565: Trickle-Up Concern
14 Dec 2023The Beeper battle, governments spying on push notifications, Stolen Device Protection, and a fun toy from 24 years ago.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Cauterized pants
- Show administrivia
- 🎄🕎 NEW MEMBER’S SPECIAL!! 🕎🎄
- 🎅🏻 Give the gift of ATP! 🎅🏻
- Follow-up:
- More on Apple’s Blue Ocean
- 📟 Battle
- Yet more on ECC RAM from Jonathan Dietz Jr.
- US fabs and semiconductor business (via Joe Lion)
- Sonos Roam audio skipping
- How does AWS S3 Glacier store data more cheaply than S3?
Photos.appprocessing tied to… external monitors? 🤨
- Governments are spying via push notifications
- Stolen Device Protection
#askatp:- Are we worried about burn-in on our iPhones? (via Will Leinweber)
- Does Marco consider embracing Swift & SwiftUI in line with his “extreme minimalism” for libraries? (via Julian Gamble)
- Do we like the Action Button? (via Torstein)
- Post-show: Marco’s new desk toy
- Photo next to an iPhone 15 Pro
- John’s game: Vexed (also on PalmDB)
- Marco’s games: Rally 1000 (clone of Mille Bornes) and Hearts
- AvantGo
- Toshiba e740
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Chapters
- Lined-pants season
- Many K’s of mediocrity 🖼️
- ATP Holiday Special
- Gift memberships!
- Replaceable-battery follow-up
- Beeper battle
- Sponsor: Notion
- More on ECC RAM
- US chip fabs being built
- Sonos Roam issues
- How AWS Glacier stores data
- Photo-indexing homeopathy
- Governments spying on APNS
- Stolen Device Protection
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- #askatp: iPhone OLED burn-in?
- #askatp: Marco + third-party code?
- #askatp: How’s the Action Button?
- Ending theme
- Marco’s new desk toy 🖼️
Lined-pants season
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve entered lined pants season. Cauterize
⏹️ ▶️ John you mean? No, what? No. Pants have lines on them, they’re cauterized, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, that’s pretty good, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you mean line like as in they have linings, yeah, okay. Yes. Lined pants, it’s just, it’s called thermal underwear,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, look into it. Every pant can be a lined pant. If you wear thermal underwear under it, I’m wearing thermal underwear under my
⏹️ ▶️ John pants right now. See,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem with, okay, that is, that is a solution. It’s modular. You gotta do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you gotta do, right? That is a solution. It’s not my favorite solution because then you add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunchable layer gap with properly lined jeans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m talking about the jeans that have the flannel lining in
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Yeah, but they’re floating away from your legs and puffing out all your nice manufactured warm air every time you take a step.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe, but see, the problem with the separate underwear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layer is that then they can move independently from the pant leg which causes bunching.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just gotta get good ones that stay in place. They’re not moving around. You gotta get a good, nice, high-quality thermal underwear
⏹️ ▶️ John that does not move around or bunch up. Or like, you’re not getting good ones that are not fitting you right if that’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like tights, they’re like leggings. They shouldn’t go anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I must admit, I do not like the process of putting them on.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mean sliding them over the ends of your legs? They’re too tight. Are you putting them over your head? Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they’re too tight and you gotta like, you gotta like, you know, even them out, make sure they’re on. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John You would not survive as a woman. Right? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was about to say, like, this is considered the comfortable clothes for most women I know. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here we are as men complaining and moaning about it. Which, I’m not saying you’re wrong, Marco, but this is like… I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re wrong. I don’t think putting thermal underwear is onerous at all. It’s just like a really big
⏹️ ▶️ John sock with no ends on it.
Many K’s of mediocrity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On a wildly unrelated note, I am drunk with power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had an epiphany a day or two back. Now, you two already know what I’m talking about, but a day or two back, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an epiphany, and it occurred to me my—and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but here we are—my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bespoke Ultrafine 5K porch monitor, because although we do have seasons and we do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have something that vaguely resembles winter, and so because of that, it is cold outside by my definition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure you two would laugh at it, but for me, it’s cold. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it occurred to me this bespoke UltraFine 5K that I would typically use on the porch during the nice weather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just gonna be sitting for the next several months. What if I added it to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey existing array of 5Ks?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand how you got the starting point, that it’s just gonna be sitting? Why would you think it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, when am I gonna, I’m not gonna use it. I mean, that’s just-
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would you leave it on the porch? It seems like the default would be Everything’s coming in off the porch,
⏹️ ▶️ John and my monitor’s going onto my computer desk because where else would it go? It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting on the floor of my office because I didn’t know what else to do with it, and then it occurred to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you do with this rectangle that lights up? I have no idea. There’s a computer over here, and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a light up rectangle over there. Are they related in some way? We’ll never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you already have 10Ks of resolution, do you really need 15? Well, damn it, yes I do. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I have 15Ks of resolution, and I am very excited about it. You two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with your measly 6K a piece. I have more than the two of you combined and I think we’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about monitors. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John here we are. But
⏹️ ▶️ John not more contiguous space. It’s all broken up. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. I look full on grandma’s boy right now. It’s ridiculous and I’m loving every second of it. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna be great. And I told myself I wouldn’t incept Marco, but here we go. This is gonna be great until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco listens to this recording of my track and says to me, oh my God, you’ve created an echo chamber never again.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll hear all the fans on those two LGs going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey exactly. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so we’ll see what happens. But right now I am mad and drunk with power and nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have three windows open now, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Three Three entire windows. Imagine that.
ATP Holiday Special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, all right. So we have a bunch of happy administrivia to take care of. First
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and foremost, there is a new Hot off the presses member special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we released earlier today. If you are not a member you can go to ATP.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey join you can join and become a member You can do that and you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the member specials We have ever recorded not just the ones that are forthcoming and you can get the bootleg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the you know immediately after we finish recording. It’s the version of the show that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all our mistakes and all of me swearing and everything. And you can also get an ad-free version of the show, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is pretty great. But in this particular instance, what we’re talking about is the ATP holiday special. Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you like to tell me about what the holiday special is, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. So it turns out we tried to talk about holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traditions or things we look forward to or our favorite things to do, or our least favorite things to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Casey wanted this episode to be 30 minutes long. CASEY
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just trying to say that it didn’t need to be more than 30 minutes. STEVE
⏹️ ▶️ John You needed to go to bed. You were sweepy. CASEY
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I mean, that’s every day. That’s every day when we start the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco STEVE Well, let’s just say it lasted longer than 30 minutes, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s us, of course. and I thought it was pretty fun. And so we had a fun holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode. It is a light, fluffy, and fun thing that we made and you can enjoy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that is available. Please go ahead and join at ATP dot FM slash join if you haven’t already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have a listen It really was a lot of fun a lot of nostalgia If especially if you happen to be an old dude or like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening to old dudes talk about toys from 30 years ago you’re really going to like it, but there’s more than just that.
Gift memberships!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, what if, John, imagine a scenario where, because of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, whatever your life situation is, you don’t really have the spare cash to send our way, which we get,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s totally fine, no offense taken, but you really wanted to listen to these holiday specials, you shouldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, steal them, but is there any other thing that you could do instead?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the season of giving, and in that spirit, we have done
⏹️ ▶️ John what programmers always do at the end of the year, which is rush like mad to get a feature out the door
⏹️ ▶️ John before the holiday season is done. People have asked for it, and we have hastily
⏹️ ▶️ John implemented it. John has hastily implemented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gotta stop you there. We did not hastily implement anything. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco didn’t do anything for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I lightly participated, and Marco sat on the sidelines and said, good work, fellas.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you all in case it doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Okay, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John allow it. We have added gift memberships. Go to atp.fm slash gift. Many
⏹️ ▶️ John people have asked for this. It is exactly what it sounds like. Someone else
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy you an ATP membership rather than you buying it yourself, or you can buy someone else’s membership
⏹️ ▶️ John so that they become a member. Here is the timing
⏹️ ▶️ John of this, obviously, is meant to get it out the door before the holiday season is over. That’s why we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in such a big hurry. If there’s some feature that’s missing from gift membership, you can email us and we’ll implement
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But we thought it was really important to get this out the door before the holiday season is over. And in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the people who signed up for membership to get the discount in the ATP store, the ATP holiday
⏹️ ▶️ John store that came and went a while back, all those people’s memberships are now expiring.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because we always say, hey, just sign up for the store, get the discount, buy your stuff, it’s worth it. And you can cancel, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really easy to do, right? That’s happening right now. We are seeing people’s memberships slowly disappear because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like, yeah, I just became a member of the store, I got my stuff and now it’s over. Here’s what those people can do. Ask
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody to buy you a membership as a gift for the holidays. Then the
⏹️ ▶️ John next time the store comes up, you’ll already have a membership because they bought you a gift membership. So you still
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to actually get the membership yourself. It’s a great way to save money. All you gotta do is give somebody a URL. They don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John all they need is this URL. They can just go there and obviously a credit card or something and buy you a membership. You need to give them
⏹️ ▶️ John the URL, atp.fm slash gift. The other thing they need to know is what email address
⏹️ ▶️ John you signed up for your membership account.
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t signed up for a membership account, don’t worry, they can just use any email address that’s you. If they enter the wrong email address, don’t worry, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John change it later. But for everything to go seamlessly, it would be good if they knew what email
⏹️ ▶️ John address you would like to use at the website. The final thing I’ll add is the way these work, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John because of time constraints, is the person who buys the gift membership for you, after they successfully buy it, they’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John presented with a screen that says, here’s what the person has to do to redeem their membership and there’s a code you can enter. It’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John a link that you can go to. But here’s the the most important part and it’s in red
⏹️ ▶️ John bold italic text on the page that they land
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on after they buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have to give you that link that redemption code, whatever. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get to you any other way. How can they give it to you? They can write it down on a piece of paper. They could print it. They
⏹️ ▶️ John could send it to you in a message. They can make a nice little card. But the point is they have to give you that redemption
⏹️ ▶️ John code that link somehow, some way. Why don’t we make a nice card and email
⏹️ ▶️ John it to you? Time constraints. We apologize. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that is the system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Somewhat manual, but I can attest that it actually works. Someone actually has already
⏹️ ▶️ John purchased and redeemed a gift membership, so the system works. Please go to atp.fm slash gift, or rather,
⏹️ ▶️ John please send that URL to people in your life who you would like to buy you a gift membership. And we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be back here crossing our fingers and hoping this whole thing works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, but a couple of things I think we need to point out. First of all, what happens if I am an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey active and paid member, but I’d like a little bit of quote unquote free membership?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I ask for a gift of ATP membership, even if I’m already a paying member?
