550: A Wizard With No Choices

01 Sep 2023

Exit interviews for the iPhone 14 Pro, Apple Watch Ultra, and Apple Watch Series 8, and our first ever Exit Salute for a much greater outgoing product.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show: 🤬 cancer. Help sick kids. Donate to St. Jude now.
• Follow-up:
  • Obscura 4 is out! (App Store link)
  • Alternative TCL TV workarounds (via Chris Berryhill)
  • Child Gmail Accounts
    • Children cannot set up email forwarding (via Henri Sivonen)
    • Child accounts are ripe for recovery issues (via Sriram Karra)
  • Trouble in HomePod paradise
  • iMac G5 perks (via Aaron Walker)
  • Ads on the ATP YouTube channel
  • Truck routing
    • Truck Map has a skip button (via Ezekiel Elin)
    • Garmin sells bespoke truck GPS units (via Jonathan Llamas)
    • Some recommendations (via Andrew Larson)
      • inRoute
      • TomTom/Garmin
• Apple Event on September 12
• Exit Interviews
  • iPhone 14
  • Watch Ultra
  • Watch Series 8
  • A special Exit Salute
• Post-show: Casey’s new vibraslap
  • DS1621+
  • Western Digital Red 18 TB

Sponsored by:

• Celtreos: An incredible shoot-em-up with 12 stages, a huge soundtrack, and tons of gameplay features!

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

Chapters

1. Donate to St. Jude
2. Obscura 4
3. TCL TVs with flashing LEDs
4. Child Gmail account limits
5. iMac serviceability
6. Ads on our YouTube channel
7. GPS for trucks/RVs
8. John’s “new” HomePods
9. Sponsor: Celtreos
10. Exit Interview: iPhone 14 Pro
11. Exit Interview: Apple Watch Ultra
12. Exit Interview: Apple Watch S8
13. Exit Salute
14. Ending theme
15. Casey’s Synology migration

Donate to St. Jude

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’re actually three minutes early today for I think the first time ever?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Might be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Are we supposed to kill time to give people a chance to actually tune in? Hello, computers are good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, we just start early. We don’t want to vamp? We can vamp. No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that kind of disrespect people who try to get here on time? It does not. It so rarely happens. We have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take advantage of it because we got stuff to do. Ha ha ha! It’s two minutes! What are they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to miss in two minutes? It’s nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There could be the best two minutes in ATP history. You never know. Odds are low. Yeah, well, apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we’re just getting started. So here we go. All right. So as you hear this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is likely September or if it’s not September, it is really, really close to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey September, which means it is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nth consecutive year, I don’t know how many it’s been now. That’s okay. For a few years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now, we’ve joined ourselves, slash our friends at RelayFM in order to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So if you’re new here, let me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey explain it to you. Or if you’ve been here before, well, you know what? You should be excited about this. This is a great time of year. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee that our mutual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dear friend Stephen Hackett, he and his family went there when their eldest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey son was afflicted with childhood cancer at like six months old. And they got literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey millions of dollars of treatment from St. Jude. And what’s magical about St. Jude but one of the many things that’s magical about St.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Jude, is that they don’t charge their patient families anything at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They don’t charge for travel in some cases, they don’t travel to put them up, or excuse me, charge to put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them up. They don’t, certainly don’t charge for the services. It’s really unbelievable. And especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a broken freaking country like ours is, it’s doubly unbelievable. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey here’s the thing, even if you’re not from America though, it’s a research hospital, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so, you know, childhood cancer research can take five to 10 years per project to complete, and it can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cost millions and millions and millions of dollars. So just as a silly example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well, maybe not a silly example at all, but an example, the St. Jude Pediatric Cancer Genome Project, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is revolutionizing how cancer is treated worldwide, began in 2010, and has cost more than $100 million,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey $100 million that St. Jude has put into this. And they share these results, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they make these public so that other people, other doctors can use this stuff. So here’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing, and I’m gonna let Marco take over here in a second and do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey his normal annual iPhone time speech, but I’ll just tell you that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no matter where you are in your life, you probably can spare a few bucks and throw it St.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Jude’s way. Don’t feel like five bucks isn’t enough. Five bucks is great. You know, 10 bucks is better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 100 bucks is even better than that, and so on and so forth. Whatever you can spare, even if it’s just a few bucks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that doesn’t matter. It adds up. I mean, Relay is on track

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to raise a lifetime total of two and a half million dollars, and that’s because of all of you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So please, if you have any money to spare, go ahead and go to stjude.org

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slash ATP, and I believe that will dump you directly into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Here’s My Money page, which is what we want. We want you to give St. Jude your money, please and thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So perhaps, Marco, you can talk about why this is a good idea in September. And then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, you can talk about what the three of us have done, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So there’s not really a bad month to donate

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} to help childhood

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} cancer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco curing and research. That’s a pretty substantially great cause.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it can be difficult if you want to donate money to a good cause. It can be difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to kind of suss out, like, what is a good cause? And this thing that is a big name thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that really good? Is the money really used well and everything else? This actually, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this stands up to that kind of scrutiny. St. Jude is a great organization. They do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a huge amount of great work and it doesn’t merely affect our friends. It affects

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hundreds of thousands of people around the world, probably millions of people around the world. And again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the research component is important. So not only, you know, if you are a child with cancer, not only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will they help to cure you and not charge your parents money, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is massive. But again, they also do research, which they share with the world,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to try to help improve everyone’s success rates and try to really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make a huge difference for everyone around the world. So this is a great cause. Now, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what’s about to happen. In about two weeks, most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people listening to this show are going to watch an Apple event. And they’re going to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bunch of new iPhones and possibly Apple Watches, get announced at this event. Most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the people who are hearing this message already have an iPhone that works just fine. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s gonna show us why we really should probably spend another $1,200 or whatever on a new iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even though the one that we already have pretty much works fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And many of us are going to rationalize this. We’re gonna say, you know what? I need this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or I deserve this, or simply I just want this and don’t care. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great. I’m gonna be one of those people. Casey’s gonna be one of those people. John, I forget, is it your year, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} It’s not my year. I’m not going to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I may put a new case on my existing phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Exactly, and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco case, I mean, look, I mean, a new case for

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} a good brand. It’s a case that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already bought. Remember, I got two of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, okay, everyone except John is gonna rationalize some kind of big purchase. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here’s the thing. It is, you’d be fine without the new iPhone this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Unless your phone is like actively broken, you don’t really need it. It’s a discretionary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fun purchase because you’re probably some kind of working professional and look, you deserve a new phone sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re nice, you know, we’re not gonna argue with that. However, I would encourage you to help

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rationalize that decision in your mind, to help justify your shameless consumerism. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I say your, I mean our shameless

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} consumerism,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially my own, I’m not even coming anywhere near not owning this myself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am as bad as anyone on this, to help justify our shared shameless consumerism.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Please donate something to St. Jude. And again, Casey said it well, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you don’t have a lot of money, five bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, that’s fine, that’s great, it’s way better than zero,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s awesome. I would encourage those of us in the audience who can afford to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buy a new iPhone that is not super necessary in our lives. Give a little bit more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My rules in the past have been, hey, whatever kind of like add-on that you tack on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the iPhone sale without really scrutinizing it too much, maybe that’s sales tax,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe that’s a case, maybe that’s AppleCare, that’s a good ballpark for kind of what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amount of money you could spend without missing it too much. I would say start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there as your minimum for St. Jude. So whether it’s 100 bucks, 70 bucks, whatever it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more than that maybe if you have been fortunate in life. That’s great, start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there and give what you can from there. And that will help absolve your rampant consumerism

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guilt that we all will have in two weeks when we get phones we don’t need that are still nevertheless very cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, stjude.org slash ATP. Start in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that price ballpark, maybe like, whatever you would spend on like a RAM upgrade for a Mac You don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think you need the RAM upgrade, but you think you might maybe someday maybe possibly use it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We’re trying to get a lot of money. So what you would spend on an SSD upgrade. Oh, yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What we’re talking about now, we’re cooking with gas. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Yeah, so there there you go Yeah, if you’re like, hmm, I think two terabytes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough, but maybe maybe four terabytes, man I might use the four terabytes. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s your donation amount. Whatever whatever you can whatever makes you feel better at night about your rampant tumorism,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I strongly suggest, please donate what you can. Thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, can you talk about what we’ve done, please?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John As always, we are trying to set an example on this program. We’re not just here to tell you that you should donate because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re gonna buy a new iPhone. We’re gonna buy new iPhones, at least some of us, and we’ve also donated as usual.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Collectively, ATP has donated $21,000 to St. Jude Children’s Research

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hospital this year. The way we normally do it is we divide that amount by three and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all three of us donate that amount at the same time. And it’s a little game we play, although this year some people forgot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we were playing that game because there’s a leaderboard on the website

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for donations that shows who the top donor is. I’m tired, okay? It’s been a long day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They show who the top donors are and it’s kind of fun to be the top donor there, if only briefly before the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John real big spenders come in. And the pledge drive has just started, you know, it’s September, we’re doing it the whole month

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, you know, so we’re just beginning September. And so there is a chance for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of us to be the top donor at this time. And so we said, okay, everyone enter your amount,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is 21K divided by three. And we entered our amounts and then we hit the buttons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Marco, who we’re gonna do DNF, did not finish. Oh my God. He

⏹️ ▶️ ^John donated exactly $7,000, which is not even playing the game. Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knew the game existed, but became very, very bad at it by donating $7,000 and one cent,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is the lowest amount you could possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} donate and still be playing the game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Each of us said to each other, $7,000, right? Yes. That’s the game. Yes. $7,000, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yes. So I thought,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know what? These two, they’re going to actually donate $7,000. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going to be even better that I snuck in with that one cent because those two knuckleheads

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} will be on the nose.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then some a**hole swoops in and decides that it’s not just one cent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to get the padding. What did you do, Syracusa?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did 7-11. $7,011. You know, the whole point is you can’t just go, oh, I’m gonna do 7,500, I’m gonna do 8,000. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re not playing that game. It’s supposed to be like, it’s around the amount you want, but then some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John extra pocket change to see which one of us is gonna come out ahead. And once again, for the second year in a row, I have won

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with my $11 bonus donation. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} please follow our example and compete

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amongst your friends to see who can donate the most to St. Jude. You can get on the leaderboard. There’s no reason you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John beat us. Normally, someone, I think like one password came in last year and beat us out pretty quickly. So I will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enjoy my brief time at the top of the leaderboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. So if I donate another like 50 bucks now, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} that- No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no. The game has, I mean, you can totally donate more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You have to donate another 7,000 though, like- Exactly. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} get added to your total. It’s individual line

⏹️ ▶️ ^John items. How badly do you want to be up there?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ll have to think about it. Anyway, stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E.org slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You’re going to hear this at the beginning of each show for the month of September. And, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would apologize for that, but I’m not going to, because you know what? Sick kids need our help. And like Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has said, we are all at some time or another, we are all guilty of rampant consumerism,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even John. So give the sick kids some help. Stjude.org

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slash ATP. Thank you so much everyone for even thinking about donating or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually donating.

Obscura 4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. First of all, I wanted to call attention to, this is breaking news, do, do, do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do, do, do, do, do. My good friend, Ben McCarthy, has released

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Obscura 4. Obscura is a absolutely bananas camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app for your phone. It is amazing what you can do with this thing. There are so many tweaks and features and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fiddly bits, but yet it’s very, very straightforward to use. It’s excellent. I wanted to congratulate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ben, who helped me out a lot with the design on call sheet. most of the things, if not all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of them, that look good on call sheet are because Ben said, hey, why don’t you try this or why don’t you do that? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any of the good parts are Ben’s fault, any of the bad parts are my fault. And so if you want to see what it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when you have someone that not only has a good design eye, but also is a good developer and can run free

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with their own ideas, check out Obscura. It’s worth looking at, if not actually purchasing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I strongly suggest as well. So we’ll put links in the show notes. The website is obscura.camera,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey O-B-S-C-U-R-A, which is actually a very good URL, not only because it’s.camera,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but because Camera Obscura. Anyways, and we’ll also put an app store link in the show notes. My thanks to Ben for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not only helping me with CallSheet while they were supposed to be working on Obscura, but also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for making Obscura, because it really is just phenomenal. So obscura.camera, check it out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Bye.

