545: My Butler Can’t Use It
27 Jul 2023This isn’t Tim.
Episode Description:
- 🗣️ HYPERCRITICAL SHIRTS ARE BACK, BABY 🗣️
- Pre-show: Marco mended something!
- Which one of us is which?
- Apple Vision Pro labs, developer kits, and more
- Casey’s phone call with App Review
- Rumor that the quad chip is canceled
- Follow-up:
- Large SSDs & Apple Silicon (via Matt Rigby)
- Threads is already tanking? (Apple News link)
- The Ubiquiti Dream Router is slow
- …but the Dream Machine Special Edition is sold out
- …and the Dream Wall is pretty cool, albeit ridiculous
- Long-term review of the Logitech Circle View & HomeKit Secure Video
- Correction: there are more HomeKit cameras
- Post-show: Casey’s troubleshooting adventures
Sponsored by:
- Notion: The connected workspace where better, faster work happens.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Dyson stick vacuums
- Hypercritical shirts!
- Who’s who? 🖼️
- Sponsor: ATP Membership
- Vision Pro labs, developer kits
- Sponsor: Notion
- Callsheet and App Review
- Quad M-chip rumor
- USB SSDs on M* Macs
- Threads update
- Ubiquiti Dream Router
- Logitech Circle View
- Ending theme
- Casey’s troubleshooting adventures
Dyson stick vacuums
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I fixed something today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mended something! I don’t know if you’ll get that reference. It’s a Jeremy Clarkson
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Oh, okay. Anyway, carry on. What did you fix?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It took three weeks, but I have fixed my stupid Dyson vacuum broken trigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was not aware that you had a Dyson vacuum with a broken trigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long story short, yes, I use Dyson vacuums. Of course I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Years ago, when it came time to buy a new vacuum, I did all the research and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked at the specs and I’m like, I got this giant, upright Miele vacuum that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has like massive suction power and is amazing to pull out all sorts of crap from rugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s super heavy and corded and therefore I hardly ever use it. Meanwhile, one year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff requested one of these little like cordless Dyson thingies, like the V7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 8 or 9 or whatever it was back then.
⏹️ ▶️ John which by the way, must have incredible profit margins because they are so expensive. I also have one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and before, before we go any further. So we have one of the not OG,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but an older corded, you know, upright Dyson vacuum with the ball on the bottom. I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got it at, um, from like, I don’t know, woot.com, you know, it was considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discounted. And I got to say, I’m not that impressed with it. So do you like the cordless one? Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corded I did not think was that great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also had an upright one and I didn’t like it and ditched it. But the cordless one, I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ John comes closer to justifying its insane price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I actually had that exact same heavily discounted Dyson stand up ball one from a million years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually broke in some way that I didn’t feel that it was worth fixing. Although I actually did fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a couple of times along the way there. Because one of the positives about Dyson is that while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not the best built things in the world, there are lots of service parts available. for not that, they aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that hard to get and they aren’t that expensive. So you can at least service them to some degree, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. But anyway, so the problem is, so I had this beautiful up, this big, upright,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy thing, and it was we just never used it. Like I would use it occasionally, but like, you know, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one else in the house would ever use. Everyone hated it. And I would never like bring it upstairs. It’s too heavy and all this stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, one year, Tiff requested one of the Dyson V whatever is for Christmas and everyone loved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And that’s all we ever used from that point forward. and the Miele still sits in the closet and never gets used. Problem is, they are built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappily in certain ways, and one of those ways is the little red trigger that you squeeze.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you search the internet for Dyson broken triggers, you’ll see these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horribly designed. All the pressure to hold that trigger against the battery terminals is this little thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piece of plastic that cracks very easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing about those triggers, though, one thing they did get right about the triggers is the effort to pull the trigger
⏹️ ▶️ John is very, very low because it would get fatiguing if you were holding it and you had to like hold the trigger and it was there was like
⏹️ ▶️ John Fighting you the whole time Incredibly weak springs in there. So it’s very easy to hold it down and I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe in the current versions of this They just got rid of the trigger entirely So they probably should have done because who wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to hold the thing down all the time I think it’s like a switch or something on the most recent one So mine hasn’t broke
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have always appreciated that they made the trigger really easy to pull But I also kind of wish
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t have a trigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, to answer your question, Casey, about how good they are, the problem is they’re not super good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at being vacuums. Like, they’re okay at being vacuums, but they’re really convenient. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t really matter that they’re not great vacuums. It matters that that’s the one you’re going to grab and use the most often. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same way, like, your phone is not a great camera, but it’s an okay camera, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always there, and you’re always going to use it, and you’re going to be using it way more than you use your better camera. You know, even though you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a better camera, it’s the same kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does have, the thing I’ll say for the Dyson handheld is they do have a lot of suction for their size and weight.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I’ve had a lot of handheld vacuums over the years, starting with the, you know, my parents’ Dustbuster, back when Dustbusters
⏹️ ▶️ John were a thing, and they came in beige. Those were terrible, and I’ve had other handheld ones over
⏹️ ▶️ John the years, and the Dyson handheld, like, you know, per unit mass, and like
⏹️ ▶️ John suction per unit mass is really good on it, as long as you keep it clean. Everything else about it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little cheap, and the battery dies pretty quickly, and they’re really expensive to replace. but still
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the best handheld
⏹️ ▶️ John has not made it to my good products list because I feel like it’s just too expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and they’re not amazing products. They’re just decent products, and the competition is worse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I know. Anyway, so my trigger broke, I had to replace it, and it became one of these projects like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, you order the replacement trigger, it gets here, so that’s four or five days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then I have the replacement, I start taking the vacuum apart based on YouTube videos that tell me how to take stuff apart,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I realize, oh, I don’t have a screwdriver that can reach down this long, skinny hole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get to this screw, like this deeply recessed screw. So now I gotta order some skinny screwdriver.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There goes another four days, five days. Then I finally get it in there. I finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get down, I get in there, I need another screwdriver. This time I need a Torx bit on the end of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long, skinny screwdriver. All right, four more days. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my word. Read ahead of the instructions, Marco. Find out which tools you’re gonna need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they’re all just YouTube videos. not good at documentation. Anyway, so then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I finally I finally have all the tools I need. I finally get to the trigger which by the way is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hilariously complicated and hostile to get to. Like it it’s like repairing a butterfly keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I there’s it’s just you have to take apart the entire thing and you’re really diving. You have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bend these terminals. Like it’s a ridiculous process. I finally get in there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put and I was smart. I bought a metal trigger so I wouldn’t break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go to put the metal trigger on it doesn’t fit without bending it because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you have to like bend and like snap it on and the moment I bend it even slightly to get it to get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fit it breaks oh it’s stupendous so order plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones another five days I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure I agree with the the actor in that sentence if there was one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I broke it Okay, I broke it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more accurate, but I was trying I’m like is there any way I can get this to somehow snap on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was it the wrong part? No, it was the right part, but you know, it’s one of those things You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is from Dyson. This is like, you know, Amazon randos. Oh, yeah. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, especially for the batteries I would not recommend buying the much cheaper ones from Amazon because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely I wouldn’t know but but a little plastic piece that Dyson misdesigned from the start No, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the Amazon ones have like they have like more plastic in the right areas Anyway, so finally, another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five days go by, I finally get my plastic ones. Today I finally put it back on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reassembled it and it works. And it took such a ridiculously long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was so not worth it, if I’m honest with you. I must have lost like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five hours to this project at least.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my word. Probably still worthy, because you don’t want to buy another one of those. They’re just too expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but the one I was repairing was like five years old. So it’s like, it wasn’t super new, but it’s like, it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not worth it. Anyway, even though I hate these things, they still are the ones I go for the most and I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most vacuuming in the house, So that’s, I guess that’s important.
Hypercritical shirts!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, there’s some exciting news.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not. It’s old news. I just want to mention it again. I’m still selling my shirts and since
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re only sold every five years, I made the sale extra extra long because I do not want to
⏹️ ▶️ John hear people say, Oh, I just missed the sale. The sales running. It’s running so long. I apologize to the people who are their shirts
⏹️ ▶️ John already. They’re like, when is my shirt coming? Like the sales not even over yet. It ends Saturday, August 12th. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you want a hypercritical shirt, I hope you’re hearing this before Saturday, August 12th.
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and like pull over to the side of the road and order it like don’t set it off to later because they’re not coming back for five
⏹️ ▶️ John years. I’m excited by the way that I think so it’s 2028 they’ll be back that means in 10 years after that it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be 2038 which is the 32 bit rollover of the Unix epoch I think. Oh my god. That’ll be a fun one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nerd. But anyway don’t wait if you want a shirt get one that’s what they’re here for for all the people who have these
⏹️ ▶️ John shirts and they’re wearing out or they didn’t get one last time and they want one. Hypercritical shirts go to hypercritical.co
⏹️ ▶️ John slash shirt before August If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re listening to this now, like John alluded to, please pull over to the side of the sidewalk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re in New York, to the side of the road if you’re almost anywhere else and go ahead, take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out your phone, hypercritical.co slash shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if you’re on one of those giant escalators for the London Underground? Like, do you have enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space to like squeeze over to the right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, don’t do it then because then you’re not going to notice when the top of the, or bottom of the escalator comes and you’re just going to like fall
⏹️ ▶️ John over and cause a big mess. Wait until you’re off the escalator and then step to the side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and plus, what side of the escalator do you stop on? Because they drive on the wrong side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the road. Do they also walk on the wrong side of the
⏹️ ▶️ John road? Yeah, there’s no way to tell there. It’s like tipping. There’s no way to tell what to do. It’s not true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, hypercritical.co slash shirt.
Who’s who?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a piece of follow-up from Wilson Martinez, and Wilson writes, I can’t figure out who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is who when listening. Can you say your names in the next podcast so I can put a name to a voice? Well, I’m Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m the normal one. And you can take that however you’d like. Marco, how would you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to introduce yourself? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m the jerk. John.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to say more. The whole point of this segment is you get to hear our voices. This is John. This is what my voice sounds like. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit like Kermit the Frog. I don’t think my voice sounds anything like the other two. I think we have very distinct voices, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you might not know. So if you’re wondering who’s John, that’s me. S.I.R. A.C. U.S.A. Syracuse. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John me. This is my voice.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re hearing
⏹️ ▶️ John my voice right now. See how much content I’m giving them? So they’ll know this is my voice, whereas they just heard Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John briefly and they’ve already forgotten what he sounds like. And Marco said like two words and then Casey laughed over him. So they don’t know who
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco is, but they know who I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ll figure out the rest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’ll be fine. My voice is my passport. Verify me. Who said that? That was Casey speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time we speak now, you have to say, hi, this is John, I’m speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you’re confusing people. Now they think you’re Tim. You have to go back and say you’re Casey. We don’t have a Tim. The reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I put this in the show notes is because I wanted like a chapter marker to send people because lots of people can’t distinguish our voices
⏹️ ▶️ John and we don’t introduce ourselves. And I apologize for that, but it’s just part of the show format. But from now on, if someone asks, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John save this in a little notes document and I’ll send it to them and they’ll be able to listen to this and they’ll hear me saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, this is John. this is what my voice sounds like. Sometimes I mumble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We couldn’t have done a better job of this to introduce people to who
⏹️ ▶️ John we are and our show. Who’s talking? I don’t recognize that voice. Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this is Marco. Over. Oh no, no, it’s happening again. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John every time we talk, it’s like IRC. We have to prefix it with our name. Marco colon.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Casey, no, I’m screwing it up now. Edit that out, Marco. We’re going to confuse people. Oh no. Oh my gosh. The funny thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, like, I don’t know, something like two years ago, I got a burr up my keister
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this. This is… Hi, this is Casey. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco two years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got a burr up my keister about this. Casey got a burr up his own keister about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you putting burrs up, you know, there? Just…
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, just bear with me. He got a burr. He didn’t say how it got there. It’s passive voice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I bet like ER doctors hear a lot of that. It got there. I don’t know how it got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shot, doc. Yeah. One in a million. Anyway, so I had put together a meet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your hosts page on the ATP website, which is there. It’s been there this whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the calls coming from inside the house. It is? Yes. ATP.FM slash hosts. And I put this together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a while ago. And the funny thing is, I put together a blurb for Marco and for John and myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think both of them tweaked the blurb that I gave them at least a little.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t tweet this. I would never leave a semi colon in my blurb.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we got to change it. It links to my Twitter handle. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this was years ago. Stick with me. Anyway, the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is… I’ve gotten taller since then. I don’t think you have. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, this is going so far off the rails, it’s ridiculous. But anyways, the funny thing to me though, is that Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you at least acknowledged the existence of this page, you know, two years ago, whatever it was, and then basically ignored it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is, you know, typical Marco fashion. That’s neither good nor bad. It’s just, you know, typical Marco. John, however, could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not let this thing that no other human has seen until today stand and triple the size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of his little blurb, making it far more involved than either of the two
⏹️ ▶️ John of us. If you’re going to tell people who you are, say something to distinguish who you are. Like, you may know me from such things
⏹️ ▶️ John as, you know, Troy McClure style. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, it probably should be updated. But what I was envisioning was not only would we have, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, this image of us and little blurbs about each of us, but I envisioned having, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, like Marco microphone review style, you know, snippets of us talking, like from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show, or perhaps even introducing ourselves or whatever. This has been such a train wreck that we cannot extract
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of this to use on this page.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s exactly correct for our show.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It should be a giant tainted record.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although it occurs to me that it sounds kind of… Introducing ourselves, that’s what they do on the earnings calls, you know? Yep, yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you’re doing this, hi, this is Tim, or whatever. This is not Tim, this is still John. Don’t be confused. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God. We’re doing a terrible job of this. This is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now don’t you appreciate the fact that we don’t introduce ourselves or refer to ourselves by name most of the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think at this point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve all stopped listening. Yeah, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John true. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what chapter markers are for, baby. If you already knew our voices, you already skipped this chapter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But then you missed out on this delightful, beautiful trainwreck.