⏹️ ▶️ John You sure can. If you get a gift. And by the way, the gift codes, when you redeem
⏹️ ▶️ John them, they start immediately. But if you already have a membership, all it does is shove your membership down into the future. So the gift
⏹️ ▶️ John membership begins immediately and your remaining membership that you paid for that will just resume once the gift membership
⏹️ ▶️ John is done. And in fact, if you get multiple gift memberships, so many people want to get you gift memberships, you get
⏹️ ▶️ John five of them. Redeem all five, they’ll just stack one after the other. The first one you redeem will start immediately. The second
⏹️ ▶️ John one you redeem will just queue up right behind it. The third one will be queued up right behind it. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John limit to the amount of gift memberships people can buy you. And again, as you redeem them, if you redeem multiple memberships,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will be queued up. And if you love it so much and your gift membership is about to run out, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John subscribe for real and your real membership will start as soon as your last gift membership expires.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we hope all this works as described, but the whole point is you can give the gift
⏹️ ▶️ John of ATP membership. You can receive the gift of ATP membership to the season.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, just another point of order here. Let’s suppose I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought a gift membership for you, John, but I screwed up your email address or you would prefer a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different email address. What can I do about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the way the gift membership work is on your member page, either the page for the person who purchased it or the page for
⏹️ ▶️ John the person who received it. you’ll see all the gift memberships that you’ve dealt with in any way. So if you were the sender, you’ll see all the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that you sent, you’ll see redemption instructions underneath there, and you’ll also be able to change the address
⏹️ ▶️ John that it sent to. That’s another constraint here. You can only redeem the gift membership if it was sent to
⏹️ ▶️ John you specifically, your specific email address. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I don’t actually use that email address at ATP.fm, I use a different email address, just tell the sender, they can go to their member
⏹️ ▶️ John page at ATP.fm and then change the email address associated with the code and then you’ll be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to redeem it. So it’s a pretty flexible system. If you have any problems with it, membership at ATP.fm, send us an
⏹️ ▶️ John email, we’ll fix it. But we think it should be all self-service, including the delivery part. Remember, you
⏹️ ▶️ John make a nice card on construction paper, use glitter, just put that redemption code right in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, thank you, John, genuinely. Thank you, John, for all of your hard work. You really did quite a lot in not a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time. I will speak for myself. I am loving the no day job Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you are just hammering through all the ATP to do’s that Marco and I have become
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exceptionally good at kicking that can right down the road, and you have been just knocking them out left and right. So my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey public and heartfelt thanks to you, John, for quitting your job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, me too. This is like, you know, for all these years, because John had a day job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was not anything we could really ever see in our side of the world, we didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever know, like, is John, like, how much of a programmer is John? Like, we knew he was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart. We knew he knew a lot about programming. We knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we knew he wrote Pearl, but who cares about that? So this is. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should see all the Pearl I wrote at my day job. Just thousands upon thousands upon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousands of lines of it. Well, and see, now we can actually see like, what like the fully,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, deployed John is capable of. It’s pretty impressive. Like, GIF memberships, this is like, John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has had this on the request list for our CMS for almost the entire time we’ve had a CMS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was always very reluctant to do it because we would start talking like, okay, well how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would this work? There’s so many little details that you have to figure out and account for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and build. There’s a lot to make this work and work well and not have weird side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effects or weird issues. It’s like, we sometimes will run ads on our show for platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do this kind of thing for you, and there is no better advertisement for platforms that do this for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than hearing how much work it takes us to try to do it ourselves. And the amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work and just, And the diff, the size of the diff on the code base for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was so big. Like, again, it of course vindicates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was right to not do it all this time. I’m not sure that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lesson you should be taking from this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, also, yeah, thanks, John. It’s pretty great that you’re doing this now, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both that it is done and that we didn’t have to do it. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. PR, it was 2800 lines, they added 135
⏹️ ▶️ Casey removed. So not a small PR by any stretch of the imagination. It’s also been hilarious, although I didn’t hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much of it this time, but it’s been hilarious seeing Marco kind of react to us doing quote unquote, real work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in GitHub, doing pull requests and issues and things like that. And I feel like Marco is just sitting back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there like Michael Jackson and Thriller eating his popcorn going, wow, that’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John watching me enjoy that PHP, just loving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. I mean, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that part is very fun. I to be honest. But yeah, you know, this, again, still moving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, you know, I wish I had any time to sit back and eat popcorn at any time for anything ever right now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really very thankful that I’m not having any of this put on my plate. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Thank you, John. That’s your gift to Marco and me, is doing all this. So thank you, Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, John. Merry Christmas. you
Replaceable-battery follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s do some follow-up. Let’s talk about John’s Blue Ocean. You have some footnotes here, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do we want to handle this?
⏹️ ▶️ John This was a footnote in the actual article from the day it was published, but I should have made it more prominent
⏹️ ▶️ John because I forgot about it too when we talked about it. Here is the footnote. This is basically the exact same URL
⏹️ ▶️ John that I linked to in the footnote that many people sent us, and it is a story from June 24th, 2023
⏹️ ▶️ John from The Verge that talks about European Parliament voting on regulation that would, among
⏹️ ▶️ John other things, require smartphone manufacturers to make their devices’ batteries more easily user-replaceable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was the Blue Ocean discussion, my idea that for replaceable batteries in Apple things, and everyone was saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John EU’s gonna make it, Apple do it. Of course, as with all things related to the EU and their various regulations
⏹️ ▶️ John and things that they vote on, takes a while to get going and you’re not quite sure how it’s going to worse- work
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. Jason Eccles says that Apple says it already complies with this law.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course Apple would say that. You can buy an iPhone today and change the battery. They already have
⏹️ ▶️ John user serviceable batteries. They’re even loan you the tools so you don’t need to buy them. And they’ve even made the removal
⏹️ ▶️ John of the back cover on the phones easier for two years in a row. So that is exactly the position I would imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would take, but here’s some more from The Verge. According to a draft version of the regulation
⏹️ ▶️ John on the EU’s website, the batteries should be replaceable quote, with no tool or a tool or set
⏹️ ▶️ John of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part or basic tools. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a lot of things. It either has to be replaceable with no tools, or a tool
⏹️ ▶️ John or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part. I mean, I guess Apple complies with that because when they
⏹️ ▶️ John sell you the part, they rent you the tools or basic tools. Anyway, it also says
⏹️ ▶️ John that spare parts should be available for up to seven years after a phone’s release. And perhaps most importantly, the process of replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John shall be able to be carried out by a layman. We’ll see how this ends up working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I look forward to like some court case in the future where Apple tries to argue that, you know, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, you know, it’s some kind of hex torx security bolt is a common basic tool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, you know, what defines a layman exactly?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, a hex tool,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget it. Like these things are glued together. There’s always some process where you heat things up and
⏹️ ▶️ John apart. And I would, you know, I don’t know what is actually, what the regulation is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be, when it’s going to take effect, how much of this language will still be in it, but it’s out there lurking
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially. I mean, and Apple’s not the only one here. Every big smartphone
⏹️ ▶️ John maker has essentially sealed in batteries that are annoying and difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John replace. Forget about doing with no tools. With tools that are supplied with
⏹️ ▶️ John the product, I mean, that seems like it would cover anything. It’s like now, every time you buy, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I guess supply with the products or spare parts. So if you buy the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way you can get the replacement batteries, it comes with a gigantic set of tools in Pelican cases. It’s like, yeah, we’re compliant
⏹️ ▶️ John with the, I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re trying to do with this thing. Are they trying to make it so people’s phones last longer? Are they trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it so that you can actually have user replaceable batteries? We’ll see, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s out there. Just like the USB-C thing was. We talked about it for years and it eventually happened. So maybe this one
Beeper battle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about the beeper battle So last way, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did we leave this last? It was working last we spoke about it, right? Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but and we were saying like hey, maybe don’t get too used to this working for very long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly, so Apple has since that time Apple cut it off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then Apparently beeper has come up with some workarounds. I’ll get into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of details here Come up with some workarounds to get it back asterisk, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the most recent as we record on Wednesday night as far as we know. So this all started with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issuing a statement. Apple says, at Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to iMessage. These techniques pose significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why you moaned about the, uh, post significant risk to security and privacy because I think that’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much a hundred percent true, right? Like the whole idea of the iMessage ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ John is they have clients and servers and Apple writes them both. So Apple knows that they’re not secretly taking your messages in plain
⏹️ ▶️ John text and sending them off to a server somewhere because Apple could do that. Like if it’s, Oh, it’s unencrypted, can get your messages?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they could because they display them on the screen, right? Like they write the client application, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple knows they’re not doing that because they’re Apple and they control all the ends. Once there’s a third party client
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this, of course, at some point, the third party client has to decrypt and decode the messages and display
⏹️ ▶️ John them on people’s screens. And at that point, they could send them off to a server somewhere and save them and you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple doesn’t have any control over those third parties. So I think it does pose a significant risk to the
⏹️ ▶️ John security and privacy of everyone who’s on the network because if you can’t tell that you’re messaging somebody who’s using a third party
⏹️ ▶️ John client, that third party client could be doing anything and Apple has no idea what it’s doing. Now, is Bieber
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that? No, I’m sorry, it’s not like that’s not their business is not stealing all your messages. But Apple doesn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I when you have a system like iMessage and their servers, where the security where Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can vouch for the security because they make the client and the server and they don’t allow third party clients, that’s kind of an essential
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the system. And now is that you know, Or were they really concerned about people’s security? Is that the main reason they did this?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, maybe not, but it is definitely a reason. And I think it’s a valid reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. That’s fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s multiple battles going on here. You know, one, one is like the technical battle between beeper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple, and maybe they’ll try to play some cat and mouse game for a little bit longer. Maybe not. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those also there’s the PR battle. And I think this is, I think Apple’s trying to squash this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and move on as quickly as possible. Beeper is I think trying to prolong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the PR battle or inflame it as much as possible because at the end of the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I applaud this level of like reverse engineering and hacking because I think it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool as a nerd they have no right to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is I don’t think it’s a good thing for anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world or Apple or Beeper for them to keep trying to fight this fight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think it’s a great experience for their customers to have to try to ride this roller coaster with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the reality is what this is very clearly is you know not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know some kind of you can call it a hack maybe you know that that that word has grown very vague
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time but I would also call it theft of services. They’re building a commercial business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on stealing access to Apple’s iMessage servers and service in an
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a great business plan. Our business plan is we’re not going to run servers. We’re going to use somebody else’s servers. Also, they’re letting
⏹️ ▶️ John you use their service. No, they’re not letting us. Yeah, but they’re going to be a foundational part of our business. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to use their servers without any permission and hope that we don’t get caught or they can’t stop
⏹️ ▶️ John us. Write that into your business plan. See how much funding you get. And by the way, who is the company? It’s the richest company in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’ll work out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. And they really don’t want you to be doing this. So like, it’s not like I’m actually to just some like, you know, side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing for Apple they don’t care about. No, it’s pretty important. It’s a very important aspect of their most important
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you didn’t want to be noticed, you can’t like have publicity or marketing.