TCL TVs with flashing LEDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Also we had some feedback from Chris Berryhill with regard to TCL TVs with flashing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey LEDs. Chris writes, I too have a TCL Roku TV that I bought around 2018.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have it blocked at my router and have been dealing with the flashing LED for years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I tried early on to disable the LED as well, but could not find a setting to turn it off. I recently had a discussion with a friend who’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey super into TVs. I mentioned to him that I don’t let any of my TVs connect to the internet. He implored me to allow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it to connect every now and again to get firmware updates in order to have the best picture.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I followed his advice and updated all my TVs over the past week. When I updated the TCL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Roku it went from 10.x to 12.x. I played around with the settings on it last night and lo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and behold under the power menu there’s a setting to disable the LED. Not sure if it was there before I updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it certainly is now and it works as expected. So number one, great tip. Number two,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John Corollary question, is this an acceptable approach to never, but great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey once in a while, connect your TV to the internet? Like your beloved Sony TV, is it on the internet? I don’t recall.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just like Chris’s friends who’s quote, super into TVs, I also recommend periodically connecting your TV to get firmware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John updates, because they fix stuff. They fix stuff having to do with pictures quality, they fix bugs in their features. Like these are little computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at this point. Forget about like the online stuff, just the features of the television for playing video in terms of how does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it handle all the various features HDMI 2.1, if there’s bugs and it’s like variable refresh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rate code, and they improve picture quality. Like they can change this thing over time. So I would encourage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you to connect it periodically to get firmware updates, but of course that’s how they get you, right? So you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanna have it connected to the internet, but you do want the firmware updates. But I thought this was great because connecting to the internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually fixed an annoying problem with the stupid blinking LEDs. And I did get an answer from some people like, why aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people just putting tape over it? Like what’s the big deal with the LED? Why are they yanking it out of the circuit board? Why don’t they just put some tape over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it? I think what these manufacturers do, at least some of them, is they put the blinking LED

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside the same sort of plastic housing as the IR receiver, so you can’t really block

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it without also blocking the IR receiver. It bothers me why these TVs don’t have Bluetooth remotes all the time. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s why they don’t just put a piece of tape over it, because apparently to put enough tape to actually block the light,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your remotes don’t work anymore. So yeah, my television is connected to the internet. I do not fear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the internet connection, although I do have a bunch of features turned off on So it is nicer with an internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John service. But in general, I don’t use the smart features of my TV, but I do do the firmware updates every time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m prompted for them. And I would encourage everyone else to at least periodically, let’s say every six months or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so, see if there’s a firmware update for your TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I would argue, I mean, I know you can exert some control over your network with fancy wifi stuff, but I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say, if you’re gonna temporarily connect your TV to the internet for this purpose, use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wired ethernet. That way, when you unplug it, it’s really offline. There’s no like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh, you told me not to remember your Wi-Fi password, but I actually did remember your Wi-Fi password. Like, it can’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything like that. You know, you really, you can really physically connect it, and then when you’re done, physically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disconnect it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s a really good tip. You know, something that, this is a total tangent, Marco style, so I’ll be the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco this episode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} When I was- I’m so sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey When I was traveling a couple of weeks ago and we went to Pennsylvania, I don’t remember how much we talked about this on the show, But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is when I was talking about my travel router, I think. Well, anyways, I typically will bring an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple TV when we’re traveling for more than just a day or two. So if Aaron and I want to watch something, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if we have enough downtime that the kids want to watch something, we can just do that on the Apple TV. Well, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey were in this very cool and very unique hotel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that was a bunch of converted railroad cars, which in America, seeing a railroad car at all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is kind of unique and interesting. but leaving that aside.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was very low speed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right. But even staying in one is extremely cool, and that’s not an opportunity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you generally get to have. Well, we were in a converted mail car, which had just been refurbished

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or redone or whatever, and they had this obscenely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey large TV that was up against one of the walls. It was like a 60 or 70-inch TV that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was on the side of a train car. The whole damn train car is what, like 10 feet wide? Like, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why we needed a TV this big, but whatever. Well, anyway, so I go to hook up a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey HDMI port or HDMI cord to it, and I brought my own cord. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wasn’t the issue, but the damn thing was like stuck to the exterior

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wall, which makes sense since it’s so short, so, you know, squat, but I couldn’t reach my hand behind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it to put the damn cable in. And so, although I am in full support, Marco, of the idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of using ethernet, sometimes that just ain’t possible. Now I know that John will now jump in and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tell you it’s barbaric to put your TV on the wall, but I’m not here to have that argument. But it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John barbaric to put your TV on the wall, it’s barbaric to put it over your fireplace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, you know, you do what you gotta do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would also argue that ethernet cables typically have two ends. That’s true. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you could just leave the other end

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} unplugged? Well, yeah, but no, that is true, that is true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But in this particular case, I know I’m taking your example and completely bending it over until it breaks, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I couldn’t get behind the damn TV in the first place. So what if you mounted your TV like that, perhaps not above the fireplace,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and now you gotta unmount the damn thing just to plug in the ethernet cable that one time. It’s very frustrating.

Child Gmail account limits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s talk child Gmail accounts. So Henry Sivanen writes, there is a significant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gotcha with recommending a Gmail address for a child. Children are not allowed to set up email forwarding, so there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rather serious risk of lock-in. We’ll put a link in the show notes to some information about this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And from Google’s FAQ page or whatever, for the most part, Gmail will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be the same for children as it is for adults. There are only a few Gmail features

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that aren’t available to children under 13 the applicable age in your country. And so those features

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are ads. Google will not serve ads in Gmail or process Gmail messages for advertising purposes. Automatic forwarding.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Children can’t automatically forward emails to another email address. Gmail offline, if their device isn’t connected to the internet. Children can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey read, send, or search their Gmail emails. Labs that children cannot turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on, experimental Gmail features. Mail delegation. Children can’t give someone else access to read, send, or delete their emails.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And spam. If Gmail identifies an email as spam, it won’t get delivered to your child’s inbox or spam folder.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Note that these restrictions don’t apply if your child is over 13 or the applicable age in your country or had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey supervision added to their previously existing Google account.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, so wait, so that seems like a big way out if you have them create an account separately

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then you add supervision to it, is that a way out?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, you can just lie about your kid’s age, which is what you talked about doing, but honestly, I always tell the truth about my kid’s age and these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John features that are in there for kids, I don’t mind. The not having automatic forwarding, I think is not a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s not like children, again, they’re not like, oh, I need to have all my email funnel into a single place, so it’s really important that I have automatic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forwarding. No, they don’t care. They just, it should just be there for them and they can use it as their address. They’ll be over 13

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before you know it, and until they are, they’re probably not gonna be using their email directly anyway, but they might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still need to have an email account to use to sign up for things. I mean, they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to, you know, register for the, I don’t know, the web forum on the Minecraft mod

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, Minecraft mod web forum that they want to be part of. And they don’t know that you need an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John email, I just register. So basically you’re going to be using this as an adult, but I told the truth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about my kids’ age and didn’t regret it. If you want to lie about their age and just say your kids start off as being over 18,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can do that too. But I don’t know if that will cause problems later when you try to recorrect their birthday. But it’s good to know what these restrictions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are. Again, we’ll link to the document. You can decide whether you want to tell the truth about their age or not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Then additionally, Sriram Kara writes, I work in the sign-in and account recovery team at Google. you’d be surprised

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how often this happens. A parent would create the quote-unquote perfect Gmail account for their newborn a few years roll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by before they feel the need to actually use it for something, by which time they have long forgotten the account password. And of course

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they haven’t set up a recovery phone or recovery email in that account. The result is that they can’t access the quote-unquote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey perfect Gmail account that they lovingly created and there’s nothing anyone can do to help them. It sucks for everyone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey For many years now when you create a new Google account you can mark it as an account you’re creating for your child. This gives you some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey parental controls including the the ability to reset their account password if needed. As for your own Google accounts, please turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on two-step verification and save those backup codes as John rightly, as always, pointed out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey In addition, do add a recovery phone and recovery email address for the same added redundancy in case you forget your password.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, like Apple has a lot of those things for iCloud now too. If you could designate somebody as your backup or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put someone else’s email as a recovery thing, these are all things you can do to protect yourself. And of course, if you use a password manager

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of some kind, hopefully you won’t have to worry remembering that password.

iMac serviceability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Aaron Walker writes, I enjoyed the iMac special episode, but was disappointed that you completely missed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the main benefits of the iMac G5. The iMac G5 was one of the few Apple products that was incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey user serviceable. It was definitely not sleek, but you could remove the back panel and replace components

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey easily. Later iMacs are sleeker and prettier, but any modifications or upgrades are ludicrously more complex

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than they were on the iMac G5. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean this is a this is a fair criticism because the the iMacs really did get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco awfully the unserviceable towards the end there, like any of the big glass front with the metal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chin, for typically to do almost anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to those, you had to take the screen off and get in from the front. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that was not an easy or safe process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for almost anyone to do themselves. So that is definitely a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big bonus for the G5. That being said, it was so hideous looking that you wouldn’t probably keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it long enough to actually have it break.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so it’s not just that this was a thing for iMac specifically, but I don’t know what happened with this machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would love to see the story on it, but this was the first Mac in ages and the last Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in ages where Apple officially supported the person who bought the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer doing tons of stuff to it. Like not just changing the RAM, changing the hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drive, like just like any kind of thing. They’re like, yep, sure, no, this is totally a normal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that you can do. you don’t have to send away for special tools in a Pelican case. We’ll have instructions right on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John website. You don’t need like a heat gun to like unglue something from something. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I don’t know what happened. It was like, when they did this, it was like, is this a new A trap? Are they gonna be selling Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are user serviceable without special tools like designed to be that way? And the answer was no, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not gonna do that. Somehow this machine came out being officially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John user serviceable without having to do anything complicated. and then they just never did that again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I don’t remember if it was the back panel or the front panel, but I do remember looking at them and thinking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s great, it’s real easy to upgrade, but also thinking like Marco said, but I don’t want this computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, to be fair, I mean, I think this was a couple of years before, but in 2006, when the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plastic MacBook came out with the wonderful Core Duo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco processor, John, that computer, the era of the plastic MacBook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before they went all unibody was also, like you could very easily, and I did,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very easily not only replace the RAM, but also the hard drive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, they had that little secret hard drive door where the hard drive would pop out into the battery bay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, and there was no adhesive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you didn’t need special tools, like it was just like a small Phillips head, I believe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it was like, I upgraded so many hard drives and plastic MacBooks for both myself and for other people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like it was so easy. And back then also, that was when 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 hard drives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were really growing rapidly in capacity in the market to the point where for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much of that laptop’s lifespan, you could buy a larger hard drive from third parties

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than Apple would sell you. So you’d get it with, I forget, it was something like you’d get it with the 60

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gig hard drive and you could upgrade it to 120 gig or something like that. And because it was third party

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardware, it was really cheap to do that too. Like whatever the hard drive would have been would have been $150, $200 for a much larger

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amount of space. So it was very serviceable back then. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then all of that went away when we went to unibodies. And of course, SSDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ruined it further.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That one is kind of like more targeted. Like you could do the specific things they allowed you. My recollection of the iMac G5 is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the entire thing was open and like every single thing inside of it was user serviceable because it was just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right there in front of you. But I may be misremembering.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, that did not become a trend.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Although also to be fair, RAM was user serviceable on almost all of those iMacs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until the iMac Pro. The iMac Pro didn’t have any door whatsoever, but all the rest of them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the rest of the metal era, all had your serviceable RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, but you would do that at your own peril. Yes, you would. Yeah.

Ads on our YouTube channel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Uh, I don’t know. I think Marco, you are the keeper of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ATP YouTube channel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} but I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s mostly John that’s doing any of the work on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So Marco tried to let me have access to it, but the YouTube has a feature that says let other people help administer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your channel. Just enter their email address here and he’s done it like twice and nothing happens. So bad show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John YouTube.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cool. It seems, I mean, I am not a professional YouTubist, but it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about a third of the features in the YouTube creator control panel are always broken at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any given time. Like, I’ve only used it a handful of times, like I’ve uploaded a couple of videos myself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had our Minecraft gaming channel for our family where I did a lot more of them, and then a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of little ATP things that John has created and then I upload them because we can’t figure out how to give them access to the account,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it just seems like the YouTube creator studio control panel, whatever it is, it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is so broken all the time in various small ways that change over time. And then you go search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for, like, A lot of times I will have to literally Google for how to do something in the YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco control panel because I can’t find something. And even Google’s own documentation on YouTube, which they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco own, is out of date. And things have moved since then. Yeah, exactly. Honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Swift’s documentation I think is better than Google’s. YouTube, for so many reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m very happy to be a podcaster and not a YouTuber.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think the experience of using YouTube’s admin interface is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not uniform. I think the people who have real channels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with lots of subscribers have a different experience. I know the very, very top SuperDuper Elite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have entirely other features that other people would kill for. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think CGP Grey has talked about how you can’t replace a video. If you have a video that has an error

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it, you can’t replace that video. You could upload a new one, but then you lose all the views on that one and it doesn’t, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you lose all your search juice or whatever you’ve got on the whole thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if you are super duper elite, guess what? You can replace videos. Really?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so whatever that is, the super duper elite, the ATP channel is the opposite of that. This is a channel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with no listed videos. So if you go there, it’s literally empty. The only reason we have it is because we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John needed some place to upload like the video recordings of our member special and we do tier lists. And honestly, there’s not much video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John content. It’s just us dragging things up onto a tier list, but hey, it’s a visual thing. If you wanna see that, that’s fine. So we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been doing that just because it’s a nice thing to do. And then people are like, I tried to watch the tier list video, but every five minutes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an ad comes up. Can you stop that from happening? And I’m like, oh, that’s terrible. We should stop that. And the answer is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, we can’t stop that. And why can’t we stop that? Because again, whatever the opposite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of having the super-duper elite features is, we have no

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} views, we have no subscribers, we have no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John videos. And so the feature that lets you turn off ads, like, hey, don’t show any ads on this. We’re not trying to monetize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything. Not that we would get money from those ads anyway, mind you, because to get any money from YouTube, there’s a threshold before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can turn on monetization so that you get money. We’re not even close to that. Like, I think it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to like a thousand subscribers or something. We’re not even close to that. So not only are we not getting any money, but because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t have monetization turned on, we can’t stop YouTube from running its own ads on our videos,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is kind of sucky. So maybe we’ll look at Vimeo next time or something. But anyway, we just want to apologize to everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re not trying to run ads on these videos. They’re just there as a fun, a nice to have thing for the members.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sorry about the ads, we would turn them off if we could, but we haven’t figured it out yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not honestly interested in Vimeo. But whenever I tried to use Vimeo in the past, I would always get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yelled at by somebody who worked there for using it wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is not the kind of video we want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, no matter what it was, it was not what they wanted. So I’m pretty sure that’s not the site for us. They don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanna see like a static tier list screen with us dragging icons up onto it occasionally. I seriously doubt it, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so I’m not sure what this, we’ll probably continue uploading to the YouTube channel. This is, I mean, I’m not gonna say this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a reason to subscribe to YouTube Premium so you don’t have to see ads, but not seeing ads on YouTube is a nice upgrade to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John experience. Maybe if we get more than a thousand subscribers, we’ll be able to turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on monetization and then use that newfound ability to turn off ads. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} don’t know, YouTube is weird. Anyway, we just want to apologize.