⏹️ ▶️ John You missed out learning about atb.fm slash hosts, which is a terrible page that we need to either update or delete. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like now we can’t. Now we have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John leave it. No, it has to stay there. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John fix it. We’ll just get rid of the Twitter handles and put in our Mastodon handles and stuff. We’ll fix it. Thank you.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco get an ad-free version of the show. So, if you become a member today, and, well, really
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they aren’t relevant enough. It includes the title selection process at the end of the show that we always do. So it’s a
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Vision Pro labs, developer kits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Vision Pro Labs, Developer Kit, and Compatibility Evaluation Sign-up are live.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can ask to work with Apple, as it says in the URL, in order to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of these things. So they’re starting extremely soon. I forget exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when, but I think in the next week or so, at least the Cupertino ones are happening. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then there’s going to be labs in London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you can go in and use a Vision Pro, presumably with your app, and tweak it and work on it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so on. They can take your app and do a compatibility evaluation. So they run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, kind of like AppReview, kind of, sort of style. I mean, none of the three of us have any issues with AppReview, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s awesome. And they’ll tell you, hey, it’s a pile of garbage, or hey, there’s a video player here that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to look at, or whatever the case may be. Or maybe they’ll talk about copyright. And then finally, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apply to get a Vision Pro developer kit, which we should talk a a little bit about the details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to that as well here in a moment. But all of those things you can do right now. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that signups for the labs, at least, I believe those close very, very soon, like in the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of days, if I’m not mistaken. I have not yet signed up for any of this in no small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part because I have not done anything Vision Pro related like I have. I would like to do some of this. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am enthusiastic about the idea of trying the Vision Pro, but I have done literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing. And so I don’t know if I’m a particularly great candidate for any of these things. Perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I can ever get my head above sand or above water or whatever with regard to call sheet, then maybe I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apply for one if it’s not too late. But Marco, I assume you’ve applied for all the things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have actually applied only for the dev kit only because my actual app for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro is nowhere near ready because it is only my like the rewrite of my app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which at this point is, I would describe it as maybe 20% or 30%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. It’s really not anywhere close to shipping. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco applied for the dev kit kind of optimistically. And they have you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco explain in like 200 words or so why you want one and why you should have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, basically. It’s like a job application. And I even wrote in there, I’m like, look, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a visually compelling app. This is a a three column list view showing lists of podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes and it’s not like a super immersive experience. So if that’s what you’re looking for, no problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no hard feelings, I understand. However, what I’m looking for is basically, I wanna know how the audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system works, how background audio works, I wanna know how my audio engine, which is pretty low level,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interacts with the hardware, I wanna be able to play with different audio configurations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and options and things like that. So that’s why I want access to the hardware. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a super visually, you know, massive immersion kind of app. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think I’m going to get one in all likelihood. And frankly, I probably shouldn’t get one for all those reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if they have a fairly limited number of them, which it sounds like it’s gonna be the case, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they wanna only give it to like really high impact, visual kind of apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no way I should have one. But if they happen to want to give one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a podcast player that is showing a list of episodes you know, playback controls, I would love to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use one. Because I think it’s going to be very difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco develop good apps for this platform without actually having one. Because we don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how any of the controls or the mechanisms or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conventions actually feel and work and look and practice. Like right now, I’m doing a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone design work. doing you know cuz I’m in the middle of this rewrite plus I’m working on my iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 17 widgets for my my old code base that will I’m hopefully gonna have iOS 17 widgets ready shortly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so doing a lot of design work where like I’m laying out interfaces on the iPhone app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yes I have the simulator but on my desk right now are three iPhones because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of various sizes and ages and things because you have to feel it you have to try it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s funny actually I happen to have dug up what I believe is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first ever podcast appearance. Because they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chuck Joyner on Mac Power Users this past week, and I remember, I’m pretty sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his show that I did in April of 2010, I think, this was between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad’s announcement and its release. It was just kind of funny,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, listening back, I mean, first of all, it is not, I was not good on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show. I was first of all, I was like calling in from a phone. I sound terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I spoke extremely slowly for some reason. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what has changed. Maybe I’ve just had a lot of coffee in the intervening, you know, 13 years. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John New York working its magic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right, I guess. But anyway, I like, I re-listened to this. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting, like I was listening back at like, cause this was the time period where we were basically, we spent a big part of the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of talking about our expectations of what the iPad would be like. because again it was announced but it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available yet and I was able to develop for it like they released the SDK before we all had hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by the way and please don’t if you if you listen to this please know like I’m not proud of like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very dated in a number of ways I made a couple of assumptions about a male audience a few times that I feel really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad about now like there it you know please be kind but anyway it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a similar time period where we had this hardware announcement and they shut off the hardware but nobody had it yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we were all developing apps for it without having access to the hardware yet. The problem was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I was saying, like, we don’t know how this is going to feel in our hands. We don’t know how certain things will work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. And what I ended up shipping for Instapaper, which was the app I was using at the time, which is what the interview was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly about, what I ended up shipping for Instapaper’s first iPad app was just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stretched-out iPhone app. And it sucked. It was terrible. and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replaced it as quickly as possible with a total redesign. And I think, I fear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that what’s going to happen with Vision Pro is we’re all going to make these, you know, versions of our apps in the simulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between now and whenever we can get our hands on a real one, probably, you know, early next year, at the best case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then we’re going to actually get it and realize, oh, this is totally wrong. Because you can tell, like, when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing the iPhone work, I can do this great design in the simulator and the first time I run it on a device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can instantly tell, oh, that’s wrong, that’s too small, that’s too big, or that doesn’t work, or that doesn’t look right, or it doesn’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. You really need to use the hardware to really know how something feels,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t need to be something super flashy, or involved, or innovative to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit those walls, and to realize you’ve made a design mistake. It can be a very simple table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view app, and you can instantly know, oh, this doesn’t work right on the hardware. And with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this hardware in particular, this is even more different than when we were going from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from iPhone to iPad. Because at least iPhone to iPad, at least first of all, the interface looked and worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similarly to the iPhone. And it was still a touch screen. So it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far more similar than what we have now, going from literally anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Vision Pro, which is controlled totally differently, looks totally different, works totally different, the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment, everything about it is so different, down to the fundamentals of how you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interact with it. So I suspect this is going to be a platform where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really need the hardware to really design an app that’s worth using at all. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I applied to the developer kit. And I kind of feel bad that even if I get one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to have very little to show in my app for maybe six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s I think I think six months from now, I could probably have a working version with the new code base that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually has like a useful amount of features that could be released on its own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But between now and then, I’m not gonna have much to show for it. So that’s why I didn’t even apply for the labs yet, because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing to run yet. I didn’t apply for the, you know, please run my app and tell me if it’s broken test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flight thing because again, like I don’t I’m not even to that point yet. So anyway, I applied.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, assuming they may be possibly ever say yes, in the next, you know, three months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’ll give me time to actually figure out how I’m going to comply with the security requirements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, it’s before we talk about that, John, did you apply for any of these things? I presume not?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t have any Vision Pro apps. They’re working on none of my apps. It’s not relevant to my apps. I don’t have any ideas
⏹️ ▶️ John for Vision Pro apps. I’m not going to get one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right, so front of the show, James Thompson was tooting on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mastodon when this all happened. James said, needless to say, I applied to get the Vision Pro developer kit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Pcalc and probably more interesting Dice by Pcalc, which is a dice simulator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can use for, say, role-playing games or whatever. And then James continues, the security requirements the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kit safe read more like a PlayStation developer kit and unlike anything else I’ve seen with pre-release Apple hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, the Apple Silicon DTK. So this is a little bit long but I think it’s worth reading. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now Apple’s words as a part of the developer kit like signup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever. Apple says, you agree that all access to, usage of, and storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use of the developer kit will be in private secure workspace accessible only by you and your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey authorized developers, for example, fully enclosed with solid doors, floors, walls, and ceiling, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey locks that can be engaged when the developer kit is in use. You must ensure that unauthorized persons, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any family, friends, roommates, or household employees, household employees, my word, do not access,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey view, handle, or use the DK, the developer kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, my butler can’t use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. Very, very, very Silicon Valley, am I right? When in use, the DK should be in your positive control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your person or within your direct line of sight at all times. You must ensure Ensure that the DK is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passcode protected. Never leave the DK unattended. When not in use, turn off the DK and store it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in its locked Pelican case in a locked space that only you have access to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For example, a locked room or closet, a safe, or a locked drawer. The DK may not be moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from or taken away from its shipped-to address by you or your authorized developers without Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prior written consent. If you will be away from your workspace for more than 10 days, consult with your Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point of contact about how to keep the DK safe while you are away. You agree to restrict access to the DK
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you and your authorized developers and take all reasonable precautions to safeguard the DK from loss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or theft. I mean, if I get one, my in-home office
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not have a lock that has a key. Yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John need a new house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it has windows. Like, does that mean I can’t use it? Like what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the what? You just
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have solid doors, floors, walls, and ceiling and locks that keep me engaged when it’s not in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco use. I’m gonna go out and live in the city. But no one else is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowed to view it. So you can only use it when you have locked yourself in the room.
⏹️ ▶️ John right, right. I think pretty much zero people are going to fully comply with this, because it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John impossible, human nature-wise, to fully comply with this, even if you have the best of intentions, because it demands
⏹️ ▶️ John so much of you that’s out of the ordinary. And the normal human mind will rebel
⏹️ ▶️ John against the absurdity of these requirements for a product that has already been announced and tried by the
⏹️ ▶️ John press, although not us. It’s not like, you know, if before this was revealed, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John understand something like this, but it’s just impossible to comply with this. Like, unless you have a compliance officer there
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s like checking all the time, there’s no way, even with the best of intentions, you’re gonna, like, it requires,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just requires too much. So I’m not quite sure why, maybe this is just boilerplate they have for when they like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Unity has been working on stuff for like two years. So like before it was announced, I can imagine agreements like this
⏹️ ▶️ John being enforced in a big company. But this this developer kit thing is open to anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who wants to apply. So like individual developers who work from their home are going to get this device.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t comply with this. Like Unity might be able to because they’re a big company and they actually have compliance officers and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s millions of dollars online if they screw up or whatever. But in general, developers won’t. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John is interesting that they’re being so super cautious about it. But I do wonder if this is like leftover language from like the before times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, because this is this is the level of security that you would have if they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if they’re showing off some new hardware soon and they go to your company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple weeks ahead of time and like, here, try this new iPad, make your app for it, we’ll show it in the keynote. Like this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of security, although this is actually, when that has happened, it’s been even higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that usually they put it in some like tremendous enclosure so you can’t even really see what the device looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like outside of the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, or sometimes they’ll have you come to them to work on it in a place that they control, But
⏹️ ▶️ John all those situations that you’re describing involve companies and companies have people whose job it is to like comply
⏹️ ▶️ John with these things and not Get the company sued because companies have a lot of money and there’s contract like that all makes perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John sense But hey individual developer come throw your hat in the ring to sign up for this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll send you a developer kit Boy, this is overkill for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that being said I First of all, I fully expect that only companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have those kind of resources are likely to get developer kits I think everyone else is going to be told,
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe not you, but I think individuals
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco will get it. There’s enough individuals
⏹️ ▶️ John with interesting apps that Apple wants to have a developer kit. And I think they’re going to send it to them. I think there
⏹️ ▶️ John will be individuals who work out of their home who are going to get a DK.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I genuinely believe, I really, really do, that Underscore will end up with one of these as an example.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he should actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he should. So I would be surprised if there aren’t at least a handful of, you know, hashtag blessed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individuals that get them. But the thing that struck me about this is, again, I haven’t even applied,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think I tend to be a straight shooter. I tend to try not to break the rules, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would probably do a best effort on following these rules. But leaving all of this aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like all things being equal, if I got one of these, of course I’d be like, Aaron, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try this out. Why would she not? And it occurred to me as I was thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this. Well, now you’re never going to get one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, totally, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make her an authorized developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John You already said on a podcast where you identified yourself by name so they know which voice is which that
⏹️ ▶️ John you are not going to comply with this agreement so forget it Casey, you’re not getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. Yeah, it’s all your fault John. I was okay when they thought it was you. But anyways, it occurred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that there is every possibility for this thing to phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home and it’s aware presumably if, I don’t know if it’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retina scan or whatever the scan was, but to identify who’s using it, it hypothetically will know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if somebody else was, you know, put this thing on and has tried it. And is it going to phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home to Apple if you do that? It, oh, that’s what I was talking to my friend Brad about this. And, you know, Brad had pointed out, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, if somebody walks up to you, is it going to be like, oh, somebody was in the presence of this thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I mean? Like, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco sure. It’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-destruct on your face.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? Like, I don’t think Apple is quite that evil,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco vindictive, whatever. No, no, no, they’re not. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is hypothetically possible and that kind of creeps me out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, I’m sure in their terms, I’m sure it says something like they can do whatever they want, but no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t be worried about that. I’d be worried about, like, you know, disappointing dad. Like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of what I’d be worried about here, you know, because in many ways, it’s similar to, like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a couple of times in the past where I’ve been trusted with pre-release review hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That wasn’t at all the same thing as this. I mean, I mean, that was like, you know, hey, we have this MacBook Pro that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releasing in a week. We’ve already announced it. You know, here you can take one to review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a week. And that’s very different from, this is a brand new platform that is unlike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything we’ve ever shipped before and it isn’t shipping to the public for seven or eight months probably. Like that’s a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation, obviously. So I would expect this to have a lot of security. And the reality is, what I should probably do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to a lab and I’m sure I would have not that much trouble getting a slot in a lab. The problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I don’t want to fly all the way to California. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’ll do it if I have to, but certainly not yet. I mean, I would wait until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer to release time before I did that, but that’s a much larger thing for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they have it in New York, I’d be there. No question I’d be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. That’s the thing. I was very surprised that it was left coast or get the hell out. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have expected them to do something in New York somewhere. And I mean, I heard through the grapevine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there is an Apple establishment in New York, like where presumably this sort of thing could happen. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I was very, very surprised that, you know, they’re telling everyone to go to California
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought they had one of the, maybe just the compatibility labs in multiple cities across the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are, yeah. But the only one in the US is in California. Oh, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. Anyway, but yeah, this is quite amusing to me. And I mean, in the defense of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, like I understand what they’re going for here. And certainly I think if I were in their shoes, my approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be, let’s put the fear of God into all these people and make them think that they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be super strict with it, even if they really didn’t care. And all they cared about was not having a video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demo or anything like that. Don’t go to YouTube, don’t go to The Verge, or whoever, who
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I think this is like a butt covering for, because what Apple doesn’t want is someone like posting a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of, here’s what the developer kit looks like, right? You know, because that’ll be a whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t want like people tearing it down and doing the I fix it, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they don’t want you to say, well, I comply with your agreement, but someone sneakily took a picture. And it’s like, look, if you comply
⏹️ ▶️ John with our agreement, there’d be no way for someone to sneakily take a picture of it because our agreement is so airtight.