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Apple wouldn’t notice. If it was just that high school student making his own client and running it against iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John and impressing all his friends with his blue bubbles, Apple probably never would have noticed. But if it’s a business, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice. That’s the thing. Like, you know, so they can keep playing the technical cat and mouse game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately, I would imagine they will have a legal battle on their hands and they will lose that one promptly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and severely. And so I can’t imagine this is going to end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well for Beeper or anybody who relies on this. I said last time, this is, it kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like the Hackintosh, like you shouldn’t, as a customer, I wouldn’t advise that you assume this will work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all in the future. I wouldn’t make any hardware buying decisions based on this. So for instance, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were not buying an Android phone because you wanted iMessage, and this comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and you’re like, great now I can be an Android phone like I would I would maybe not count on that being a thing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to if you already have Android phone fine if you want to buy an Android phone anyway for other experimentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine or if you want to convert to it for other reasons fine but don’t make any decisions based on this working because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it already is semi broken and I think will be promptly shut down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple legal pretty soon if nothing else because you know again like when you’re when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building a hackintosh or you know unlocking your DVD player or whatever. That’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different because you are like gaining access to a device that you already bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that kind of doesn’t leave your home, so who cares? But in this case they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally like hacking Apple’s service. They’re running this service, they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally hacking into Apple service and stealing use of it and then making a commercial product out of that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that is beyond any reasonable line and whatever you think about iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lock-in and anything else, frankly I don’t think it’s that big of a deal because you know if you look around the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world iMessage is pretty big in the US. It’s not very big outside of the US because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of the world has discovered things like WhatsApp and Line and all the other all the other different chat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that everyone uses in different places. WeChat you know like all the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones that are in the rest of the world outside of the US, iMessage doesn’t really have that much of a monopoly there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If anything I think Any market for this has probably already come and gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because anybody who has mixed chat groups or uses an Android with, you know, outside of the US
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, those groups are all using other apps for their chat platforms. If anything, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows maybe Apple should have made iMessage for Android a long time ago, but today it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moot. You know, I don’t think this is going to change much of anything. But regardless, Beeper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a cool hack that, you know, the 16-year-old kid who figured out this reverse engineering, It’s it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically impressive, but this is not a business. And this the sooner this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stops, the better it’ll be, honestly, for Bieber, because it’s only going to get worse from here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Bieber reenabled it. And they had they had a reply to Apple’s statement
⏹️ ▶️ John that will link in the show notes where they were very indignant. And they’re like, what is Apple saying about security? We made it more secure
⏹️ ▶️ John because previously people were sending SMS and all sorts of, you know, ridiculous statements like that. It was like, look, if
⏹️ ▶️ John people on Android want to talk to people on iPhones with end-to-end security, they can just use WhatsApp. Like, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re the only possible option here. But anyway, they eventually get down to like the barting stage. They’re like, look, if Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worried about security and privacy, we’ll give them the source code so they can see if it’s secure themselves. And we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John even have a third-party security team look at it. And if they really want us to, we’ll put a pager emoji
⏹️ ▶️ John next to all of our messages so they’ll know messages are coming from us. And it’s like, they don’t want to vet your source code.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t want you to use their network at all. They didn’t invite you. They didn’t tell you you can use their servers. It’s like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re worried about security here, you can look at our source code. What are you trying to give them homework? They just don’t want you to use their
⏹️ ▶️ John servers. Like this kind of bargaining, you’re like saying, look, we’re doing everything we can. We’re bending over backwards.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see what Apple’s problem is. The problem is they never invited you to use their servers. It’s not a public service. It doesn’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ John public API. It is not a platform. Do you understand? You’re not allowed to use
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And they don’t, we’ll give them our source code. How about you just go out of business? Like, if you’re willing to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, do whatever Apple wants you to do, Apple wants you just to go away. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t sit with us. Yeah, exactly. If Apple wanted iMessage on Android, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just make it themselves. They don’t need Beeper to do this for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the thing. If you wanted to go this route, you should have gone to Apple and say, hey, we think you should open up iMessage,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we think we should be the contractor to build the third-party client for Android. And if Apple said, OK, then they would have a contract,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you would do that. And would Apple agree to that? Probably not. They’d probably try to do it themselves and do a bad job. But whatever. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple way for apps that are on other platforms. see QuickTime and Safari for Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that didn’t happen. Apple doesn’t appear to want that. If you want that to happen, you need to convince Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s their service. I don’t understand it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe you would, maybe you can convince them. I don’t know. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna decide to do it on their own, but that’s not what’s happening here. Instead, it’s really like the high school student is a great
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of avatar for this because it is kind of the level of like the sort of indignant child saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you want from me? I just, I don’t know why you won’t let me use your servers and charge people for it. So mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here, look at my source code. It’s fine. Look, we’re not doing it. It’s everything’s, ugh. Anyway, not a fan of Beeper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I’m trying to picture like how I would react if someone did this to Overcast. Like if someone reverse engineered the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast API and made an Android app and started charging money for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they were making an Android podcast client, but they didn’t want to run their servers. So I just used Marco servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and just advertise, oh yeah, this is Overcast now. You’re using Overcast right here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge a subscription for their app. Right, that’s probably more expensive than mine. And then they would come to me. And they would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re worried about it, we’ll send you the source code to our app. And then you’ll know that it’s OK.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I can just audit that on my own time somehow whenever I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John let you continue to make money while using my server back end that you’re not paying for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’d have no control over what they do with my app or the service. I would shut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that down so quickly. And I wouldn’t care if I burned all my old clients.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would shut it down immediately. and I would not feel bad even for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I cannot fault Apple for this at all. Apple is 100% in the right, it is their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prerogative to do whatever they want with this service. And the idea of having some other app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interact with your service that you don’t control, where the, as John mentioned at first, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like, you know, the security of the entire thing is part of your main product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s part of the integrity. It’s part of the selling point. The
⏹️ ▶️ John most used app in iOS, at least in the US anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like, I would never in a million years allow a third party to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, you know, hacking my stuff on the side there with my service outside of my control. That, I would never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a million years allow that, and Apple sure as heck won’t. And this is going to be over very soon.
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More on ECC RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ECC RAM. It just won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John die. I mean, it won’t die because there are still nuances that we haven’t gotten right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re going to keep doing until we get it right. This will be the last time, though. This
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is going to be the last time we get it right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it will die, but it will tell you that it has died.
⏹️ ▶️ John So to refresh everyone’s memory, this was originally like an Ask ATP question, basically saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC memory used to be a thing. Now in Apple Silicon, is it a thing? it be? What’s the deal?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John going, we’ve been narrowing, getting closer and closer to the truth. One final update
⏹️ ▶️ John from, of course, Jonathan Deeds Jr. And where last we left
⏹️ ▶️ John it was basically to summarize that the RAM used in the latest Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John things have on die ECC and support link ECC, which is the ECC
⏹️ ▶️ John in transit between the RAM and the the SOC. But we weren’t sure if Apple was using that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the upshot was like, oh, they They could have as good ECC as the Xeons did.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not sure if they do. But they should have better ECC than the plain
⏹️ ▶️ John old consumer Intel’s that didn’t have ECC in the old days. Here is further clarification for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John On-die ECC is not part of the JEDEC. Is that right, JEDEC? I always heard JEDEC.
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go. On-die ECC is not part of the JEDEC specifications for LPDDR memories.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is implemented in various proprietary fashions by DRAM manufacturers to increase the yields on leading edge process notes. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is what we heard from a lot of people like, oh, that error correction is not for correcting errors. It’s actually just for correcting errors, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John very confusing, but it’s like, what was the motivation? The motivation, all right, so I’ll continue reading
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Not all LPDDR4 chips incorporate on-die ECC, however,
⏹️ ▶️ John many do. It really depends on which manufacturing process used, and we’ll link to a white paper that sums up the issue
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes. Jonathan continues, as you correctly surmised, Apple has gone out of their way
⏹️ ▶️ John to minimize trace lengths ensure the highest possible signal integrity with their on-package memory for Apple Silicon.
⏹️ ▶️ John They also minimize electrical loading by placing only a single die or rank on each LPDDR channel
⏹️ ▶️ John and have elected to stick with relatively conservative LPDDR6400 speeds rather than pushing the
⏹️ ▶️ John envelope with something like LPDDR5X9600. Apple doesn’t appear to have Link
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC enabled on the M-series chip, and it’s not clear to me that the memory controller is necessarily supported.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they’re simply using DesignWare IP from Synopsys, then it’s probably along for the ride but who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Classic sideband ECC where you have extra DRM devices written in red back by the memory controller provides
⏹️ ▶️ John end-to-end SECDED. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John single bit error correction double bit error detection. I think we talked about this in the past show. Neither onDi
⏹️ ▶️ John nor LinkECC do that. So this is the important distinction that we didn’t get at before. All this ECC stuff we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John does not do single bit error correction or double bit error detection. So what does it do? On-die
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC silently corrects any single bit errors that happen on-die with no involvement from the host system. This allows
⏹️ ▶️ John DRAM manufacturers to sell chips that may contain a sprinkling of defective bits as known good dies and their
⏹️ ▶️ John customers are none the wiser. As an added benefit, on-die ECC will also correct any single bit errors caused by external
⏹️ ▶️ John factors in rows that are otherwise free of manufacturing defects. Did you get that little bit? So like, they do this
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can sell you RAM that has bad bits because they know the the ECC will fix it. But also
⏹️ ▶️ John if a cosmic ray hits your chip, they’ll fix that too, provided it happened
⏹️ ▶️ John on one of the things that didn’t already have a defect. So if the cosmic ray hits one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John good cells in the RAM, it causes an error, the Andai ECC sees it and
⏹️ ▶️ John fixes it. Great. If the cosmic ray hits one of those rows that had a bad manufacturing defect
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was only working because ECC was fixing the 1-bit errors, now you’ve got a 2-bit error and it can’t correct
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So this is the important distinction. Jonathan continues,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no mechanism present to inform the host system when errors are corrected or uncorrected
⏹️ ▶️ John errors are encountered. So if you get that 2-bit error, not only is it not corrected, but the RAM chip
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell you about it. So that error is getting passed on and link ECC doesn’t matter because at that point you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John erroneous data coming off the RAM chips. So that’s a bummer. When the memory controller
⏹️ ▶️ John handles ECC, you can track errors using counters and provides substantially more robust features. For instance, John’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Xeon-based Mac Pro reports memory errors for each DIMM and system information and macOS will alert you when the
⏹️ ▶️ John DIMMs are failing and require replacement. This is a fun thing from back in the Intel days. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it was my 2008 Mac Pro. Might have even been my G3, I don’t remember. But one of those big
⏹️ ▶️ John tower computers with an Intel CPU that I owned that had DIMMs in it had little red LED
⏹️ ▶️ John lights on each little slot that the memory DIMMs went in. and if you had a banned
⏹️ ▶️ John DIMM or inserted it in the wrong place or whatever, it would light up red to tell you which one was bad. Amazing, loved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You can even see it in the, like about this Mac thing. It would tell you like the, I think it would tell you the error count on each DIMM,
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the, you know, the full fledged ECC where every single DIMM has extra memory. We talked about it before, that’s implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John by the memory controller, right? That is a more robust solution. So Jonathan continues, all
⏹️ ▶️ John DDR5 memories implement on-die ECC, yet DDR5 DIMMs with extra chips for sideband
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC are still a thing. In fact, because DDR5 DIMMs are divided into two 32-bit channels, the ECC
⏹️ ▶️ John versions are 80 bits wide and require two or more additional chips to store the ECC data. LPDDR
⏹️ ▶️ John channels and die interfaces are both 16 bits wide, so adding one extra die per channel to implement sideband ECC would
⏹️ ▶️ John require doubling the number of DRAM dies. This is obviously not a practical solution. If you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John achieve the same level of ECC available on Xeons and AMD EPYC platforms using LPDDR memory, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John implement inline ECC. In this scheme, the memory controller stores ECC code along with the actual data on the same
⏹️ ▶️ John die without making the channel wider. Obviously this comes along with some performance implications and a reduction in memory
⏹️ ▶️ John size available for storing data. To date, Apple has not implemented inline ECC on Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. So to sum up, ECC, is it a thing on Apple Silicon?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not in the same way it was on Intel Xeons, but in slightly more ways than it
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. Could Apple Silicon benefit from it? I think so, yes, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the costs involved mean that the only place it would really be appropriate would be on the Mac Pro if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John continues to make that a thing and maybe on the highest of high-end Mac studios. And based on
⏹️ ▶️ John all this, my guess would be that Apple is never going to do either one of those things because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so expensive and like because they don’t want to do the inline one because you don’t want to take a performance hit
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other one is just so much more expensive that I don’t think there’s any appetite for that from Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John customers or from Apple itself, which is kind of a bummer. But as many people who wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John in, pointed out or supposed,
⏹️ ▶️ John we got ECC for all those years, the Intel Mac Pro, because Intel put it
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And Apple essentially got it because if you wanted a Xeon that supported ECC memory, like it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John there you go, right? I suppose they could have not taken it or whatever, but it was already there. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John part, it was priced into the package. Now that Apple gets to decide what features exist, and now that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John decisions about what features to implement really are not focused on the Mac Pro, like at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t imagine this ever appearing, but I still think that if there’s one computer that it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be appropriate for, it would be the Mac Pro. The rest of them, probably not. Anyway, watch out
⏹️ ▶️ John for those cosmic rays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think you’re probably right. They probably won’t ever do it again, but if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are looking for more things to differentiate the Mac Pro, and maybe even the Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from, say, the laptops or the entire rest of the product line, that is something they could do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, I think you’re probably right, they probably won’t, but it would be at least a differentiating
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, and why does Intel do it? Like, everyone always points this out in their emails to us. They’re like, well, you know, where
⏹️ ▶️ John is it really important that you handle these error cases? Things like money, right? One bit
⏹️ ▶️ John gets flipped and you don’t detect it in a money transfer thing. That could be a lot of money gained or lost
⏹️ ▶️ John in, a millisecond, right? It’s a big deal. And so you want redundancy,
⏹️ ▶️ John protection, protection against everything you possibly can. And cosmic rays, like they’re gonna come, they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John tunnel through your data center, no matter how deep underground you make it, there’s probably some cosmic ray that’s getting in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John errors in manufacturing. You do not want those to happen without you knowing about it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine to detect it and throw up your hands and say, I cannot continue and just halt the whole machine. That is better than accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John adding or removing billions of dollars with some bit flips somewhere, right? or thousands or,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, one cent or like whatever. You just you really want the numbers to add up at the end of money stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And similarly for like safety systems and, you know, weapon systems or medical things or whatever, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are cases where you want to do everything you possibly can to protect
⏹️ ▶️ John the integrity of the memory. But there’s pretty much nothing that Apple does, except for the car that they haven’t ever shipped, where that
⏹️ ▶️ John rises to that level of reliability concern. So then it’s really just a matter of, OK, well, are they
⏹️ ▶️ John putting so much RAM in some machine that the odds of an undetected 1-bit error become 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John over the course of a year of running or something? And how important is that? You know. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I loved it when I had it. I like the little lights on the DIMMs. I would take it if they gave it to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but reading all this makes it seem like I’m not going to get it.