GPS for trucks/RVs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. All right, let’s go to truck GPS corner. So Ezekiel Ellen has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a hat trick of feedback at this point. Ezekiel writes, truck maps, which we’ll put a link in the show notes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has a skip button below the phone number prompt. It’s practically invisible. I’m sorry, I should have given some context.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is, I believe, Marco, what you used, and you were complaining justifiably about having to issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them or hand them your phone number in order to use the app. But it turns out, apparently, if you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey eagle eyes, you could have hit the skip button.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, which I apparently did not see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Was it like super duper light gray on a white background?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, right. Probably. I mean, look, Apple uses a lot of those these days, too, themselves. But yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not doing it on purpose, though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so anyway, I missed that. Sorry. Again, App Review, where were you? But hey, here we go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s all right. That was the app that would announce a turn once four miles at a time and then never tell you about it again. So I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spend too much time with that one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, then Jonathan Llamas. Llamas writes, I’m a semi-longtime listener, and I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a CDL, a commercial driver’s license, I have sent countless emails to Tim Cook requesting truck routes be baked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey straight into Apple Maps. I’ve tried using the same truck route map, Marco, or app that Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey used, and it was frustrating to say the least. Garmin sells GPS navigators specifically made for truck routes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You can input the height, width, and length of your vehicle and the device routes you the safest way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But personally, I don’t want to fork over $300 for a device that has the UI of the early 2000s. I wait with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bated breath until Apple implements truck routes and Apple Maps. Until then, I’ll stick to using my iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pro 11-inch mounted on my dashboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and we actually, we got a number of emails from people who drive trucks for a living, who almost all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco said that pretty much the big dog in this space is still hardware GPS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco units. That are, you know, these ones that Jonathan’s talking about, like the Garmin makes them specifically made for trucks. And like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because the apps are so bad, many people still use hardware GPS units.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Which, I mean, it does make sense, but that is a bummer that that’s the state of the art.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, basically, because once smartphones chased all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things out of the dashboards of regular people’s cars, they retreated to smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and more lucrative markets like this thing. And some people said about these GPS device

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that they like the idea of you just buy this one dedicated device, you pay a couple hundred bucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for it, and that’s it, as opposed to the crappy app that Marco was trying to use, where it was like $250 a year. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is an expensive subscription, if there is any subscription, it’s less expensive than that. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, I know some people were very satisfied with these. Some people thought they were crappy and anachronistic, and some people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were very satisfied with them because they were crappy and anachronistic. So there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Then Andrew Larson writes, I genuinely, I know I’ve said this a couple of times. I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that we have listeners in every freaking corner of the universe. I really think at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this point, I know Hello Internet has been defunct for a while, but I really think we’re getting to Hello Internet levels of coverage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in terms of our listening. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t think we have any astronauts yet, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s true. Not to my recollection. We’ll work on the astronauts. But yeah, anyways, Andrew

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Larson writes, I’m a general manager at a U-Haul retail store. For apps for routing, I recommend two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things. There’s an app called InRoute. That’s I-N-R-O-U-T-E. This app is super cool and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has many features you’ve maybe never thought to have in an app for routing. It’s affordable and includes something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey called RV mode, which may help. For anyone super concerned about the routes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that allow or don’t allow trucks, I recommend the out-of-app purchase of a hardware GPS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Long after the average consumer driving their Honda moved

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from TomTom and Garmin, the market specialized in more niche features such as these, as well as marine-focused

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey models for Marco’s inevitable future boat purchase. That’s the other market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to retreat to. Yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So speaking of listeners in all sorts of places, not only is Andrew’s recommendation of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in-route app, you know, pretty app, I heard about it from a few people, We also heard from the developer of the in-route

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app. It’s made by an indie developer. And the developer, Rob, wrote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in, unlike the two apps that I tested, it reroutes you if you go off-route and there’s no pricing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tricks. After a seven-day trial, it renews for $5 a month, discounted plans, blah, blah, blah. There’s apps for CarPlay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac under Catalyst, and iPad. And unlike most navigation apps, your data is completely private.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And Rob links to the whole privacy policy thing. So pretty cool that not only do we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hear from people who can tell us which apps and GPS things are better, but literally the author of one of them is also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a listener of our show and wrote

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That is very cool. Yeah, and you can see it from the screenshot of Zap here. It lets you enter the height, width, and length and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weight of your vehicle. You have options to avoid tolls, avoid ferries, because you might not want to drive a big truck

⏹️ ▶️ ^John onto a ferry, avoid highways, and you can have routes that are the most curvy or the least curvy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or the least ascent of elevation. So exactly the options you’d want to have because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have all those things. It’s more than just like, hey, will I shear off the top of my truck on a bridge? Stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like how curvy it is and how much it goes up and down and avoiding ferries are things you would not think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of for regular routing, but are very relevant if you’re driving a big truck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So yeah, this is definitely an area where the platform owners probably need to get a little better,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially since in America anyway, pretty much everybody is driving these monstrous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vehicles that can’t park in normal parking spots. I mean, maybe they don’t care about curves or shearing off the top of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their things, but if the current trends continue, they’re not gonna be able to fit in parkways either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so anyway, next time I rent some kind of truck or RV, I will try in route because that sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the best option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Again, I love the coverage that we have. It makes me so very happy. Yeah.

John’s “new” HomePods

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, and then finally, John, how is your gift box coming along? How are things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going in HomePod land?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Shortly after the end of the show, I did come up with the use. I think I might have come up with this on the program or maybe on the bootleg, I don’t remember.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like, I know what I’ll do with these. I’ll put them in my wife’s office because she currently uses a very small, not very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good sounding Sonos Toblerone thing. I think I did talk about this in the show. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I’ll put them down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there for her. And so the day after we recorded, I’m like, okay, I’m going to get these two HomePods. I know where they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going now. bring them down to the office, set them up on our desk as a stereo pair. This should take five minutes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? No, of course not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t even think you can reset them in five minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, so first I was trying to, yeah, I was trying to be like, okay, so it should just work. I plug it in and of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John course it’s not showing up and I go to home map and I try to add accessory and they’re not showing up. I’m like, I probably have to factory

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reset these. So I look up the instructions and how to factory reset them. And I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it like three or four times and it doesn’t work. And then I even got to the point where I messaged Marco and I said, are these still attached to your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple ID? Can you delete them from your Apple ID? So I was like, maybe he needs to do something at his end. Wait, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get those messages. Where’d you message me? One of the many places that you don’t look, apparently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Was it in the document?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} No, it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in Slack. I believe your app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mentioned. Oh my God, Marco. So the listeners missed. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we got to back up because this is a good story. So we had agreed to talk about in due before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the show are St. Jude donations, as we talked about. And so a few days ago, John had said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the two of us, hey, let’s do this, you know, 15 minutes early and that, and, and, you know, is that cool with everyone? I said, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sure. So I am sitting at 745 our time waiting for Marco to hit go on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Zoom room. And, and then Marco shows up, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I’m immediately there. He

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} goes, Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what are you doing here? I said, well, we agreed to be early. We did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So it is made clear to me that Marco, you either need to, we either need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey move our Slack communications to like iMessage or something, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you just never care about what we say. And that makes me sad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I normally I am better at this, but it’s been, look, I’m like selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one house, renovating another house, doing all this back and forth. Like it’s been, it’s been quite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weeks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t have an expectation that you’d immediately respond to me or whatever, but I figured you would have seen it eventually within a week, that’s all I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying. Like, so, and when I did send that message, I thought about how should I send this? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I briefly thought, oh, I’ll use iMessage. But I’m like, no, in the sort of, in the hierarchy of importance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is not that important. I don’t care if he ever sees, you know, and doesn’t respond to me immediately. I’ll just send it through Slack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, and what happened was, before I could get a response, I figured it out, so it didn’t matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway. But that’s the level I was thinking. But, you know, so I’m not, who cares that you didn’t respond to it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I figured you would have at least seen it a week later. But that’s the hole in your system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Is that the key?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Although actually, in Marco’s defense, I can’t put my finger on this message because I was gonna try to figure out when it was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, I deleted them. I deleted them. Oh, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nevermind.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so, okay. So I can’t be at

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} fault for not seeing it in like-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I deleted them like 24 hours later. Well, I- I figured I didn’t want you to be distracted because I’m like, I know you’re busy and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you saw it 24 hours later, you’re like, oh, I need to help John. You don’t, I got it figured out. So first I put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a message that said, don’t worry, I figured it out. And I left that there for 24 hours. And after 24 hours, I said, I don’t want you to accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see the other ones and not see that I figured it out. And so I deleted them all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, I’m all, I am so here for busting Marcos chops, but in this one, I think he might get a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pass on this particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one. Well, this doesn’t explain the, let’s get online 15 minutes early thing. That’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} That’s just still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sitting in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Anyway. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did figure out the factory reset. And for people who don’t know, if you read the instructions and it’s like, you know, unplug your thing for 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seconds, plug it in, wait 10 seconds, then hold your finger on the thing for 10 seconds. And you would think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, oh yeah, they want me to unplug it, plug it in, then hold my finger on the top of it, right? If you do that and don’t exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John follow their instructions, nothing happens. Yeah. So you have to plug it in, wait 10 seconds, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then put, if you plug it in and then just lazily wander over to it later and put your fingers on it, doesn’t work. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my bad. So I reset the thing, configured it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I’m doing like the right one, you know, it gets set up, it takes a long time, ask me a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of stuff, I give it a name, blah blah, you know, fine, whatever. Then I go to do the left one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it is not happy. Like it does through all the steps, it goes to reset, add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John device, it shows up, set setup, do all the things, blah blah blah. You don’t really have any options. Like basically you’re just tapping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through a wizard where there are no choices. It’s like, do you want to transfer settings? It’s like, well, it’s literally the only button and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no X or close box or whatever. So yeah, I guess I’m transferring settings. Anyway, the left

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HomePod gets stuck on a thing where it just says configuring and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the other one said configuring for a while too But then it didn’t say configuring and it said and when it’s in configuring you can go to the options and it says

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not all The features of this HomePod are available yet But when it’s done configuring they will be and you can do stuff with it like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John play audio But you can’t put it in a stereo pair. You can’t do timers. You can’t do all sorts of other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whatever. I’m sure it’ll be fine. I just leave it down there. I come back down an hour later it’s still configuring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whatever. Go back through some other stuff. Come down two hours later, it’s still configuring. Now I’m Googling for HomePod

⏹️ ▶️ ^John configuring for hours. Million results. Everyone’s HomePods are configuring, configuring for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hours. What should I do? Oh, you know, burn down your home and move to a new country and get a new identity. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s always the answer. Because like when people have computer problems, they’re like, delete your Apple ID, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John marry someone else, like send your children for all for adoption. Like it’s just reset the world. and like maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they do that and it solves their problem, but I’m not gonna delete my Apple ID. I’m not even gonna sign out of my Apple ID.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not gonna reinstall my operating system. Like I’m not gonna, you know, I’m not doing those because I’m like, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t make any sense why that would work. And they’re like, oh, it’s configuring because they just updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a new version. And if you have the old version of, because you know, they did the thing where you update your home, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple home thing or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} updated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Quick aside, is that safe? Cause I’ve been staring at this thing for probably months now and I’m so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey scared to do it. Is that safe to do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it is. I finally did it online. Okay. But when that just came out, people were like, oh, don’t upgrade your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John home because if you have some old HomePods, they won’t be able to join the new home and blah, blah, blah. One of the things they did suggest that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did try was like try making a new home like in the Home app and then try setting up the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HomePod on the new home. And I did notice that this HomePod was running whatever the OS is called, version 15,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the current version is like 16.6 or something. So I’m like, it just needs a software update. So I just need to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe I’ll just put it in the fake home and get it to update. And eventually I got it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the point where I would try setting it up. I’ve reset the thing so many times now. Try to set it up and it would be like, it would go through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the steps and it would be like, okay, we’re gonna update your HomePod. I’m like, yes, yes, update it to 16. But then it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just be stuck on configuring. And so I gave it like eight hours and it was still configuring. And then I gave it 24

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hours and it was still configuring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And again, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you Google for this, so many people are like, my HomePod’s stuck on configuring, what do I do? And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I figured, all right, I’m gonna make a Genius Bar appointment. I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} make an appointment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh my, this is so much worse of a gift than mine was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Oh yeah, it’s great. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey word.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, I’m gonna make a Genius Bar appointment. And what am I gonna do? I’m gonna carry my HomePod to the Apple store and I’m gonna put it on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John counter and say, can you please update this to whatever OS 16? That’s the only thing I wanted them to do because I figured the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem’s gotta be that it’s running 15 or something and it just needs to be running 16. Maybe it can’t be in a stereo pair

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with one that’s on 16 or like maybe you can’t join to the new house. But I just wanted to run a software update but I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not for the life of me, figure out how to get this thing to do a software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John update. Like that’s all I want. I don’t want it to join anything. I don’t need to, just like, just run a software update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s actually a little bit easier on the HomePod mini by the way, because the HomePod mini has like a, what is it? Yeah, Marco probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knows, a USB, a micro USB connection. What does it have on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it? It, wait, the mini has a connection? I thought it was a fixed wire.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, there’s a USB port on the HomePod mini because one of the options was, do you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do basically you want to update the OS by doing a restore by connecting it to the finder, you know? It’s gonna have to your Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with USB launch the finder and basically do like an OS restore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh Yeah, the the end of the power cable is is a USB C plug. Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right anyway there is a way to sort of hardware restore because I was like Let me just can I just get these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the version 16 of this OS and just blast it onto there with the wire? But if you’re in a home pod, the answer is no So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I made the genius bar appointment And then it was like the day before the Genius Bar appointment was supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to come. And then I went down there to get the HomePod, but before I did it, I figured, let me just look at the Home app to see what it’s like, maybe take a screenshot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it being in configuring. And it wasn’t configuring anymore. Hooray!

