, oh no, I see this, you know what I mean? Because in the moment, it’s hard to tell. That’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John the use of recording this, not as like a gotcha or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, I don’t think I have the deftness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the ability to be as dispassionate as, you know, Christian was with the Reddit stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, even if I were to record something, it’s exactly for that reason. It’s not because I want to leak it or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then, and like we said about Apple, they’re not going to trash you. Like that’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Apple does. You don’t have to worry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. But it’s just, it’s so, it’s just so frustrating because it, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of you, I think have said, if they were explicit about what the problem was, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe specific is the word I’m looking for about what the problem was, I would be happy to rectify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem and get to a get to a position that makes us both happy. But because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re so hand wavy about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and they’re just well…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re direct. The problem is their response or their initial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco response at least is basically we don’t want to deal with apps that show content from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big publishers of media. Like look, I am right there with you because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my app does that. Like it’s just not movie producers. but you know I’m not that far off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I know that you know at any time I could get rejected and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a problem with the App Store because they might come to me and say I have to get rights from every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single podcast in my directory.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they could say I found one podcast that had pornographic content and pornographic content is not allowed on the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco App Store. Please resubmit
⏹️ ▶️ John without pornographic podcast, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is funny because it would be from their directory but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John could happen. We’re not talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John our directory right now, Marco. We’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about Overcast. Your app contains pornography.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, when you have an app showing third party content, that’s always a risk. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always run the risk of like, this might snag an app review because of this weird technicality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the answer really is like, if this ever goes before a human who has a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more authority to make a judgment call, which it might, like I might get kicked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the chain a little bit, and as you go through the different processes, as soon as somebody has a bit of a judgment call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can make about it, they can look and say, yeah, this is fine. But the hard part is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting to that person or banging your head against this wall enough to get through the lower level people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just then have had mostly do a lot of that. Honestly, I really do think if you just submit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different screenshots that don’t have that particular movie, I think that might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to get through.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you could you could just pick five different Disney properties and roll the dice and hope you get a different reviewer,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s what it is. like people get rejected and then they get approved for like, they didn’t change anything or they changed things in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t have made a difference. And it’s just, it’s just who you get. And like, and maybe it’s an automated tool looking for the Pixar stuff, but who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s it’s not consistent. That’s the, another wonderful thing about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I mean, the, the front, the other frustrating thing about it is like, I have never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done subscription stuff before. And genuinely, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though I do believe I can look in the mirror with an honest heart and say, I genuinely believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m doing everything right. I’m doing it by the book. I’m doing it with the user’s needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and wants in mind. I really am trying very hard to do the right thing here. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was actually looking forward to having Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me, you know, yeah, we’ve looked at it and you’re, you’re handling subscriptions the way you’re supposed to. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the whole point of this build in the first place. And that is what I think is the point of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app store. To me as a user and as a developer, the point of the app store is to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure that I’m doing right by what I would call my customers, what is really Apple’s customers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they’re often reminding us, you know, I’m doing right by whoever’s customers and making sure I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidentally or deliberately hoodwinking them. And that’s what I wanted out of this review. But now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m in this like legal hell that I’m not entirely clear how to get out of. And like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone’s in the chat room saying like Marco’s right that’s what it is don’t show blatant copyrighted brand content
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey poster is copyrighted content
⏹️ ▶️ John every television show poster is copyright of course every single thing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all trademarks too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right it’s not a possibility
⏹️ ▶️ John all trademarks the art is not art that Casey made and again i’m not saying that it’s legal this
⏹️ ▶️ John is such a legal slam open and shut case but the fact is tons of apps on the
⏹️ ▶️ John app store do this and we’re pretty sure they don’t all have rights to all content for all movies
⏹️ ▶️ John for all time. So there must be a way for Casey to be successful. And Casey just wants to know,
⏹️ ▶️ John me what I have to do. And the answer is not just don’t show copyrighted content. Because if he shows no copyrighted content, his
⏹️ ▶️ John app has no graphics. Like it’s only text, it’s text only. It’s a terminal based app.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, that would be kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of cool. It would be, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s not the app you need. It’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey app that people
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, just don’t show copyrighted content. then his app can’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh wait, oh my god. What if, okay look, everyone loves nostalgia, right? What if you make it like one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those like 90s library card catalog lookup computers that had like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monochrome green or yellowish screens? Remember those? It was all text-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you would type in your library thing you were looking for and it was so cool because it wasn’t the card catalog. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was like those ancient term, whatever the heck system that was. They don’t smell as good as the card catalog though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, they don’t. But yeah, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the heck kind of like, you know, computerized whatever that was. If you end up not being able to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any images in your app, you can just re-theme the whole app to look like one of those cool lookup things. That would be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can just submit it with different screenshots and see if that gets through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and I mean, again, I think for now, because there’s no dire urgency, I’m just gonna let it chill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until I have this phone call. And then I suspect what’s gonna come of this phone call is nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Marco said. And so then I’ll just be, you know, I’ll just stick my thumb in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the wind and see what happens. I’ll try to submit with no Disney Pixar stuff and see if that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets through. And if that doesn’t get through, I’ll try something else. You know, somebody else in the chat is like, hey, just put in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of placeholder things. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like if I’m a-
⏹️ ▶️ John You can make a bunch of fake movie posters. That’ll be compelling to customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. Like why, if I’m a customer, a potential customer, why would I be interested in this app with a bunch of useless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John data? It would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, what are these movies? I’d never heard of any of these. This is weird. And here’s the thing about the screenshots for the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously they care what you put in your screenshots, but not in the way that you might think. I’m sure everyone has seen screenshots on the
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store that don’t, you say screenshots, like they don’t actually show the app in use
⏹️ ▶️ John or they show something that’s not really in the app. App Store doesn’t care. Nope. You can show, you can just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically you can make a black background, put white text on it and say, my app is cool, you should buy it. That counts as a screenshot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t have copyrighted material. It’s fine. You can put anything you want there, including, up to and including
⏹️ ▶️ John like the little, you know, those little templates that they have that show like an iPhone, like have an iPhone, like a little virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone. And then on the screen of the iPhone, put any old thing you want. Put a screenshot from Marco’s app in there. Put literally
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. Does not have to be your app in that shot. It’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture. Yeah, they don’t check at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as long as it doesn’t have Disney Pixar content or like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as it doesn’t have a giant Apple logo in the middle of it, as long as it doesn’t have a naked picture of Tim Cook that you AI generated, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re checking for stuff, but they’re not checking for the stuff that, like, they’re not looking for truth in advertising. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t want customers to be misled. Your screenshot shows a screen that’s not even in your app. They do not care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so we’ll see what happens. Like, it’s frustrating. Honestly, I wasn’t even the one that put this in the show notes to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about today. That was John, I think, that did that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m angry on your behalf. Well, and I appreciate it, I genuinely do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean, I’m very, yesterday I was angry. Today I’m just very frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I just, like you both had said, I just want to understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the way forward is. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I think if you, you know, you said a second ago, if you have that call, you’re pretty sure you’re gonna get nowhere. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so. I think if you have that call, you’re going to come out of it knowing exactly what the problem is, even though they won’t directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say it in all likelihood. But you will know it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when you get your next rejection, you can say to them, but I had a call. And they said if I did this, I would get approved.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they would say, we’re not talking about the call now, Casey. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey talking about your app has
⏹️ ▶️ John submitted it. Your app has submitted it, blah, blah, blah, section, blah, blah, section, blah, blah, blah. Please resubmit. If you have any questions, feel
⏹️ ▶️ John free to contact us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In three to five business days. I don’t know. It’s frustrating, and it’s tough. And again, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of almost wanted a rejection in hear me out. I wanted the rejection because I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know that they really looked particularly at the subscription flow and they looked and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they gave it their stamp of approval because I genuinely hand on heart, I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to mess this up and I’ve tested the snot out of it, I’ve done everything I know how to do to test it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m one guy. I don’t know if I’ve gotten it right. And I really wanted them to look at the subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flow and really, really, really try and make sure that this is good. That to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, as a user, as a developer, that’s what the purpose of review is, is to just be another system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of checks to make sure that I, as a developer, am not doing something nefarious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not hoodwinking people either deliberately or otherwise. That’s the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point. I’m really sad that I’m mired in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other stuff, And I have zero indication that anyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used the app for more than a couple minutes. And that’s what I should expect, but it’s not what I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for. So, it is what it is.