US chip fabs being built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe Lyon has some thoughts on US fabs and the semiconductor business. Joe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, in addition to Intel and TSMC building fabs in the US, Micron is building two fabs in the US
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. That sentence would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. When Moore’s Law was going at full steam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the 80s to 2000s, semiconductor companies could be careful about building too many fabs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because process node shrinks basically made it so that companies could continue to pump out more transistors year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after year while using roughly the same amount of wafers or increasing the wafer outs or the number of fabs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a reasonable pace. But with silicon shrinks slowing way, way down for all kinds of chips in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey future, the main way to pump out more gigabytes of memory or storage or more logic transistors, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to be to build new fabs and generate more wafers. Instead of relying on process shrinks as a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continue growing transistor outputs, the future is going to have to also rely on massively expanding the number of fabs and wafers to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep up with transistor demand growth.
⏹️ ▶️ John So watch for that gigantic silicon fab opening somewhere near you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am at least not at all well versed on things like world politics or even the ins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and outs of the semiconductor trade but you know looking at you know things like the US you know the CHIPS Act or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it was called we were funding a whole bunch of you know fab stuff and I know a lot of it’s basically going to Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff that’s fine but like looking at a lot of this stuff you know we the computer industry has has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grown up during an era of pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty stable world peace in most of the world we’ve been able to have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know free trade with China with Taiwan you know all these like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very like globalized economies we have this assumption that we will be able to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and therefore like oh we we can build all these ships in Taiwan because of course that will always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue to be available and and and we won’t have any problems at all by doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it’s probably better for the industry to start building in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safeties, to start diversifying. You know, have factories in multiple countries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that make critical parts, be able to do as much stuff as you can domestically, you know, in a country as big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the US, you know, hopefully we should have our own capacity for all of this stuff. And I know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know anything about this business to the level that other podcasters do, talk about this and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analysts and stuff, but to the extent that we can, I know we are pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far from being able to make like cutting edge chips and cutting edge fabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here in the US. I know that. And we might stay that way forever, who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is probably a good idea for lots of reasons to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build as much as we can with our own capacity And so this is all the stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re seeing, you know, new fabs being built, funding for them, different, you know, geopolitical effects.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s this is probably for the best. The more we can build here, probably the better.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even things like TSMC, not a US company, having them make fabs inside the US
⏹️ ▶️ John is another hedge because they can, in theory, do have the cutting edge knowledge of
⏹️ ▶️ John the fabs they’re making here. I don’t think are going to be cutting edge, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not even clearly could be in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future. Yeah, that’s exactly it. Like you gotta start somewhere. And and you know, so all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this like, you know, this reinvestment of these this new capacity we’re building out. It’s a good start. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it is far from the end, but it’s a good start.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I would say like second only to health care. I think computer chips
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be a business for the foreseeable future. It’s not like they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John away. Maybe they’ll be replaced by quantum things. I’m saying is like this is an industry that is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a flash in the pan things, you know, computers will be with us for a very long time
⏹️ ▶️ John and as they evolve, we should make sure we have some piece of that business. Obviously, we have we have many parts
⏹️ ▶️ John of that, like the US is doing great in terms of operating system platforms. The two main phone platforms are
⏹️ ▶️ John US, it’s Google and Apple, right? You know, and the PC platforms, Microsoft and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, like we’ve done a lot of great things here but there are some gaps and silicon chips are definitely
Sonos Roam issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me that you found a solution to this problem that only you are having with
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I have been gathering a bunch of stuff related to my Sonos Roam that would occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John stutter when I tried to play music to it through AirPlay and my solution, my workaround had been to either restart the
⏹️ ▶️ John Roam, restart the phone or both. I’ve also tried the thing that someone suggested, maybe it was Gearambo or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. If you go to, if your phone is set up as a developer device and you go to like the developer
⏹️ ▶️ John settings screen, there’s a thing that that says reset media services. That also works by the way, I’ve done that a few times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Reset media services usually also fixes the problem. Anyway, since
⏹️ ▶️ John I reported that, many, many people sent me many, many links from many long suffering
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonos customers over the course of many years having exactly the same problem with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Sonos Realm. We will put many of those links in the show notes. Solutions are offered.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the solutions they suggested did not actually fix the problem for me, but people continue to suffer
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. Someone even thought it was a manufacturing defect and that the new ones didn’t have it. I don’t think that’s true because I purchased
⏹️ ▶️ John two of these over the course of many years and the most recent one has the same problem as the old one. Here’s the upshot.
⏹️ ▶️ John The current situation is that I have heard that this problem is being worked on inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonos. So I’m out here, kind of like I was with the window dragging bug, saying fingers crossed,
⏹️ ▶️ John they know about it at Sonos. They should know about it because a lot of the links we’re gonna put in are like the community sites
⏹️ ▶️ John on Sonos, like the Sonos’ own forums, people were complaining about it for years. And maybe me complaining about it
⏹️ ▶️ John on a podcast gave it a little, you know, nudge, kick, but it’s still happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in theory, someone is working on it. So that’s the situation. I will let you know if and when a firmware update
⏹️ ▶️ John arrives in my house that fixes the problem. In the meantime, I’ll just keep rebooting things. Have
How AWS Glacier stores data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Feedback from, at this point, two or three months ago, we were talking about AWS S3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Glacier. And this is, I don’t know if I’m the best person to give a summary of it, but basically long-term file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage that’s allegedly very slow, but it’s very cheap. And I forget exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who it was. I assume John was theorizing, oh, maybe it’s on like optical media or tape or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a rumor. It’s a story that you hear. If you’re involved with AWS S3 and you hear about Glacier, someone will
⏹️ ▶️ John mention the rumor or that they’re using optical drives or Blu-ray discs or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever was like the cheap but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. Yeah, because the whole thing is like, Glacier, it’s like S3, sort of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, it’s way cheaper to store things. And the idea is, the trade-off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re making by being way cheaper to store things is they make it more expensive to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data back out, and it’s slow to get data back out. So the idea of Glacier is, if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of data store that you tend to write a lot more than you read. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, archives of log files or like database backups or you know things that like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing them a lot you hardly ever have to read them but you really want very cheap storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that’s what Glacier is for. So that’s why there were all these weird rumors when it came out like how are they doing this it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way cheaper than S3. They were like are they that maybe that they have some kind of like tape robot and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have a million backup tapes and they’re and like a million tape robots that are going through, fetching them, or who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows what they were.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s like, what was it, was it Eraser? With Vanessa Williams and Arnold Schwarzenegger, where there was like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey climactic scene where they were getting like mini discs or CDs or something. I think they were like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, The Trey? We were talking about this just a month or two ago. The Trey that you put the CD in, and the CD. The Caddy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Caddy, that’s what I was looking for, thank you. And they would like spit out a Caddy, and Vanessa Williams had to like, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copy it or something like that. It was a delightfully crappy movie. I should watch that again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caddies were awful, but they looked really cool in movies. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. Anyways, all this to say that anonymous is written in with regard to AWS S3 Glacier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I worked for AWS Glacier has never been optical disks nor tapes. It’s always been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard drives. The way they make storage cheaper is they over provision the storage racks and only a fraction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the drives are powered at any given time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so so what I assume this means is like, you know, because obviously power is a major cost for a data center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might even be the biggest cost for a data center. And so the idea is, I guess, they just have racks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are just stuffed full of hard drives. Most of them are just powered off, and they power on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones that they need upon request, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John And overprision, I’m assuming, means is they couldn’t turn them all on at the same time because they wouldn’t be able to get the heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, presumably, they’re limited by either heat or power or both. And so they stuff them full, and they say, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, at any given time, we can power on 40% of these or whatever. And they manage it that way. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll give my little AWS pitch now. if you’re using S3 and you haven’t looked at it in a while, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, maybe it’s not relevant for Marco, but for people who are actually storing huge amounts of data. Is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still super expensive? Yes, it’s not relevant to me then,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay. For people who are storing huge amounts of data, there have been advancements
⏹️ ▶️ John in the, financial advancements in S3, the most recent of which is S3 intelligent tiering.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had so many ways to like, oh, you can save money, just take your least recently used files and tier them down to a cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John storage and do this and do that. It’s like, yeah, you could do that. But am I gonna write some weird, sophisticated algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ John that figures out which files I should tear down and which files I should tear up? Because of course you get charged every time you tear them and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like several years ago, AWS introduced S3 intelligent tearing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which yes, they do charge you for. But net net, the fact that AWS does it for you
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably going to save you money, right? So basically you just say, here S3, here’s my file. If I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John access it in a while, just put it in cheaper and cheaper storage. Cheaper and cheaper and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco slower and slower
⏹️ ▶️ John storage, right? And when I get it pulled up to the faster stores, like just S3, just do everything for me and
⏹️ ▶️ John try to save me money. Because I think as AWS learned over the years that if you give all these different tiers
⏹️ ▶️ John and different price structures and everything and hope that people will write some sophisticated algorithm that
⏹️ ▶️ John moves all their data to the most economically advantageous tier, they won’t. It’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to do, right? They just want you to do it for them. And that exists. It’s called, I believe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John called intelligent tiering. So look into that. paying a lot of money for your stuff that started in S3. I believe Intelligent Engineering might
⏹️ ▶️ John even go all the way down to Glacier but I’m not sure. But anyway, if you haven’t looked at their pricing stuff in a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John there may be something out there that will save you some money with little to no work on your part.