⏹️ ▶️ John So no matter what happens, it’s your fault. Which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what lawyers do. Yeah, exactly. Indeed. But the other thing too is like, you know, because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving all these statements assuming that it will be fairly hard to get developer access to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s assuming there’s a whole bunch of people trying. And that’s probably a safe assumption in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolute terms, but in relative terms, I think this platform, like I think Apple needs developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be interested in this platform a little harder than they normally have to push. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the iPhone, they don’t really have to push at all, we come to them. You know, with the other platforms, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to do a little bit of pushing because it’s less compelling or less like gotta have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for developers and I think the vision I think vision OS is gonna have a you know as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mentioned before I think it’s gonna have a pretty gradual start it’s not gonna have a lot of unit sales to start it’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna be easy to get for a lot of people for a while due to lots of things not least of which is the price of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also you know the manufacturing and country availability and stuff like that so it’s gonna be a while before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this platform really ramps up with developer interest it might be the case that But any of us who are interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in making apps for it, they might be like, yes, please, here. We don’t know. I guess we’ll find out. It remains to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be seen how competitive these developer resources actually are. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope there’s tons of people wanting to develop for this platform because frankly, I think it’s pretty cool. And I’m hoping to be a user of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this platform and I’m wanting to have a healthy software ecosystem. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard from a lot of people who are in the wait and see camp. As I mentioned in my Vision Pro Challenges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco segment a few weeks back, I don’t think a lot of big companies are going to jump on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco board quite yet. So it’s probably going to be largely down to independent enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and developers like Underscore and possibly me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see whatever John comes up with. And hopefully, Casey, you can port CallSheet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it and everything. But actually, I think it would be a pretty good use for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I do as well. It’s not lack of enthusiasm, it’s just lack of time. There’s only one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me and I’m trying to get the damn thing out the door, which we’ll talk about here in a minute. But yeah, I mean, I think call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet does make sense for it, but I can’t, well, maybe I could, but I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the kind that I can’t in good conscience apply for a developer kit before I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least have something to show for it. Even if Apple doesn’t necessarily care, I care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to have a little bit of my head around what all this means,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not there yet. But hopefully it will be soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it doesn’t really help that I have to rewrite all my widgets first, and also they redesigned all of watchOS, and like all this other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff I have to get to first, really, for this fall. But anyway, we’ll get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then a friend of the show, Steve Trout & Smith, also noted that the Vision Pro loan period is until 90
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days after the launch of the retail product in the United States. It would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make sense for Apple to extend that period in countries that have no retail launch of the Vision Pro, unless it expects developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with in-progress apps to either pause development or try to figure out how to import one from the US.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, really, honestly, at this point, like as I was saying earlier, I think if you’re, if you’re going to release an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app for this platform, you need to be trying it on hardware first, and if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no way to get one of these afterwards, I don’t see how you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue to maintain an app on this platform.
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Callsheet and App Review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was on vacation last week, as was John, which is why we recorded early.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for the first time ever, we actually timed them in parallel rather than serially. So I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very proud of John and myself. But nevertheless, that’s neither here nor there. So when we last left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our hero, that hero would be me. Hi, this is Casey. When we last left our hero,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had submitted a call sheet to the App Store with a build that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could release, but I knew there were a few fixes left to be done. The screenshots weren’t exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I wanted. I just wanted to get something across the finish line before I left for vacation. And I don’t think I made it clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that was the real push when we spoke about this last a couple of weeks ago, but I really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get something through app review before vacation. So at least I could go on vacation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not stressing about it, knowing, hey, I’ve made it across the finish line at least once. I have something I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release if I really wanted to, everything’s kosher. Everything’s good. As we discussed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and as John got extremely fired up about, which was very kind of both of you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get my back like that. But anyways, as we discussed last time, which was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two weeks ago, I got three different rejections. The first was they want an unclickable URL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the app description. Fine, I did that. Then I got a rejection for there being a video player in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that doesn’t have a video player. Fine, we clarified that. Then I got a rejection for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Disney and Pixar copyrighted material in the screenshots that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I provided to Apple, and I got rejected. And so I wrote Apple, because this was happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as close to real time as one could be with app review. They would send something within a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half an hour, 45 minutes, I would send something back. Within about an hour after that, they would send something back, and it was going back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In my ignorance, my naivete, I don’t know how to pronounce that word, you know what I’m thinking of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m a dope, I thought, hey, let’s just get on the phone. You call me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I can call you, or whatever. Let’s just get on the phone. Let’s hammer this out in like five, ten minutes. We’ll get it done. It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they said, sure, we’ll call you back in three to five business days. Well, three to five business days meant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that when I was on the beach in Cape Charles, I received a phone call from Apple. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ran to the dune, which was far away from all the people and the music and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re supposed to keep off the dunes, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, I ran to the cutout through the dune that you use to get to the beach. See,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget with whom I’m speaking. By the way, that was Marco, everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the beach. Oh, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m the chief interrupter. I don’t know if that’s true. It’s definitely true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I spoke with a gentleman who only identified himself as Richard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to God, he was incredibly kind and incredibly patient and incredibly chill.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I cannot, I probably shouldn’t state this publicly because it’s mildly embarrassing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I cannot remember having a phone call that I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, maybe not scared, nervous, worried,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a ball of emotion about. Like, my heart was pumping a mile a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In retrospect, I should have done a Apple watch like heartbeat do that. You know what I’m thinking of? And like, I actually read my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you get the alert? That’s like, Hey, your heart rate’s a little off.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s so true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to begin
⏹️ ▶️ John a workout? People are always doing those fake icons for different kinds of workouts.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should do a talking to app review workout. Someone work on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 100% true. So anyways, so hand, I mean, I cannot, I cannot tell you how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was not really moving and I was like mildly out of breath.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was so nervous for this phone call and truth be told, Richard was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so nice and so chill and I, based on his demeanor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alone, I really didn’t need to be this worked up. I had built this up in my head. I’ve been stressed about it through the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beginning of our vacation and I’m just freaking the F out, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he gets me on the phone and one of the first things he said, which kind of made me me chuckle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t remember the words verbatim, but as close as I can remember, he said, um, I just want to let you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that I have to tell you this call cannot be recorded and I do not consent to it being recorded,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I thought was quite funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s an interesting sentiment to express even to those that aren’t the exact words because cannot be recorded.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Richard, I’m not sure you’re right about that. I’m pretty sure it can
⏹️ ▶️ John and I register your lack of consent, but I happen to live in a state that requires only
⏹️ ▶️ John one of us to consent and I consent. So where are we now, Richard? But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good way to start that call. So I’m glad you didn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this call could be recorded. It probably shouldn’t. You probably should not record as
⏹️ ▶️ John far as you know, I’m not recording this, Richard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And if you recall, I did briefly look at the state laws or the Commonwealth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laws here in Virginia. And as far as I can tell, it is a single party consent Now, California
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not, if I remember correctly. So I don’t know how that would work out, but it does. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John can do whatever you want within the law, but then also Apple can just reject your app forever. So think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that. There’s that, too. I did not record it because I was standing on a beach. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he gets me on the phone and he basically says, I’ve taken a look at your situation. Your app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is good to go. Do you want to do you want me to release this one or do you want to send another bug fix through? What do you want to do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to pause you here, Casey, because one strain of feedback we got after the show where
⏹️ ▶️ John I was complaining about your rejection and how ridiculous it was, was from people with experience with
⏹️ ▶️ John copyright and dealing with IP law and ownership of stuff. And many of those people
⏹️ ▶️ John were super duper confident that we were a bunch of dummies and just didn’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John how copyright law worked. And I think all of us were fairly deferential saying we’re not lawyers, we don’t understand how copyright
⏹️ ▶️ John works, but one thing we do know, and what I tried to emphasize in that episode is, There are many
⏹️ ▶️ John apps like this on the App Store, and there is no way that all of those
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, some of which are made by individual developers like Casey, have gotten all the clearances
⏹️ ▶️ John that these supposed experts in copyright law think we need to get. And I think Richard saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh no, your app is fine, pretty firmly puts the decision in our camp saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were right. You don’t need contracts with every movie and television production company
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world to produce an app like Casey’s. In fact, Apple said it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and we had, I could look it up, I have my phone next to me, but I would say we had a five to 10 minute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conversation, but the TLDR, the short short of it was, it was fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were good to release as if I was good to release. And so I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no idea if I got through because of ATP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I got through because John Syracuse was upset and Marco Armin were upset.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really don’t think that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John genuinely don’t think it is. I think the app is fine. That’s the whole point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. There’s so many apps like this. If just a single human who understands anything about the App Store looked at it, they’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh yeah, there’s tons of apps like this. Did I do anything wrong? No? Then why are we stopping it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also I feel, oh, by the way, this is Marco. I feel like all that you need to know is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s now resolved. That’s it. Don’t dwell too much on why, just move on.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, what is it? Past performance has no, whatever, implications on future, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they tell you about the stock stuff. doesn’t mean that the app won’t get rejected for the exact same reason next time you submit it. That’s the magic of the App
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Green Yeah, that is the magic of the App Store. And I asked him a few things, not in a challenging way. Like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think at one point I said, hey, you know, for the future, should I have handled this differently? Like, did I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something wrong here? And I was very deferential. I was very, you know, I was trying to say in so many words,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, look, I don’t want to waste your time. I actually might have even said that to him. I don’t want to waste your time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jared Polin I think I know what you were trying to say, but in a very nice way. Exactly. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was trying to say… Which
⏹️ ▶️ John is, this whole process has been BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yes. I was trying to say this was a waste of everyone’s time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John especially mine. Yes, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What should I have done for the next time? And again, he was very kind, very chill. He said, no, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re good. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s all fine. And you should
⏹️ ▶️ John have said, and Richard, what do you think you should do for next time? Is there
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anything that you want to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about that maybe you could have done better?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s very funny. So anyway, so we were on the phone for five or 10 minutes, and he said, OK, how do you want to proceed? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to release this one? And it was all depending developer release once it gets through app review. But I said, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? No, I’d like to see this across the finish line. Would you go ahead and send it through, please? He said, absolutely, no problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll give you a call. It’ll probably be a couple hours. We’ll get it through. This was somewhere to the order of 1 o’clock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the afternoon Eastern time. 6 o’clock Eastern time comes around. The app still hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passed review. I know that it’s in review because you can see, you know, the state of things using App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connect and, you know, and there’s an app for that, I think also called App Store Connect. There’s a website, blah, blah, blah. And I see that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been in review for like a couple hours now. I am pooping my pants because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the very kind Richard had told me unequivocally, it’s good to go. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought I was good to go before I even sent it to review and it turns out I was wrong about that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the deal? And right around the time I’m like spiraling into the depths of despair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get a phone call from Apple. And it’s Richard. And he says, hey, you’re probably wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on. I said, yes, yes, I am. There’s something wrong on our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but we’re working on it and we’ll get it through. I promise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Are you sure? Yep, yep, yep. I’m totally sure. Would you like me to give me a call?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you like me to give you a call when it’s through? Yes, please. I’m really worried. He said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no worries. I will give you a call. And then it was actually, of course, of course it was like 10 minutes after that that it all went through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He gave me another call. All was good. So sitting in the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now, pending developer release is the very first release of Call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sheet, which I’m extremely excited for and I’m extremely thankful for. And actually, before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I talk release plans, I should back up a half step. I’m sorry. I should have reordered this in the show notes. We got a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback from lawyers and people with amateur lawyers saying, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John had mentioned a moment ago, oh, it’s absolutely copyright. Apple cannot accept anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. You’re absolutely 100% going to have to use stable diffusion to make fake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey poster art. I actually had somebody reach out to me. I wish I had their name in front of me. But they said, hey, I’m a producer on such and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such. And I am giving you permission to use this thing that I have the rights to, which is very kind. I really appreciate that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Only 700,000 more people you need to get agreements from, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. No, but I don’t want to besmirch this fellow. It was very kind of him to say that, genuinely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, a lot of people said, you know, of course this is never going to work. And a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other people said, oh, I’ve been through this. Here’s what you need to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so the most concise example of this, and I think most easy to understand, was Ibrahim Thameem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who wrote, I just wanted to suggest something that might help with the App Store rejection you talked about in the last episode of ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ATP. I spent a lot of time with the same exact issue with my app that used the Movie Database API.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What finally got them to accept the app was to include a note below in the review information section.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s weird, but this seems to be what they’re looking for. Since then, I’ve been able to get multiple similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps approved by providing this exact note. The note is as follows. As mentioned extensively in the app, all imagery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and metadata used in this app is from the MovieDB.org API. Therefore, any information regarding permission
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use the images or metadata, please refer to and then hit the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie database terms of use URL, which basically says, I am not a lawyer. Look,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything that’s been uploaded to us, as part of uploading it to us, we are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking those who are uploading it, do you have the rights to this? And they have attested yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if they have the rights to it, now we have the rights to it, because they’re granting us rights, and now we’re granting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you rights. So I think it’s kind of like Spider-Man pointing at himself sort of situation. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John works. But I like the fact that Ibrahim put the little FU at the beginning, which is like, as
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned extensively in the app, which you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey may or may not have actually looked at. Like, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s kind of like uploading a web browser and saying, just so you know, every web page this web browser
⏹️ ▶️ John loads is on the web. And that content is not part of our application.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And yet, Apple will
⏹️ ▶️ John still say, I don’t know. I could browse porn. Rejected. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of sort of, you no superstition about do this and they got my thing through. But the problem is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s such a random number generator, like app review. Like, is it, did I get through because of something that
⏹️ ▶️ John I did? Or did it get through just because I was gonna get through no matter what at that point? Like Richard said, Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t need to change anything about his app. He didn’t need to get agreements with every movie studio. He didn’t need to do anything. His app
⏹️ ▶️ John as is was just plain fine, which is what we all thought. Because again, there are apps that
⏹️ ▶️ John are very similar that are, I’ve been on the app store for years and years. And why wouldn’t Casey’s be fine?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all about, you know, it’s a bunch of humans and they make mistakes or they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afraid to, you know, step over a possible line or whatever else. And so as long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as this system is human-based, it’s going to have human problems. It’s gonna be inconsistent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s gonna be, you know, they’re gonna mess up sometimes. You’re gonna get, you know, crappy reviewers sometimes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the system wasn’t human-based, if it was AI-based or something, we would have different problems. We wouldn’t have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems. So, you know, it’s just part of being an iOS developer is you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta play the system. You have to know that, yeah, there’s occasional landmines you’re gonna step on. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really know how certain things are gonna go, and you kinda just build that into your expectations. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can rage, and we can fight against it, and we can say app review sucks, we can say we shouldn’t need to do this, et cetera. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, sometimes we need to fight that fight, but usually we just have to work within the system the way it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But see, here’s the thing with the system. You mentioned it being AI-powered. Like, oh, it could be worse, it could be like no humans involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we have the worst of both worlds. Like we have fallible humans, but also we don’t have the humanity that
⏹️ ▶️ John comes with them. Like the thing, what we would expect, maybe not in Casey’s case, but in other cases where
⏹️ ▶️ John people get angry about things is like, in actual human relationships between humans or even just
⏹️ ▶️ John relationships between companies, a thing called reputation exists. There is a level of trust
⏹️ ▶️ John that gets built up. Like Panic, the software developer Panic, should
⏹️ ▶️ John be treated differently by Apple than I am, or than Casey is. because they
⏹️ ▶️ John have such a long history of such high quality applications. There is trust built
⏹️ ▶️ John up from literal decades of working with this company and these same people. When humans relate
⏹️ ▶️ John to each other, it’s not all the same. So app review, everybody’s the same. Everyone’s supposedly treated the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s supposed to be fair. But what it doesn’t allow to happen is to like, let’s give panic the benefit of the doubt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s assume, you know, that they’re not secretly doing, like let’s not assume the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. Let’s give them a reviewer who actually looks at their app and knows that it doesn’t contain a video player. You know what I mean? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there should be different treatment. There is different treatment for Microsoft, Google, Adobe, you know, the big companies that are big competitors
⏹️ ▶️ John or that Apple needs or whatever. So that does exist as we’ve talked about, but I feel like the next level
⏹️ ▶️ John down, like we want, if it’s humans to humans, I want the advantages of it being a human power
⏹️ ▶️ John process in addition to the disadvantages. Now I just feel like we just get the disadvantages and there are no advantages.