Upgrading to AirPods Pro 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on, let’s turn this round upside down. When I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and moved to Fastmail, one of the things I did was talk about it because it genuinely is very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. And I also looked up my referral code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I made a convenient URL for it, like we were talking about with hypercritical.co.shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what I did was caselist.com.fastmail. And that will refer you to signing up for Fastmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it uses my, you know, not promo code, but referral code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if one signs up for Fastmail using that code, I get a small kickback. It turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out enough of you have done that, that they gave me a couple hundred bucks. And you know what turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out is a couple hundred bucks, AirPods Pro 2, baby. And so I treated myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a set of AirPods Pro 2, even though they were completely frivolous. I have perfectly functional AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro 1s that are only, might even be less than a year old. It was, I think it was this past Christmas that Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got them for me. I had zero reason to buy these AirPods Pro 2, but they were quote unquote free, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why not? So I got myself some AirPods Pro 2. Here’s the thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that Marco necessarily needs to put in a spoiler horn here, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are a happy AirPods Pro 1 owner, just go ahead and skip to the next chapter because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not gonna make you happy, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco guarantee it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is gonna be an expensive chapter for you to hear. This is gonna be a very expensive chapter for you. Why didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone tell me that the AirPods Pro 2 were so much better than the AirPods Pro 1? Not any of the seven podcasts that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have talked about this over the last year repeatedly. They’re so freaking good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the surface, it seems like they’re the exact same until you start using them. The swipey upy downy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the volume, I actually do like that, but I’ve barely used it because I’m not used to having it. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never had it in any of the AirPods that I’ve ever owned. The, I guess it’s a transparency. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have them near me. I think they’re in the other room, but whatever it is with the noise cancellation that’s intelligent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they had a term for it, like a marketing term for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it. And I forget what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was. Maybe that’s what it was. Thank you. The adaptive noise cancellation where it cancels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the junk you don’t want, but lets through like when people are talking to you. All I can think about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, just having received these after being aware of the Vision Pro, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems a lot like that breakthrough thing, again, I forget the marketing term for it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where somebody walks up and they bust through your virtual reality and so you can see them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Vision Pro, having never used a Vision Pro, it’s spiritually the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All the background junk I don’t care about, it goes away. And not only that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the AirPods Pro 1, it was active noise ducking, in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opinion, or deafening, I don’t think is the word I’m looking for, but you know what I mean? Attenuating maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would bring down the noise level of a fan or like an HVAC system,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, or something like that, but you could still hear it. It was way quieter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you could still hear it. Hand to God, most of the times I’ve had a fan nearby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I have the AirPods Pro 2 in, it is literally gone. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey active noise cancellation. It’s like nothing I have ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experienced. It is unreal. It’s not that way always, but a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the time it is active noise cancellation. It is bandanas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so impressed by these things. They are so freaking good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of wish I bought them when they first came out. I would have paid, I think an additional $50 for them because they seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be perpetually on sale on sale at Amazon, which is a very un Apple thing, but here nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, even as the owner of AirPods Pro 1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that work great, even though they’re only a few months old and even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though I am cheap, I mean frugal as they get, oh my word,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really is true. I mean, when Marco says you should spend money on something, I always say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure, whatever. No, Marco’s right. You should spend money on this because It is so freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. I cannot even begin to tell you. They are so good. And I’m so incredibly impressed by
⏹️ ▶️ John You should consider doing what I’m doing with my also apparently accidentally unneeded
⏹️ ▶️ John pair of AirPods three. We remember I said I was going to get AppleCare plus on them because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they they seem to go wonky after a certain period of time. So I should just pay for it. And I can’t do it on a subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s just a one time chunk of purses you could buy. I was about to buy it when I got them. But then I looked
⏹️ ▶️ John at the fine print and it’s like, oh, your AppleCare begins and
⏹️ ▶️ John it lasts for whatever it is, one year after the date of purchase of AppleCare. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what it said. I’m doubting myself, but I think it said one year after you purchase the AppleCare, not after you
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase the AirPods themselves, but when you make the AppleCare purchase, because you can make the AppleCare purchase after you buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPods. So I bought the AirPods and I went to buy the AppleCare and I said, wait a second, if
⏹️ ▶️ John the clock starts ticking, it’s only one year, and if the clock starts ticking, I don’t even remember what it is a year, but whatever, it’s a fixed period of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John The clock starts ticking when I buy the AppleCare. Why don’t I wait until the last possible minute to buy the AppleCare?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a good point. And I’m wondering, all right, so how long can I wait? Apparently you can wait like 60 days or something. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a long period of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or whatever, 90 days, 60 days, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey remember what it is. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s 60, I’m not sure, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s 60. But here’s the good thing. For once, Apple’s stupid nags in the settings app on your iPhone come
⏹️ ▶️ John right in the settings screen it says, like, AppleCare coverage available. There are 45 days remaining to
⏹️ ▶️ John add AppleCare Plus coverage to your paired AirPods, like right in settings, right at the very top of the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. So I always know what the countdown is. I’m not gonna miss the date. I put it in my calendar and I put a reminder for it anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John but every time I go to settings, I see how many days left I have to buy it. So when there’s one or two days left, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John buy it and get the maximum possible AppleCare time on my AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I’m debating whether or not I wanna do that because I actually have not yet, knock on wood, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John haven’t had the crinkle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Had any sort of crinkle or failure or anything like that. but I know it’s a very common occurrence, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am thinking about doing the AppleCare Plus, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was like 30 bucks or something like that. So I might, but one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I cannot say enough good things about these AirPods Pro 2, they are so freaking good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, remind me, you or Tiff, somebody in the house has them, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we both do, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re so good. Even, you know, there was a whole bunch of like, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AirPods Pro 2 over the 1, they’re not like three times better. They’re not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two times better. But I would say they’re, it’s-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say they’re close to two times better. I really would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s great about them, in my opinion, is not that like no single feature about them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is mind-blowingly better than the predecessor’s version of that feature. They just have a bunch of little improvements.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think the noise cancellation is decently better. I don’t think it’s, you know, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massively better. It’s decently better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, I might disagree with you there. Granted, I’m in the honeymoon period, but it is starkly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better in my opinion. Like noticeably, easily noticeably better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, maybe it’s, maybe it also varies by like, you know, what kind of noise you’re canceling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s also fair. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so that’s, and you know, all that aside, so there’s little improvements there. I even like, I love the improvements to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the charging case. Like that it makes sound when you charge it. Like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you’ve aligned it correctly. you know, it’s starting to charge when he goes ding, you know, little things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve made a bunch of little improvements. And overall the AirPods pro one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were also an amazing product besides that, that crackle flaw that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of them had, including both of mine. Um, and, and tips actually, like we,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had to get go through a few of those like through warranty repairs and everything. Um, as I think many AirPods, AirPods pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one owners did. Uh, but the AirPods pro one, I would say if you were still work, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think you need to be like be super rushing out there to get the upgrade But as soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you have a reason to if you can justify Like replacing them for some reason or handing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them down or whatever or if they do die Go right for the twos. They’re awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But but I don’t think you have to feel too bad for not having them yet If you have a perfectly working pair of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean that they are very very good and I am very impressed by them and And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a frivolous purchase, and I obviously resisted until I had what was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effectively free money. But goodness, I am very glad I spent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this sort of free money in order to get them, because I am deeply impressed by them. I’m deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impressed by them, I really am.
ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hello, listener. Please consider becoming an ATP member. Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes with some interesting cool perks. So number one, you get an ad-free version of the show. You get your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco private feed. You can add it to any podcast app you want that supports URLs, which almost all the major ones do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then you have an ad-free version of the show. You also get access to our bootleg feed if you want. This is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular perk. Many of our members listen this way, which is an unedited version of the live stream. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no ads in that either and in that you get to hear all of my bad jokes and Casey’s swear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco words and John of course is perfect he doesn’t make any mistakes but Casey and I make tons of them you get to hear all of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s kind of fun and then you get to hear our post-show discussion about title selection any little bits
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#askatp: Time Machine still needed?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. A friend of the show, Dan Provost, who is one of the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey co-founders of Studio Neat. I freaking love Studio Neat stuff. If you’re not familiar with it, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should go check it out. I should put a link in the show notes. I think I did under his name. Yes, I did. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at Dan’s name in the show notes and get a link to Studio Neat stuff. He did not ask me to say that, but their stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excellent. Anyway, Dan writes, in 2023, how important are time machine backups? I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud services have matured to the point where they can be trusted as safe data storage. Every important file I have in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my computer, I have in Dropbox. I back up my entire computer to Backblaze. My most precious digital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey files, my photos and videos are on my computer’s SSD, Backblaze, iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photo library, and additional all of my favorited photos that I edit are also in Adobe’s cloud service for Lightroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So basically four places. The main reason I ask is I need a new drive for Time Machine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like John, I wanna leave the era of spinning disks behind. but a large enough SSD is quite pricey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How are we feeling about cloud backups only these days? Let me start, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run Time Machine off of my Synology and it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Network-based Time Machine, particularly on a Synology is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have in the last, I don’t know, two years that I’ve had my laptop, I think I’ve tried to do restores via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Time Machine maybe once, maybe twice. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do think it’s nice to have a redundant copy on some sort of disc, even a spinning one, somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey locally. But I can’t in good conscience sit here and say it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compulsory. Like, especially in, granted, Backblaze is a former, probably future, infrequent sponsor of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ours. But truly, Backblaze is very good. It works very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And given that they’ll ship you a hard drive, this is not an ad break, believe it or not, but given they’ll ship you a hard drive with all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your data on it, like overnight, I am hard pressed to continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, yeah, you definitely need time machine. I think John, you’re gonna have the most opinions about this. Let’s leave you for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last. Marco, your thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As long as your stuff is other places and you have the backblaze as,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like the fail safe, you know, the just in case, Oh crap, a solution. Uh, I think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably okay. I mean, I, I still use time machine. Um, I also do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my sonology, uh, and, and the, the upside, there are a few I’m too obsessed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that. Number one, I have found since the M1 era of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers, the problems that I encounter occasionally by trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use USB external SSDs are significant. And like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just yesterday, I had to unplug my external SSD because like Finder was just beach balling and everything was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird and everything was beach balling and being weird on my computer until I unplugged that SSD. And that this is not the first time that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever happened. And maybe I’m just getting weird ones, I don’t know. I don’t want spinning disks on my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in my office even at all, so it’s SSDs only. Although, on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the shopping holiday that just occurred from the Washington delivery service, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were some really cheap eight terabyte SSDs that I was kind of tempted by. But instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of getting those, I got a pair of really cheap 16 terabyte hard drives for much less money than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna put in my Synology. And because the whole reason I was looking was that my Synology was running out of space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part because we use it for Time Machine for both mine and Maya and TIFF’s laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quick aside, actually, quick aside related to that. I noticed, actually, my friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sam had pointed out to me that the Western Digital Reds that I think all three of us have tended to use in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our Synologies, those were deeply discounted, I think, two days ago. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am due to, I would argue we all are, but I am definitely due to upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or replace my Synology sometime in the next couple of months. And so I grabbed four 18-terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives, which is something like, even with two-drive redundancy, it’s something like, what, 36 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of space, which is considerably more than I’m using right now. It’s like, I think I’m using like 10-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terabytes, maybe a little less than that. Anyways, I grabbed these four drives for, in sum,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a lot of money, but given the price of these drives, it was something like 210, $220 a drive, which was stunningly cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I figure at some point I will get a chassis to shove all these in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that was, it’s hard to derail this further, but I think that was a bad decision for two reasons. Number one,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m always tempted to do exactly what you’re doing, but what I say to myself to prevent myself from doing this is
⏹️ ▶️ John that the longer you wait, the more megabytes you’re gonna be able to get for your
⏹️ ▶️ John any time you buy hard drives, if you don’t need them immediately, then you’re just wasting money. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sale. I agree with you in general, but yes, it’s a sale. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John beyond that, I think-
⏹️ ▶️ John milk. Yeah, it’s like, look, it’s not going to go, in general, the trend is you get more bagelites for your dollar
⏹️ ▶️ John the longer you wait. So even though it looks like this is a great sale, if you don’t end up buying a new thing for a year, you still might have saved money on
⏹️ ▶️ John this. But the second reason is going to make you sad, and this is why you should read our feedback. We haven’t talked about this, and maybe we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about it more later, but the latest Synologies all say that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can only use Synology branded drives in them. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John you put a Western Digital drive in there, it will complain to you that that drive
⏹️ ▶️ John is not supported and will throw up a bunch of errors and warnings and generally be annoying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. That’s partially true. Let’s not get derailed and spun around the axle on that. That is more true than it is not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t think it’s quite as widespread as you thought. But let’s save that for another time.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it is. Like go to that, go to there. Well, anyway, for a future show, go to their config, go to the Synology website
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have a compatibility checker and just pick any Synology that you want and then pick shows
⏹️ ▶️ John which drives it’s compatible with. And if you only see drives by the brand Synology, make sure you pick, like a place where you can pick
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology or third party drives. If third party option isn’t there, or you go to it and you only see like one
⏹️ ▶️ John IBM drive or something, you can’t use those Western Digital Reds in there without being nagged knowingly at things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it doesn’t even let you rebuild an array if one of those drives is in it, because it’s like, oh no, this isn’t a supported drive. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a, my Synology is fairly young, so I don’t think it’s one of the absolute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most current models, but it’s, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a thing they just started doing. But like I said, if you go to the compatibility checker, you can pick Synology by the year. year is always
⏹️ ▶️ John the number in the model thing. So it’s you can just go, you know, start with 2023, then go backwards 2022, 2021. And you’ll see, oh, when I go back
⏹️ ▶️ John to 2021 or 19, all of a sudden, third party drives are listed. But when I go to 2022 or 23, no more third
⏹️ ▶️ John party drives for such and such models. Like it varies by model. So you have to check.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I think that the the model that I was planning to buy, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is 1823 XS plus, which is probably more than
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s Synology only, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That one, I believe of your right is pretty much Synology only. Now my understanding is there are definitely scripts that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can find on the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will add pretty much any drive to their bespoke compatibility list. So it’ll shut up and leave you
⏹️ ▶️ John voiding your warranty and no longer being supported and blah, blah, blah. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I generally agree with your point to wait for hard drives, but I genuinely think I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be purchasing a new chassis sometime in the next month or two. So I’m not gonna be waiting long. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey poor Dan has been waiting for us to answer his question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So you were, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Time Machine, Synology, both TIFFs and your laptops carry on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Time Machine over the network is really nice in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can still use spinning disks if they can be somewhere else in your house that you don’t need to hear it. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you put your, if you put like a Synology in a basement or a garage or something like, then it’s out of your way. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to hear it. So you can use big, cheap hard drives if you want to. And it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for whatever reason, network Time Machine, I’ve been running, I’ve been running Time Machine 2 Synologies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a very long time, and I’ve never had a problem. Whereas running it direct attached,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve often had like, the drive will run out of space in some way, the Time Machine like doesn’t know what to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do and can’t proceed, or things like that. Whereas like, over the network, it’s rock solid. Like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open source package this thing is probably based on, it properly enforces disk quotas for users,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it never runs out of space, macOS knows how to handle it, it’s still, you know, encrypted, mounted as a sparse whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something and so it’s it actually works really reliably the one major downside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it is slow as crap it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow so if you ever extremely if you need to restore from it it’s going to take days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to restore a whole drive so it’s not great for whole drive recovery it is really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for oh what was that file I had on my desktop history that actually undeleted, like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point in time recovery, or point in time browsing, it is really nice for that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need to pull something off a time machine frequently, it’s maybe twice a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for those twice a year times, I am really glad I have it, and it is useful to me. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to cut one of these backup methods out of my life, I would cut time machine long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I would cut Backblaze. same but you know in the since I already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the the Synology and everything set up to do it and hard drives are so insanely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap I continue to do it but yeah if if push came to shove I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably let it go
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s why you shouldn’t let it go so in the olden days we had a saying rate is not a backup
⏹️ ▶️ John because rate is or was it a redundant array of inexpensive drives inexpensive haha
⏹️ ▶️ John discs depending on who you ask and independent discs or or whatever, we would say RAID is not a backup because
⏹️ ▶️ John people would get a RAID array and they’d be like, I’m gonna make a volume out of multiple drives and I have redundancy
⏹️ ▶️ John so that if one of my drive fails, my array is still valid and I could take out the failed drive and put in another one, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John re-silver itself and I’ll have my thing back up again. And they’re like, I don’t need backups. I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John one drive redundancy, I’ve got two drive redundancy, who needs backups? RAID is not a backup because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your actual real data that you’re using. And if you delete a file and remember that you, Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like you were saying, Marco, oh, there’s a file I deleted that was on my desktop last week, can I go get that again? On Raid, the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is no, because you deleted it. And back in the Windows and DOS days, you use undelete programs to try to find it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff like that, those kind of heroic measures, that’s not what you wanna be doing when you want that file back. You wanna be able to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to your backups and pull that file. Raid is not a backup because Raid is where your live
⏹️ ▶️ John file is. A lot of those things you listed are also not backups. iCloud Photo Library is not a backup.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the live place where your photos are. And yeah, they have the recently deleted photos there for 30 days and so on and so forth. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if something goes wrong with that, or much more likely, if you accidentally delete something and don’t realize it for more than 30 days,
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud Photo Library is not a backup, it’s your live data. Your SSD is not a backup where you’re actually using it. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on my SSD and it’s on my iCloud Photo Library. First of all, they sync with each other. And second of all, if you delete it off
⏹️ ▶️ John your SSD and that syncs to iCloud and you wait more than 30 days, it’s not there. Backblaze is a backup.