Photo-indexing homeopathy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally for tonight, photos not processing faces or pets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this was you. Remind me, John, you wanted it to process stuff. You wanted to sync now or process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, but you didn’t have one. Right. Or something along those lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Photos does a bunch of things in theory, but it does them when it damn well feels like it and you can’t make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. So this is via Justin Mercer. Justin writes, It’s not going to help John’s situation, but this stack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exchange on just unplugging an external monitor immediately fixed my own problem overnight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after not making progress for three weeks on detecting faces and photos. Coincidence or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey added to the photos homeopathic remedies. And so the TLDR on the Stack Exchange is that somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did a lot of spelunking and found, if I recall correctly, that the GPU felt like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was thermal, well, maybe not thermal throttling, but it was not in a position thermally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do a lot of this AI, you know, ML sort of detection and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And once the person stack exchange unplugged their external monitor, thus putting less of a burden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the GPU, suddenly, everything started turning and turning almost immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s that’s the problem with all these background things I’ve talked about, like the Apple’s trying so hard to be nice to your system,
⏹️ ▶️ John so much so that they refuse to run if they’re afraid this will use too many resources. And what I’m always looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for is the button that says just use all the resources now, like, and then I’ll push the button
⏹️ ▶️ John when you want, I want you to to stop. Like I’m telling you now, it’s okay. You don’t have to only run on the E-core.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have to only run not on the discrete GPU. Like what, like do not like, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ John by default the services are, this is, I have something that was back in the Intel days when you had the, the integrated GPU and the discrete
⏹️ ▶️ John one or whatever. Just like, don’t worry about it. If you see a resource in the computer, just use it. Use all the resources
⏹️ ▶️ John now. This is the thing I want you to do. And then have a button that say, okay, I’m back on my computer. I want you to stop doing that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t exist yet. So So hopefully that’ll be next year’s big photos feature.
Governments spying on APNS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some topics. And it seems like it’s all security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the way down. And let’s start with the very uncomfortable news that governments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are apparently spying on Apple and Google users through push notifications, which is super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun. There was an article on Reuters, unidentified governments are surveilling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smartphone users via their apps push notifications, a US senator warned on Wednesday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Apple. Although the details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and Google’s push notification services give the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those apps to their users, and in turn puts them in a unique position to facilitate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey government surveillance of how users are using particular apps, Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, quote, repeal or modify any policies, quote, that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey From his letter, the data these two companies receive includes metadata detailing which app received
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a notification and when, as well as the phone and associated Apple or Google account to which that notification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was intended to be delivered. In certain instances, they might also receive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unencrypted content, which could range from backend directives for the app to the actual text displayed to a user in an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app notification. In a statement, Apple said that Wyden’s letter gave them the opening they needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to share more details with the public about how governments monitor push notifications. So Apple said, quote, now that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this method has become public, we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a little more here, but let me take a breath. Gentlemen, anything you’d like to add?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this situation and Apple’s response to it, this is just a fact of life in this
⏹️ ▶️ John country and I assume in all countries. You know, companies operate within
⏹️ ▶️ John governments. Apple is the US company, they are subject to US laws.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes those laws say that Apple has to do things for the government and that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John also can’t tell anybody about them. And I’m sure Apple doesn’t like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they are a U S company are subject to U S laws. So they do it. Uh, and in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming of course, Apple knows that they’re being asked to push notification stuff, but they are apparently also
⏹️ ▶️ John constrained from telling anybody that that’s happening for security reasons. But now that it is public,
⏹️ ▶️ John now that the Senator has said this in its public, Apparently, and I’m not a lawyer, but apparently Apple’s lawyers now believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that because it is public, they can say, yes, this was totally having us. We couldn’t say anything before, but now we can say something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is crappy, but that’s the way things work. And this isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John more of a government issue than a tech issue, but it’s the intersection of those two wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Because in our country, in theory, the laws that
⏹️ ▶️ John we subject the companies to are the laws that we have chosen by electing
⏹️ ▶️ John representatives who then make the laws and so on and so forth. That process, the distance from
⏹️ ▶️ John what the people want to which laws companies like Apple are subject to often seems like a long
⏹️ ▶️ John distance. It’s like, what can I do as a voter to change this?
⏹️ ▶️ John This issue is not going to be quote unquote on the ballot anywhere. It’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be in campaign ads. It’s not gonna be front of mind for a lot of people. People who don’t listen to Tech Posse probably don’t know about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yet somehow laws related to this, that basically say when and how the government can demand
⏹️ ▶️ John something from a tech company, and when and how the government can force that company not to say anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, those laws are written and exist. And if you don’t like them,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they sound like, hey, I don’t like that, I don’t want to live in a country where my government can do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you might say, I want to change that. Is there some way I can change that through voting? And the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is in theory, yes. In practice, probably there are more important things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like preserving democracy, stuff like that, that may,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, when do we get down to the point where you’re voting based on nuances of policy
⏹️ ▶️ John about security for tech companies? We’re probably not at that point, which is disappointing. I personally find frustrating, because I do
⏹️ ▶️ John care about these issues, but I care more about preserving democracy and abortion, for example. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re really, it’s like, And our stupid two-party system is like, look, you already know who you’re voting for anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s not that much you can do about it, except I suppose to become more informed and pressure the
⏹️ ▶️ John representatives that are closest to you so that hopefully somehow, this is like the reverse of trickle-dagging economics
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably works about as well, trickle-up concern, where you voice your esoteric concerns
⏹️ ▶️ John to the representatives who are closest to you in the hopes that somehow, some way, some message might filter
⏹️ ▶️ John upwards in the chain to someone who has some power over this. The good thing about stories like this, this and this
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t Reuters and was picked up and maybe not the mainstream press but like the mainstream-ish press is that this
⏹️ ▶️ John puts it into people’s minds that say, hey, you may not know this, but this is a thing that your government is
⏹️ ▶️ John able to do. It’s able to do this stuff and it’s able to force the company not to tell you. And we know
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple in general doesn’t like to be in that position, has fought the US government before
⏹️ ▶️ John over issues like this of like, we want the texts of this, you know, person and Apple says we can’t give them to
⏹️ ▶️ John you and the government wants to put them to put in back doors and all this other of stuff like to the
⏹️ ▶️ John degree that this enters the public mind by being in the New York Times or being your local newspaper or whatever, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s good, but I’m so pessimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John about the ability to change any of this just because
⏹️ ▶️ John of how distant I feel as a voter and how distant I think we all are as citizens of this country
⏹️ ▶️ John from what happens at the way far other end of the government. So like I said, this is not really
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple story. I think Apple is doing mostly the right things here, with one caveat that we’ll get to in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John But hearing this story does not make me happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I know our government has done stuff like this for a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time, decades. And that’s nothing new, but it doesn’t make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any better. I can’t think of something that’s less American, at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less of the ideals of what American means, then we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have some kind of police action against you and we’re gonna prevent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the company that we are getting your data from, from even telling you that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gave us your data. That is, I would love to hear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the founders of the country I think would have a pretty big problem with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. I wouldn’t go that far. But the other thing is that’s why those canaries exist where they’ll have a page that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have not, this thing has not happened to us. And what they do is they just remove that from the page if it ever happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to them. So they can plausibly say, we didn’t tell anybody it happened, we just removed something from our website,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I don’t know if this, the problem with the canaries is you kind of have to
⏹️ ▶️ John anticipate the thing that might happen. So you can put a statement, you can put the negative version of the statement there and then remove
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So I don’t know if that was an issue here, but anyway, senators
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently can find out this information and make it public, which then gives Apple cover to say something about violating the law or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe that’s also a part of the system working. And by the way, if you’re wondering how these laws happen, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a terrible ratcheting mechanism we have in this country and others, I’m sure, which is based on fear.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whenever there’s a crisis and people are afraid, that’s the perfect time to pass a bunch of laws that give expansive power to the government to
⏹️ ▶️ John invade people’s privacies for, quote unquote, safety. And when the danger is gone, those laws go away. Of course
⏹️ ▶️ John not. It only goes in one direction. Anytime there’s a crisis, pounce on it, make more laws. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the Patriot Act, 9-11, whatever, you know, the people are afraid, pass more laws that gives the government more
⏹️ ▶️ John power to invade people’s privacy. And we’ll repeal that when the danger’s gone. They never will. It’s like the tolls
⏹️ ▶️ John that are there to pay for the bridge. And once the bridge is paid for, do the tolls go away? No, they never go away. In fact, they just
⏹️ ▶️ John keep going up. So that’s another reason I’m pessimistic about reversing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Not that nothing can be done, because, you know, again, these stories coming out helps
⏹️ ▶️ John it get into the front of mind. People do have hearings about it. And some of our representatives do care about this and
⏹️ ▶️ John try to make things better, but boy, it’s an uphill battle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I think more interesting than this is, what data did Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give law enforcement agencies or whatever this was? Like, what information does Apple have to give them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple runs the push notification service. Apple has the metadata.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They cited metadata detailing which apps sent and received message, you know, and and what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, to what phones with what push notification tokens. And so presumably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you know, suppose some law enforcement thing is, you know, basically wiretapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone, you know, for whatever, I, again, I’m not a lawyer, but so whatever, whatever the modern day equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that would be called, basically, you know, wiretapping, you know, a phone, they can go to Apple and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, any, any push notifications that go to this person, we want copy. Presumably Apple has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say yes, as we said. So that data, you know, the app sends data through the push notification service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple. Apple can then capture it on the way to the phone. I can’t think of any other way this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could work. You know, I would assume that they couldn’t just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use basically an SSL proxy on somebody’s connection, because I would assume the push notification service would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not deliver those then. I assume it does some kind of…
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s just metadata. Like that’s why I quoted the part of the thing where they that it might be unencrypted data. Because I can imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is both Apple and Google by the way, it’s not just Apple. I can imagine there are some situations where there might
⏹️ ▶️ John be some unencrypted payload that is not related to the push notification. But maybe, especially on Google platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe there was a time where there was unencrypted data. But essentially it’s just metadata. It’s kind of like the metadata that we talked about with
⏹️ ▶️ John the governments, you know, tapping phones. It’s basically like, who’s calling who and for how long? They don’t know anything that was said. They
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t see the contents of it, right? But they just know this person called that person for that amount of time. And that metadata is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John valuable. Even if you have no access to what was said, merely just knowing this thing happened, then
⏹️ ▶️ John this person got a messages push notification, then this person got a messages push notification. You can start connecting the dots and seeing how
⏹️ ▶️ John people, you don’t know what they’re saying, right? Cause it’s end to end encrypted and Apple can’t tell you, but just knowing how the dots are
⏹️ ▶️ John connected, that metadata is so valuable and can reveal so much without having to see any of the information.