⏹️ ▶️ John And whether that’s an advantage like, oh, Casey gets to talk, you know, because again, Casey assumed when he talked to a human,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’d be able to work it out, because at that point he’s getting higher bandwidth treatment and to Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John point earlier, wouldn’t it have been easier to skip all that time that we’ve wasted both of our time and energy
⏹️ ▶️ John before this five second phone call? This five second phone call, granted it’s not as scalable as you know, people after
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t be calling everybody on the phone or whatever, but if Apple had put the amount of effort they put into
⏹️ ▶️ John that phone call into one or two of those early reviews, this whole problem could have been avoided. So I still feel like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying that they have to be perfect, there’s always gonna be mistakes, but if it’s going to be human powered, I want
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the advantages of human review. And part of those advantages is the ability to build up
⏹️ ▶️ John trust and a reputation over time for good developers, which again, may not apply to Casey with his handful of apps that he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John put out, but the other
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco developers. Are you saying he’s a bad developer? No, I’m just saying like, you know, some developer,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s not panic, right? He’s not, he’s not Adobe, he’s not Microsoft. He’s not one of those giant companies. And he’s also not a small developer
⏹️ ▶️ John who has like decades and decades of, you know, he’s not underscore, you know what I mean? Like those types of relationships
⏹️ ▶️ John built up over time saying, has Underscore been sneaking bad stuff in there? Is he stealing people’s contacts, right? Is he
⏹️ ▶️ John making gambling apps for children? No, no, no, he’s not doing any of that. So he should have a higher
⏹️ ▶️ John level of trust than hey, we’ve never heard of this developer and I have no idea what this app is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but on the other hand though, I mean, look, again, the system has a lot of flaws, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also love the fact that everyone gets a similar level of BS. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, that there aren’t, I mean. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is, just for Adobe and Google and Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, you know, Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to break a certain rule much more than we can, but when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they break it. Well, Facebook gets sent in the other direction. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get extra scrutiny. Well, but like, when they break a rule, they still can’t release the app, but they aren’t kicked out of the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco program forever. Yeah, exactly. You know, there is some big company privilege for sure, and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been occasional special deals made. There was that rumor that seemed pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well backed that Netflix was not paying the 30% for some time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, as I’ve said in many years in the past, that’s appropriate. Apple should do that. It makes sense to do it. It
⏹️ ▶️ John would be dumb not to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Anyway, so the system is not perfect, but it is overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does work mostly the same for most people most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that is a little more comforting and it’s probably better than the alternative of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big companies get much better reviewers and then the rest of us get only Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first level reviewer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So I think the point that Ibrahim and a few other people have said, who have also used the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff from the movie database, is that they want, I’m putting a lot of words in a lot of people’s mouths
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, but it seems to me that the general gist of it is that Apple wants to be able to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look, this person or this company or whatever, at least on the surface, seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have some sort of rights to the content that they’re presenting. And by using the Movie Database API,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have granted me those rights. And presumably, on the ingestion side, like I was saying a minute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, whoever is uploading this stuff, they’re claiming to have these rights. Doesn’t mean they do, but at least they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey claiming to. So the Movie Database feels like, if I’m right or wrong, they’re in the clear. I’m not saying that’s factual. I’m just saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what they feel like. And then Apple can say, well, look, you know, this app developer says they got the rights
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from there. Don’t sue Apple, Disney. You know, sue either the Movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Database or this Casey List character, sue them. Again, maybe this is just a circumstantial. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was John that said that earlier. Hi, this is Casey. And maybe this doesn’t have anything to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. But enough people have said similar things that it makes me think that that might be factual.
⏹️ ▶️ John These all sound like good hacks for trying to get through those first reviewers that you got who just aren’t paying enough attention to your
⏹️ ▶️ John app. And you just need to find some way to find some words that their eyes are gonna fall across and go, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes me feel better about it. Because again, Richard didn’t say you need to add this statement. Richard didn’t say he
⏹️ ▶️ John this agreement. He didn’t say anything like that. He said, you’re good to go. Because he, I think, by the time he called you on the phone, understood
⏹️ ▶️ John what your app was about. As mentioned extensively in the app, as Iram said, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you should have mentioned it more extensively in your app. Maybe your launch screen should be like, powered by TMDB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, so what are the plans for launch? So as we record, what is it today? The 26th of July.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not quite ready to hit the Go button. But I think the plan is, and this is just between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, ATP listeners, I think the plan is on Monday the 7th of August.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the intention. Monday the 7th of August, the app will go live. My intention is in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next 24 to 48 hours, I am going to cut off the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey member-only perk of the test flight. But hand to God, this app is much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better because of all of the people that used it before it went to app review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m really appreciative of all the people that signed up to try it, that’s signed up at atp.family.join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m appreciative of all of you who have sent me feedback. Almost all of it was extremely useful and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely actionable. Some of it was not, but that’s how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s been surprisingly pleasurable for me to get all of this feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to work through problems that I didn’t see because I’m too close to it. And if I’m completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest, the reason I did all this originally was because I trying to juice ATP memberships.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it actually ended up working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice for me in the sense that it worked out nicely for call sheets. So I’m really thankful for it. I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you spent any time looking at the app and sending feedback and so on. But yeah, on Monday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey August 7, that is the plan is I plan to release then probably nine in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning Eastern, but we’ll talk about it when we get closer. Or maybe I’ll certainly be tooting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it on Mastodon. Maybe Maybe I’ll be threading it. We’ll talk about that potentially in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute. There are no precise app release times in the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there’s that too, that’s true. But anyways, but the idea is on Monday the 7th and genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really, really excited. I’m really scared, but I’m really excited. I hope the damn thing works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m really looking forward to it. So on Monday the 7th, that’s what’s gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It works and it’s gonna be great. You’ll see. I appreciate
Quad M-chip rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, continuing on the follow-up that will not end, and that’s in no small part my fault. Hi, this is Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On Upgrade468, an anonymous Apple engineer talked to the wrong podcast about Mac Pro stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What the hell is this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I know, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are, I have endured hours of Mac Pro bullshit. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean content. I have endured hours of it. And I, the hell with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you two. I don’t get the benefit of getting this feedback to lord over these two jerks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I quit. Everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco fired. You’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fired and I quit. Anyway, Upgrade 468, which other than this moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of my favorite podcasts, except right now. I hate it right now. But anyway, Upgrade 468,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an anonymous Apple engineer working on the GPU team said the following, I presume this was John that transcribed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. Thank you, John. The Apple engineer said, “‘The quad chip has been canned with no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plans to return. For context, we are actively developing what will presumably be the M5 chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the quad chip was only ever spec’d for the M1, and removed late in the project. There are no plans to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey create a quad chip through at least the M7 generation. My understanding is that the quad required too much effort for too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey small a market. Something interesting that may come in the M8 and future generations is called multi-die
⏹️ ▶️ Casey packaging. This allows the CPU and GPU parts of the chip to be fabricated on different dies and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey packaged together, much like how two Max chips make an Ultra. Ultra. With this design, it’s conceivable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we could have three, four, or five, or more GPU dies with one or two CPUs for a graphics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powerhouse or vice versa for CPU workstation that doesn’t need as much GPU grunt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, as far as I know, no such plans exist yet. John, you have the floor. So
⏹️ ▶️ John some of this is old information. We knew the quad was cam, we knew it was only planned for the M1, so on and so forth. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John new information is, oh, and by the way, we talked in the past episode so they could do the quad in the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John or generation or something. It’s like no this rumor and again I want to emphasize that Upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot and does not vouch for this anonymous thing because we get anonymous feedback they just you know this
⏹️ ▶️ John is what they say this is what they’re claiming so just I don’t want if this turns out not be true don’t blame Upgrade and don’t blame
⏹️ ▶️ John us it’s you know you just sometimes you get anonymous feedback but this is what this thing uh this person claims.