⏹️ ▶️ John So one, you’ve got one backup because Backblaze does take your stuff, puts it elsewhere, and if you forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it will be in Backblaze. Backblaze has its own retention policy and you can do this. They have an advanced versioning thing to keep longer versions,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you do have to keep a minor retention period. But Backblaze will have like, for example, multiple snapshots
⏹️ ▶️ John of your desktop if you have that multiple version thing, right? And you can go back in time and get that. Time Machine is also
⏹️ ▶️ John a backup. It’s not your live data, and it will store multiple versions of everything that it’s backing
⏹️ ▶️ John up until it runs out of space. It won’t just say like, I save it for 30 days or whatever. It’s like however
⏹️ ▶️ John much space you have, that’s how far back you’ll be able to go. So adding more space lets you go back farther depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on how much you change on a daily basis or whatever. So I would say your first thing is make sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m gonna make sure, but like the more backups you have, the better. And cloud services, Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a backup. iCloud photo library is not a backup. Your actual SSD where it is, is not a backup. You have one backup
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s Backblaze. And that backup is good to have, and you should, because there’s an offsite backup if your house burns down,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s pretty far away from you. And yes, they’ll mail you a hard drive, but it’s a little bit inconvenient. I would want
⏹️ ▶️ John to have at the very least one local backup and one cloud backup. Right now you have one cloud backup,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have no local backups. Time machine is one form of local backup. SuperDuper clone,
⏹️ ▶️ John Carbon Copy Cloner, that’s another form of local backup without versioning. You know me, I have all those
⏹️ ▶️ John things and multiple time machine backups, but having a local backup is convenient, not just for when you wanna pull that one file,
⏹️ ▶️ John which you can also do from Backblaze, but if you ever have to do a full restore, waiting for the drive to come in the mail
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a pain and then you gotta send it back. If you have the hard drive right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might be faster than doing a network time machine restore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s true. It’s always, and what he’s talking about is direct connected, like that’s why he was on a spinning disc, like a direct connect
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. That will always be so much faster to restore from. The fastest thing is not to have to restore at
⏹️ ▶️ John all and just to be able to reboot from a clone that was made last night, right? And yes, you’re missing the data that was in between and you can pull
⏹️ ▶️ John those individual files in your back, right? But multiple backups, one onsite, one offsite.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right now you have one offsite. It’s not about the reliability of the cloud things. It’s the Dropbox is not a backup because it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John live place where your data is. Dropbox also saves versions too, but it’s not really a backup service. It’s not made to do that. iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library, recently deleted folder, but still not a backup service. So that’s what I would say. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be okay if you just have a cloud backup like Backblaze, and as long as the retention period is enough and the versioning
⏹️ ▶️ John is enough, but it’s more convenient to have a local backup and a cloud backup. And if you wanna go further, I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, have a second cloud backup. You can count the Lightroom thing as a second cloud backup if you want. Although I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if that counts as a backup if you’re syncing things there, then it’s just another live copy of your data. But have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John local backups, because multiple local backups, chances are that you’re going to accidentally delete
⏹️ ▶️ John something more often than your house burns down. Cloud backup is to save it in case of a disaster in your entire
⏹️ ▶️ John house, but within your household, you’re more likely to accidentally delete something and to be able to pull from local backups that
⏹️ ▶️ John are fast and local. And one thing you can do, I mean, you can’t really do this with Synology, but like, if you want to do like
⏹️ ▶️ John a, I think you can just still do this, it’s like a time machine server, like make a Mac be a time machine server for other Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you can do that. And then what you could do is if you ever needed to restore, shut down that Mac, disconnect
⏹️ ▶️ John the drive from that Mac and plug it directly into your Mac and restore from that Time Machine disk locally instead of doing it over the network
⏹️ ▶️ John to save speed, which again, you can’t really do with the Synology NAS or whatever. So I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John local backups are still a thing. There are other software that does them besides Time Machine but Time Machine comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac, it does a pretty good job. And if you have it locally connected, it’s way faster than network. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John that I have all my local backups are internal, I have a local internal clone and a local internal
⏹️ ▶️ John Time Machine backup that are both on SSDs. And they’re way faster than Synology, but they’re not as fast as I thought they would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really wish Time Machine would go faster, right? Certainly, again, certainly faster than doing it to Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m also still doing, that’s why I can compare. But I really thought that, I mean, granted, it’s just on SATA, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bottlenecked by the interface. But when I look at the transfer speeds, the transfer speeds over SATA
⏹️ ▶️ John are not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is just how slow Time Machine runs. Part of it is because it’s I-O throttled, because
⏹️ ▶️ John all the Time Machine stuff runs at low priority. That is not really a good way to change
⏹️ ▶️ John that without like eliminating low priority IO across the entire system, which you don’t wanna do because you do want some things
⏹️ ▶️ John to be low priority. But part of it is just because it’s like grinding over the disk to find out what the changes it’s made. It’s got like three different
⏹️ ▶️ John strategies to figure out what has changed since my last backup. And apparently all those strategies
⏹️ ▶️ John are slower than I think they should be. You know, and using the spotlight database is
⏹️ ▶️ John one, using snapshot diffing is another. I’m like, shouldn’t there be one of these that’s lightning fast? Especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if I have it being like backup every hour. Like if I’m not touching my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and an hour goes by and it runs a time machine back up and it’s like, you know, searching for changes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I found 700,000 changes. I’m like, really? In the past hour when I wasn’t using my computer, you found 700,000 changes?
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t taken a single photograph. No one in my family has taken a photograph. Nothing has synced. No new email has arrived. My
⏹️ ▶️ John email’s in Gmail anyway. I don’t have local mail. Like 700,000 changes, really? And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John so time machine is not perfect, but it is included, it’s free, it does do the job, is well supported
⏹️ ▶️ John by Apple, I would encourage you to continue to have a local one.