⏹️ ▶️ John And practically speaking, Apple can’t give you the information because it’s end to end encrypted. So this is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John best you can get from Apple and Google for essentially tapping communications on these end-to-end encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John networks. At least we’re not like the UK where their government’s trying to make it so that end-to-end encryption is illegal. You have to have backdoors
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. We kind of fought that battle in the 90s with the chips and TVs or whatever, and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t come back up again. So I suppose things could be worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but also, you know, so from Senator Wyden’s letter, it says, in certain instances,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data that’s captured might also have unencrypted content of the messages. For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody who doesn’t know the way this works, you know, for Overcast to send a notification to my apps, Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you say, yes, allow this app to send me notifications, the app gets a token, just a long string.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then so on sync back to my servers, it reports, hey, this user has this push notification token. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anytime new episodes of shows this, this and this are published, send notifications to this token. So if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco send like, you know, the new episode released, here’s the title, here’s a description. If I send that in a notification,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has access to that. And so if Apple’s being, you know, forcibly tapped here by a government, the government would have that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, a different way I could send it is, you can, what you send to Apple is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arbitrary JSON dictionary. You can put whatever you want in there. Now, by default, if you put things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, title, message, it’ll display those exactly as you’d expect in like the kind of basic default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. But you don’t have to do that. You can send it in whatever format you want, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then your app can have a custom extension running that’s a notification content modifying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extension. When your app receives that notification from Apple, it’ll receive that JSON
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dictionary. And before the phone displays the notification to the user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re allowed to run on the local phone app, you’re allowed to run this extension for a short time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to modify or add to the content of the notification between the notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services payload that you sent from your servers through Apple with the JSON dictionary and being shown to the user.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I assume, I actually don’t know this, but what I assume is that the security conscious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chat apps most likely encrypt the data they send to Apple servers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they have their notification content modifying extension decrypt stuff on the app side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of tapping wouldn’t work. That’s what I assume is happening when the Senator’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco letter says, in certain instances, they might be able to receive unencrypted content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing most of these apps probably do that, and that’s why it isn’t always unencrypted content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s certainly interesting to think like, how could Apple, Because, you know, Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like when governments force them to hand over data. They really don’t like that. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, and they continue to, change the security and design of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their services to minimize the amount of data they have in the first place for governments to even come looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, it wouldn’t surprise me if maybe at some point Apple changes the push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notification service and the way it works to have much more encryption built in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that Apple has less ability to even tap his data in the first place. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Agreed. So Apple has since updated their law enforcement guidelines to require
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a judge’s approval before handing over these records. Gruber had called them out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amongst others, but had called them out saying it’s kind of BS that Google apparently required
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a judge’s order, whereas Apple just, you know, took it on scouts honor at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you were really a police officer and you were on the up and up. And so they’ve changed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And previously, Apple required only a subpoena to turn over push notification records, whereas Google required a subpoena
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subject to court oversight. Apple has now updated its guidelines and now requires a search warrant. And it reads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple ID associated with the registered APNS token, that’s Apple Push Notification Service, and associated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey records may be obtained with an order under some government code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a search warrant. So there you go. And we will put relevant links in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s kind of weird that Apple is so against this, but then they were slightly more lax than Google. Maybe they didn’t know they could get away with
⏹️ ▶️ John requiring what Google required. Because you would think, like, it’s not kind of, again, it’s not really up to the company to decide
⏹️ ▶️ John what they do and don’t comply with. But maybe Apple wasn’t aware until all this came out that they could have been more
⏹️ ▶️ John restrictive than they were. So now they are more restrictive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So, yeah, this is gross. I mean, it’s not surprising,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s gross. And I’m glad that Apple has swiftly taken action to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be more transparent about this. Well, maybe not transparent, but more, I guess, restrictive is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a better word about this. But either way, it’s gross. Governments, generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, I don’t think they should be doing this. But here
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought they shouldn’t be doing it. It’s just that the way we want it to work is when it’s super really important,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, but when it’s not super really important, no. And the way
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it actually works
⏹️ ▶️ John is as soon as they’re able to do it, they do it all the time as much as they can. It doesn’t matter how important it is. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s what we’re complaining about. Not that we think, oh, government should never, because this is the role of government. They should be allowed to force
⏹️ ▶️ John companies to do things for security reasons, you know, in extreme circumstances. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the function of government that I think we all agree on. The problem is when there’s no transparency and no
⏹️ ▶️ John oversight, what we know happens is the government just does it whenever they feel like it. And it’s real
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to do that when nobody can tell you they’re doing it. So they’re doing it and they’re like, no one’s gonna know that
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re doing this anyway. I just wanna know what my neighbor had for lunch yesterday, so I’m going to check his text messages, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the company can’t tell anybody I’m doing it because it’s against the law. You know what I mean? Like, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s people doing that, but I, for sure people are using it to like, spy on their significant others and other
⏹️ ▶️ John bogus stuff. Like, just look at all the history of all surveillance laws and tech. It is just so
⏹️ ▶️ John massively abused and a complete lack of transparency and oversight just makes that worse. And the normal,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it can be secret oversight, as in your representatives in, you know, in Congress or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John have committees that oversee this, but someone needs to be aware of it. Someone who’s accountable to the people needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be aware this is happening. And ideally, it would only happen in extreme circumstances and not
⏹️ ▶️ John just all the time whenever people feel like it. And I think all of our collective faith and the government’s ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that is very low because we just assume based on past events that they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just do it whenever they feel like it and not tell us about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because that’s what actually happens. It’s not like we’re just being conspiracy theorists here. No, we have decades of history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showing us that’s exactly what happens. This is not a theoretical, this is just what happens.
Stolen Device Protection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, speaking more about things that you can do yourself to protect yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the new iOS beta for 17.3, there is a new feature called Stolen Device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Protection. So let’s set the stage. I think it was in the spring or thereabouts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Nicole Nguyen and Joanna Stern, I believe, wrote a couple of articles that were really, really good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how apparently it has become a thing for thieves to look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over your shoulder or put you in a position so that it is easy for them to look over your shoulder as you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey type your iPhone passcode. They will then swipe your phone, they will run away with it, and because they have your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone passcode, they basically have the keys to your entire Apple kingdom. They can change the passcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your phone, they can disable remote wipe, but more importantly, they can go in and change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the password on your Apple ID. So this is not your phone’s passcode, but your Apple ID password.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you’re screwed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then they own everything, all your photos, all your data, all your movies, all your everything. And in this situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can’t help you because they don’t have any way to get that account back from you. They don’t have any proof that you are
⏹️ ▶️ John who you are. You just SOL, it’s just a bad situation. And I have to say, by the way, that article about
⏹️ ▶️ John thieves are watching over your shoulder and bars and stealing your phone is totally one of those scare stories that makes people like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I’m afraid now I’m gonna read this thing. Who even knows how frequently that was happening? But
⏹️ ▶️ John in this case, it doesn’t matter because the story does conclusively show this is
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. This is A, has happened, because here are some people who happened to, and B, it is possible. So even if it
⏹️ ▶️ John only very, very rarely happens, it’s the type of thing of like, well, if it’s possible, can we do something
⏹️ ▶️ John about it? That doesn’t seem ideal. I don’t entirely believe that there’s an epidemic of this going on, and suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m afraid that everyone’s gonna swipe my phone or whatever, but knowing that it’s possible makes me think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John something that could be improved about the phone that I’m using, because it seems like that shouldn’t be possible, and
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly it is. So that’s something that needs to be fixed regardless of how often it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, couldn’t agree more. So Apple has come out with in 17.3, this new feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called Stolen Device Protection. If you enable the new Stolen Device Protection, your iPhone will restrict certain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings when you’re away from a location familiar to the iPhone, such as your home or your work. Here’s the rundown,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, I believe this from Gruber, an Apple ID password change if you do nothing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you don’t enable this new feature, A thief can use the passcode to change your Apple account password
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and lock you out. This move is the key to thieves turning off Find My and wiping phones for resale. Since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, the iPhone’s owner, don’t have the changed Apple ID password, you can’t immediately locate your phone or remotely wipe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its data. With this new feature, again, only in beta right now, with stolen-
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I want to emphasize this, that yeah, you can’t remotely, you can’t look at your phone or wipe your data. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will never have access to any of your stuff ever again, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, your purchases, all that is potentially gone. because the thief doesn’t care about that. They’re not stealing
⏹️ ▶️ John your photos, although maybe they’ll wander through it looking for nudes or whatever, but they do wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John sell your phone and they don’t care that they just lock you out of your stuff because they changed all your stuff on your Apple ID. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the new information, you never will. They’re not gonna send it to you. That’s why it’s a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, I mean, they could, like depending on what else they can access once they have access to everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all your bank account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they can possibly go into something like PayPal or something and, or your bank and they can take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your money And there are documented cases of that happening exactly by this method.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If somebody has your phone and your Apple ID and your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passcode to your phone, they can do a lot. And that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real, I think, the really eye-opening part of this story when it broke last year, or earlier this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, the really eye-opening part of that was, I didn’t, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people, I think most nerds especially, We didn’t know that with a phone and a passcode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could reset the Apple ID password. And so we didn’t realize like, wow, the passcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your phone is way more of an attack vector than we would have potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought of before. That was the real shock here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because most people use a passcode that’s just a bunch of numbers. They don’t use the longer alphanumeric one because it’s just too
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying to use. So that’s why it’s easy to shoulder surf because you can see the giant buttons they’re hitting and people don’t think about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. People are like, oh, my Apple ID, that’s a big complicated password. and I’ve got two factor on and I’ve got this and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got that. But like, so we talked about this when we originally talked about the story for a bunch of historical reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John and in modern days, customer support reasons, that stupid numeric passcode, which
⏹️ ▶️ John might be, you know, I think, do they still allow you to forge it at once? I hope they don’t. But anyway, a small number
⏹️ ▶️ John of digits on a gigantic keypad is easy to see. That alone, plus possession of your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John is enough for them to just break everything. And that is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t think most people realize, like the way most people kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, cavalierly both handle their phone or set it down on tables in public,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or type in the passcode over and over again when Face ID fails, like the way people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treat their phones and entering their passcode, the level of casualness that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treat their phones and passcodes means that having a phone and having a passcode should not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as powerful as it is. And that’s the great thing that Apple is addressing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And this is a very, very, very early version of it. It literally just came out today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, or yesterday. So it’s very new. And it’s right just now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this very first beta for 17.3. So we’ll talk about it in a sec, but we’re gonna see how this goes. But this is very, very new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of first draft attempt at making some changes here. So I think some changes here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are badly needed. So this is a very welcome thing to see. And we can nitpick the details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there. But overall, I’m super glad they are actually addressing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so we never explained the difference. So if you do have this feature on, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want to change an Apple ID password when away from a familiar location, the device will require
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your face ID or touch ID. So the idea is it requires the user that’s using the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone to prove they are the owner of the phone. It will then implement an hour-long delay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before you can perform the action. After that hour has passed, you’ll have to reconfirm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with another face ID or touch ID scan. Only then can the password be changed. So I think the theory here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, A, you’re proving it’s you. B, you’re doing it twice. And C, you’re delaying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. So if somehow you got through the first touch point, where you’ve proven that you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do this, the thief would still have to wait an hour. And hopefully in that hour, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it comes to a phone, you have realized your phone is gone and you’ve borrowed somebody else’s phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to either remote wipe the phone or do whatever you need to do in order to prevent them from stealing
⏹️ ▶️ John it in lost mode. Like there are lots of things you can do pretty quickly just from any web browser. You can go to iCloud.com, log in
⏹️ ▶️ John with your password. Just remember, they couldn’t change because they’re on the hour delay, right? So they’ve still got your phone and they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John probably going to resell it or whatever, but you can just get to a web browser within an hour or I guess call
⏹️ ▶️ John like 1-800-SOS-APPLE or whatever the hell the number is now and just just say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need the phone to do it. You don’t need another Apple device that’s logged in. You just need a web browser and the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to go iCloud.com and hopefully you’d know your Apple ID password or have a backup code written down somewhere. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John were debating in Slack whether we think an hour is the right amount of time for that. Because remember, if you have this turned
⏹️ ▶️ John on, what this also means is that when you legitimately wanna change your Apple ID password, you also have to wait an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ John So is one hour the right amount? Should it be four hours? Should it be 24 hours?