⏹️ ▶️ John They said not only is the quad not coming anytime soon there are zero plans for it up through
⏹️ ▶️ John the M7. This by the way shows you how long the timelines are on hardware. Stuff has to be planned out years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John in advance for this stuff. Plans can of course change, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John really shows what Apple is thinking, if this rumor is true, about the directions. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like, oh we couldn’t do the quad, it was too expensive, and you know, the M2 is not that different
⏹️ ▶️ John from the M1, but we’ll revisit this later. It’s more like, we couldn’t do the quad, it’s too expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, forget about the quad. Just forget about it we’re just gonna plan out our chips we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna go M3, M4, M5, M6, M7 we’ll just plan out our long five year,
⏹️ ▶️ John six year, ten year plan don’t even worry about the quad doesn’t need to be anywhere on there we don’t need it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The multi chip packaging thing we’ve talked about that back in the day when we were originally talking about the you know Jade 4C and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John and chiplet architectures in the city of chips and different ways to put multiple dies in the same package
⏹️ ▶️ John this is before we knew about the ultra really but yes Of course that is a conceivable approach, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if if this rumor is true if this anonymous, you know inside tip is true
⏹️ ▶️ John it Tells you what Apple thinks of the future of the Mac line and what
⏹️ ▶️ John it thinks is that it does not need to have anything More powerful than
⏹️ ▶️ John the ultra obviously, you know The m3 will be when the m3 ultra will be more powerful than 2 ultra and up
⏹️ ▶️ John to the m4 I’m fine, you know, they’ll get faster over time but it seems like they think that
⏹️ ▶️ John class of chip is all they’re going to need. What that says about the Mac Pro, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they keep shipping that big tower case or whether they don’t or whatever, is not that important unless you’re one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John people who really needs those PCI slots. But what this really says to me is,
⏹️ ▶️ John they think that if you’re doing something with a Mac right now, where you have to wait for the computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not going to do anything to help you other than give you one that is incrementally faster than you have now. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not, they could get more performance. Like there is more performance to be had. So in
⏹️ ▶️ John any realm, GPU or CPU, you could get a PC that has more GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, much bigger, you know, more CPU cores, much bigger GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would do your task faster, assuming it’s a cross-platform app or there’s some equivalent or whatever. But they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, if you get a Studio or a Mac Pro, which is basically the same, whatever speed that does it at,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you could get a PC that does the task twice as fast because it has twice as many cores, but we’re never
⏹️ ▶️ John going to sell a machine that’s like that. So if you sort of look at the PC market and you say,
⏹️ ▶️ John here is the sort of performance ceiling for CPU and GPU for personal computers within
⏹️ ▶️ John some reasonable price ceiling, Apple is always going to be a fairly significant step below
⏹️ ▶️ John that because they’re just not going to build anything that can compete with the high end because they’re saying we’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to build something that’s like a quad, which means they’re gonna build, the biggest thing they’re gonna build is an Ultra, and we
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of know the thermal envelope of the Ultra, the machine they put it in. This rumor is saying is basically, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, if we can’t fit it in the Mac Studio case, we’re not gonna make it. Because if we needed
⏹️ ▶️ John something bigger, I really don’t think they’re gonna make an Ultra that’s too big to fit in the Mac Studio case, for
⏹️ ▶️ John example, right? The M6 Ultra will fit in the Mac Studio case because that’s what that
⏹️ ▶️ John chip is designed for. But you could build something with more cores that would be faster that
⏹️ ▶️ John would fit in the Mac Pro case, and this rumor is saying Apple does not plan to do that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s fine for people who don’t really wait for their computers to do much of anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re currently waiting on your computer and you’re like, boy, I wish this could be faster. Yeah, next year it will be faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re like, but this could be twice as fast if I had twice as many CPU cores, Apple’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be, but we’re not going to make that machine for you. And that may be fine because, you know, most
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t need that. But it is disappointing on multiple levels. Obviously, it’s disappointing to me and
⏹️ ▶️ John like I think they should make that machine because it’s an exciting thing to pursue and so on and so forth But
⏹️ ▶️ John it does mean that a certain section of the market that continues to think well Maybe maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John next year they’ll make one and maybe this Mac Pro is just an interim step this rumor turns out to be true those people who don’t listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to this podcast probably are gonna be like as The years passing by huh? I guess Apple’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John Just not gonna do that anymore and they’ll be disappointed And I do wonder if we’re not just going through this
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle again that we’ve gone through a couple of times where Apple sort of loses interest in the Mac Pro Mac Pro level hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John and either stops making it or make some that’s disappointing and then pro users get angry and then Apple apologizes
⏹️ ▶️ John and tries to make a new one. Like, I don’t that’s not a healthy cycle, but I mean, the
⏹️ ▶️ John two alternatives alternatives are we were in that cycle again and we’re going to like there’s going to be some equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of the roundtable like five years from now. Right. Well, there’ll be some crisis and people are going to be complaining or there won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be that crisis and Apple is just stepping back from that market entirely. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John stepping back in that market entirely is, again, I think it’s a bad idea, but it’s also like, and not for the reasons you think,
⏹️ ▶️ John like setting aside GPUs, because I want to set that aside for a second, just CPU. The,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Mac Studio is small and there’s only so much CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John heat generation you can put in that case. Again, setting aside GPU, pretend the GPU is like
⏹️ ▶️ John as small as you could possibly make it. You can make and use more CPU cores for things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are highly parallel Maybe Apple doesn’t care about those things like, you know 3d rendering
⏹️ ▶️ John and blender or whatever whatever tests that you have that can actually spread across all the CPU cores Even
⏹️ ▶️ John something simple is compiling if you have a huge application. I imagine if Xcode is doing its job
⏹️ ▶️ John it could use 24 48 cores if you’re building some gigantic thing, maybe I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what the best examples of multi CPU things are but But those applications exist and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is basically saying, even though you can use more CPU cores, we’re not going to sell them to you. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and you can get them from Intel because Intel will sell you something with 56 cores right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you need a big case for it. And we do have a big case, but we’re not going to put any CPUs like that in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s always going to be disappointing and limiting the GPUs. Now getting to them
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually a separate issue because Apple could at any point in in the future say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, we’ve decided to bring back external GPU support. Whether it’s an Apple GPU or a third party, like that option
⏹️ ▶️ John is always there. Even if it’s just for compute or whatever, they can always do that. But the CPU thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually worse because you can’t add more CPU cores with a card. So as long as Apple continues to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing with card slots, the M5 generation, if people are complaining or they think there’s some market
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to go after, they can come back with the FPGA card, like the Afterburner, right? But they can also say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have an external GPU or some machine learning thing, like those slots
⏹️ ▶️ John exist, Apple can use them. There’s nothing about the lack of a quad that precludes that. What the lack of
⏹️ ▶️ John a quad kills is big multi-core CPUs because where are the CPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna come from? Now the whole idea of like being able to rebalance them, like let’s make one with lots of CPUs and few GPUs or
⏹️ ▶️ John vice versa, that’s cool and all, but if you have to fit it within the Mac Studio like
⏹️ ▶️ John thermal envelope, there’s only so much horse trading you can do there. Like, oh, I wanna have, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, five more CPU cores, but then I have to reduce my GPU. And like, you can never
⏹️ ▶️ John put it as much GPU as you want in there because there’s just not enough, you know, thermal headroom. And if you start
⏹️ ▶️ John pushing out the GPU for more CPU cores, you can’t push out all the GPU, you have to drive the
⏹️ ▶️ John display somehow. So I think that’s interesting. And I think if they actually use that technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should use it to make essentially the equivalent of the quad that’s not actually a quad. It
⏹️ ▶️ John would be an ultra, but there would be two much bigger ultras with different ratios of stuff. and then like a third party
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU or something like that. So anyway, we’ll see how this goes. Like, I don’t know how much credence to
⏹️ ▶️ John put in this rumor. It is pretty definitive saying that we’re just not gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John this for a long, long time. But boy, if there’s not, because there was pushback
⏹️ ▶️ John before, like why did they have the Mac round table? The Mac Pro was a big part of that. But part of what people
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted was make me a fast computer and make it expandable and quote unquote modular. Remember the big discussion
⏹️ ▶️ John we had, what the heck do they mean by modular? I think what I thought they meant by modular, I made it, said it as
⏹️ ▶️ John a joke, but also kind of serious, was they mean the monitor is not part of the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s one definition of modular.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple makes a modular computer, multiple modular computers, where the monitor is not part of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them is called the Mac Studio. That does fulfill one of the things that round table was about,
⏹️ ▶️ John because people were kind of pissed at like, I don’t want, iMac Pro is an amazing computer, but what if I don’t want the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to the computer part? Please make me a modular computer. And they did. I mean, they made the trash can
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was module two, but that was also a problem, right? That was before that. But the Mac Studio does
⏹️ ▶️ John fulfill a lot of that promise. But I do wonder if we’re not just headed for another collision of people saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John come on Apple, insert competitor name here, offers me an 87 core, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, CPU, and Nvidia is making this monster GPU that you can’t compete with, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you offer me nothing that can do anything like that and I have to leave your ecosystem and use PC
⏹️ ▶️ John instead because you don’t compete in that category anymore. Maybe Apple will say, fine, see ya, I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t sell that many of those anyway. But I do think that is probably a mistake. Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro uses a chip from a Mac. Granted a lower power chip from a Mac, but it does not use an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. So I really do think Apple should reconsider these plans. It doesn’t mean they need to make a quad because maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the wrong approach to making a Mac Pro caliber system on a chip or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe trying to put four of them together is too much. Maybe they want to revisit and say, we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the Ultra, and the extreme will be basically two things that
⏹️ ▶️ John are bigger than a Mac shoved together like the Ultra. You know what I mean? There are other potential options, but that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned in these plans either. But I’m just the idea guy, Apple, you gotta run with this. My idea
⏹️ ▶️ John is don’t do this, because totally giving up the high end is something that Apple has pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much never done. In every generation of Mac they’ve ever made, they’ve at least sorta
⏹️ ▶️ John kinda tried to be in the conversation on the day of release with their high-end computers to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the biggest, baddest PC can do, we can do some selected, some hand-picked
⏹️ ▶️ John set of things better. And I think it’s going to be harder and harder to be able to say that if they just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we are never gonna make anything that can’t fit in the studio case. So this is a disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor, and Apple should see me after class.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything you can do, I can do better. No, this was, it was surprising even to me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as I like to give you two a hard time about the Mac Pro, I mean, I do want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac Pro to exist. I think there’s something we said for Apple having a no holds barred,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just all out incredible computer. And I will sit here and debate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you, John, whether or not you need that computer, but nevertheless, I do think it should exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it is a bummer that they seem to be letting it go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it’ll be interesting to see how they market. Like, you know how they market? they’re always like, oh, they have some graphs they showed
⏹️ ▶️ John against like old Intel Macs and stuff like that. But they’ll, even the current graphs that they put against like, you know, PC GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John are mostly fantasy, but they’re just gonna have to stop doing that entirely because they’re just gonna be like, no, we’re never,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re never going to compete with that. But how can we, like, how can you compete on a, on a, you know, embarrassingly
⏹️ ▶️ John parallel CPU problem when you have half the number of CPU cores? Like no TSMC,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, fab advantage is going to let you compete with twice the number of CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores are more on a highly parallel thing. And the same thing with GPU. So it’s very disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I still, the more I think about this, the more I think that my passing theory from last episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like, this is really just, the Mac Studio is the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what we now know as the Mac Pro is just the Mac Studio in a PCI case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The more I think about it, the more I am comfortable with that theory.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that is what they’ve shipped, but it’s also saying that like, they’re not going to make what was previous.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac Pro is a slot in the lineup. And what you’re saying is, that slot doesn’t exist anymore. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a Mac Studio and Mac Studio with a backpack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sort of, except I would characterize it differently. Those are the facts, but I would say that’s actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only unsurprising, but mostly fine, in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at where high-end computing is these days, Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have much of a role in it anymore, because Apple doesn’t get along well with NVIDIA and it hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time. And when you look at what kind of roles do the Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Mac Pro not serve very well, most of that market is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the high-end GPU market. That’s the biggest area where they’re really underserving,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think. And I don’t think Apple has been a major player in high-end GPU computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some time now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but like it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. They keep making worse and worse machines and shooing the market, then
⏹️ ▶️ John of course they’re not gonna be a player. And then you use, we’ve talked about this before, then you use the fact that you’re not a player to say, well, we don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in that market because there’s not really a player there anyway. Like you can get out of any market by slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that to yourself. That’s true, and that is what they’ve done. However, I don’t think this Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing its GPU support is as big of a change as we initially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought simply because that market has already largely left them. And again, through their own doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, but that market was already mostly gone. So I think having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro exist as basically the PCI Express breakout box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Mac Studio and having the Mac Studio really be the current Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro for most other needs, I think not only is that clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case, but I think that’s fine. It’s not fine for everyone, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is fine for most of the market that the Mac Pro still had at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s why I mentioned at the beginning, like, do you in your work ever have to wait for the computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because some people that’s not true. Like you just don’t, people just don’t have to wait for the, and I’m not talking about like network, like this webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John is loading slow. Like, are you waiting for the local computer to grind through something using disk IO,
⏹️ ▶️ John using CPU or using GPU? And like 99% of Apple customers, especially in Apple Silicon, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not, they don’t wait for anything. Like they’re waiting for the network, but they’re not waiting for, oh, the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is grinding over this or the GPU. Maybe game playing, you could say I wish I had higher frame rates, but like you’re playing the game, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there are some people who are waiting for the computer and for them to be out there knowing that this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that takes them 15 minutes could take them seven right now, not next year on a computer, but right now it could take them
⏹️ ▶️ John seven because they could have doubled the CPU cores and their thing is using all the CPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and knowing that Apple like, quote unquote, could make that machine and Intel does, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna ship it to them is gonna be frustrating to those people. So we’re gonna be losing a new section of people, not the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John people who already left, not the people who wanted the stuff that Apple hasn’t offered in years and years, but the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much up to this point expected that Apple would be in contention with, you know, again, with
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU power mostly, and occasionally with GPU power, to do whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they wait on their computer doing. Now, a big part of that is video stuff where I feel like Apple still
⏹️ ▶️ John is in contention because they do have those dedicated units inside the SOCs for doing video.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think the video people will actually be, should be mostly happy, because I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John in a lot of those cases adding more of those video units would be useful to them, because they’re usually just like
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to encode one or maybe two videos at the same time, but not like 20 of them at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do think there’s another class of people who wait for their computer to finish stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John who are now are going to know that they could be waiting half as long because their thing is parallelizable. And that hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John been the case before. I try to think back, like, was there a time when Apple would just opt out completely? There
⏹️ ▶️ John have been dark times where they’ve done a poor job, but never has there been a time where they say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not even going to try to compete. And to be clear, this rumor doesn’t really say that because
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know what the M6 looks like. We’re just assuming it’s gonna have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John ratio of CPU, GPU, power units, efficiency cores as they currently do. We have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. So I don’t, you know, even if this isn’t true, you may be reading too much into it to think they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to compete at all, but it sure seems like that they subscribe to the idea that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you wait a little bit, but look, what are you going to do, switch to PC? so it’ll be fine.
USB SSDs on M* Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Matt Rigby writes, this is in response to Marco’s passing reference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to having trouble with writing or mounting external drives on USB. In our somewhat extensive testing and troubleshooting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at work, Apple Silicon Macs seem to have trouble with external USB mounted SSDs that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are larger than two terabytes. Specifically, we encounter these issues using docks that include the Asmodai
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ASM235 USB to SATA chipset. This unfortunately includes the very popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OWC drive dock and other iterations of the Blackmagic rack mount SATA dock among others.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We haven’t found any immediate solutions to this issue thus far, but we’ve had success with a variety of Nintendo level
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plasticky docks from StarTech that don’t utilize this chipset. So in short, Marco, you’re not alone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s there’s definitely some chipset driver or Apple Silicon weirdness out there. Sorry, I don’t have a solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my solution has just been try to rely less on USB connected drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are always connected. So that’s why that’s why I moved my time machine to Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the big one and it’s just, yeah. There’s something weird with Apple Silicon Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many USB drive enclosure type things or SSDs and I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gave up. Like I’m like, I can’t keep dealing with this. So just move that role
⏹️ ▶️ John to the network. I mean, you should check to see if you have this chip set thing and because like a lot of those enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ John are fairly cheap, like you can get an enclosure for like 20 or 30 bucks, you might wanna just try a couple of different enclosures and see if it
⏹️ ▶️ John solves the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is it’s intermittent. So it might take me months of troubleshooting to slowly figure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. And it’s just not worth the hassle.