#askatp: 3rd-party Mac Pro CPU?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Torb writes, oh, this is the Mac Pro section. Do you even need me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m gonna go see. Here it comes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna go see. Torb writes, do you think a third-party ARM chip provider could be the solution for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro? Things like the Fujitsu A64FX or Amper? Ampere? Amperium.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. At least show that ridiculously scaled up ARM solutions can exist. Feel free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to apply the quote on an infinite time scale quote to this question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no way Apple does not make the chip for the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, there’s that. So let’s set that aside. Obviously, Apple’s not gonna wanna do third-party stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this gets to what we were talking about before of like when Apple was buying Xeons, they’d have to pay these
⏹️ ▶️ John hefty profit margins to Intel and they couldn’t determine what was in the chips, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John had the advantage that Intel sold those Xeons to tons of people. And so Apple benefited from the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the quote unquote volume discounts of the fact that Intel wasn’t just making those chips for Mac Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John because if Intel just made a chip specifically for the Mac Pro, they would charge so much more money because like
⏹️ ▶️ John basically zero Mac Pro sell as far as Intel’s concerned in terms of volume. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple was not Apple, to Marco’s point, if Apple was not Apple and did not
⏹️ ▶️ John want to own and control the primary technologies that contribute to their computers, yes, I think they could,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially for massively multi-core stuff, use a third-party ARM chip to
⏹️ ▶️ John give them a chip that is worthy of the Mac Pro. It would be crappy single-core performance, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if they found some specific tasks that you really need massively multi-core, they could buy a third party chip, pay the profit margins
⏹️ ▶️ John and do that, but they’re never going to do that. And honestly, it would be worse because setting aside what they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John now, that chip is not gonna have any of the stuff that Apple wants out of its chips inserted into the
⏹️ ▶️ John neural engine, the specific features of the GPU to support metal,
⏹️ ▶️ John the multi-processing stuff they put, like it’s just Apple, the media engines for ENCODE and DECODE
⏹️ ▶️ John for the specific codecs that fit directly with their libraries, like that synergy would not exist with the third party thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that would, if a company other than Apple was running Apple, they could do this and it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John better than it is in some ways, but this is not going to happen. Unless they did some sort of like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple chip, but we partner with some other company, because if you look at Apple’s GPUs, didn’t they buy like imagination
⏹️ ▶️ John technologies or something for the GPUs and they bought a PA semi to design their ARM chips
⏹️ ▶️ John to begin with, with the A7. It’s not like Apple’s above partnering slash buying companies and doing stuff, but they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the ones in control. And it has to end up being called Apple Silicon. So whatever they do,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what it’s gonna be.
#askatp: Apple silicon for servers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, David Loring writes, the server market is the biggest market for very large CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the rumored quad. Could Apple use their own high-end chips and custom servers, like Amazon does with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their Graviton processors to improve the economies of scale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and make the high-end desktop processor a more viable product? Or does Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simply not make sense for servers?
⏹️ ▶️ John Margot should just say the same thing you said last time. This is never going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. Yeah, I mean, it’s not that Apple Silicon wouldn’t make sense in servers. It’s just that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a business that Apple not only doesn’t want, but I think would be ill-suited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to serve, just kind of personality-wise. Has been ill-suited to
⏹️ ▶️ John serve. They’ve literally done this. We saw it. They were ill-suited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like Apple and the server market, I think, is an even worse fit than Apple in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming market. It’s not really in their DNA to serve that market very well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although they did try. They gave a better try than gaming because you know the X serve line They made service before the X serve
⏹️ ▶️ John but X serve was their first like rack mount server Even the Apple Network Server 400 or whatever. It wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John rack mount. It came on wheels though But like yeah They’ve made a couple runs out of the end the X serve error
⏹️ ▶️ John was and the X of rate error was by far their most Serious run at it and it was not
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly successful and they don’t do it anymore And I don’t you know if they
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to say we can get more economies of scale by making an awesome server chip and selling to people who want awesome server chips, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John left with the same problem. Well, first of all, A, Apple doesn’t want to give their chip to anybody else, because why would they? And B, the chips
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple makes are highly custom tailored to exactly what they want. Like specifically,
⏹️ ▶️ John and not just like, oh, they want them for their hardware, their software. Apple makes their chips to work well
⏹️ ▶️ John with their software and vice versa. Nobody else on the server has the same software needs as
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does. Apple has like software and libraries, their Accelerate framework, Metal, all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that runs the headset, the watch, the phone, and all the Mac stuff, that is basically useless to most
⏹️ ▶️ John servers and super essential to Apple. So if Apple made a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John type thing and offered it, hey Amazon, do you want any of these? They’d be like, what the hell is all this stuff in the CPU? We don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John any of that. We want a million tiny little cores, so for our gigantic service where we sell
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU power to people to run stuff, or maybe we want gigantic GPUs so we can farm them out to GPUs. And Nvidia makes
⏹️ ▶️ John those giant GPU cards for us already, and companies make these ARM chips for us, just make tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of tiny little cores that we run Linux on, I don’t really need a neural engine. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ John you very much. I don’t even know what Metal is, so that doesn’t help us. So no, we’re not interested in your chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think they would do this. I think they’d be ill-suited to it. And if they did try to make something, they
⏹️ ▶️ John either have to compromise what they want for their computers, or they’d have a chip offering that would be of
⏹️ ▶️ John no interest to the server market.
#askatp: Mac Pro RAM-disk?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Patrick Melody writes, would it be worthwhile or even feasible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple to put a dedicated DRAM-backed quote-unquote drive on some kind of hardware fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey path to be a RAM drive for virtual memory backing store to help make up for the fact that we can’t expand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM in SoC systems? Wow, that was a lot. Would could this help or is this just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a trash idea? John, can you start by explaining what the theory is here, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John What they’re just describing is that like, can we put another tier in the cache hierarchy? Every,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, computer, personal computer has a cache hierarchy of like essentially how distant,
⏹️ ▶️ John both actually physically, but also like metaphorically, how distant is this piece of memory that I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John get? The least distance are registers, which are right there in the CPU. You don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John go anywhere to get them, they’re right there. And then you’ve got a level one cache, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly less distant cache that’s also on the CPU and made with very fast transistors that are faster than
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that you use in RAM because they use like six transistors to reach bit of memory or whatever, instead of one or
⏹️ ▶️ John a half or whatever. Anyway, there’s a cache hierarchy. There’s level two cache, which is cheaper, larger, but more
⏹️ ▶️ John distant. Level three cache sometimes, which is still cheaper, still larger, and still more distant. And then you get RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is way bigger, much more quote unquote distant because it’s at the other end of a bus, or even in Apple’s things,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a bus that leads to someplace else in the same package. And what this person is saying is, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what if we add another level to the cache hierarchy that’s farther away,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it would be another pool of RAM that is not on the package, but it’s off-package RAM. And we’ve talked about this, and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has patents for it. Like they could have external DRAM in slots, but also RAM on the CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you put that in one giant hierarchy of memory, that you’d pull things
⏹️ ▶️ John in, and as you use them more often, they would move in closer and closer, and they would push out less used data, and all sorts of cache
⏹️ ▶️ John population algorithms. Yeah, you could do that. What that would do is, if you overflowed
⏹️ ▶️ John into that slower, more distant RAM, it would make things slower. And you say, well, we could use that as like a
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM disk, but that dedicated RAM would just be used for disk. So instead of when we swap,
⏹️ ▶️ John we wouldn’t be swapping to disk. That’s not a great idea, using a RAM disk as swap. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, you can speed things up a little bit, but the problem is then you’re going through the whole disk IO subsystem and running software
⏹️ ▶️ John to get data, like you don’t wanna be going to swap. Even if that swap is RAM disk,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at the code path that leads to you pulling a page from quote unquote disk, the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual IO part where you pull, because honestly in a good drive, even a spinning disk, it’s probably in RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, what you’re pulling if you used it frequently, because the spinning hard drives have RAM caches
⏹️ ▶️ John on them and SSDs have caches on them as well. But it’s really, it’s all that code path you’re going through to get
⏹️ ▶️ John to the point where you’re reading something from quote unquote disk. That’s what’s killing you as opposed to pulling it over the
⏹️ ▶️ John bus. So, you know, coming up with new novel hierarchies
⏹️ ▶️ John of memory is good, but there’s a reason every single thing, every single computer doesn’t have 75
⏹️ ▶️ John levels of cache. You have to sort of balance cost and efficiency to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John how big should the caches be? How far should they be? And how many should we have? And I think Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think using what this thing is describing, using a RAM disk for swap would be a
⏹️ ▶️ John poor choice of the expense for that. Making a separate, expandable pool of DRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and having that be part of RAM, but not part of swap Maybe a better choice, but only for applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that need like 1.5 terabytes of RAM or something.