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John updated itself. And the answer is, how long does an original HomePod take to update itself from the, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the OS is called, version 15 to 16? The answer is somewhere between 24 and 48 hours. That’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad. With no progress indication whatsoever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it’s doing anything, it just says configuring. And then of course, once it updated itself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it joined into a stereo pair just fine or whatever. So these products, boy, just a combination

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of so many of Apple’s greatest hits, just completely opaque, no progress indication, and just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it just took way too long. Like it shouldn’t take that long. What is it? I know they’re slow. I know they’re like little crappy watch processors,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but more than 24 hours for an OS update? I think my Series Zero watch updates its OS faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than that. It was ridiculous. They are configured now, still haven’t gotten any opinions from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my wife on them. I’m not sure if she’s even actually used them because she hasn’t actually been working from home recently. She’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been traveling for work and has been going into the office. So I await reviews, but they are at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John least configured. Oh, and by the way, out of sympathy, my upstairs HomePod decided that it was not gonna work correctly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anymore. I asked her to turn off the lights and it’s like, I had some BS excuse about like, I’m not on the network and don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you’re talking about. So anyway, I asked the Google thing to turn off the lights. And then luckily I’m now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an expert in resetting HomePods and I reset the one upstairs. And I restored that to factory

⏹️ ▶️ ^John configuration and reinstalled everything. The one upstairs is on the thing where it’s like, you’re not signed into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your Apple ID, please enter your Apple ID password. Have you seen that one, Marco, in your life?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like on the iPhone?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, like if you go to the home app on the iPhone, it would be like, your HomePod is not signed into your Apple ID. And if you go to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the settings, you go to the settings for the HomePod, and it will say, please enter your Apple ID password. And I’ve been doing that for years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every once in a while, it just forgets my Apple ID password or thinks it does, so I manually re-enter it on the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This time, it said, I don’t know, I’m not signed into your Apple ID, please enter your Apple ID password. So you go to settings,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it has a little button, basically some blue text that says enter password. I tap that, does it prompt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me to enter a password? No, it does not, no text field appears. Instead, I get an indeterminate spinner, and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says authenticating. I’m like, authenticating with what? I haven’t entered a password yet. The button says enter password, and normally it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shows a text field. But now it just kept showing a spinner, but don’t worry, that spinner spins for like three minutes and then just goes away,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you’re back at seeing the screen that says enter password. So that’s why I factory reset that one. So now all my HomePods have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been factory reset on average, let’s say seven times and so far so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wow. That sounds fun. I gotta tell you, this is definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey making me love my Sonos stuff even more because that stuff really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey does just work. It’s incredible how, I’ve never owned a HomePod and it’s because all I’ve heard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that they’re garbage. Like, I know they sound great. You know what it is? It sounds like me describing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my BMW, which to this day, I will say, God, I love that car so much. God, it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey such a good car, but it was only running for about 10 minutes at a time. And that’s how all of you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sound when you describe your HomePods.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That is very apt. Like, it’s the HomePod, look, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have a long history with HomePods. I’m back on the down, you know, on the rollercoaster, the rollercoaster

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of HomePod opinions. It is a rollercoaster, because when they work, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sound so good and they do sound better than almost anything else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in their category, especially if you care about size. Like if you’re looking for something that is small and sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good, there is almost nothing else in the market. That being said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am currently testing a pair of Sonos Aero 100s in replacement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of my HomePods. Oh, really? I have, I will have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more to say on that in a future episode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Just to be clear though, I am becoming one of those Sonos a-holes that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I will perhaps quit the show if you tell me that you don’t absolutely love them. So consider your opinions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wisely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Let me just say that the relationship with them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is more complicated than I would have expected. Oh, really? But not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in bad ways for the most part. So anyway, I will have more to say on my Sonos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Era 100s in a future episode, but they are still in the place that my two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new HomePods were. So the experiment hasn’t failed. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s also it isn’t all roses, but there are some surprising roses. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ll get to that another time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And just keep in mind, by the way, these HomePods that I have are mine is like the very first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one off the you know, like when they just were released, and probably at least one of Marcos is like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think both of the ones I sent you, I had four of the first gen HomePods.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I sent you two of them, I still have two, and I bought them all fairly early on in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the HomePod’s life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, you can kind of tell, because I’ve spent so much time in the stupid Home app, that if you look at the model number, like the model

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number looks way shorter than you think it should on these things. Like the normal model numbers for Apple things is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MLA something something slash A, you know those things. The model for these things is MQHV2.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s it, that’s the whole model number.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} It’s way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shorter than like if you look at what the model number is, I think on the version two ones or on any of the modern products. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s my indication that all the ones I have are super duper first generation. I’m just glad they work at all, I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, do they? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} mean, and by the way, what is the OS called?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know it used to be called Audio OS, but is it not called that anymore? What does it doesn’t say what the name of it is? What is the OS?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It was it never had a public facing name, and it still doesn’t. When Apple refers to it, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will always refer to it obliquely. It was they’ll say something like like our home platform or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they will always refer to it not by name because it officially does not have a public name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it was called Audio OS internally for a while. I’m just not sure if it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco called that. It was and I’m not even sure if the HomePod Mini and HomePod 2 even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco run that. Like that was what it was called on the HomePod 1, the original one, but I think they might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have changed the software stack for the Mini and the 2, but no one really talks about it.

Sponsor: Celtreos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Celltrios, a shoot-‘em-up slash shmup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco game for Apple’s platforms. This category, this is, I first learned about this back in the Super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nintendo days with Gradius 3, and this is, it’s that kind of game, you’ve seen these before, where you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have the little ship and it’s a side-scroller and just waves of enemies keep coming at you and you have to blow them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all up with these, you know, big customizable weapons and everything. You pick up power-ups, you got to go around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco obstacles, that kind of game. It’s super fun. I love shoot-‘em-up slash shmup games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love them. And what’s great about Celtrios is, unlike many modern games,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are no ads, there’s no in-app purchases, there’s no subscriptions, and nothing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco locked. You can play it over and over again for as long as you want, with lots of customization options

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to keep it fresh, and available exclusively for Apple platforms. Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Celtrios has 13 stages. You can start from any of them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you don’t have to worry about losing your progress or anything. If you quit the app, you can resume play later.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they have all sorts of abilities. They have customizable ship configurations, randomizing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so kind of keep it fresh, all sorts of varieties of ways to play. And this has a huge high-quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco soundtrack. When I first played this, I played it with no sound, and then I played it later with sound, and I was like, oh, that was a mistake the first time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The soundtrack is awesome. There’s over 45 minutes of music in Celtrios. They keep expanding the game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Over 75 free updates have released so far and the entire game, all of Celtrios, was made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by an independent developer. They support one or two player play. On the Mac you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have various inputs. On the iOS you need to use game controller for two player, which makes sense. So it is just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is a great game. Check it out, get Celtrios if you love traditional shmups or you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just want a quality game that’s fun to play again and again with none of the usual annoyances of other modern games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco On Celtrios, Mac is available on Steam with a free demo or you can go over to the Apple App Store to get Celltrios

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for iOS and tvOS. Thank you so much to Celltrios for sponsoring our show.

Exit Interview: iPhone 14 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, we got news yesterday, I believe, that the next Apple event,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is presumably the iPhone event, is on September 12th. It will be at 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey o’clock in the morning Pacific, which is one o’clock in the one-room time zone. As

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey expected, none of us got an invite to be there, but that’s okay. We’ll watch. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going to talk about predictions next week, but for now, Marco reminded us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that we should probably do some exit interviews. So, Marco, do you want me to quarterback this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or would you like to?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can do it. So yeah, so this is the, even though I have the least

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco experience of the three of us working in corporate jobs, I came up with this idea a few years ago to do an exit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interview of the outgoing devices that we have been using for the past year on the eve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the new ones presumably being released or announced. And because I feel like, you know, It’s one thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when, in this case, we’re going to talk about the iPhone 14, the Apple Watch Ultra,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the Apple Watch Series 8, and maybe some other stuff like the Lightning Port. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interesting, when these things come out, you can talk about, oh, and we will,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when the iPhone event show happens in a few weeks, we will talk about, oh, here’s the cool new stuff, this sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good, this looks good, the reviews say this is pretty good, then when you get it, you’re like, oh yeah, this feels good, this looks nice, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it’s different after a year. You know, after a year, the novelty has worn off and you get to really evaluate,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, how was the iPhone 14 Pro? Or how was the Apple Watch Ultra version

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one actually living with it for a longer term? How does it perform long term?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Are there any, you know, flaws that didn’t seem like a big deal at the beginning, but became a big deal later?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Things that you thought would be a big deal that weren’t a big deal later? So I feel like this is kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of a fun segment to do and I don’t think anyone else really does it. So this is kind of like the ATP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco innovation, besides one of us, I think, might have been a follow-up at some point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} That was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} it was me just recently. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, it was, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} So anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can’t put that on the record, it’s just gonna confuse the AIs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} They’re already confused.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You now need to make very neutral, direct statements correcting the record.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, they’re already hallucinating, like as if they’re at a Phish concert, which we will also get to later. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so, exit interviews. First, the big one, the iPhone 14 slash 14 Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, John, you have the 14, right? I have the 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro. Yeah, that’s the 14 Pro, yeah. All right, and so do I. And Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you haven’t dropped this into a well yet, right? You still have a 14 Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is true. There is a couple of, or there are a couple of very, very, very hairline scratches,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not impacts, but scratches on the screen. But yes, it is for all intents and purposes, a fully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey functional, unshattered iPhone 14 Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will say the screen on my 14 Pro, you know, every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year the phone tweaks the screen glass formulation in such a way to try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make it more drop and shatter resistant. And some years, and even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco within variations within certain years, some years you get a screen that just scratches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like crazy because usually to make things more shatter resistant, sometimes they have to tweak the properties

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the glass in some ways that make it a little bit softer and make it more scratch prone in exchange for not shattering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as easily. My 14 Pro has been either the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the second most scratch prone iPhone I’ve ever had. This screen was, like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had visible scratches on the screen within I think two weeks of owning it and it’s only gotten worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over time. And like, I know it’s not just, I don’t just carry around sand in my pocket because-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Are you sure? Yeah, exactly. Are you sure there’s not sand in your pocket? I mean, granted of the three of us, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the most likely one to have sand in my pocket, but this doesn’t happen with any of my other devices. It hasn’t happened with past

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phones with a couple of exceptions from long before, like before I was at the beach. It doesn’t happen with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other devices. Like it’s just certain phones have very scratch prone glass for whatever reason. And the iPhone 14 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for me has been the worst for in a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I have scratched my screens, minor scratches over the years. I know it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not like it’s impossible for me to scratch a screen, but I’m looking at this and I’m cleaning it off with my shirt while

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re talking. I can’t find a single scratch of any kind,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any size, any lightness, anywhere on my screen. And I’m not super careful with my phone. I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use it as a phone. It’s fallen off my nightstand 50 times onto the ground in front of it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve dropped it while walking down the stairs. You gotta use MagSafe, man. I put it in pockets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the time. I put it in jacket pockets. I put it in my jeans pockets, I put it down on surfaces, right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side up and front side down, not a single scratch anywhere on it. So I like the sand in the pocket

⏹️ ▶️ ^John theory. I don’t know what you’re doing to your phone. No, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually that, my phones usually are like that. They’re usually scratch free. And that’s why it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco notable when one isn’t. But anyway, we’ve heard before, like some years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like there will actually be variations in this property within different phones of the same year. Like with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like different iPhone 14 Pros might actually vary in this way. So I can’t fault the whole line for it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that was a very kind of unfortunate thing about this phone right from the start for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But moving on from that, physically speaking, this phone is heavy and dense,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I really don’t like it. And I really am very excited about the rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the next ones being more using titanium for the frame instead of stainless steel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because steel is really heavy. Titanium is less so. Aluminum is even less so. And actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few months ago, I bought a yellow aluminum iPhone 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco non-pro as a test device because I needed more test devices, as I discussed previously. And the 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco non-pro feels great in the hand, in large part because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is noticeably lighter weight than the 14 pro. It’s not a small difference. Like if you look at the actual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weight numbers, the weight numbers make it seem like, oh, that’s maybe a moderate deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When you hold it in hand, it’s a huge difference. The 14 non-pro feels

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fantastic. And it still has the giant glass back, glass is heavy, but it has obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a much simpler camera module because there’s only two cameras, not three, and they’re smaller, so that’s probably some of the weight right there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it also doesn’t have the stainless steel edges, it has aluminum. And aluminum is actually even lighter than titanium in most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco uses, depending on structure and everything. But, you know, if you think that the new phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using titanium are going to automatically get as light as the non-pro phones? Probably not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because not only will they still have giant cameras, and non-pros probably won’t, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco less giant, but also aluminum is still lighter than even titanium,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which we actually see in the Apple Watch, which we’ll get to in a little bit. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 14 Pro is super heavy and dense, and I really, I’m glad to hear rumors that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to maybe address that. I hope they go as far as they can with addressing that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of the reasons they might not want to address that is battery life. I have found the 14 Pro to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco okay battery life. It’s not great, it’s not bad, it’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And batteries are very heavy and very dense so maybe that’s part of the reason why this phone has to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much heavier because it needs that additional battery power to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to power the always on screen. And I think of all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the features and updates to the iPhone 14 Pro line or 14 at all line,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the always on screen of the 14 Pro to me is the single standout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feature of this generation. Because we, promotion, that was last year, wasn’t it? We didn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t- Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been around for a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} while. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco promotion launched on the 12 or 13 Pro. So that wasn’t new this year. But the always on screen, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was the big new thing. And that changes so much about how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many of us, not all of us, but how many of us can get value out of our phones. A lot of people don’t use it. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of people, they just kind of don’t have their phone resting in a place where they would see the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So they don’t really use it or they don’t like how it behaves. In some ways, they turn it off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I turned it off. I tried it for a couple of weeks and I turned it off. I’ve never looked back. I just do not want that feature.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the extra battery life is a bonus, but I have to say my battery life has also been weirdly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John variable, kind of like when you’re on betas and you’re like, oh, I’m running a beta, something must’ve gone nuts in the background and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like burned down my battery. Every once in a while I’ll have a day where I’ll look, it’ll be like 5 p.m. and I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at my battery power. I’m like, what the hell happened today? Like, why am I so low on battery? But that’s rare.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Most days, I talked about this when we first got the phones, part of it is because of my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MagSafe charger in my car. You know, it’s a MagSafe mount, but it also charges the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone. So if I’m driving anywhere, it’s like 8 p.m. and I have 85% battery, right? Because I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been just driving around running errands and every time I’m in the car, the thing is stuck to the charger. But even days when I don’t drive anywhere,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just battery life is a non-issue. Like, I mean, and maybe also because I’m on wifi a lot, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when I go for dog walks and stuff like that, just battery life has been fantastic. Except every once in a while,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll just be like, where did my battery life go? I don’t know what’s going on. Obviously I think it’s a software issue. I think what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it shows is the 14 Pro has a good sized battery. And it’s only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John betrayed occasionally by software features, whether that be just the baseline