Threads update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wall Street Journal writes that Threads is already losing its allure for users adding urgency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for new features. This was, I think, a couple of days ago now. But anyway, for a second week in a row,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the number of daily active users declined on Threads, falling to 13 million, down about 70% from a July 7 peak, according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to estimates from market intelligence firm SensorTower. The average time users spend on the iOS and Android apps has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also decreased to four minutes from 19 minutes. The average time spent for Android users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the US dropped to five minutes from a peak of 21 minutes on launch day, according to SimilarWeb,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a digital data and analytics company. Meta executives have said that they expected an eventual decline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the app gained more than 100 million signups within a week of its launching earlier this month. They have signaled that they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the fall off as worrisome and have said that they are working on additional features. Meta aims to increase the number of users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and improve the experience before trying to monetize the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that last sentence, because it’s like, oh, don’t worry, we’re adding features. So come back, they’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John really cool. and then we’re gonna crap it all up. Yep. We’re trying to monetize.
⏹️ ▶️ John So come back so we can put ads in your timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ John most fun things, I think I mentioned this when threads first came out, I said, obviously no, they didn’t have a chronological
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline, but it’s obviously why they needed algorithmic one because that’s the right choice for most users.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the developers of the application said, oh, don’t worry, chronological timeline is coming.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, but will I have to re-enable it every single time I launch the app? like I have to in Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John and they didn’t answer. Well, guess what the answer was? The answer was yes. You will have to re-enable
⏹️ ▶️ John it every time you launch the app because why would we remember that setting? Like, we
⏹️ ▶️ John want you to see the algorithmic timeline. And yeah, it’ll stay on the chronological one, but if the app gets pushed out of
⏹️ ▶️ John memory or you relaunch it or 24 hours pass or whatever, we decide, guess what? You’re back on the algorithmic
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline. Just manually select the chronological timeline every time. I don’t see what the problem is. Well, the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ John that shows that you hate me. So I don’t like this app. But yeah, so this is why,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the reasons I’m very glad that we picked the title for Marcos Ray’s 100 Million Tire Kickers, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they got all users real fast, but you have to do something to keep those users. And
⏹️ ▶️ John despite what the Wall Street Journal says, and it’s typical sort of, you know, financial business person thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to add features. I’m not sure adding features, lack of features is why people are
⏹️ ▶️ John leaving threads. Like they came in to kick the tires, And I think what makes people stay is
⏹️ ▶️ John a compelling experience as they say in business speak. And that has very little to do with the feature set. People,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, went to Twitter and continue to go to Twitter, building their user base up to whatever it currently
⏹️ ▶️ John is, several hundred million or whatever they’re down to now. But anyway, because of the experience on
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter and Twitter had like no features for a really long time. And granted the
⏹️ ▶️ John bar has been raised, but like it’s not the lack of features that’s making people leave. they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John leaving, one, because I feel like it’s a fragmented market, and two, they were just hopping in to check it
⏹️ ▶️ John out, and they’re not entirely sure if it’s a place where they’re gonna make a home or whatever, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John it fits into their life, and they’re not sure they are really enjoying it, or there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John there that’s making it sticky for them, and I think that has nothing to do with lack of features, lack of
⏹️ ▶️ John chronological timeline, lack of editing, any of that stuff, because lack of editing, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t stop Twitter from being, Twitter at its peak had no editing. And that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we complained about it but it didn’t stop Twitter from becoming super important. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of agree with the Meta executives are saying, like, we knew it would drop and it’s fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they can, you know, what they wanna do is build it back up. There’s gonna be a big burst of interest and then people are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John taper off but it’s not like they dropped to zero. And the advantage Facebook slash Meta has
⏹️ ▶️ John is they have the money and time and maybe the will to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this and build it up. Like it’s not gonna go, you know, the expectation that
⏹️ ▶️ John it would just say, and soon it will be 5 billion people, that’s unrealistic, but they have time to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a go of it. So I don’t think this is a doom and gloom story, but it does show how,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what those tire kickers thought. Tire kickers were, most of the tire kickers were not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John convinced by the experience of using threads, which mostly has to do with what was it like, Like, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there? What are you reading? Are your friends there? Is there interesting news there? Are you seeing celebrities?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you find the content compelling? Kind of like the same way that what made people stay on Netflix, it’s not the quality of the application
⏹️ ▶️ John or the video player. It was, do you like the shows? That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John would make people stay on threads or any sort of social media type service. And then once you
⏹️ ▶️ John all get there, then your thing will be filled with ads. Before
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to monetize the platform, before really making it just a miserable place to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I would like to do a temperature check for the three of us. Hi, this is Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is your threads usage these days? Because this happened for me and for John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least, it happened before vacation. And I was looking at it, you know, like once or twice a day before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vacation and then vacation happened and I don’t think I’ve opened it since. And I’m not saying that there’s anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong with threads. I’m not saying that it’s turned bad or anything like that, but I just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forgot about it. So I’m curious and perhaps we’ll start with my concurrent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vacationer, John, are you using threads at all? Are you up, down or about the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a couple of weeks ago?
⏹️ ▶️ John I still try to visit all the apps pretty regularly. Obviously, Mass.Online is my main one. I have seen, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so when threads came out, I saw a big decline in activity among the people that I follow on
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue Sky. Those are, all those qualifiers are important because my experience is not the same
⏹️ ▶️ John with other people’s experience, especially since I tend towards chronological timelines and not algorithmic ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Threads, where I previously didn’t even have a choice of a chronological timeline, I saw the threads
⏹️ ▶️ John activity drop off after the initial burst as well. And most of the activity I see in threads has
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing to do with anybody I follow because there’s an algorithmic timeline and they’re just throwing me random stuff in my face. And I think their algorithmic
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline does an okay job. It wasn’t totally off the wall of things I might be interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in. It was a reasonable mix of sort of mass market media stuff plus
⏹️ ▶️ John people that I could conceivably be interested in following or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will try the chronological timeline if I can remember to reselect it every freaking time I launch the app because they hate their users.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll see if that changes things. But I definitely saw less activity. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John less posts from the people I follow, even given the algorithm, less replies, less mentions,
⏹️ ▶️ John less long conversations, right? just, and I feel like that’s natural after the initial burst
⏹️ ▶️ John of activity, but the Mastodon experience, like the Mastodon had a big burst of activity
⏹️ ▶️ John and it kind of tapered down, but the level it tapered down to, my timeline on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John is more active and more interesting and more engaging to me than my timeline
⏹️ ▶️ John in any other service. But that’s just me. I feel like that is not necessarily true for other people. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John heard from a lot of people that they feel like Blue Sky is that for them, that blue sky is where the interesting conversations
⏹️ ▶️ John are happening. And even though there was a traffic decline when threads came out, still they feel like blue
⏹️ ▶️ John sky is like their anchor of where like the most interesting things are. And I bet that’s true of some people in threads too. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how this is going to shake out yet. I feel like threads did get an important headstart on
⏹️ ▶️ John being a mainstream thing. And certainly they still have way more than Mastodon and way more than blue sky, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John still invite only. But I still feel like it’s anybody’s game. And
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously I’m rooting for Mastodon to be like the slow and steady wins the race. Just, you know, no one can stop us
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s open source software and anybody can run a thing or whatever. But, oh, and on that front, Threads
⏹️ ▶️ John continues to claim that they’re gonna federate with ActivityPub. So if and when something happens in that
⏹️ ▶️ John area, I’m sure we’ll talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Marco, what are you doing with Threads?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, this is Marco, Marco Colon. So far, I am mostly forgetting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to open the app because I’ve just been working a lot on my Mac, which is what I am usually doing most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time in my adult life, and there is no Mac story yet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when, I think the most likely Mac story that they add is not gonna be some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice app like Ivory, it’s gonna be a web version of the phone app.
⏹️ ▶️ John they said that’s coming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, which is, I mean, Instagram has that. It’s not great. Even the phone app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is clunky because there’s not multiple account support. So if I wanna have, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my personal account and then I have an account for Overcast and we have an account for ATP. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac, I have Ivory always in four column view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have my personal timeline, then I have my personal mentions, then I have ATP mentions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I have Overcast mentions. So I’m keeping track of my personal account and my two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work accounts all the time and I’m able to quickly and easily post from each one, retweet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from one to the other or whatever the case may be. That’s how I’ve, that’s how I used Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a decade or whatever and this is how I now use Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco While Threads has way more people and in fact many of the people on Threads, as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned before, my, the community I have found on Mastodon is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful for iOS developers. It is not wonderful for diversity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. and there’s a lot of people who I would love to follow their content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mastodon is feeling increasingly more strongly like I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop Linux. It’s like there’s only this one subset of nerds that I’m finding here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again this is probably mostly on me in the sense that it’s hard to find people outside of your circles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the servers because it is less algorithmic and that and that’s again that’s I’m sure that’s a lot my fault but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like this is a chat room for developers and nerds and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine but there’s also other people in my life I want to hear from and read their stuff and interact with them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more people of way more variety that I want to follow are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posting on threads and I’m not there most of the time because I just I’m not browsing it on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone most of the time I’m at my Mac that’s where I consume things and I also don’t find the Threadz app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco particularly you know a good fit for me necessarily in the way it works and how it’s organized things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the way I get to threads is probably going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end up being via Federation if that ever happens. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’ve discussed, that’s not likely to be a great experience from either direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way it’s probably going to work is threads is going to be very much like Instagram for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram is an app that I can’t use on my Mac. And, well, I guess I could use a web interface, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks. So it’s an app I don’t use on my Mac because there’s no third party clients for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You know, it can’t fit into my workflow very well. I have multiple accounts, but I barely use them and it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to manage. And that’s an app that has a ton of people who I’d like to follow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I usually forget to check it. And I end up checking Instagram maybe once every week or two. And there’s a whole pile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting for me when I get there. I dip in, check a little bit, and then I switch apps at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I forget about it for the next two weeks. That’s probably how threads is going to go for me personally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the foreseeable future because threads is not where I am. It is on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great. I’ll check it sometime, but it’s not on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I totally agree with you. I do look at Instagram probably more than I should,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I certainly don’t look at it near as much as I look at Mastodon now or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter in the past. In no small part, that’s because most of the day I’m at my computer and I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use a native app to look at these things. And there isn’t one for Instagram, there isn’t one for threads, and there is one for Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s great. So I hear you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the fragmentation is a problem for like the, you know, we’re all looking for a quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Twitter replacement or whatever. Like Twitter had everybody. Twitter had the celebrities, Twitter had the tech nerds, Twitter had,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because it was the only thing. They got critical mass and there was no real competing services.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now there’s just, there’s even celebrity fragmentation. Like so Mastodon has the nerd
⏹️ ▶️ John adjacent celebrities. So like a sci-fi author, like a famous sci-fi author is gonna be on Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like Tom Cruise is not gonna be on Mastodon. Julie Roberts, whatever, I respect random movie stars. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the big stars who are not nerd adjacent in any way, not on Mastodon right now. Threads
⏹️ ▶️ John has a bunch of celebrities, but those nerd celebrities who are on Mastodon primarily
⏹️ ▶️ John use Mastodon, even if they’re also on Threads. So if they’re having an
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting conversation, it’s probably gonna happen on Mastodon, but only because they’re nerd adjacent, but then they
⏹️ ▶️ John miss out on conversing with the rock and roll stars who are on threads or on Instagram or are still on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so even just, even the mainstream is fragmented. Like obviously the nerds are fragmented.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it, you know, it makes lots of historical sense why all the nerds are on Macedon and everything like that. And I am glad that I have a nerd community
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but I do miss the feeling like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but either two things, either the mainstream is at the same place where I am, which is not currently the
⏹️ ▶️ John case, or at least I know where to go to find the mainstream. And I feel like when I go on threads, I’m not even getting all
⏹️ ▶️ John the mainstream because I see the people who are still on Twitter. I see the people who are primarily on
⏹️ ▶️ John MassDON, even though they’re technically on threads. And this, I think is related to why
⏹️ ▶️ John people might’ve checked out threads and not be that interested because they see the mainstream fragmentation too. They’re like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John this isn’t as hopping as Twitter was. Maybe if they find their little subset, like a lot of people have found
⏹️ ▶️ John like a good like niche community on Blue Sky, but Blue Sky doesn’t have all the mainstream celebrity,
⏹️ ▶️ John important famous people, politicians, companies, like no one service has that anymore. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that, like, oh, if you go here, Delta Airlines is here, and that funny Comcast
⏹️ ▶️ John account, and your favorite celebrity, and your favorite sports star, there is no one place
⏹️ ▶️ John where all of them are. And having them all in one place makes that really compelling to the common
⏹️ ▶️ John person. And so now I can feel for someone who’s like, no, I tried it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John none of these places are like Twitter used to be. And Twitter’s also not like it used to be. So I guess I’ll go
⏹️ ▶️ John look at TikTok. That’s where we are right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see that being resolved anytime soon. I think we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be in this weird fragmented world for the foreseeable future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I tend to agree with that as well.