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, security versus convenience. If you want more security, it’s gonna be way more inconvenient that time you
⏹️ ▶️ John do wanna change your Apple ID password. And there are probably some edge cases we’re not thinking of where it’s really, really important for
⏹️ ▶️ John you to change your Apple ID password now, now, now, but you have an hour delay. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a good start because I mean, the obvious thing that we talked about when we originally said this is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why don’t they just make it so your passcode can’t do that? Why don’t they just make it so the passcode is insufficient to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John at all? And all the answers we got from people in the know at Apple is like, that’s not really viable because
⏹️ ▶️ John people forget everything in their life, essentially, except for their phone passcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s like the only lifeline to rescue their stuff. And that happens, you know, to my point before about
⏹️ ▶️ John how often does it actually happen that people are shoulder-suffering your code. The thing about people forgetting all their stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John being rescued by their passcode that they only know because they type in a million times, that happens
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more. Thieves shoulder-suffering is incredibly common. So that’s why Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t and essentially can’t do the thing where they just say, yeah, your passcode won’t be able to be this powerful anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John because it would be a support burden nightmare. Basically, if your goal is to reduce the number of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who lose all their stuff, making that change would increase the number of people who lose all their stuff. They’d be losing it for a different
⏹️ ▶️ John reason for quote unquote their own fault, right? Instead of thieves doing it. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, what you’re trying to do is make it so fewer people lose all their stuff, not more. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ John an attempt to say, okay, we’re going to implement a system where we keep all the benefits of being able to save people’s bacon
⏹️ ▶️ John if they just know their passcode, while also preventing the thief scenario, giving
⏹️ ▶️ John you that one hour gap to save yourself somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I dig this in principle. It seems well thought out. It seems to be not punitive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re at a place that your phone recognizes, you know, home or work. Assuming that that actually does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. I saw somewhere on Mastodon today that somebody tried all this out and said it, their phone, Or maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was Gruber, actually, I think, had said that his phone had been somewhere for a long time, or it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a test phone, and it didn’t, it’s still, or I forget,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was Gruber who did it. He did it in his house. Like, that’s part, the location thing is trying to balance the convenience of saying, like, oh, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in your house, you can change your Apple ID password. But like, home and work, that’s tricky, because if you work in a big office building,
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone shoulder-stretches your phone at like the little, you know, cafe in the lobby, and goes into
⏹️ ▶️ John the lobby bathroom, they’re still at your work. And so now they don’t have the hour delay. So that’s the tricky
⏹️ ▶️ John bit about like, are we gonna have to pick the locations that we consider safe? You know what I mean? Probably someone’s not gonna shoulder
⏹️ ▶️ John surf your passcode inside your house and then go into another room and change your Apple ID password. But at your quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John work, that could totally happen. So I hope there’s some flexibility there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t love that little exception. I would rather, I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see that either removed or controllable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and again, you know, home, I feel like that’s semi reasonable. Although if you’re not home and the thief steals
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone, which you’re out with out, I guess, and then just goes into your yard and changes it, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John security versus convenience. There’s no easy answers here. But you rapidly find out if you’re ever involved in
⏹️ ▶️ John any way in implementing one of these things, because it’s so easy when it’s happening to you, saying, this should be more secure
⏹️ ▶️ John and it should be like X and be like Y. But for the whole rest of your life, this should be easier. I shouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to wait an hour. Everyone wants everything to be just the way they want it when
⏹️ ▶️ John they need it. But there are trade-offs. That’s the practice of engineering.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So if you want to turn this on on the beta settings, face ID and passcode or touch ID and passcode, stolen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device protection in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you two going to turn it on? Absolutely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably will. Yeah, I don’t see any reason not to.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m definitely going to turn it on, if only to see how annoying it is, right? Because I want the protection
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m willing to tolerate a reasonable amount of annoyance. And so, you know, the only way to find out how annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, is turn it on and try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not only am I turning it on, although I think I’m going to wait until maybe after the beta to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if I want to turn on the beta one version of this in case it hoses my account somehow. But as soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as this is stable enough, not only am I turning it on, I’m going to require it for all devices in my house.
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#askatp: iPhone OLED burn-in?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. Will Lineweber writes, iPhones have had OLED screens for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Does the prospect of OLED burn-in make the always-on display option a bad idea? Likewise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what about the new iOS 17 standby mode? Will, I have now seen the FedEx logo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now I am stressing about something that I didn’t think about until I read this. So thank you, Will, for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To be honest, I’ve not worried about this. I’ve had a couple of iPhones with OLED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, or a handful of iPhones with OLED. I don’t even, I can’t even keep track. And I haven’t noticed any burn-in and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just going to continue to try not to notice it. So for me, I don’t really care. Let’s start with Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then we’ll talk about Mr. Worried himself afterwards. So Marco, what’s your thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve had OLED screens on iPhones for a while, as, as Will says. The always-on display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve also now had for a couple of years. I assume either the physical panels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some of the software implementation details or both Somehow Apple has mitigated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the risk of burn-in enough Now, you know the always-on phones, you know, no one’s had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them yet for like four or five years. So we’ll see but Not only have I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not seen any burn-in problems. I haven’t even heard of anyone having any burn-in problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, well put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it seems like if there are any they must be so rare that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really not a problem. So it seems, I was concerned about that as well, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they first announced the Always On, I thought surely that runs as risk. Maybe the Always On
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is such a small percentage of the possible brightness of the screen, maybe that helps a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit, but I don’t know. But whatever it is, it seems to not be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the screen tech in tiny OLED screens is not quite the same as in like
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions, although it is closer to monitor type things. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John all OLED stuff does eventually burn in and wear out. What’s happening is the organic
⏹️ ▶️ John compounds are degrading in the light up thingies. There’s lots of stuff you can do in software to compensate for that. What you really
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna have is headroom, such that if it degrades, the circuitry compensates for it
⏹️ ▶️ John because you weren’t driving it at its maximum brightness anyway. So if it degrades a little, you just give it a little bit more extra juice and
⏹️ ▶️ John it maintains its brightness. And those are the mitigation factors that most OLEDs use. The things
⏹️ ▶️ John that phones have going for them versus televisions are many. So the first used to be before the always-on
⏹️ ▶️ John displays is they’re just not on all the time, right? If you’re not using them, phone screens go to sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John That changed with the always-on display, but as Marco noted, Apple’s implementation of always-on,
⏹️ ▶️ John including on the watch, but also in standby mode, has been, and the always-on display on phones and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John has been fairly conservative with the, you know, how bright the display is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s related to the second thing, which is HDR. Televisions, if you have them on all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John like people tend to keep them bright, especially if it’s in a bright room. And if you happen to be watching HDR content, it
⏹️ ▶️ John could be even brighter. Our phones are HDR capable, but most people do not leave their
⏹️ ▶️ John phone on a static screen of an HDR, an HDR static screen
⏹️ ▶️ John for hours and hours at a time with a static, you know, CNN ticker at the bottom or whatever. And that’s pretty much what
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes to burn one of these things in, in a one or two or three year period. Because remember the phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they don’t have replaceable batteries. End up getting chucked in three years anyway because the batteries are bad on them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Or recycled or whatever, right? So I think all those things are protecting
⏹️ ▶️ John the screens. Like burn-in happens based on time and brightness and the staticness
⏹️ ▶️ John of the element and how much headroom the screen has. And our little screens are not on that long, are not kept that
⏹️ ▶️ John bright, and are fairly resilient against the burn-in because these tiny little screens,
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, they don’t even get as bright as televisions. Televisions are going, I mean, Even even the MacBook Pro screens, well, those aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs or whatever, but television screens are now breaking through the 2000-nit barrier going up even higher
⏹️ ▶️ John than that. With OLEDs, our phones are not there. And you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like my Pro Display XDR. All day it’s sitting here, not that it’s an OLED or anything, but all day it’s sitting here showing me quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John white windows, but they are at most 500, 600 nits. And unlike Marco, I don’t have them at that brightness,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They’re not at 1600 nits. Like they’re not HDR brightness, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also true of our phone screens, that is really, really protecting them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There are other manufacturing differences between how do the OLED screens
⏹️ ▶️ John in our phones work and how do the OLED screens in our televisions work. They’re not the same. You know, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on which OLED tech, there are certainly not QD OLEDs and even the WRGB OLEDs from LG,
⏹️ ▶️ John they use a white backlight with color filters versus the AMOLEDs that are in our displays now are
⏹️ ▶️ John actually also slightly different, right? All that has conspired to make it so that
⏹️ ▶️ John our phones do not suffer from burn-in that we notice. That is the key part,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It could be happening and it’s being compensated for, but the bottom line is, do you see any part of your phone screen where something
⏹️ ▶️ John is bothering you in the normal lifetime of a phone? So far, the answer has been no, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that will continue to be the case. So I think it will be spared. The rumor, by the way, for the OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad is that it’s gonna be a double layer OLED from Samsung. So it’ll be two OLEDs that
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially run at lower brightnesses stacked on top of each other so the the total
⏹️ ▶️ John brightness is higher but each individual OLED is running at lower brightness so therefore you’re preserving more
⏹️ ▶️ John of the part that wears down through brightness. That’s the key just don’t don’t show
⏹️ ▶️ John things very brightly don’t send a lot of electricity to those OLED pixels and they wear out slower.
#askatp: Marco + third-party code?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Julian Gamble writes, Marco has talked about his quote, extreme minimalism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote approach to coding projects and in particular adding libraries. It has given us all great joy to see Marco embrace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift and SwiftUI. I do note that these have less of a minimalist approach in coding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey culture when it comes to libraries. Has Marco’s conversion of Overcast to Swift meant that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he has moved away from his library minimalism? What’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only have I not moved away from using from my aversion to using third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code and libraries I’m actually going more in that direction and now overcast already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t have much third-party code in it I think at some point I had the one password SDK
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use a little it’s literally like one file called TP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco circular buffer which is an audio ring buffer library it’s one C file with a handful of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functions in it, mostly macros, and I used this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook KVO utility, which I hated the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had Facebook code in my app, even though it also was like two files, and I could read it all and it was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was very minimal. But the new version so far uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of those things except for tpCircularBuffer. Like that, like my audio ring buffer at library,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. That’s the only thing. So I don’t even like Overcast originally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use FMDB Gus Mueller’s library for SQLite. I don’t use that in the new version either because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote Blackbird and it talks directly to SQLite. So I don’t even need that. Like I’ve gone more in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direction of my own code. Now, I don’t honestly see why Swift and SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it harder to do this or make it, you know, push me, would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push me more in the direction of using third party code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So let me jump in here. Yeah, why would I be doing this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So I think Julian’s point is that Swift, and less Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe more Swift UI is a pretty big framework.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think that Julian is considering…
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it though? Compared to what? Compared to UIKit or AppKit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So hold on. Here’s the thing. I don’t think Julian is making the distinction between first and third party.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think if you were to look at this as both of them being equivalent, which I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, I’m just saying I think that’s where Julian’s coming from.