⏹️ ▶️ ^John overhead of always on screen, which again, I don’t use, but if you do use it, you’re spending some battery on that obviously.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or the something weird has gone on with some app or some part of the OS on this particular day in the Birdman

⏹️ ▶️ ^John battery. But in general, I would say the battery life of this is, I think probably the best it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in recent years for me on phones. I remember my 12 being worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I agree, this phone is big and dense and heavy, but that’s a trade-off I’m willing to make to basically not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to worry about battery life anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, my battery life, I think I echo what John is saying. Now, it’s also hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me because I often have my phone plugged in for doing testing or whatever. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey consider your source. I am at best an unreliable narrator for this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I echo what you’re saying, John, that there are days that like a process just runs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey away or something happens that I feel like something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wrong has gone on and my battery’s just slaughtered. And Erin has actually been saying, because she

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doesn’t have her phone, her 14 Pro on a charger very often during the day. And she has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey been saying that her battery life has gotten real bad recently. And I’ve taken a couple of glances

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the battery stuff in settings. And I can’t say I’ve come up with anything obvious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that, you know, oh, this is exactly what it is. And when I’ve looked at it on my own phone, I’ve definitely seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some occasions where Instagram has seemingly gone kind of bananas,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but my goodness, I feel like normally my battery is pretty darn good. Her battery,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think like Marco, because Marco, you said yours was really crummy, right? Her

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} battery is really crummy. No, no, I said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s okay. It’s not great, it’s not bad, it’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, well, hers is like crummy to okay. And then, yeah, mine waffles and varies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey between the two, it’s very unusual.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, that’s been a story recently. People are like, oh, the 14 to the 14 Pros have some kind of manufacturing problem with the battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’re only a year old and their battery, like that battery health number they give you, it’s like lower than people expect. Where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that? I’m trying to find it in settings and I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey find it. Settings and then battery, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} thought.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Settings and battery, okay. So all our phones are basically a year old because we all got them on the launch day, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And actually mine is a little bit younger because I got it replaced because of the camera within like the first month. But anyway, what is your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John battery health at on your year old iPhone 14 Pro. 100%, I’m kidding, mine’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at 90.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 93.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mine’s at 97. Oh wow, goodness.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, I think, you know, I did get mine replaced, I forget when it was, you go back in the archives, remember my camera was weird. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another thing about this phone, this is the first iPhone I think I’ve ever gotten that basically had a manufacturing defect. Which is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it’s just a lottery, whatever, you know, but I’ve had a lot of iPhones and this year I got unlucky. I had that fogginess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the camera, and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} there. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was in, it was within like the first month or two that I had the phone. But yeah, their solution was to give me an entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new phone because apparently they didn’t want to replace the camera module. And a couple other people had that problem as well. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. So mine is actually younger than a year, but 97% after, you know, nine months

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, still pretty good. And both of your numbers seem reasonably, but some people like, oh, I’ve had it for a year and it’s like an 81% and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is a manufacturing defect. Batteries are kind of one of those things, even more so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the screens that Marco was talking about where you never know what you’re going to get. You might get lucky or unlucky

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the build quality on the battery. They are complicated, delicate sandwiches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of chemicals that can go wrong in all sorts of ways. Solid state batteries can’t get here soon enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But in the meantime, we’ve got these pretty complicated little lithium-ion sandwiches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shoved inside our phones. And I don’t know. Maybe there was a manufacturing problem. Maybe they’ve changed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suppliers midway through or whatever. But my personal experience is, you know, after less than a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John year, you know, nine months or whatever it is, 10 months, 97% capacity and pretty good battery life,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John except for when the software goes off the rails.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So going back to the always on screen for a moment, I think if you were one of the people who was turned off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by it initially and then turned it off initially, in one of the later point updates of iOS 16,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they added the option to make the background of the sleep screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just black instead of showing your wallpaper in like a dim state. And I found,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as soon as that came out, I turned it on and I’ve left it on since then. Not only does that probably save some tiny amount of battery life

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it’s not lighting up all those pixels, but also-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not so tiny amount of battery because it literally isn’t lighting them up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, but I mean, but it’s lighting them up very little in the other mode. But anyway, I have found that helps a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the awkwardness and downside of Always On when we were first all getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used to it was sometimes it was difficult to tell whether the phone was active or not, and you had to like tap it to like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco brighten it up, that distinction is much easier to see and detect when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the background is black, when it’s in the sleep mode. So I have found that option

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco significantly improves the Always-On screen for me. And so if you haven’t tried that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco option, I would say try it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I did try that one, and when it came out, it didn’t really change it for me. I don’t know what it is. It’s not like that I hate it or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything, but it’s just that I just don’t want the screen of my phone on when I’m not using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Like it’s never in a context where I would look at it to provide useful information and I can never build that habit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by like, you know, putting it on. It wasn’t, I wasn’t doing it for battery life. It was entirely just the user experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, I just want my phone to be off and completely black when I’m not using it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I like the idea of tapping to wake it up and I don’t, just don’t want anything on the screen. So I don’t think I’m ever gonna go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back on this feature because it’s just not, I just haven’t been able to build the habit of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking to my phone to see useful things on it when I’m not using it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. Yeah, Erin is in the same boat. Like she almost immediately turned off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the always on display, which is why it’s even more striking that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey her battery life is such garbage because her display is off a lot. So I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what’s going on there, but it’s frustrating for her and I don’t blame her at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So overall, I would say iPhone 14 series, pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The main areas I hope to see improvement are weight and maybe some of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco battery inconsistency management in some way, while that is very likely to be software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco influenced, if not 100% software related. But yeah, the size and weight, I would love to see this thing get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit lighter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I would agree with that. One of my concerns about this generation of phone, and this is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a real concern, or it’s a thing I think about a lot, is the camera system. Obviously the 3X camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is still not great, which is disappointing because sometimes I want that reach, but I tend to avoid it because I know how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much worse the 3X camera is. And it didn’t get any better this year from last year, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I would like to see some advancement in the 3X camera. And then the 2X camera, like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 2X camera being also, the 2X camera is worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the 1X camera, but I think it also does a thing will it will take a crop of the 1X camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at certain distances for 2X? That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is. No, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} is only- Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is, there’s a 3X ultra wide, you’re right. All right, so it’s a crop of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the 1X

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 2X is always a crop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, okay. So, and like, the thing is, I never, like when I find myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at 2X, I’m like, oh, but I don’t want a crop of the 1X camera. I should just take this at 1X and crop it myself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cause why, it’s like, you know, I have cameras that can go into crop mode too. And if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had to put an APS-C lens on it, Yes, of course you need to use crop mode, but otherwise I would never use crop mode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just take the full shot and I’ll crop it later. Why make that decision ahead of time and lose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information? So every time I go to take a 2X picture, I’m like, I should change to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 1X and just crop it myself later. And I don’t like that tension. I mean, half this is a me problem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the phone problem, but 2X is a convenient distance a lot of the time for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I really wish I didn’t have to make that trade-off. Like I didn’t, I wish that wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a thing. I wish I could get like basically, I guess I’m asking for a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 2X camera, like the ultra wide. I know it’s the third, you know, third camera on here. And I do use it like when taking pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like my son’s dorm room and you wanna get the whole room or whatever. But I don’t know, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dissatisfied with the zoom ranges is what I’m trying to say with the camera. And it’s not a particular fault of the 14 Pro because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not much different than the 13 Pro before it. Or like the Apple has been doing this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The difference here is you got the 48 megapixel thing where you can take the full 48 megapixels And I have to have done that a few times and that’s fun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever But I’m dissatisfied with given the amount of area they use here and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give an amount of cost and everything on all these cameras I wish there was a better balance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Zoom ranges for me to take photos with that were more satisfying to me. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t I don’t again this is this is just a me thing probably because of the way I take pictures and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and The fact that I’m used to using my quote-unquote real cameras much more often that when I’m using the iPhone I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find my camera choice is somewhat frustrating and I fluctuate between them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so if they could resolve that or like improve on that measurably, I’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John appreciate it. Like a better 3X camera would be a step in the right direction. A better balance between 1X and 2X.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, I was gonna say ditch the 0.5X, but I wouldn’t ditch it. Maybe just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make that camera a little bit better too because honestly those pictures don’t come out great. I don’t know, I’m very picky.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I’m glad you brought up the cameras because I actually, I forgot to mention this this is kind of a big thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I I’m not a huge fan of the the default photo processing on the 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pros cameras in in particular it tends to look like too much like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 1990s unsharp mask usage you know like it’s like it tends to crank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up the contrast on edges too much and and it makes photos look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit too like over sharpened and unrealistic and an over processed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by default and and whenever I’ve whenever I’m like seeing an iPhone photo in my library

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at anything bigger than the phone screen size so maybe I’m doing it on my Mac or on an iPad or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that jumps out at me like oh that’s that looks a little harsh like and that’s that’s the word I would use for it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is harsh now the iPhone still remains the best camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for weird or variable conditions or poor conditions because you know what it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does computationally is still excellent and it’s it’s much easier and faster and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more consistent to get a usable shot from an iPhone in weird or poor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco conditions than from any other camera really. But in good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lighting the iPhone looks really weirdly over sharpened now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The picture from the iPhone 14 Pro and I know that you know they did all the stuff with the 48 megapixel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sensor with the weird pixel splitting thing. Frankly, I have not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seen what appears to be a noticeable improvement from that. I don’t shoot raw, maybe that’s my problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe I should be using a Pro camera app and I should be shooting raw and doing that kind of processing and everything to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better control over it. But whatever it is, I am not super happy with the photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve gotten out of the 14 Pro. So I’m hoping, every iPhone that comes out, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tweaks the treatment of the camera, whatever the built-in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco filters and stuff are, they tweak it all to match whatever the sensors and ISPR that year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s great. And some years it’s better than others. And I think this is one of the kind of down years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I think part of the problem with what they do with those tweaks, because they do, they change this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all for every year. And it’s not just to match the hardware, but they make different artistic decisions, essentially of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I assume probably internally chasing like the worst case scenarios, like, oh, when you take a picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this kind of lighting, our current algorithm for sharpening or edge enhancement really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just overdoes it and it looks terrible. So we should tweak it so that that worst case scenario

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not as bad. And all of that adjustments to software, you know, and they brag about them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the keynotes and they will again say, look at our processing, look at what a great job it does on this thing, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Think the fundamental problem that both, that I probably have and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you Marco will as well, maybe Casey won’t mind, is that their target,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what is the goal if we’ve done a good job at this? Their target is we want this camera to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take photos that most people are happy with. And kind of like all the TVs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people have in vivid mode all the time or whatever, or with motion smoothing turned on, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most people are happy with is not what we’re going to be happy with. And so like their default

⏹️ ▶️ ^John processing may be getting closer and closer to succeeding, but as it gets closer and closer to that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not what we want. Like, you know, if you want the cameras to look neutral and not too enhanced,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use a third-party app like Obscura or like, what is that other one? Halide? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there you go. Like there are other choices. You don’t have to use the Apple one. Apple does make it very convenient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use the Apple one. Maybe you can use the action button on the new iPhones to launch the camera app of your choice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I feel like their goal is to achieve something that we don’t want. that most people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will find the look of over enhanced, over sharpened, very contrasty photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, to give a thumbs up and say, I like that better. It looks good, but that’s just not what we want out of it. So I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like we are, it’s hard to fault Apple for that. Like they should make things that, that make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most people happy. But if you have different tastes in photos or like, don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them to look that way, you’re going to have to try third party app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know. I, I’m certainly a less sophisticated photographer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than either of you two, but I don’t think the camera is bad at all. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t generally disagree with the choices that it makes. And in fact, to my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey eyes, I think that my 14 pro camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is except in like perfect sunlight, the best camera we have in the house. Like I love my Olympus,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my Olympus, micro four thirds, but indoors, it’s not even a contest. It’s not even in the ballpark

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and outdoors, the Olympus is better for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Unless I want an HDR photo or, you know, or, or whatever the case may be. Like there are other times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the iPhone is again, better than the Olympus, even outside, although it’s much, much, much more rare.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I quite like the iPhone camera, although I desperately want a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey longer reach. Like I would love a six X camera. And so I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think I’ve told either of you this yet, but if we do get that Periscope camera and if it is only on the Max,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am strongly considering going for the obscenely oversized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey phone for next year because I really just would love to have a much, much deeper

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey zoom. And I think I might be willing to try it to see if it’s, try the big one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Have you been keeping up on the rumors? I don’t remember what the rumored zoom range is, but I don’t recall it being

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} six. I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John six X, I thought, no. We’ll do some more research on it for next week’s episode when we actually do our predictions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But as usual, pretty much everything about all these phones is leaked. Yeah, exactly.