Ubiquiti Dream Router
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, do you want to talk to us about the Ubiquiti Dream Router and why it’s a piece of garbage?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So I mentioned the last of the end of last show, this is Marco. I mentioned that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, that we, we are, you know, we purchased a new house and that I’ll be setting up, you know, networking gear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff in it. Uh, and I was looking at Ubiquiti’s new gear. I mentioned in passing, I ordered the Dream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Router and I couldn’t believe it was only 200 bucks and it seemed like the successor to the Dream Machine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was their previous cylinder, which I’m literally talking to you through right now. Many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrote in to point out that the Dream Router, while it looks just like the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cylindrical Dream Machine, is actually like a cut-down model. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so inexpensive. And in particular, it is apparently very slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to process things and that its slow processor limits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its throughput on an internet connection to roughly 700 megabits. and I mentioned I’m getting gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fiber so everyone wrote in to tell me I should not use the Dream Router it is too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow and my gigabit fiber is it will oversaturated and I won’t be able to get my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full connection speed and whatever else first of all thank you everyone for telling me that I didn’t I didn’t know any of that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great to know and I will try to return it although their website is currently broken for returns tonight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’ll do I’ll figure that out some other time I love ubiquity stuff but the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes out of stock constantly because everyone loves ubiquity stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing I was looking at instead of the Dream Router is the Dream Machine Special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Edition. This is a 1U rack mount. It includes a PoE switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Dream Router. Doesn’t have an AP, but I get separate APs usually, so less important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Has a hard drive bay in case I wanna use security cameras. I’ll get to that in a little bit. But I was looking at the Dream Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Special Edition as the alternative here. When I was looking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was in stock. And then when everyone wrote in to tell me I shouldn’t get the Dream Rider, I thought, oh great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll just go order the other one I was looking at. Sold out, and it’s remained sold out for the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week and a half since we last recorded. Also, during that time, the Dream Rider itself went out of stock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool. I believe it came back in stock today, if anybody wants them. But this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with buying Ubiquiti gear. They are frequently out of stock. Just sold out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you don’t know when they’re coming back in. You can sign up for the notices and they might come back in stock the next day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the next month or never And there are you can go like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can go on Amazon or eBay and pay some you know Scalper vendor some premium over ubiquity’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prices, which you big we stuff is usually pretty affordable It’s part of the reason they got so popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can go pay like Cisco level prices for you big week here from some retailer retailer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere. He’s ripping you off off. But it’s just it’s very frustrating when when you need ubiquity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gear now now now and you go to get it and it’s just sold out. But you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is you know ultimately that the reason they have this problem is that they are very desirable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know they you know good for them. I’ve I’ve used their stuff for a while and I think they’ve earned their success and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a reason why I keep buying their stuff. It’s really good and it isn’t perfect. Occasionally there’s a dud but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know usually their their track record is very high and it’s and for what you’re getting, it’s usually pretty,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty remarkably affordable. So all it is to say don’t buy the dream router turns out I’m going to try to return
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine and try to get myself a dream machine special edition if I can get it in time, but I probably can’t so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably going to be sticking with the dream router for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you see their their like Powerwall thing? I forget what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco actually yes, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dream wall. That’s $1000. Otherwise, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey cool, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, The Dream Wall is basically like, it’s similar to the Dream Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Special Edition, but it’s this like wall hanging thing that weighs like 25
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pounds, hangs off your wall, and has a built in, I believe an 18 port PoE switch? It has a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PoE switch built in, and it’s $1000. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, well, I see what this is for. I don’t need 18
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports even in any switch for the new house. I think I’m going to need something like six or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight ports. I’m not, I’m not doing like every room in the house. So, uh, I’m just doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of, you know, key areas that I’ve that I learned are necessary and that’s about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, the, the dream machine special edition, we find if I can get ahold of one and until then I’ll use the dream router
Logitech Circle View
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so Marco, you seem to be deep into home security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe home automation or I’m not even sure what’s going on, but you have some thoughts about Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CircleView cameras, HomeKit Secure Video and more. What’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. So, as mentioned, I have cameras on the outside of my house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for various reasons and I’ve used various ones over the years. So I have the… time-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my oldest cameras in use are an original pair of Nest Outdoor cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are probably something like seven years old by now. They’re fine. And then I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have used the Logitech Circle View HomeKit Secure Video cameras for about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a year on those. HomeKit Secure Video was announced a few years ago or two years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that. Still to this day, there’s only, as far as I can tell, two lines of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras that work with HomeKit Secure Video, I think it’s only the Logitech Circle View
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have a doorbell version and the one I use, the kind of standalone one, and there’s an Eve,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a couple of Eve cameras, one indoor and one like hardwired outdoor one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s it, as far as I can find. There are, as far as I can tell, there are no other HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Secure Video capable cameras. The appeal of HomeKit Secure Video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it sounds amazing on paper. And so I kind of wanted to give this like update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one year in of having this be like my primary video system for this house. Like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I’ve been using it and how it’s been performing. So the Circle View cameras, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively affordable. I think about $150, $160 each, something like that. They are outdoor or indoor capable. They have 180 degree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field of view, which is a blessing and a curse. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to see detail very far away with that kind of perspective. But you know, you can put them pretty much anywhere and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reasonably wide view of whatever you need to see. The selling points of HomeKit Secure Video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are that number one you don’t need to pay like an additional cloud service like most of these cameras like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nest and everything else like you usually have to pay some kind of cloud storage service fee, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new subscription every month, you got to pay 20 bucks a month for Nest Protect Secure, you know whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of stuff. HomeKit Secure Video just uses your iCloud storage and the number of cameras you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have on it is related to whatever tier of iCloud storage you have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the highest tier of iCloud storage and I believe that entitles me to quote unlimited cameras I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lower tier I think you get like two or three or four or something like that. But HomeKit Secure Video is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continuous recording. It only records motion events. So if you want to look back and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oh you know what were the leaves like you know 18 hours ago unless there was a car driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by or a person walking by you’re not going to see that. It’s it only records motion events and like the few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds around them. So that’s that’s kind of kind of how they get around not having too much data being recorded.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By comparison, like my old Nest Cams were continuous 24-7 with I think like a week or a month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retention. The upside of that is you have a huge record of everything that happens around you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Downside of that is it uses a ton of data. Like the continuous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming of that data to the cloud, to some data center in Google, uses a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ton of your ISP local bandwidth, so you need a pretty good connection. You need no data cap really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of the main differences between those two systems. In terms of actually using HomeKit Secure Video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, the other advantage is that it does most or all of its processing locally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So any kind of like object recognition, any kind of intelligence, it’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that locally on your local network. It does require you to have some device being a HomeKit hub like an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV or a HomePod, but it does it locally. The great thing about HomeKit Secure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Video is that when things happen, they are fast. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one thing I absolutely love about it. And we have one on our,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the area where we park our bikes here. And every time someone comes home, they usually come home on a bike.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When Adam’s coming home from school, I know because I get the tap tap on my watch, and I look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it says bike camera, and I know like, you know, 15 seconds later, he’s gonna walk up to the door, and boom, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he is. And it’s so fast. And I know too, like when I go down there to get my bike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or when I show up, I pull into the bike area and I feel the vibration on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my wrist like two seconds later. It’s that fast, it’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s also great about the HomeKit video is that it is integrated with iOS very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. So when I get that tap tap on my wrist, I can look at my watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and right there on my watch, it’ll show a little thumbnail. If I look at it on my phone and I long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press notification, just right there in the long press view for notification, I get a little, I get the video clip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the motion event right there. It plays right there. I don’t even have to open any app or anything. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice in the Apple ecosystem to use HomeKit Secure Video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the downsides to this system. The accuracy of the intelligence, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it recognize things properly? Does it have false positives, does it have false negatives? I have found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the accuracy is usually pretty good. It usually identifies people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when there actually are people there. Although sometimes it thinks a moth flying around at night is a person. I don’t know why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, it’s pretty good recognition. It is way better than my old Nest Cams
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were. I don’t have new Nest Cams to test. I don’t know how good the new ones are. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better than the old ones are. Again, it’s way faster to recognize than the old ones are too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I love those notifications with the video clips. That is great. The problem is the Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Circle View Camera is really mediocre. It drops the connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. It’ll have long spans where it disconnects. And HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helpfully alerts you when your camera disconnects and reconnects. So I see this happening all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day long. And I have, I should point out, I have I think four of these in use on the network.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The one in the bike area is super reliable. All the other ones are not. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know why, I don’t, frankly, I don’t really care why, they’re just, they’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you search the internet for solutions on this problem, you see people all reporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing, that their Logitech Circle View cameras are super unreliable and they drop off the network all the time or they disconnect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else. Everyone has solutions that basically amount to turn it off and turn it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again and it works for a while. Like if you reset the network in some way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you reset your router, It’ll force them all to disconnect. When you turn it back on, they’ll stay connected for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few days and then they’ll start flaking on and off again. Uh, people say, Oh, I signed a dynamic or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a static IP. Did that no, no change. Uh, put it on 2.4 gigahertz. Did that no change? Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these different things you can do to try to try to debug a glitchy wifi device. I’ve done them all. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a year to do them all. The logitech circle view cameras are just super flaky,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super mediocre. I will have spans of hours or days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where a camera will just say no response. Something could be happening, like somebody could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stealing my bike. So I feel like it kind of defeats the purpose of cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if a lot of the time when you go to look at them, suppose we’re away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a storm comes through. I want to know what’s going on around my house and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe on my house or usually if a storm I’ll put a camera in the house as well when we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave so I can check and see like is there water coming in? You know that’s important stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these cameras are just so unreliable It’s really hard to depend on them for anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I’m torn here because when it works. It’s really nice, and I love all those integration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features I love how incredibly fast it is when it’s working, but these cameras are garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And no one except Eve makes any other ones. And Eve only has one outdoor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capable one. And it requires it to be like hardwired by an electrician. You can’t just like plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into an outlet. It requires like direct wiring and it has to mount onto a box. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually have one sitting here. I’ve had it for like six months and I haven’t had an electrician
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to come out and install it yet. So like, it’s just sitting here waiting. But it’s like, that’s not gonna work for most of my use of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these cameras. Like, you know, I obviously I use a lot of these around and anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s basically no options except the Logitech and there’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eve cam like and this I feel like this is a problem with so much home kit stuff. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great system, but Apple doesn’t make the equipment and they outsource it to someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they make the equipment and it’s maybe it’s okay. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s buggy. Who knows? And that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of defeats the purpose of the whole system because like it undermines the quality of the whole ecosystem when we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have good options. So anyway, all this is to number one, kind of warn everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t recommend the Logitech Circle View, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco therefore most of HomeKit Secure Video, because it is really flaky and really unreliable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a shame. The other thing is, I’m curious if anyone has had experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with another system that’s really good, that actually is reliable. In particular, I’m curious,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, is the modern Nest camera good? I’ve only seemingly updated it once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since I’ve gotten the other ones like seven years ago. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like- It’s not Nest anymore. So I have both of them. I have the old Nest and I have a new post-Nest,
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever it’s called now, Google Home. Yeah, the one that uses Google Home, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, my
⏹️ ▶️ John indoor one, so both of these don’t have the speed thing that you’re talking about. They
⏹️ ▶️ John are network-based and they’re not speedy too. They’re pretty speedy with
⏹️ ▶️ John the, hey, something has happened, but when you wanna go look at it, It’s really dependent on your network connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, I don’t think it’s gonna be as instant as you thought it would be. The My Outdoor one, I think I’ve had for about a year
⏹️ ▶️ John now. So far, so good. I mapped out its
⏹️ ▶️ John little area to ignore like passing cars, but tell me about like, you know, things that are happening on my property
⏹️ ▶️ John with the little, little mappy, you know, those things that have where you just mask out areas. That’s been pretty reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, it’s recognition. It has face recognition so it can know who people are. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it also does like on its own, it can say vehicle, animal, person. All that is pretty much dead
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Like when a rabbit goes by, it knows it’s an animal. When a person walks by or walks up the driveway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they know it’s a person. And when a vehicle pulls into the driveway, like it’s pretty good about that. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like the interface to the data that it has collected is fairly impoverished. It is continuous
⏹️ ▶️ John recording. And I do have all this footage that I can go through, but the ability to navigate it isn’t great. Like I do
⏹️ ▶️ John wish it was, in some respects, I wish it was local, like you were saying, like, well, not that iCloud is local
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but processing local would be great, and storage local, like on Synology or QNAP or the other ones would be great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the other hand, I love that everything is remote, so that if someone hits the camera with a baseball
⏹️ ▶️ John bat, I’ll still have footage of them. You know, or like if the house burns down, I’ll have footage before the house burns,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. It is nice that it’s continuous recording to a cloud thing that, yes, I pay for, but the annual
⏹️ ▶️ John fee for me to have my two cameras is not too onerous, and it’s basically 24-7 continuous recording
⏹️ ▶️ John inside and outside of my house, which I found very valuable, even just to see what the dog is up to, you know what I mean? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I can compare because the indoor ones also have face recognition and supposedly know who everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John is. And it’s pretty good, it tells me dog barking, Alex has entered the kitchen,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like it knows people, it knows where they are, it knows what’s going on when, you know, in the house when we’re not home.