#askatp: Dual-socket CPUs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Arien Aneha writes, I wanted to know why doesn’t Apple consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using a dual socket CPU design for the Mac Pro? I know they did this before for our PC. Is it not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an easy way to bump performance, especially with thermal headroom? With their thermal headroom, excuse me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not really because, so back in the old days when we had dual socket CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there was an interface between the CPUs for things like cache coherency
⏹️ ▶️ John and cross CPU communication. And what Apple does now by putting,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, multiple core CPUs are using the, what is it called? The interconnect
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy, the interposer. That, the interposer thing, or having multiple cores in the same die, all of that
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much faster than communicating, like over the logic board between two socketed
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs. Just so much faster. It’s physically closer, the signal path is shorter, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John speed of data transfer is faster because you don’t have to go out of the chip package into
⏹️ ▶️ John traces on the motherboard and into another chip that’s busy doing something else, you can much more tightly integrate them. The Interposer
⏹️ ▶️ John is as close as we can think of that, but still faster because there’s so many more connections and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John so much closer to each other and everything runs so much faster. So like the world has moved on from that. What we have now
⏹️ ▶️ John are these chiplet packages where even if you have multiple dies on the same package, they’re still closer together
⏹️ ▶️ John and more tightly integrated than two socketed ones. So I don’t think that’s a great solution. I think it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John slower than doing the quad the right way or slower than the Ultra because the Ultra is like oh
⏹️ ▶️ John why not have two socketed maxes the ultra is faster and better integrated than that.
#askatp: Mac Pro supercar aspects?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Jan Lenart writes, does the Mac Pro have any supercar aspects to it anymore? The technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that could trickle down is getting scarce at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you two think? Is there any supercar aspects that you can think of, of the Mac Pro? Maybe wheels?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What other Mac has wheels?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I think having any sort of internal expandability is something to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s something to be, I’m not congratulated, but to be lauded, I guess maybe is what I’m looking for. But I don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that as being a thing in basically any other Mac. So, I don’t know. I can’t think of anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, in my opinion, not knowing much about like, you know, recording studios and specialty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I.O. cards and everything, it almost seems like the Mac Pro is a giant PCI Express dongle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, this is like, we have the new world of Apple Silicon and we really want everything to be as on-chip as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible and we want to use external expansion as much as possible for, you know, through Thunderbolt to have these nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clean computers like the Mac Studio. And then for you legacy folks out there who need PCI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cards, here’s a giant dongle for you. Like that’s kind of how it feels. And hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future, as we talked about, if they are able to do the quad chip, then they can raise the performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ceiling more and then that becomes kind of its own Halo type justification of like, you know, look how fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can make this for people who really need it. But the way it is now, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly super unexciting. I don’t think it inspires anybody to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do anything except complain about the price and lack of GPU expansion and the lower RAM ceiling and lack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of other forms of expansion. The idea of a Halo computer or Halo car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is to excite your fans, to really show like, look at how awesome things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be if you had infinite money to afford this thing. Also to excite your employees. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. And this Mac Pro, I understand the reason they make it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does seem to serve a very small market, But I don’t think this excites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone. In fact, I think it actually discourages a lot of people who want Apple to make really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end hardware. Because this kind of shows that crowd,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we’re not really interested. Slash, we don’t think you matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to whatever degree that’s true or not. And I say this as somebody who doesn’t want this anymore. Like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely happy with my MacBook Pro, and if I ever did want to have a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade from this in terms of performance, I would go with the Mac Studio, which would roughly double
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my performance. But even that, my needs are covered. So I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to do this for my own personal needs, but it is, I think this product,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this particular revision of this product does not contain any supercar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco halo car excitement to me. It is just one giant PCI dongle, but that doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it can’t ever contain those things. It’s this version that doesn’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can foresee a future in which if they’re able to do the quad and really push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that performance even higher and push the capacities even higher as a result of doing that, that could be more
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think even this one does still have some supercar aspects to it. They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John are not as exciting as they could be. So first of all, on the PCI thing, I wouldn’t just call it a PCI dongle because
⏹️ ▶️ John the difference between this and a breakout box is this is on the same motherboard. the path between
⏹️ ▶️ John the SoC and the PCI things is faster and wider than it would be if it was in a separate box, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s literally all on the same motherboard. You can’t do that with any other Mac. And it’s obvious it’s not supercar
⏹️ ▶️ John in the wider sense, but in the Mac world, no other Mac has this much, has an expansion slot with
⏹️ ▶️ John this much bandwidth to the SoC. And so why does that matter? I was looking at what the MKBHD
⏹️ ▶️ John video where he was pulling a Marco and justifying why he’s gonna get one of these, which you were like, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wait to hear this. what is your excuse gonna be? And what he came up with, which I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John valid in a Marco way,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the only Mac that you can buy that I can put this in. And he holds up like what must be
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole jillion dollar PCI card that you fill with SSD, like
⏹️ ▶️ John M.2 SSD things. And they all, it’s like an SSD raid that cuts to like a 16X PCI slot. And
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s like, this is like 16 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John of massively redundant SSD thing storage that is so much faster than
⏹️ ▶️ John any one SSD drive you can get. And so it was like, now I can do my video and instead of this gigantic promise rate array
⏹️ ▶️ John with like a million spinning hard drives, all my video is on this card that I shove inside my
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. And now I have access to my like 8K raw data of this crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John Android phone that no one wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And now I can grind
⏹️ ▶️ John through it at a million frames per second, smooth. Like it’s basically like no other Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John can have disk IO this fast. Cause you can’t attack it, Thunderbolt forget about it. It’s not, it’s too slow.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like sipping through a straw. Internal SSD, no other Mac can touch this because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is essentially a massively redundant parallelized set of SSDs of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John think of the fastest SSD you can buy and put like seven of them or eight of them in parallel and read and write from all
⏹️ ▶️ John of them at the same time. And God only knows how much that card costs, but you can’t put that card in any other
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. So if, you know, that’s a super hard aspect. Massive, it’s not massive
⏹️ ▶️ John storage, like lots of space. It’s how fast can you read and write? Like if you do like a disk benchmark on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna have numbers that are way bigger than any of their Macs. So there’s one. The other one I would say is the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s old hat, because we’ve seen it before. This is a supercar case. It’s expensive for no
⏹️ ▶️ John over-designed, it’s expensive to produce, it’s fancy. Supercars
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. They have, you know, they have like carbon fiber bodies and things that are totally impractical and you know, might not
⏹️ ▶️ John even help the car’s performance in any way, but they’re fancy and they look cool and they cost a lot of money. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another one I would say. I think that’s about it. Maybe you could say cooling,
⏹️ ▶️ John which kind of ties into the thing, but yeah. You can put cards in here and some of these cards give this thing super car like
⏹️ ▶️ John capability and the case is like a super car, but in most other aspects, it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ John doing its job. so we hope they do better next time.
#askatp: Is Vision Pro the halo car?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, David Saunders writes, do you think the Vision Pro is so ambitious and contains so much new tech design, UX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ideas, etc. that it is now effectively Apple’s halo car product? That’s a pretty good argument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my book. Yeah, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the just the basic, like, to get the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, we talked about this before when they announced it, but like, to get the Vision Pro from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, from from not existing to being able to show you effectively like an empty desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like, just put this thing on your head and show the room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And make it look like you’re looking through it. And show an empty screen that you can open up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows into. Like, that, just that. Just before you’ve even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done any application usage or experiences with entertainment or whatever with the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. Just the simple task, quote, I’m using simple here very loosely, just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple task of show your empty desktop. That took so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much for this product. It’s so many disciplines had to come together
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not only do that passably, but to do a good job of that. And then you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the eye tracking, the gesture recognition, the audio processing, what it’s doing, how it’s mapping,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it’s looking at the lighting in your room and figuring out where your walls are. And there’s like, there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much going into this product to effectively just create the empty environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you to then later put applications into. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both profoundly wasteful and profoundly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over-engineered and really cool. And nothing to me says Halo Car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like profoundly over-engineered, logically wasteful, but really cool technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage. So I think that actually is a better Halo Car than any Mac Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think so because I think when we talk about Halo cars, car companies make cars. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t make dishwashers or swimming pools or other things. When you make lots of different kinds of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like making a really fast car is not the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as making a transparent 16K television that rolls up from a slot.