Exit Interview: Apple Watch Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Alright, we should move on from the iPhone. I do not have an Apple Watch Ultra, so I have nothing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say about that. John does not have an Apple Watch Ultra, so he has nothing to say about that. So, Marco, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do have an Apple Watch Ultra, and it is better than I expected. I did end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up switching away from it during beta season, because I devoted it to a different beta

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco path than my main watch, because you can’t back-restore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watches to previous versions. So, I haven’t really worn the Ultra since the summer began

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the most part, but it’s very interesting. I think the Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has largely succeeded at being a new market for the Apple Watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know to what degree it has succeeded in being an extreme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch for extreme sporting people who were previously buying garments and stuff. I have a feeling it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably hasn’t eaten too much into that market because a lot of that, a lot of that market,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it still doesn’t have certain features or characteristics to address. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just anecdotally, I see tons of ultras out in the world. Tons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It seems like this has been a very successful and well-selling product. And I have to give Apple credit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for it being the first, like, really new and different Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco since the introduction of the Apple Watch. Like it was a major change, a major departure in lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of different ways, especially in the physical design of it. And I think they largely succeeded.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I assumed when they announced the specs and the size, I assumed it would be comically way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too big on me, and it isn’t. It’s not small. I would say it couldn’t get any bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on me, but it actually works because of the design of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you know like the angle that the straps exit the sides certainly like you know some of the some of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dimensions and some of the the way it falls in your wrist it actually fits on more wrists than you would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expect based on its stated measurements so fit-wise it’s great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the the industrial design of it succeeds in making it look more rugged

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and hardcore and in certain ways it is not in all ways you know but in certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways it is that’s good battery battery life on the Ultra is indeed great because it is a much bigger battery. I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the use of titanium as the only choice of material because that made it light enough still because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you would think it would be really big and heavy. And it’s not light, but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco noticeably too heavy. It’s like right in the middle. It’s right where you want it to be. So that’s really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love the orange accents on the action button and on the crown. One of the downsides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco though is that this watch having these prominent orange themed accents, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco restricts what strap colors look good with it. And also the design of the Ultra,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way that, you know, the watch being large to begin with and a slightly different strap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exit angle on it to make it fit better on with its big size, that actually changes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what straps look good on it compared to other Apple watches. And it has its own collection, but I would say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it needs more. The strap selection for the Ultra is still pretty limited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in terms of what both looks okay with it and works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well with it, you know, physically. I think the rubber straps, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forget, is it the ocean band? Is that what they call it? The rubber ones with all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rod holes throughout them. Those I think are the best strap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for it overall. the navy blue and I think is the easiest and the best looking one overall.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wore that most of the time with it. I also later on put a the silicone loop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on it which doesn’t quite look as right but it was a little more comfortable on my wrist. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would love to see more strap options and and maybe I know this is heresy for people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco love orange because I and I love orange in case you haven’t you know noticed with my app icon and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but maybe an option where the side button is not orange to give it a few more color options with straps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’ll see about that. But anyway, the speaker on it’s nice and clear and loud. You know, I don’t personally use it for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything. I’m glad it’s there. Different hardware is good. The crown guard on it, the protrusion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around the digital crown and side button to make them harder to hit off, basically, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco climbing a wall. I was hoping the crown guard would make it more difficult for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the buttons to be pushed, say, if you are wearing weightlifting gloves and your hand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tilts up, like if you’re in like a high plank or a push-up here, so your hands like up relative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to your wrist, it’s very easy for the corner of a weightlifting glove to accidentally push the crown or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the side button if you’re wearing your wrist, if you’re wearing your watch in like the regular orientation on your left wrist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I was hoping that the crown guard on the Ultra would prevent that kind of accidental crown crown and button

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pushing from happening with certain workout gear, and it doesn’t. Because the crown

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and buttons still protrude out slightly from the guard and And so something that pushes flat against

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the guard will still push those buttons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey Johnston would want me to tell you you’re not supposed to wear gloves when you lift weights. I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That would solve your problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco though, right? That would solve it sometimes. I mean, certain certain positions of my wrist, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even the skin bunching up could theoretically push those buttons. Yeah. But it certainly happens a lot more while wearing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gloves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, speaking of this guard, the crown guard and what it’s supposed to do and how it’s working for you. This whole watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of reminds me of, I mean, I don’t know a lot about the watch world, so maybe this is a non-app analogy, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe there’s a better one in cars, but like, for it being like for extreme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sports or whatever, it seems like the Apple Watch Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the watch that people buy because it looks like a watch that someone who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did extreme sports would use, but of course they’re not going to do it. To kind of like Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aspirational. It’s like aspirational off-road SUVs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, like the Rolex Submariner, you’re not gonna go diving with that watch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right? Of course, almost no one does. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a diving watch, but you’re right. And so it seems like the Apple Watch Ultra, I mean, I guess it does probably have more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John abilities for the supposed purpose than maybe some of the other watches are, but the entire watch market seems to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be, get this watch that looks like a watch that a mountain climber would use, but you’re not a mountain climber.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Get this truck that looks like someone who’s gonna go off-road would use, but you’re not gonna go off-road, you’re gonna drive to Starbucks, right? And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get the Apple Watch Ultra because it looks, I mean, and the watch market, every watch to me looks like, why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does this watch look this way? The explanation is like, oh, that’s for like when you’re climbing a mountain or when you’re under the water that you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just like, but you’re never doing those things. It’s like, yeah, but you don’t understand. Like the whole watch market seems to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that. So to me, the Apple Watch Ultra seems like it hit that bullseye perfectly, which is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one’s actually gonna take this thing diving, but you see so many of them around for the same reason you see all those other ridiculous watches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around that have features and looks to them crown guards or whatever. It’s like, well, you know, when I’m,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when I’m picking up my coffee from the desk, what if my, I hit my wrist on the edge of the desk, this crown guard will prevent me from accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hitting a button. You know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I mean, I, there are legitimate reasons for the crown guard to be there for some people. You are right that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the vast majority of Apple watch ultra buyers will never do anything extreme enough to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco justify them. And that’s okay. People buy watches number one, because they look cool. And then number two,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cause they provide some kind of utility. And that that utility usually is not super ultra, you know, damage protection

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in your extreme sports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Although you have talked about like the actual utility this watch provides is a big flat screen. Yes. Which has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing to do with extreme sports and has everything to do with like, oh, do you actually wanna use apps on your watch because you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John utility from them? Well, using the apps on this screen is nice because it’s big

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s flat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, and that is one area where the Ultra really excels if you are using your smartwatch like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a computer. It’s simple as that. Like, you know, for many people, the Apple Watch is mostly doing passive, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, tracking your activity, maybe popping up an occasional notification, but you’re not really like interacting with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it that much for most people. But if you’re a nerd and you’re actually like interacting with apps on a regular basis

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the watch, you’re trying to read long texts or whatever, like having that larger and totally flat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco edge to edge screen actually makes those things a lot better. So from that point of view, it’s like the Max

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phone in the sense that like, if you’re actually, if you’re really heavily using it as a computing device, having a bigger screen is nicer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So from that point of view, the Ultra succeeds as well. The last thing I’ll say about the Ultra is I think the action

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco button has been kind of a miss. Both in the physical placement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it and in the software abilities that it offers. It’s very difficult to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use the action button well. And also, it is, in my experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wearing the Ultra, I hit it accidentally all the time. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that could be significantly improved. Right now, the action button is on, it’s, if you’re looking at the watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the regular orientation, it’s on, it’s kind of in like the bottom left side of the watch. I think if they swap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it with the speaker and put it at the top left, that will improve it. Because right now it’s very difficult,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you, if the wrist, if the watch is on your left wrist, like as it usually is for most people, if you want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco push the crown in, what you will typically do is using your right hand,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pinch the watch with your index finger on the crown and your thumb right on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco action button. So even after wearing this watch for months,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I never got used to that. I would constantly still hit the action button inadvertently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so I ended up turning off its function. Like I tried, that’s the other thing, the functions that it offers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are very specific to certain workout needs and I didn’t have any of those particular needs so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I tried things like, maybe I should have it start the stopwatch or stuff like that. And I never found

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a good use for it that, first of all, would tolerate accidental input without being too annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And second of all, that justified the kind of clunky nature of using it. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the action button, it’s a good idea to have more buttons on the watch that are software programmable. That’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It needs some tweaks, both in its physical design and its software design. And maybe we’ll see that in future versions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But other than that, I really think the Apple Watch Ultra was extremely successful in what it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco set out to do. It seems to be very popular and I think I’m looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forward to where it goes next.

Exit Interview: Apple Watch S8

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That being said, for most of the year, I was spending much more time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wearing my Apple Watch Series 7. I’m not talking about the Series 8,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which we’re about to mention, because the Apple Watch Series 7 is the one I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prefer over the 8. The Apple Watch Series 8 now deserves an Exeter interview.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It was just like the 7, with almost nothing changed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So why do you prefer the 7?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because I guess they don’t have enough titanium to make all their watches out of it, So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they removed the titanium option from the regular Apple Watch Series 8. And the Series 7 comes in titanium,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so that’s what I’ve been wearing. And titanium is by far my preferred Apple Watch metal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these days. It is almost as light as the aluminum, not quite, but it’s in the ballpark of as light as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the aluminum. It looks very nice. I think it looks significantly nicer than the aluminum and with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco its nice brushed pattern and the way it reflects light and everything. And it’s a little bit less flashy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and less noticeable with scratches than the steel. So I love the titanium.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if I was gonna buy a new Apple Watch today of the regular series,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I guess I’d get steel. But, and I wore steel for years and I love it, but I love titanium more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they got rid of it with the 8. And presumably because they probably didn’t sell a ton of it and maybe because they wanted to save it all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the Ultra. But I’m hoping in future Apple Watches that makes a comeback as an available

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco metal for the regular Apple Watch series. because ultimately the regular Apple Watch series is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more comfortable on me. That’s why I used it more than the Ultra for the last half of the year. It’s more comfortable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on me. It kind of fits my wrist a little bit more gently. And I like the way the straps work a little bit better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on it. So that’s why I went back to the Series 7 and not the Series 8. And the Series 8 really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t offer a whole lot over the 7. In fact, between 6, 7, and 8, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have been very few changes. They’re all even running the same system on a chip, the same processor. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m, and rumors are, they’re going to finally update it for the nine. We’ll see. But the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco grade I would give the series eight is it wasn’t even interesting enough for me to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buy. And that’s saying a lot because I buy fricking everything. And even the series eight, I couldn’t justify.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I have a series eight and I mostly agree with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you. I like it. It’s not terribly interesting. I wish I had a better battery.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s all I got. I am the small series eight. Uh, I am on the 41 or whatever it is. Millimeter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, the battery is sufficient. Uh, I typically work out half

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an hour to 45 minutes every single day. And I will top

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up when I’m showering. And if I do take a little siesta, which, which used to be fairly common, but now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s fairly uncommon. Uh, I’ll top it up all that’s happening, but you know, today I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lay down or anything like that. And I had a fairly busy day. I did a 45 minute workout and I’m at 14% and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s about 930 at night. So it is enough to get me through a day, but not with a lot of breathing room.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I would love either a watch with a much bigger battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that is not the Ultra. I’ll have to try the Ultron again whenever I do upgrade because maybe it would work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on my wrist, but nevertheless, I would love either a much bigger battery if possible, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey perhaps more likely a much more power efficient CPU because these watch batteries

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really are being to this day are still being stretched to their breaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey point, I think. And I would love to have have more. Just give me more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it does depend a lot on what you do, like, especially it depends a lot on things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how long in a day you’re running in a workout mode. And then and certain certainly like whether that workout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mode is using GPS. So like if you’re going on an outdoor run,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, yeah, that’s not typically what I’m doing. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially if you are like using cellular to stream the music like that’s that’s just about the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power intensive thing you can do on the watch is like workout mode plus GPS plus cellular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that will drain it significantly whereas if you are you know just mostly like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in regular watch mode sitting around somewhere where you have wi-fi not doing a whole lot with it that’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last a long time um and and certainly you know i i never really got into sleep tracking so i i

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t do do that whole game where you try to charge it when you’re in the shower. I never got into that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m just charging it overnight and when I’m in the shower. So my battery life has been great. I’m also using the larger

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one, the 45mm Series 7. But, this is a song about Alice. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco talking about the Series 8. Series 8 Apple Watch, it’s totally fine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s barely anything changed from the 7, which itself was not a massive change from the 6. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, hoping for better things with the 9, but the Series 8 is still a great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch overall, It’s just, it doesn’t really provide much over the predecessor.