⏹️ ▶️ John But sometimes it’s like, unknown person in the living room, like, oh, come on, it’s just Alex again. It’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John not unknown. And the indoor ones do that more than the outdoor ones do. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they have come a long way since, and I think my indoor one is even newer than yours. The outdoor one seems to do a
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good job. And I like the strategy of the outdoor one to be a tiny standalone computer
⏹️ ▶️ John on its own. It makes them bulky and expensive and you gotta pay for the service, but I don’t have a home hub
⏹️ ▶️ John to worry about. It doesn’t interact with iCloud in any way. And I’m pretty sure, I don’t have an Apple Watch, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John see my wife when she gets the alerts, she sees a little thumbnail of like, you know, we noticed the person
⏹️ ▶️ John in your kitchen and it shows them the person in the kitchen. Are they as timely as yours? Probably not, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they, you know, and I think she can tap on it to see the little video clip too, if you know, if the cell
⏹️ ▶️ John data winds are right. So I don’t think, I don’t think the modern Nest ones
⏹️ ▶️ John have all the advantages you just described. But in terms of reliability, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can pretty much always connect to the camera and there has been no point where it has not been recording. Occasionally if I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t connect to it, because my network connection is flaky wherever I am, but it’s not like the camera didn’t record that.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I get back home, I can use the awful interface to scroll back through to find that
⏹️ ▶️ John footage. So, I mean, this is not a satisfying answer. Yes, they’ve gotten better, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s hard for me to recommend this over what you have, because it’s just a different set of trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I just checked. So it turns out I actually have six of the circle views, not four, my mistake. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have six circle views. Currently, two of them say no response. earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today I checked and four of them said no response and they were a different set.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s just, they’re unbearably unreliable. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I, yeah maybe I will try the Nest again. But anyway, I also, I’m curious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too if the listeners know like I know Ubiquiti has their own cameras and they record locally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can access them remotely and you know they record onto either one of their network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video recorders or the hard drive slot in the in the router I’m trying to buy but can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m curious, like, if anybody has experience, I’ve never used Ubiquiti’s cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know Synology also has a built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey surveillance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco station feature where you can have stuff recorded to that. I’ve never used that either. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me briefly interject here. So I have never used surveillance station. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost nothing about it. It’s the second thing on the list of to-dos after call sheet gets released.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the first thing is the fiber project that will probably never actually happen. But nevertheless, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do want to put a couple of cameras like around the house and perhaps one in the house to see what Penny is doing when we’re not here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, my parents have a Synology, a very, very small, I think it’s a two or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four bay Synology. I think it’s a two bay. And they use surveillance station. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen it used a handful of times. I know very little about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my dad seems pretty satisfied with it. Now I don’t think he’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, he’s very savvy, but I don’t think he’s, you know, to the level of any of the three of us. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what the notification situation’s like. I do know that everything is recorded locally. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s processed locally as far as I’m aware. So I think it would get you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty close to what you want. And I think the way it works is you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like one or two cameras, this personology quote unquote for free, but then you have to buy like licenses for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey additional cameras or something like that. Again, I’m talking very well out of turn at this point, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that is a solution that you should at least investigate. It may not be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rightest answer for Marco, but I would at least take a look because my parents have been using this for literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years and they seem really satisfied with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hoping that the Ubiquiti ones are good because most of them, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even all, but I think most of them at least are powered via power ethernet. I love PoE
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s the way my parents is as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, first of all, it’s way more reliable because it hardwires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the network connection as well. It also saves on cables. Like then I don’t have to have all these, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, USB extension cables with sealed boxes to protect them from the weather, running from these outlets that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves have to be sealed. Like, it just makes everything better. And then it’s easy to like, then they have power backup because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all my PoE hubs are tied into my main UPS system, backed up by Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Powerwall batteries, and solar powered in an emergency. So all my networking gear, I have on redundant power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I can count on it, even if, say, a hurricane comes through, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not here and I wanna see how my house is doing, I can probably do that, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fiber goes out. That’s a different story. But for the most part, I love PoE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff for lots of reasons. And that also allows me to then, you know, part of the problem with the Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CircleViews is that they, as mentioned last episode, they come with this roughly 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foot USB power cable. And so, you know, you can only have it 10 feet from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either an outdoor outlet, or, you know, some kind of sealed box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can put some kind of extension or sword strip or whatever into that can protect that joint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the weather. And that’s annoying too. whereas I can just buy like a hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foot ethernet cable and just run it from the insulated inside to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera, seal it at the camera end with, you know, an enclosure or some kind of goop or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done and that’s it. And, you know, so I think that’s ultimately what I will probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try next, but I kind of just want to know like, are Ubiquiti’s cameras good? Is Ubiquiti’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface for accessing them good? Are the apps good? Are they reliable? You know, it doesn’t play well with iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do I have to use one of those HomeKit bridging kind of apps, like either HomeBridge or Hoobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, whatever, I’ve never used those before, but, you know, do I need to use those or can I get away without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them? If I do use those, are those good? Are those reliable? Like, you know, it’s such a big topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so anyway, I hope to get some good tips from people. So thank you in advance for whatever you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just very quickly with regard to Hoobs, HomeBridge and Home Assistant the other one you’ll hear a lot about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I did try to use Home Assistant literally years ago. It’s unquestionably more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than HomeBridge without a doubt. It also is one of the, was one of those things where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way it thought and operated was the antithesis of the way my brain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinks and operates. And I’m not saying it’s bad by any means. And again, everyone who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that can wrap their head around it, Merlin as an example, swears by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But I just could not get my brain to click with Home Assistant. Homebridge is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I use, and it’s extraordinarily reliable. I do almost nothing to it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run it in a Docker container. I think we should probably start talking about those at some point, Mr. Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, I really do encourage and endorse Homebridge. It’s very, very good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty straightforward, pretty simple. It didn’t used to be, but now it is. And I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey barely anything about hooves other than I know that it’s a thing that exists. Very helpful. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. You’re welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I should clarify too, like the reason why I like having a bunch of cameras around my house, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because I’m, you know, I’m not like paranoid about crime, you know, I have found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many uses for these where it’s useful to know, like for instance, if you’re away for the weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and someone drops a package on your porch, that’s really good to know. So you can like ask a neighbor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, can you please bring it in or something? You know, like there are lots of, you know, checking on your house during storms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checking on John’s dog. Like there’s lots of occasions in real life where like, oh, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen to have remotely accessible cameras in your house that are reasonably private or not in your house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like around your house, occasionally in your house. I don’t put cameras in my house when I’m home, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you’re gonna leave for the weekend, there’s storm coming, you put a camera in and you can check on stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of thing. I love having those abilities. They have proven useful many times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t just to scare away people from peeing under my deck. It is also high utility.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, thank you in advance for anything. You can send me listeners, and if you happen to recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ubiquiti stuff, hopefully it’ll be in stock. So, thank you very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our sponsor this week, Notion, and thank you to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at atp.fm slash join, and we will talk to you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was Marco, by the way.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, check podcast so long
Casey’s troubleshooting adventures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had some interesting troubleshooting adventures. I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to quickly detail them in part. So, um, if there’s anyone who ever, uh, runs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into either of these situations, they can learn from my mistakes. And partly because I thought they were funny and or weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, first of all, when we were, where were we? We were gone for some reason. It was not the beach trip that just happened. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, um, it was a couple of weeks ago. I forget where we were, but we were away from home for a few days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I think we might’ve been at my parents and a really bad storm. when it came through Richmond.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it took out, it’s a long story why, which we can get into, but it’s not interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But suffice to say, it took out the, it’s not the ONT, it’s like the power supply for the ONT. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that’s in my garage. Not the thing that the fiber comes into in the back of the house. It’s the thing that’s in my garage plugged into a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular outlet. And I believe, like I said, it’s the power supply for the ONT, for the Fios.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It took out that outlet, like that outlet is GFCI outlet. It tripped for whatever reason. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Fios connection to the house was down for several hours. A couple of days later,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after I’d come home and reset all that and so on and so forth. A couple of days later, I was somewhere, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I was, maybe a library or something, and I was trying to use my WireGuard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VPN. WireGuard is really, really good and I like it a lot. It has a couple of features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that keep me stuck to it. In the past, Tailscale has sponsored, and Tailscale,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they did pay us to say this a while ago, But legit, tail scale is really good. And it’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less fiddly than wire guard. So I have tail scale as a redundant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system in case wire guard fails, which it was doing at this particular point in time. I couldn’t figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out for the life of me what was going on. And I don’t know if you happen to know anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about wire guard, but do you guys know, do you know how wire guard works, either of you by chance?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so apparently, and I am also getting outside of my comfort zone here, but apparently it all works via UDP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what this seems to mean, from my limited understanding, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the WireGuard client software will often tell you that you are connected when you are not, in fact, connected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because it’s just sending packets out into the ether and assuming that they’re getting to where they’re supposed to be getting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It took a lot of troubleshooting for me to figure out what the issue was with my WireGuard, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would connect, but would do nothing. I couldn’t reach the internet, nothing was going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. It was dead in the water, except it said it was connected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, very good guess. And you’re kind of close. As it turns out, what had happened was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use a host name off of kclist.com as my house’s IP address.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I can go to mainstreet.kclist.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, and I can get to, that will push me over to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the house’s IP address. Well, when the files is down for several hours, you know what changes? Your house’s IP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey address. But because TailScale is this weird UDP thing, or at least I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s why, it thought it was connected. God knows where it was connected to. But when it actually tried to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get any response from the WireGuard server, did I say TailScale a minute ago? I meant WireGuard, I’m sorry. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it tried to get to any information from the WireGuard server, it wasn’t listening because it was at the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IP address. So it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fixing- Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John like you got a new IP address from Verizon is what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re saying? Correct, yes, yes. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John someone else probably has your whole IP address.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. And so it just it took me forever to figure this out, including,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, tearing down my whole wire guard installation on my Raspberry Pi, which is the server, and rebuilding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it from scratch, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And it turns out I just never updated, you know, my mainstreet.caseylist.com
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what DNS is for. Why don’t you have like a dynamic DNS thing for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because this is all running through Hover, and I don’t have anything that I’ve automated to report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into Hover that mainstreet.caselist.com
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been using this free dynamic DNS thing for, I don’t know, at this point it’s like a streak, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John contest. So it’s a free service that gives you a dynamic IP address. You just, you pick the host name
⏹️ ▶️ John and they say, you know, you like, something on your network will ping them occasionally, and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey let them know what
⏹️ ▶️ John your IP address is, right? And it’s free. but they really don’t want it to be free.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want me to pay for whatever, like, the next upsell thing is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, I was using dyn, dyndns.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I think that’s what I’m using.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which now is dyn.com. And years ago, it became clear that they wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing to do with free users. And so I just abandoned it at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s my concern with Cloudflare, by the way. Like, Cloudflare, they give a lot for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or for like, you know, even their like $200 a month plan gives away a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of unlimited this, unlimited that. But they are always pushing very, very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the upsells, for all the paid stuff that is not only not free and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely not unlimited, it’s extremely expensive and extremely… You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay by the everything for the upsell stuff. And I worry, Cloudflare right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of things on the internet right now are only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their owners and hosts because of Cloudflare. And I feel like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one bad quarter away from ruining a lot for people.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re doing okay. But the free service that I used back in the, well, first it was just free, back in the good old
⏹️ ▶️ John dot-com days. And then it was like, oh, they would send me an email every once in a while that said, visit this webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John to let us know you’re still using it. So of course I just automated that and had a system that just, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then eventually, in the more modern age, they said, oh, well now there’s a captcha on it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John point they added the captcha, I’m like, well, it’s not worth my time to automate this anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John So for the past, it’s gotta be a decade, I should look it up, for the past at least five years,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe possibly 10, maybe more, once a month I get an email that says, go to this webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John and click this I’m not a robot box or solve this captcha to let us know that you’re still using
⏹️ ▶️ John this IP address. And I’ve been doing it once a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey For real, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I’m like, it’s like a, it’s like a, what do you call it? A game of chicken. I’m like, I’ll do this forever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Captain America, I could do this all day. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have paid zero dollars to this company ever, and I’m getting a free IP address that’s always up to date with my
⏹️ ▶️ John IP of the thing, right? And they just constantly are saying, you sure you don’t want to upgrade? Sure, I’m like, yeah, no, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, I’m human, no, I’m sure. Yep, I’m sure this month too. I’ll be sure next month too. And I just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this has gotta end. Like, I wonder if someone inside the company is like, this person has been on our free plan for 16 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we do something about this? Like, no, I’m just gonna keep solving the CAPTCHA. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is not probably a good use of my time, but like I said, I don’t wanna break the streak. But you could run DNS yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, run your own DNS. This is the old dream of the internet, back in the old days. I’m gonna run a Linux server, I’m gonna have my own
⏹️ ▶️ John DNS, and I’m gonna run my own mail server, and that’s so distant from us. But things like Fastly and Cloudflare actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do bring some of that back, or NAWS do bring some of that kind of back into reach
⏹️ ▶️ John in exchange for selling a small part of our soul to the man. But, uh, you know, it is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. The other one I can’t, this story is going to have to be really quick and because I don’t remember the details,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I was having a different networking issue inside the house. The call was coming inside the house for the second time. I made that joke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this episode. And, um, I found that, I think the wifi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was working fine if memory serves, but Ethernet wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working at all. And I could not for the life of me figure out why. I’m pretty sure that was a circumstance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this started because I was downstairs trying out, I think a dongle for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my laptop before we went to the beach in case I, you know, but because I bring an Ethernet adapter everywhere cause I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a weirdo. And I just wanted to verify that this dongle that I had still worked and it wasn’t working. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, well, that’s weird. Then I tried a known good dongle, you know, USB-C to Ethernet dongle. That didn’t work. Uh-oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this ain’t right. So then I move upstairs. I was doing this downstairs. And the situation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downstairs is, you know, ethernet to switch to Mocha Bridge to coaxial cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that runs eventually up to the office, to a different Mocha Bridge, to the main switch for the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a total nightmare mess of possibilities for issues. It’s been pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much rock solid for years. But in the troubleshooting mindset, it’s a pile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what-ifs that I needed to eliminate. So I come upstairs with the known good dongle. I plug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it into my main switch is a 16 port, you know, a gigabit switch in the house. I forget who makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I think it’s D-Link. It’s been again, rock solid for years. And I plug it into the switch, still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not working. And then I plug back into my desk setup with my beloved CalDigit TS4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has ethernet running into that, still not working. I think I rebooted my Eero once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or twice, trying to get that to work. That didn’t work. Nothing is working. Would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you care to guess either of you what the issue was and how I fixed it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope, good guess, but no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is there a USB SSD plugged into something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no. You know what I had to do to fix it? I had to restart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco which is something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I have ever said before in my life. Oh my god,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never had to do that. Right? With any switch ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to say you had to replace your switch. I don’t think I know how to restart any of mine, but I have replaced this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey switch before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I pulled the power from it, counted to five, put it back in, everything’s been fine since.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, actually, I think if we had like a power failure a couple years ago, one of my switches… And this
⏹️ ▶️ John was what started it, I think. Yeah, one of my switches was freaking out, the lights were all going crazy on it, and I banked the plug on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That helped. I did look this up, how long have I been freeloading on this dynamic IP?
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer, based on the oldest email that I have telling me that I need to go somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John your free DNS is gonna expire unless you go to this thing and tell us you’re still using it. The oldest one of those emails
⏹️ ▶️ John I have is from 17 years, two months and 21 days ago. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how long I’ve been free loading.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once a month for 17 years. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I really, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John competing with Casey on the cheapskate scale here. It’s free, like
⏹️ ▶️ John why would I pay for the thing? It does everything that I need it to do. The price I pay is, and at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point, because of the captures, like remember your IP and everything, I just have to click a link, Click I’m not a robot