⏹️ ▶️ John But within their categories, those are both Halo products. So you make a bunch of TVs, but you also
⏹️ ▶️ John make this like ridiculous TV that costs $60,000 that no one can afford to buy, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. Like you said, Marco, like it rolls up out of the thing and it’s clear. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just to get a picture on this TV, like so much technology, so much advanced technology and expenses involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the end, like it’s just showing a picture on a television. It’s such a waste of resources and technology to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. And in the end, you’re just watching like streaming Netflix on your 16K TV. That’s a halo
⏹️ ▶️ John car TV. But it’s not a halo car sports car. So if that same company made cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a conglomerate or whatever, I think you have to do it in different categories. Now, I think the headset
⏹️ ▶️ John does have some aspects of like advanced technology, kind of like the iPhone did. Like, it’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something one notch better than everybody else, especially when it all comes together. Like the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, was the iPhone screen amazing? Was the iPhone like processor amazing? Was the
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system in it particularly amazing? It was the combination of all those elements that gave you the iPhone experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was amazing. And so you could say when the iPhone came out, it’s, is that Apple’s Halo product? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was certainly the Halo phone and the whole industry. Like everyone looked at that phone and it was like, people thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it was fake because it was so amazing. But if you look at the constituent pieces, it’s not that amazing. So same thing with the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. It’s maybe one step ahead of all the other headsets, but you know, Sony will sell those screens
⏹️ ▶️ John to other people, but it’s the synergy of like, okay, well, Apple makes that and they make the processors which are low power
⏹️ ▶️ John and fit in there and you don’t get too hot. And also they make the software that brings all this
⏹️ ▶️ John together. So I think within headsets, the one and only one Apple makes that is suffixed with pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple’s Halo headset. But that’s different than a personal computer and it’s different from a phone. And that’s just within Apple with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of products that are very similar to computer products. If Apple made a car, it would be much easier because we
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, is this a Halo car? And if they made something that was like the i3, we would say, does it do stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John better than like, if they made something like the i3 but it literally drove itself and had no steering wheel, we would
⏹️ ▶️ John probably call that a Halo car of a different kind. but if they made just an i3 that you had to drive yourself, it would say, eh,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not a Halo car. So I feel like the Vision Pro, I mean, it’s only $3,500. Not that I say the Halo cars have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John really expensive, but it doesn’t hurt. Like they usually are, right? $3,500 is expensive, but it’s not a $50,000 Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would say some very advanced technology and
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing work is in the Vision Pro, but I do kind of separate it. That’s why I always talk about Apple should make the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fastest personal computer. Don’t say anything about their phones or their iPads or their headsets. I think they should make the world’s best headset too.
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they are, so good job with that so far. But I think they should continue to do so. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John also think they should make the world’s best phone, although in the realm of phone computing speed doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ John that much, but in general, Apple pretty much always has been in the running. And we say this with the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. Like I’m not saying like, I say you should aim to make the world’s fastest person, you’re probably not going to, let’s be real, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t update it for three years, you’re gonna fall behind. In the realm of phones, Apple’s phones are often
⏹️ ▶️ John the fastest phones, but if they’re not, they’re always in the running. and by the way, they do it with smaller batteries, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So we just want, you know, being in the conversation, being in the running, being comparable to your peers,
⏹️ ▶️ John being in the fight for best of the best. They’re doing that with the headset, they’re doing with the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re definitely doing that with the tablet, with the Mac, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the best of the best in laptops, but in high-end desktop personal computers, they’re not really in the conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore and that’s where I want them to go. So I don’t know if that bifurcation makes sense because people just think of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple as one big company and they just want the company to have a halo car, but they make lots of different things, not currently
⏹️ ▶️ John including a car, but I kind of separate them mentally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As far as we know, they’re not making a car.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right? Or if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making one, we haven’t seen it. Please don’t make a car. Thank you so much to our sponsors this week, Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Collide, and thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at adp.fm slash join,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will 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
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, the anti-Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to ♪ Are you accidental ♪ Podcasts so long
Coming to America
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, I lied to you. Oh gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel bad about it, but I lied to you for the sake of this moment on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A couple of episodes ago, after we went off the air, you asked me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I knew yet what we were doing for my kid’s school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after he finishes the elementary school here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I said no, that was a lie. I actually did know exactly what we were doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is why yesterday we bought a house on Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John congratulations. You mean the second one? I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jesus. Okay, so explain to me what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve built quite a life for ourselves out here at the beach. And since we came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out here full time for COVID and our Westchester house was where we were going to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back for, you know, whenever we moved back after COVID and whenever we moved back for schooling. Out here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is an elementary school, but it’s only an elementary school. And my kid is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to exceed the elementariness of the school. And so we were faced with, you know, do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we go back to Westchester this fall and take our house back from the spiders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have taken it over in the meantime? Or do we look at maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere else? And because we’ve built such a life for ourselves out here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we want it to be close because driving for, you know, it looks like Westchester and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fire Island are close to each other, but when you actually have to make that trip, not only is it not brief,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s terrible. It’s a terrible drive. It’s really grueling and it can greatly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vary in how long it takes. On a good day, it’s two hours. Whereas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island is full of communities that have really good school districts. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island, in many ways, I always call it the South of the North. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very Southern culturally in a lot of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m not sure if I’m offended, but I’m definitely confused.
⏹️ ▶️ John You try ordering like a Southerner at a deli and see how it goes for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guarantee you there’s more pickup trucks driving around Long Island than there are in the South. There’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pickup trucks driving around
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere. They’re not just in the South.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so anyway, there’s lots of delightful places on Long Island that are significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer. Like, it’s the order of 20 minutes instead of 2 hours. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve been looking for… I’ve been looking secretly for a house there. I didn’t want to tell you until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the show because I knew John would give me crap about it. me crap about it and that might be funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could have given you some suggestions for good areas, but I’m assuming you wanted to get someplace
⏹️ ▶️ John close to Fire Island or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, we wanted somewhere close and so I don’t think I want to get too specific, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we bought somewhere on the bottom of Long Island. It’s funny, we actually, there was a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us to potentially buy a place that was on a canal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the question came up of should I get a boat?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word, So you could like sail?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like that cat with the newspaper. The cat with the newspaper meme. I should buy a boat. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about this before on the show. It’s just a path between where we are now and Marco eventually getting a boat and we’re traveling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And everyone keeps telling me that and this was the clearest chance I had yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was the clear like, look, if you ever even think you might want a boat this is it. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to really seriously consider like should I get this house and get a boat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then just zip over whenever I want. And the thing is, because I have lived here for a few years, I know lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people with boats, and every single time they tell me about their boat, it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hell. And then, the best thing is, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I’m actually on someone else’s boat that’s not a ferry, I realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I like being on boats. I don’t think I like this even. Not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I not want to deal with the pain and the buttery of owning a boat, But even the activity of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco riding a boat, I don’t even like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can’t make a living as a bay man anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well done. Not on that down easter, Alexa, I tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so yeah, so we didn’t buy that house for lots of reasons, but that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I did have a clear opportunity to become a boatist and I chose not to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, what I would have said is, so you’re thinking of buying a house on a canal, so both of your houses will
⏹️ ▶️ John be extremely susceptible to hurricane damage?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. That also factored into the decision making, yes. But anyway, yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got a house yesterday. It needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some work, and I think this will provide a decent amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible topics for the slow news summer as we go through this. Because already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, because it needs a decent amount of work, we’re not gonna be able to move into it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit. Already, like, I am so glad I resolved my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation days earlier, because, you know, now, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we just close on the house. We walk in. This house has been vacant for some time, and it needs some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. So, like, we don’t have any- there’s nothing in it. We can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really move into it yet, because we’re gonna be doing a bunch of construction. So, for- it’s just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, like, mostly vacant as we do all this crap. And so I’m looking at things like, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we are gonna be doing construction while not living there, and so we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be 20 minutes away for a lot of the time, do I wanna put in some kind of basic cameras? Do I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart smoke alarms so I can learn if anything goes wrong? Stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then you need internet service for any of those things to work, really. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, what is the internet service? Can you get Fios?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gigabit Fios being installed in two weeks. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, as a prerequisite for any house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that. And yeah, so I got to go through. I can bring over a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of my Westchester stuff slowly, like once we can actually start moving stuff in. But all my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco networking gear there is all super old, ubiquity stuff. So I figure I might as well get the new Wi-Fi 6