Exit Salute

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then finally, Marco made a really good point. All the rumors are pointing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to this is the year of USB-C. It’s finally happening. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the iPhones that we have in hand are the last iPhones with lightning ports, RIP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the lightning port. And I will start by saying this can’t come soon enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am so ready for this. I am so ready to ditch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lightning. I don’t have any particular problem with lightning and I think in the context of a phone it actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is really really nice but at this point I will take

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ubiquity over any niceties of the lightning port and I think that’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no small part influenced by the fact that I use Qi charging overnight.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do have a dock that I’ll have to replace on my desk for when I’m working but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the only time I ever really plug in my phone because I have that, you know, wireless CarPlay dongle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s the CarLinkit one. I don’t, mine is ancient. Just get CarLinkit and that’s the one because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I put this in the show notes and every single time people are like, what one do you have? CarLinkit. C-A-R-L-I-N-K-I-T.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, anyways, I have wireless CarPlay for me. Now, Erin, I could get her one of these, but I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey she cares. So her car would, will need to get a different cable presumably, But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by and large in my day to day life, the only time I’m plugging in my phone is when I’m having one of those Syracuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey style off days with my battery. And we have one of the iPad or whatever watt chargers, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hooked up to a USB to lightning, a USB-C to lightning cable down in the living room. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we’ll use that as like our emergency top up station. That’s about the only time I plug in my phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And any other time I am wirelessly charging or doing development on it. it. So whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, I am so here for USB-C. I would love to not have to worry about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lightning anything. And I say that as someone who never touches lightning, even my travel setup, as we talked a couple of weeks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ago, is that Qi based, uh, Mophie three in one thing. So I don’t even bring lightning cables when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I go traveling, but, but still it would be so nice to go USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey only. I mean, hell, when I go to Wegmans or whatever to do work, because I want to get out of the house, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey love to not have to bring a lightning cable and worry about that. It’s just the ubiquity is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what does it for me. The world has moved on, although not from micro USB, but that’s neither

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey here nor there. The world has mostly moved on, asterisk, dagger, double dagger. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey please, please, please give me the USB-C iPhone. The lightning port was great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It served its purpose well, but it’s time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And for exit interviews, I think we could give, I think I would like to give an exit salute

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to lightning because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I feel like it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John served its purpose very well. People who don’t remember how old this is, so 30

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pin lasted what, like almost 10 years? Now we’re like 11 years for lightning?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it was the iPhone 5 that launched with lightning.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so in terms of how long a connector lasts, it’s about average,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and as Casey pointed out, like this one, Apple has been essentially drag kicking, screaming it’s upgrading.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like it’s not like they did it super fast. And I bring this up because the story about these connections is always everyone’s annoyed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when things change, right? You know, people don’t like change. I understand that. But timing wise, this makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some kind of sense. And if you go back to the beginning of when the lightning came out, it was replacing 30

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pin, which there are people listening to this program don’t know what that is. Go find one and look at it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’ll be like, people used to connect their phones with this. It’s hilarious in the way that like a VHS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tape would be hilarious to someone who watches Netflix.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right? It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically looks like a SCSI cable, like compared to like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just so big and so awkward and delicate and weird and Apple replaced it with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this one extremely tiny, they didn’t just make it a little bit smaller, they made it smaller enough that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, you know, we’re not gonna have to worry about the size of this connector for the foreseeable future. They made it so there’s no wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to plug it in, micro USB and basically every USB except for USB-C. No

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrong way to plug in, it works both directions. They made the little connectors are a little tiny solid piece of metal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is not going to bend or break or whatever, like the connector itself was the thing that you plug in was very solid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and This was coming into a world where there was no equivalent USB C didn’t exist at that point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So they had to make something themselves, which is people say, you know might think it’s Apple at its best and worst

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s at its best because they’re like they saw a technical problem They solved it in a very clever way with something that was better than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything else in the market and it’s at worst because Lighting was a hundred percent proprietary You had to pay Apple money if you wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sell a accessory that had the made for iPhone, whatever, you know And for a while, I think Apple was like, had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the only factories that made this connector. Maybe they still do. And like, it’s proprietary and, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, Apple made money off of it and it would, no other phone in the entire world used this, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Apple sells a lot of iPhones, so it was fine, right? And the thing is they made this proprietary connector

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and eventually USBC came out with some help from Apple that had many of the same advantages, but was industry

⏹️ ▶️ ^John standard. And eventually that rolled out across the industry. But what Apple didn’t do was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as soon as Lightning had essentially served its purpose and now we have an industry standard connector that we can all go to, they didn’t immediately

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leave that. Part of that was because they don’t wanna give up that made for iPhone money, right? I get that. Part of it was because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re putting off the painful change because whenever you change, people complain and it’s painful. But part of that I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, let’s just give Lightning its natural lifetime. One new connector

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for your phone every decade is a reasonable cadence for technological progress. 30 pin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Lightning, USB-C. If each of those three gets 10 years, that’s fine. I know everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna complain because they’re gonna be like, oh, I just got this phone and now the connector changed. And you know, like, cause you haven’t had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that phone for 10 years. Maybe this is your very first phone and you buy all these lighting accessories and you didn’t know this event was coming.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then it comes out and the phones are all using different things. And next year you gotta get rid of all your, like change is always gonna be hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for somebody. I get it. But Apple did not make a proprietary connector and then say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, nevermind, we don’t need that anymore and switch after two years. Cause that would have been worse for customers that wouldn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allowed the ecosystem to build. The whole ecosystem of docks and other things that work with lightning connectors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And on top of that, Apple did improve the lightning connector over the course of its life. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John couldn’t fix some of the fundamental things about it. In particular, I think we’ve talked about this before, but all kinds of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connectors or most kinds of computer connectors have some part of it that’s springy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and some part of it that is rigid and the springy things grip onto the rigid part. The rigid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part doesn’t move. It just is there to be solid and the springy parts grip it, right? And in Lightning,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the springy parts are inside the phone and the rigid part is of course the connector. If you look at a Lightning connector, nothing on it flexes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is just a solid piece of metal with little divots on the side and the springy parts are in the phone. USB-C is the opposite.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I believe in USB-C the springy parts are inside the connector and the rigid parts are inside the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In practice that hasn’t been that big of a deal but in general the USB-C design is smarter because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if some springy thing is gonna get loose from constantly having the connector put in and taken out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’d be better if that thing that gets loose is on a cable that you can throw away versus inside the phone that you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really replace the plug on it that easily. The other thing is, we all remember, and probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many of you are still experiencing this to this day, I know I am, you can look at a lightning connector and see those little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John black smudges on them. Yep. That is a thing that as far as I know, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did fix in later revisions of their devices cables that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that work with lightning because I think that was because one of the pins constantly had some amount of power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it and get these little black scorch marks and There was a period when the lightning cable went from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the little apart the little plastic part that wraps around The metal thing with the contacts on it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that plastic part got thicker And I think it’s because they changed the chip that was in there people might not know but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of Apple’s cables have actual Computer chips inside them, which doesn’t really justify their price their price.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, it’s not just a bunch of wires with the connector And I think they changed it to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever that pin was that was getting the black marks like pulse its Energy instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of doing I’m probably gonna details wrong here But the point is Apple revised lightning somewhere within its lifetime

⏹️ ▶️ ^John To fix one of the few actual flaws that it had and even that flaw wasn’t that bad because we all have these little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John marked Lightning cables I use them all the time. They still work fine. They don’t damage your phone They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t cause your there, you know, it’s not a hardware virus that infects all your phones and now nobody can charge. The main

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem that people have with lightning, which I’m not sure will get any better with USB-C, is pocket lint and crap getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John jammed up there. And that is more of a mechanical issue than an electronic one, but it is a issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with all these types of connectors. I’m not sure how USB-C will go because I’ve never had a USB-C phone before, but fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crossed. But anyway, that electrical problem with it, they fixed in a later revision. And you might not know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because if you still are using your old cable with the very small, very slim piece of plastic around and the lightning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connector, you’re not getting the advantage of that. I think you have to have the newer cables that are identifiable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by me anyway, among Apple’s cables as being a little bit thicker around that thing. And for those ones, I’ve tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. I have some of those cables and I have some that aren’t. And the newer cables with the thicker thing never get the black

⏹️ ▶️ ^John marks. And the old ones still do. So I think Apple has been an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John excellent steward of this proprietary connector. I don’t really begrudge them the made for iPhone thing. So there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plenty of third-party rip off things that didn’t pay for it or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s had its run, it did its job. I’m glad it was there. I’m glad I didn’t ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have an iPhone with micro USB on it, God forbid, right? I’m glad we didn’t have 30 pin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for longer. And I was happy to use Lightning for all this time. But of course, as all we tech nerds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John agree, it’s time to go to USB-C. I’m not sure if when we go to USB-C, I’m gonna miss Lightning. Lightning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is still a tiny bit smaller, tiny bit thinner. but you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time, I’m ready to take the hit. I’m not sure what the public reaction to it will be, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really just no alternative. Setting aside the EU stuff and all of them being forced to do it or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Lightning has run its course. And of all the things that Apple has done hardware standard wise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they did a pretty good job of it. It’s not perfect, again, the little black marks and the many cables they made with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inadequate strain relief and all the other things they’ve done, but there’s been a pretty good third-party ecosystem for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Lightning. I don’t think it has ever had any catastrophic errors where like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we screwed up with the connector and it just doesn’t work. The pocket lens thing, again, I don’t know if that’s gonna be better or worse with USB-C,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I, you know, I’m trying to think of everything in terms of tier lists. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} don’t know if Lightning would be S

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tier, but it would definitely be A. I think it did a great job. I salute

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Lightning as it is on its way out the door.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think the, what, I think the key innovation of Lightning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was the reversible connector. that was unheard of before. Like I don’t think any major computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco connector was reversible before that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know what did that? The headphone jack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Couldn’t put it in the wrong way unless you had an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John original iPhone and tried to use a regular headphone. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} setting that aside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like there have been connectors where you don’t have to worry about how to put them in. I think it was a computer innovation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say, oh, guess what? We have connectors, but they only fit one way. It’s like a kid’s shape sorter. Isn’t that easy?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I was like, okay, maybe for literal SCSI cables, it’s pretty obvious which way the shape

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sorter goes. by the time they’re the size of micro USB or God forbid, USB-A, where it’s externally symmetrical and internally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John asymmetrical, mistakes were made. And Apple corrected that and Apple helped correct that with USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, like the only reason why we are down on lightning now is that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rest of the world went to USB-C and now we are so close to the, you know, one cable basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco although a million asterisks on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The rest of the world and also Apple, Apple everywhere except for the iPhone and the AirPods and the keyboards

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, right. But, you know, even even setting aside all of those accessories, which, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, I know there’s rumors they’re going to do new AirPods cases. That makes sense. You know, probably with AirPods cases with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco USB-C, I’m sure we’ll be able to buy the case for like 70 bucks. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to get rid of lightning everywhere. Like I know we’ll talk about predictions, but like getting rid of lighting on the phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that’s the big one. But it has to go everywhere. And eventually I’m assuming it will go everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just hope they don’t drag their feet on it and have like keyboards that connect with lightning four years from now on Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s my fear, because they really don’t update the peripherals that frequently. I mean, the Magic Mouse has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been updated since it used AA batteries, and the trackpad, I think, was never updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until, well, the current design of it. It’s many years old now. The keyboard’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got updated with Touch ID fairly recently, so I don’t know how much they’re gonna update them again. Who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco knows? But anyway, what’s great about this move, if this happens, is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m gonna be able to get rid of like maybe 40% of the cables that are in use in my backpack and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around my house. So that’s, you know, traveling is gonna be so much easier. I can’t tell you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how often I go to reach for either a USB-C cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or a Lightning cable, and the one I find is the other one. And so that’s gonna be really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really nice. Also a great thing about USB-C over Lightning is that both ends of the cable are the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same. It’s gonna be great when it comes, but yes, the Lightning port itself, you know, for when it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was designed, it was way ahead of its time. And it has really served

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us pretty well with surprisingly few downsides all this time. And so it really has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been extremely successful. And yeah, I think giving it an exit salute

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is totally warranted. I won’t even like put one finger down to simulate the blackened pin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like no, I’ll give it all the fingers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yes, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the thing about the blackened pin. Like none of us like it because no one likes to see anything blackened on a piece of electronics,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But practically speaking, like I think that is basically a cosmetic issue that only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John annoys people who want things to be perfect. Like I’ve never even heard of it causing problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, the problem people have is lint. Lint fills the things and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t work. Oh no, it caused me problems. The blackened pin, it would eventually make a device or its cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not charge anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Really? I’ve never seen that happen. And we have, I like to have like original lightning cables that are blackened,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just completely messed up with it, but they still work. So I don’t know, maybe I’ve just been lucky.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m between the two of you. It happened to me, I don’t remember if it was devices, but certainly to cables, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was very rare when it did happen to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and it was usually on older things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John To avoid it, you have to use one of the new cables with one of the new phones. And it’s so easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not to do that because we just have all these cables around and you just mix and match or whatever. And you’re like, what are you talking about? They never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fix this, all my cables are blackened. I did the test myself several years ago and I said, I’m only going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use this new, what I know to be one of the supposedly fixed cables on my nightstand with my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone, and I’ve used it for years, it’s perfect. No blackened things on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The lightning cable, it was a little annoying to be its own thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was a little frustrating to run into someone with an Android phone and not be able to charge your phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because they had like micro USB or whatever, garbage connector. But even still,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it’s an S tier cable slash port slash whatever for me. It really did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey serve its purpose well. It’s riding into the sunset. It’s riding high into the sunset. Happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and accomplished. I salute you, Lightning Port. I salute you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh man, all right. Next member special. Tier list, different connectors. Gosh. I added it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the list. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a bad idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I know, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m literally putting it on the list.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsor this week, Celtrios, and thanks 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.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental And you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can find the show notes at atp.fm And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re into Twitter, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, tech podcast so long

Casey’s Synology migration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So this is going to be quick, partially because we’re running long and partially because I don’t actually have that much to say yet. But last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey week I had teased, certainly in the bootleg, I don’t recall if that made the released version, but I teased that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are you ready, Marco? I will give you a moment to grab what you need to grab. I teased that I have bought a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new Synology. I did get a new Synology. I did get a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slight discount on it from the Synology folks, which was very kind of them. Synologists?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the sinologists. I will talk about what I got and briefly describe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why, but I haven’t really started using it that much. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’d like to get this off my chest first because I’m very annoyed and frustrated. I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sinology products. I love, love, love them. I talk about them incessantly because I love them so darn much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I adore them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} And also… You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hear the comma

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} going right Also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am real crabby about their migration story. Now I will probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get the details wrong because I was doing this in haste and I was doing it like a week ago. Now I did take some notes for myself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but the migration story for Synology, the, the thing they want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you to do, and this is genuinely very cool that they support this, but what they want you to do is take all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the drives from one Synology, slap them in the new one and call it a day. What? Which that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what they want you to do. That’s like the easy peasy way to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. I would assume that wouldn’t work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know, exactly. So that’s why I do genuinely think it’s pretty cool that that’s supported. No, no BS. I really mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that. But I have noticed in the intervening 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey years, so we were gifted from stenology, each of us got a DS 18, 13

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey plus and 18 indicates 8 Bay, if I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey understand stenology nomenclature properly, the eight indicates 8 Bay. the 13 indicates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it was new on or around 2013. And this is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like extremely beefy for home use or really meant for like small office