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, might as well. What do you mean? Marco gonna Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have perfectly good
⏹️ ▶️ John network equipment. Rather than moving, it’s like, this is an opportunity to buy new equipment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like 802.11n. It’s not recent. I know. Oh, gosh. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network equipment’s really cheap now. Can’t you just buy new access points? I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but OK. It’s a modular system, Mark. I know. So the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ubiquiti system I have back there, I have this giant old switch, which is fine. It still works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this was before the Dream Machine era. They have the cloud key, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the router is a separate box. And the cloud key is this almost like the, it almost looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a PoE injector. Like it’s this thing that kind of just hangs off your rack and you gotta like stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it somewhere. There’s multiple pieces to it, like more parts than usual. And I had to order the Fios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yesterday and I’m looking like, I gotta get my own router there somehow. What router do I have lying around that I could bring there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the connection? And I was like, you know, it’s Prime. Let me see, how cheap is Eero right now? And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic Eero router was, normally is 200 bucks and yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during Prime whatever was 160 or 180 but the Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dream Router their new like all-in-one thing is only 200. Oh that’s really not bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No and that and that includes the Wi-Fi 6 built-in access point it includes the whole controller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that they have and it includes a built-in switch that also has four PoE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports. That’s a no-brainer like 200 bucks for all that and and I have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous version of that like the little like the blue cylinder thing that before they put the PoE ports and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m using that now here at the beach and it’s been great. So I’m like, all right, that I know this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a good setup and now, and you know, I know, I know the ubiquity system and I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is going to be a situation where like, you know, I’m going to have this thing in the garage where the cable comes in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I got, and then I’m going to like staple an ethernet cable along the roof or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get to the office on the other side of the house. And it’s somehow, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is going to be, this is going to be quite an ordeal getting this house worked on. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of various logistical reasons, I’m actually going to probably be using it as an office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the first few months of school because we won’t be able to move. It’s going to be a whole thing. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, is Adam going to live there when school begins, I’m assuming?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. We’re probably not going to be able to live in the house when school begins.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I will probably be driving him off the beach every day on the sand for the first couple of months
⏹️ ▶️ John a long drive long drive early in the morning when it gets darker and darker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s I mean that that parts fine I can deal with that But it’s not gonna be worth driving all the way back here to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all day and driving all the way back to school So I’ll probably just stay over there all day during the school day And I’ll like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use my gutted house as an office if it’s at all possible to
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll be make for some great equity podcast recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. Well, I’ll be I’ll be home by night time
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope we hope so. I mean we driving across the sand at night. Yeah. Hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t it’s fine the whales don’t have lights but you know you just use yours and it’s it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m always amused like when when I’m driving on the sand I’m like how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people’s commutes involve a non-trivial risk of hitting a whale that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a common thing you have to watch out for oh my word you have to look out for seals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the tracks and stuff it’s it’s really weird anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m gonna I’m actually gonna be a Long Islander for real this time. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh. You already were. I’m just, I’m kinda happy I beat John back, just for the bragging rights.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you still gotta, you already beat me back, cause Fire Island’s part of Long Island, as we know. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey uh. It’s not, it’s totally not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, yeah, the number of years I’ve spent there, I still have quite a bank that you need to catch up to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I keep going to your pizza place, I’m, I’m.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re eating all my pizza, that’s true. I am, yeah. You’re keeping my pizza place in business, I appreciate that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fine. You should go at
⏹️ ▶️ John Brent’s and Ali’s a couple times too, They need some love. It’s not too far away. Here’s the thing about Branchanelli. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s a different restaurant though, but if you order the pizza there, you’re like, but the pizza tastes the same. Why? And there’s like a family
⏹️ ▶️ John connection there, some kind of feuding thing, but it’s always fascinating that there’s two pizza places that have basically the
⏹️ ▶️ John same pizza. It’s really weird. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so yeah, there’s going to be a bunch of tech stories about this. I’m thinking like, you know, like I got to figure out the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network stuff. I got to figure out smart home stuff. Some of my smart home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff I will love to use again. Some of it I will not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use again. I actually, for just coincidence today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I spent a good part of today moving around some of my Logitech Circle View cameras, which are the HomeKit Secure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Video outdoor capable cameras. And they are not good. These are, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are outdoor cameras. I did not put an indoor camera outdoors. They are powered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a roughly maybe 10 foot cable with a USB-A plug on the end. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course USB-A plugs are not weatherproof. In fact they have tons of metal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re fully exposed so you have to put it in some kind of weatherproof housing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or tuck that inside somewhere to actually plug it into the power adapter or whatever. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had one of these that was in a part of the house that was 100% shielded from the the wind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the rain. It was under like a, this like, you know, this kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little tucked in area under the deck. This camera stopped working. And I turned around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happened? The other ones all work. I think I have four of them, like they all work. What happened to this one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I looked at the cable and it’s stuck to its power adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John eventually, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of got wiggled it out a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John How long do you have to live at the shore to learn how this works? It’s not exposed to the wind and the rain. It’s like the air is
⏹️ ▶️ John poison there for metal. Like it’s filled with salt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here, I’m gonna paste into our Slack group. What does USB power connector look like?
⏹️ ▶️ John Welcome to the seashore. That’s what, I mean, that’s what your bicycles look like. Like, unless it’s in a hermetically sealed
⏹️ ▶️ John container where no air from the seashore can get to it. Yeah, it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. Yeah, so outdoor cameras here. I think outdoor is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative term And this is definitely not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an outdoor, outdoors in other places. Maybe outdoors like in Arizona, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle of nowhere, in the middle of land with no humidity. Like yeah, it would work great there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not so much. Well, this is very exciting. Congratulations.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should post the address in our Slack so we can look at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, I completely and strongly agree with your desire to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vague about where it is. However, I am a little bit sad that the listeners won’t be able to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John heftily judging you and angrily judging you for whatever particular town
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have ended up in.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of good places. I’m looking at the map, but things within that distance of where he lives and far around plenty of good places
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. That’s, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, the thing is like in general, like Long Island has a lot of really good towns with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good public school systems. That’s what we were looking for. Like that’s, it’s kind of an embarrassment of Rick shows. Like there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of good choices. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John as much as I give it crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it depends on like what kind of lots of good choices. Like, do you like really dense population, like a cute little town? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John like things to be more spread out? How close do you want to be to a highway? Like there’s you have a wide
⏹️ ▶️ John variety of choices. How big a school do you want to go? Like you want your kids to go to a little school or a giant school. All
⏹️ ▶️ John those choices exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And all within pretty like I always joke like, you know, Westchester was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built, you know, all the rich people from the city moved to Westchester, built houses there before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We really had much of a strong car and highway culture and so Westchester
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was designed With the car really as an afterthought and pretty much everywhere you go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Westchester You are constantly bottlenecked by local traffic on little skinny roads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happen to be like the only way to get from here to there Long Island is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long out is the opposite of all of that and way cheaper in taxes
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t always that way It’s time for you to read the power broker Marco now that you have all this all this long on stuff I read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that being said Getting anywhere on Long Island and shopping and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go like if you have to like oh I got to go to like a Best Buy to pick up this thing today or whatever That kind of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is such a pain in the butt in Westchester on Long Island. It’s like oh, I got to go to Target They have this exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. I have to go get oh this target doesn’t have it It’s only took 20 minutes to get here I don’t know I’m not mad and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in another 10 minutes I can get to the next target and get it there. And everything is like easy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flat and there’s parking lots and everything is, no matter where you’re going on Long Island, it’s 20
⏹️ ▶️ John Back in the day though, in my day, there was no Target, there was no Walmart, there was no Kmart on the entire island. Can you
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine that the days before the sort of hegemony of giant big box retailers? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was the same parking lots, it was the same roads, it was the same shopping centers, but the stores that were there were not, there was
⏹️ ▶️ John zero Targets, zero Kmarts, I didn’t even go to one of those stores until I went away to college.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And look, obviously living in suburbia basically is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are certain downsides to that kind of culture and that kind of civic design for sure. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality is, modern American life requires a lot of that stuff and it is just so much easier on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island than it is in Westchester. So, and the roads are in way better condition and the taxes are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way lower. Property taxes are not lower, are they? Oh my god, it’s like a third.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Hmm, really? It’s a lot lower. Well, I guess it depends where you are in the island. Westchester must have horrendous property taxes. Yes, it sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a lot lower. And the funny thing is, the low islanders complain about them as if they’re super high,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like, oh, you have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They are pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John high on a national level. Well, yes. Like, look at where the property taxes are in Florida. Yeah, well.
⏹️ ▶️ John You live in a swamp, I get it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would pay a lot to not live in Florida. And I do!