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use Synology. Eight drives, ours all came preloaded, I believe with three terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey drives. I know mine is a darn ship of thesis at this point. I can’t speak for Marcos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think John, you said you’ve only replaced a couple, but. I replaced zero. No, that’s nuts. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I seriously, most of mine are replaced. anyways, I adore my Synology. It’s run great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it’s getting long in the tooth and I wanted to get a new one. And so what I decided was I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going to get a slightly smaller one. I will get a six base Synology and I got a 1621 plus. And I did that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because, Hey, guess what fellas in the last 10 years, since we got our Synologies,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey our jobs have gotten big. Old school platter spinning disk drives have gotten freaking big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Prime Day rolled around and I think I genuinely don’t remember, but I think it was something like $1,200

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all in, which is unquestionably a buttload of money, like it’s a mountain of money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but you know, once every 10 years, I don’t think that’s so bad. So I got four Western Digital Red 18 terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey drives. If you don’t care for Western Digital Red, I don’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh, bliss. It’s fine. This is what I’ve chosen. Please don’t scare me with horror stories about Western Digital. Cause I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey already hear you clacking on your keyboards, writing me emails. Nevertheless, I bought four 18 terabyte West

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Digital Reds, and that’s what I put in this new Synology, four drives.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And not only could I not move all eight drives from the old Synology,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but now this new Synology supports BTRFS, Butter File System, whatever you wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey call it. And I would like to move to that because I do a podcast with a Mr. John Syracuse, who is very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey opinionated about file systems. And my impression from John was that Butter or whatever it’s called is better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I wanted to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. You could use that on your own one too. Some of my things are BTRFS I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t, not if I don’t, not without reestablishing the entire volume.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, you gotta reformat stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Exactly. So I go to install the drives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the new Synology and that works fine. It does say, oh, these aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the drives we prefer because Synology has very annoyingly gone and started selling their own hard drives.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So of course they get very picky or they can get very picky about what drives you use. And in fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t get part of the reason I didn’t get a newer Synology was because they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have cranked that up as the hardware’s gotten newer, the, the annoyance and like, oh, you’re not using our drives. You’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey using our drives. And I didn’t want anything to do with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is, it is undesirable to say the least. And trust me. Oh, trust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me. I have lit up my contacts at Synology about how I think this is really gross.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Don’t you worry. I cannot believe they didn’t send this with like a bomb inside of it after all the complaining

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and moaning I’ve done to them. But nevertheless, I put in the drives, that works no sweat. It, you know, it installs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey DSM, Disk Station Manager, which is their like operating system, whatever, all well and good. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I go to make the volume, which is, you know, Synology speak for basically binding all these four drives together.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I chose Synology Hybrid RAID 2, which is to say I could lose two drives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and still have enough data in the remaining drives and parity checks and whatnot that I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey recover. That’s because I did SHR1 in the 8-base analogy, and you will recall right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the beginning of COVID, I lost a drive. And then in replacing that, almost lost a second drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and almost lost my entire entire data set, which would have been absolutely terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So… For refresher memory though, both your old one and your new one, you’re essentially setting up as a single volume.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No. Well, yes to the new one, no to the old one. The old one, six of the physical drives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was one massive volume. And then two of them, I did whatever the equivalent, whatever the rate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that it’s just, it’s two

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} physical hard drives.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Thank you. Treated as one. And the only thing that goes on that volume is time machine. And so that’s all redundant. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I lose it, I lose it. Not the end of the earth. I am issuing time machine entirely on this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Or maybe I will choose like, maybe I’ll get like an external drive or something to, to, to do time machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the future, but I am not doing anything with it on the new Synology. So it is four

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey drives, two empty bays, one giant volume of what is I think it’s like 34, 36 terabytes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because it’s two times 18 minus some overhead. I want to say it’s like 34 terabytes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey My current Synology, the volume is something like 12 or 15

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey terabytes and I’m using 10-ish. So I have two spare

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bays and I have something like 20 extra terabytes of free space anyway. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I make the volume and it says, oh, these aren’t Synology drives. I say, I don’t care. And it’s OK. Fine. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey established my SHR2 volume with butter, btrfs, whatever, whatever, all is well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I go to do migration assistant. And the first thing it said was, well, you should really just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey move the physical drives. I said, I can’t do that because I have two freaking less spots. OK, fine. So then I go to do the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey migration assistant again. And I can’t get it to work. And the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is, is because I have two-factor auth on my old Synology. and I will on the new one when I finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get it up and running. But I have two-factor auth on the old Synology, and the old Synology is so long in the tooth now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that when the migration assistant goes and does whatever verification it does for the two-factor auth,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it doesn’t complete in time and the two-factor auth times out. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I created another user that doesn’t have two-factor auth, and I go to do that whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dance with migration and the migration assistant, and it’s like, yep, you’re good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, oh, no, you’re not good. Oh, God. You’re not good because your old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Synology is on, I don’t even, I genuinely don’t remember what file system, I guess, X2 or whatever, like the, the.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John EXT4, EXT4. EXT4,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you go, thank you. The old Synology’s EXT4, your, your new volume’s BTRFS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So guess what? Get beeped.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So. Oh, actually, so wait, replacing the drives. You mentioned that a couple of times now that that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they want you to do. At first I was like, well, that’s dumb because the whole point is you want to get a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Synology that can store more. And if you get a new Synology and put the old drives in it, but here’s what I think they want you to do, which is even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worse. I think the idea is take the old drives, put them in the new thing. Let’s say you have the right number of bays to do it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then what they expect you to do is to basically swap them one at a time. Take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out one, put in a new bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} drive. Take out another one, put in another.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But remember how long it took for you to replace one

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} drive on your old Synology?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Literally days.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Literally days. And that had a third of the storage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would take you like a year and a half to replace

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} all the drives,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John during which time the thing would just be thrashing constantly. Like, I don’t know what they expect you to do. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s very disappointing to hear that their migration assistant, for what I think is the more sane approach, is not ideal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, so if you’re someone who has a better answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for this, I am all ears. But basically what I did was I said, all right, here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we go. So the way I have my files organized on my Synology is that the top level

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has a handful of folders, but the primary one I happen to name archive 10 years ago. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey within my archive is like everything that’s in Flex and all sorts of other junk. Like basically 98%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the data in my Synology is in the archive folder, maybe not literally 98, but a lion’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey share of that data is in the archive folder. And I mounted the old Synology as a network share from the new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Synology and said, go. And a day and a half, I think it was later,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because I’m running this, the old Synology is on a bonded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two connection, you know, gigabit ethernet to the switch. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new one, I only connected one of them. I don’t know if it really makes a difference anyway, but it took like a day and a half to transfer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like eight terabytes. But the problem that I have and why I’ve been kind of kicking this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can down the road a little bit for the last week, is that the old Synology is a moving target.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like I’m constantly adding, updating, changing, whatever on the old Synology. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think what I have to do is like either log into one of these via the terminal, which you can do and is very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey easy, or somewhere else set up some sort of like fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey regular R-sync,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} which-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Synology can do that. They have a feature that can, because I sync one of my Synology volumes to another separate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John physical Synology with a feature built into their operating system to do that for you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, then you and I need to talk after the show. See me

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John class. You think I actually know where that setting is in the settings? No, I set that up 10 years ago, but yeah, I could probably find it again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, let’s, yeah, let’s talk about this after class. But yeah, so I’m gonna need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do something like that to do, to some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey degree, have a, not a literal, but a figurative like hot swap between these two, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at some point, I’m just gonna need to move from one to the other. My intention is that the old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one will be a, maybe not maybe a hot swappable, but a local backup in the same way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I have a Synology remotely at my parents that has a full backup. I’m hoping that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the eight bay one, I’ll move to a different room or put in the garage or something like that. And that’ll become a local backup for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey emergency purposes. But nevertheless, at some point, I need to cut everything over, which means I need to get all the data in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sync between the two, which isn’t that big a deal, but is something that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would require some sort of automated thing like R-Sync or whatever Synology’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bespoke thing is. And actually, I believe that one of the migration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey assistant approaches is basically R-Sync under the hood or something like that, or maybe it’s not migration assistant, maybe it’s something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey else. But nevertheless, I’m gonna have to do something along those lines. But as much as I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey am super jazzed for this new Synology, and I mean that, and they still have a full-throated endorsement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from me, or maybe not a full-throated, maybe an almost full-throated endorsement. The one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gotcha that I have had in the 10 years of Synology bliss is, wow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is this migration story real bad? And it really, really bums me out. And it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ll get through it, I’ll get past it. And as with many things, if this is the most of my problems right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am so very incredibly lucky. But golly, what a pain in the butt it is. And so at some point I will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have more to say about this, but that’s basically all I got for right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was thinking about what if I, because I always think about getting into Synology and someday my thing is gonna blow up and I’m gonna be sad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But what I think about is like, oh, I kind of made a mess of my various volumes and stuff. I’m like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wouldn’t want the new one set up this way. And what I periodically do, because I’m paranoid, is I do the thing in Synology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you can essentially back up your system settings to a single file. Right, have you done that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know of what you speak, and I think I did it a couple of years back, but I don’t think I’ve done it since.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, you can do it to the network and you also download a local file. And this is just the settings of, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guess it’s stuff like, what network am I on? and like, you know, I don’t know, it can’t be that much. Obviously it’s not the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John data, right? It’s just a tiny little file that does the configuration. So my thought would be I’d get a new one, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do a backup of my old system settings, restore that backup onto the new one, set up all the volumes how I want,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then I would essentially do like the, I guess the equivalent of a clean install on a Mac, where I manually, well, you know, with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our sync or whatever, copy the files from like, oh, here’s all my Plex stuff, manually copy those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to where the Plex stuff is on my new thing. I’m not sure how I would handle like the Plex metadata, because I honestly don’t even know where the heck that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is hiding on my Synology, but like basically take all the files and app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John configuration from my old one and put it in where their new home is going to be on the new one myself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one batch of things at a time until I had everything updated. And because that process would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John involve something like Rsync, to catch up, to essentially, you know, to say, okay, now I need the last little bit before I cut

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over, I just repeat those same commands that I ran before and hopefully they just take less time now because most of the time they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying, I already got that, got that, got that, you know? And that was my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plan. And you describing their migration system makes me think that I should continue to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that be my plan, because at least that’s a plan that’s 100% under my control. And it probably would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be slower and less thorough, but because I’m not getting rid of the old Synology, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just got to do that to the point where I think I got it set up, do the cutover, and the old Synology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a long time will probably still be there. And I won’t use it as a local backup of anything. I’ll just let it sit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there exactly as it is encased in amber. And if I’m like, oh, something’s not set up, how is that set up on the old

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technology? I’ll just go look until a year has passed and I’m satisfied with the new one. Does everything the old one did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then I’ll wipe the old one and use it as a backup or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, no, I completely agree with that approach. The only thing I would say is I’m not sure what the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey answer is. Should you put the data there first or should you restore the settings? I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quibbling over a minor issue at this

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} point. You gotta do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the settings first. Got

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} it. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} because- Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the settings aren’t, I’m gonna do restore of the settings and they’re not gonna be quite right and things are gonna be screw up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and maybe you’ll even conflict with the old one because it’ll just be like, I want that IP. No, I want it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I want the dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John DNS. I’d want it to be entirely empty while I’m screwing with getting the system settings right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and changing my mind about how to format things and looking at all the different features and they’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the data would be the last thing I would do. We’re like, okay, now it’s set up the way, it’s named the way I want, dynamic DNS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is set up, the networking is the way I want, I figured out the ethernet connection, everything’s all good. it’s in physically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the place where it’s supposed to be, then I would start copying data over. The only big question for me is the only app I really care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about that has metadata is like, where is the Plex database? Where is that Plex thing hiding? I don’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s a really good write-up that I’m not gonna be able to find and we’ll forget to put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the show notes, but Plex does have a migration, like FAQ or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey instructions doc or whatever, somewhere online. And I’ve followed it before. And I think I’ve done this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like four or five or six times. And I think all but one, it worked pretty much flawlessly. And it will describe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to you where you need to look for the metadata and things of that nature. And if you follow the instructions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and if you follow them fairly religiously, it turns out it will generally work. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’re gonna have to dig it up somewhere, but if you follow those directions, it should be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, that’s good to hear. Yeah, Plexus is pretty good. I just haven’t ever tried it before, but it occurs to me that I have no idea where it is. And also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every time you install Plexus in Synology, it makes a bunch of directories where it thinks you should put stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And of course I never put my stuff there. So I don’t know how many of those directories I have hanging around. It’s like decoys

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with this little tiny, like trivial empty databases and metadata stores that are just waiting to trip

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me up. Well, that’s not the real location. That was five versions ago where I put it. Yeah. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anyway, so I am excited. I am genuinely excited. And again, don’t take this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one faux pas, or maybe that’s not what I’m looking for, this one stumbling block as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a reason not to get a Synology. because they didn’t ask me to say anything about this. And I’m telling you the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey honest truth, but I really do advise you, these devices are so nice to have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it’s so wonderful to not have to worry about hard drive space. But golly, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey looking to upgrade, tread carefully, because it is a bit of a pain.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} And everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sent hate mail to Synology that say it’s unconscionable that you don’t let people use third-party drives.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I don’t begrudge them selling their own drives, and like they can even say, this is the easiest way to do it, And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they should offer a better guarantee.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} That’s exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I said. When I was lighting up my couple of contacts at Synology, I was like, look, if you want to sell your own drives, fine. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you want to say that you get more or better support when you use your Synology-branded drives,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fine. But to be sounding the alarm, oh my god, oh my god, you’re going to blow up your Synology,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s just not necessary.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, like we were saying when we talked about this, they’ll mark the volume as degraded, and you can’t even replace drives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it in the extreme cases. And there’s third-party ways to hack around this, It’s just, you don’t want to have a business where it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John routinely understood that you have to install a third party hack to allow you to use drives that work perfectly fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Shame on you, Synology.