⏹️ ▶️ John My guess was it has to do with Swift package manager. Like basically that Swift, unlike Objective-C, Swift has an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple-supported actual package management system and a culture
⏹️ ▶️ John of making packages and sharing them. And Objective-C never had that. Objective-C had CocoaPods and whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ John other one was, and they were never really officially Apple-supported, and it was just kind of janky, but if you’re doing anything in
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift, it’s becoming kind of like as good as Perl was in the late
⏹️ ▶️ John 90s, where you can look up a package that does what you want and grab it and add it to
⏹️ ▶️ John your project pretty easily. And that culture just didn’t exist in
⏹️ ▶️ John the Objective-C days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or it was much smaller. I mean, so I am using Swift packages, but they’re all packages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote. Like the current version of the rewrite has, I think four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco packages, but they’re all just, you know, OC audio, OC utilities. Like, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my overcast utility classes and common classes. And, and, and that’s, and I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s by the way, why every language should have an officially supported package system. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you never use anyone else’s packages, using it for your own stuff is just so much nicer to have actual official
⏹️ ▶️ John support right there in Xcode. That’s going to, I don’t know, Swift package manager just had growing pains and it’s young and, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just. the fact that we’re on that road and that Apple actually supports it and there’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John true thing that the whole community get behind just makes everything so much better even if you never use anyone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code. Yeah, like in the olden days we had frameworks like we had just to see frameworks that are fully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supported on iOS, you know, as of not too many versions in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just never got into frameworks like I tried as a developer. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not an advanced Xcode user. I am not an advanced build system engineer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything that requires weird build settings and a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trickiness in Xcode. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John even running things from the command line, doing builds from the command line, which I know a lot of people are into.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like any of that. That kind of stuff becomes a huge block
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to do anything that requires it because I’m not good at it. The documentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is minimal. The usability of Xcode doing advanced stuff like that is usually pretty awful because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone just kind of knows how to do it from a million years ago and they’ve never made it easy. Um, like, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that involves advanced build system tricks, I usually can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and won’t do. Uh, because I’m, I, and if I try to do it, it costs me hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I eventually come up with some brittle thing that then breaks six months later when I try to do something else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, I try to avoid that kind of thing. So, Swift packages have been mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. The downside is that Xcode is buggy as hell when dealing with them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the good news is that when it works, if you’re willing to clean your build folder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and clear all issues and maybe quit Xcode a lot and be careful what you have open at the same time across two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different projects, then if you baby it in those ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system actually is conceptually pretty simple and is certainly much easier to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s getting better, and we know Apple is behind it, so it’s not just like, oh, well, is this going to be the one that wins it? this is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the one that wins. Like Apple is, you know, it’s gotten better already. It still needs to get better than
⏹️ ▶️ John it is now, but like I have full confidence that they will continue to work on this and the community
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to be behind it. I can look for Swift packages and find them sometimes for things I’m interested in. Again, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m not going to use them, it just makes it easy to just make a new empty project, pull the package in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah. And to be clear, like the reason why I don’t use third party code much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if at all, is is mostly because I’ve been burned by in the past a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what you know when when I’m doing the calculus of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like is is it worth it to write my own version of this I might have different requirements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you do you know when I’m like overcast the code base is now 10 years old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I am like I’m writing it now for hopefully the next 10 years or beyond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is something like what if If you’re just trying to get something out there quickly, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your concept of, am I still gonna be, like whatever thing I’m building right now, am I gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the one responsible for it 10 years from now? Like if your answer to that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe not, or definitely not, or ha ha, what are you talking about, then you have different priorities than me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you need to build something faster, if you’re building something for, say, a company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t really matter whether you use someone else’s even or odd library or not, Go for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Get your job done faster. You won’t even be there in 10 years. Who cares? If you’re building something for a hackathon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re building something as a prototype, if you’re building something as like a version one that you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might become a business but maybe not, or you’re just doing it for fun on the side, by all means, build it however
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want. Build it quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if you’re building something that other people might have to work on, using the library that everybody uses for that thing means that
⏹️ ▶️ John they can hire another person who has a chance of understanding it without having to read all of your code and figure it out. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the argument for third party, you know, there are lots of positive arguments for third party libraries, not just like it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John bad and Marco can avoid that badness because he’s lucky. Sometimes there’s goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, exactly. And, but, you know, from, my priorities are so different and my needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very different. It isn’t just me being, you know, a jerk. I mean, it’s partly that, but I need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, I need to know that whatever I’m writing now is gonna never give me trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and never surprise me with, say, discontinuation, or never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprise me with some detail on how it works that I wouldn’t have expected or might be hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find. I’m building stuff for the long term, you know, for myself. And so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care who else works on it because no one else is gonna ever work on this code, not a likelihood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I was waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that. I was waiting for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John In a case where this might have backfired, this fucker writes his own PHP framework because he’s the only person who’s ever gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John work on this. So it doesn’t matter that you use some third party or thing that people might be familiar with and they’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ John be anyone parachuting into the code. It suddenly has to not only understand the product, but also the framework it’s built on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What PHP framework would you have been familiar with? I mean, sure, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John but still, I could find documentation for I don’t even know what the PHP framework. So I know when we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about this on the member special, I remember Dan said, you should have used Blorp or Gloop. But anyway, I’m sure there
⏹️ ▶️ John is. I’m sure there’s documentation online for those frameworks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s all Laravel now, right? I don’t know. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Laravel is the bespoke one, or not bespoke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, it’s far from bespoke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. That’s, I think, like, it is so taken over PHP culture that, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same way that, you know, if you’re building a web app in Ruby, you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building it in Rails, and Rails was so successful that, like, it took over all of, like, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there was anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John going on. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John only did it take over, like, there was one point where, like, the new version of Rails was essentially the
⏹️ ▶️ John big, they absorb the Rails competitor and say, the new version of Rails is the thing that used to be competing with Rails. I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ John the details wrong, but something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more or less happened. Right, yeah. And to that extent, I think Laravel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Laravel, I’ve never used it, I think that has absorbed so much of PHP that if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using PHP, it’s kind of just assumed that you’re using Laravel, I think, for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ John you pronounce it? I think Blorp or Gloop that I said was probably just as good.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I have no clue.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never heard it spoken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. Now we’re gonna get feedback. all
⏹️ ▶️ John the Blorp users are going to write in.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey four remaining Blorp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users are going to write in and say, It’s not pronounced that at all, but that’s all right.
#askatp: How’s the Action Button?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all right, let’s move on. Torstein writes, two months in, how do you like the action button? Is it useful? Is it just meh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey irritating or gimmicky? Any accidental, I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey activations. Which list for future upgrades to it? Or will it go the way of the touch bar and get less and less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention from Apple? For me, I like it. I don’t think it’s been world changing, but it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have something in a place where I had effectively nothing. And by that I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most useful thing that the ring silence switch did for me since the moment I got my Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch was being a good fidget toy, which while really a terrible fidget toy, if I’m honest, but I used it a lot as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fidget toy. And so now I have something useful there. For me, I’m using it for the camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t come up with a better way or not a better or a more useful thing that I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think I would prefer. And so I’ve stuck with the camera. And I do like having it. I like having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the camera available to me without thinking about it. I am fully aware it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the lock screen, I am fully aware it’s in control center, but this is still faster and I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having it there. And honestly, I don’t have any plan to change it. I know that Federico amongst others have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing some really impressive and wild things with the action button and shortcuts, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feeling a need I don’t think I have. So I like it. I don’t think it’s do or die, so to speak, but I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it. I prefer it over the ring silent button. John, I’ve picked on Marco first last couple of times. John, what do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you think? Well, you don’t have one of these. Nevermind,
⏹️ ▶️ John back to Marco. I don’t have one, but I do have something to add here. It was the last part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John question. I was like, do we think it will go to the touch bar and get less and less attention? The rumors for iPhone 16
⏹️ ▶️ John is not only will, they all have the action button, not just the pro ones, but the whole 16 line will have the action button.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s, I mean, I know we’re like, you know, almost a year out, but like the other rumor is that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna add another button to the other side of the phone near the bottom, like basically
⏹️ ▶️ John below the power button. And I don’t know, like this is one of those rumors where it’s like, really?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you misunderstanding some kind of thing in the supply chain or something? But anyway, watch for that. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John all for adding more buttons. Obviously there’s a limit. You can’t have buttons up and down the sides and the tops and bottoms
⏹️ ▶️ John of the phone, but I feel like we were in a button drought, kind of like the port
⏹️ ▶️ John drought on the laptops for a long time. The action button has sort of broken through. I think Apple’s committed
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. I think you’re gonna see it on phones going forward. I think, especially the action button, taking over
⏹️ ▶️ John that spot is an easy win because you already had a control there. So it’s not like you’re carving out a new spot for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it actually adds another button to the other side somehow, you know, we’ll see. Maybe it’ll be a button bonanza.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Marco, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love it. It’s not like a world changing thing, but it’s a nice thing. So I have mine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mapped to the flashlight, which again, like the camera, it’s usually on the lock screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I could just do that, but I have a dog and it’s winter. And I often am like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking him out for a second. I don’t want to like go get the big flashlight off the shelf and bring it like you know I want to just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I’m outside. Oh, let me see this or I’m like you know I’m Reaching under a cabinet for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know oh, let me quickly pop this on It’s very useful as a flashlight in my life, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I have it as that. It’s not super exciting It has been a nice a nice minor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvement I’ve never had any accidental activations to answer torsion question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And whether they add more buttons in the future or more sequences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of presses that you could do to have different actions on this, who knows. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I look forward to these little minor things adding up. The other thing is that I used to…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not a monster and so my phone does not ring most of the time. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vibrates or whatever else. else and I used to every night before bed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flip it to out loud mode again and then I’d wake up and get ready in the morning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and flip it back to silent mode and occasionally I would forget to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so occasionally my phone would unexpectedly ring out loud and every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like yeah like it was so jarring when that would happen and man if that would happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like somewhere like around other people I would be mortified. So by removing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ring silence switch it has removed the ability for me to quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and easily change that setting. So the result is I don’t I don’t change it anymore. I just leave it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silent mode all the time. And I if you did want to do it, couldn’t you schedule it with shortcuts? Probably. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I think you can make shortcuts fire based on time of day. And then you could just I think you can just you know anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I endorse not turning your ring around when it’s nighttime. Like, especially if you have your phone on vibrate, if it’s on like
⏹️ ▶️ John a hard surface, it’ll wake you up too, just with the vibration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like the thing is like, the reason I would do it was just an old habit of like, I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure if I’m getting alerts that my servers are down or whatever, like I want those to make noise and wake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me up. Or if someone in my family is calling me, like maybe somebody’s having an emergency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to know about, like whatever. But now there’s all these different settings of things like do not disturb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all these different, You can put different settings and different contacts and filter modes, you can have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break through. And so there’s so many options now to let important stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break through the silent switch that I’m fine to just have it on all the time now.
⏹️ ▶️ John great. Plus you’re a parent, so if you’re anything like me, your ability to sleep through any kind of noise has been
⏹️ ▶️ John destroyed by having an infant. So again, if you just put it on vibrate and put it on your nightstand, it will wake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Notion. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. me, we’ll talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
Marco’s new desk toy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you got a new toy apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Got a new desk toy and maybe away from my desk sometimes, too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna send the picture to you. Hold on. I got myself Something I had in college and high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gosh. I got myself a Palm pilot Specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the palm 5x, which I think was the best palm pilot ever made now. I’m a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biased That’s the one I had in college Um, in high school I had a Palm 3X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, for a couple years, like the end of high school. Um, and this, what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I have learned is that Palm Pilots now are available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on eBay for basically nothing in good working order. Um, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this cost $20. Oh my word. Came with the full box, docking cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, charger, like everything. You could have just gone to
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got one. My suggestion is you get vexed ve x 2x is v xx
⏹️ ▶️ John ed really fun game,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay? I will set up yeah, so in high school. I never had a phone. This is this is like you know 90
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1996 to 2000 so it was it was too early for you know teenagers to have phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some people had pagers or beepers in this time But but I did not I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was not going to happen for me So at some point I got a job,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was working at a natural food store, just basically a grocery kind of thing, and I got a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job and eventually I had a few hundred dollars built up and I wanted so badly I got myself a Palm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3X. I was like a junior in high school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What did I need an organizer for? What did I have to organize? You weren’t doing any homework anyway. I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing any homework. I didn’t have like calendar events to organize. I didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of phone numbers to keep track of. I didn’t have like a massive to-do list.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you want just a really expensive thing that plays games worse than a Game Boy?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, well honestly, frankly, I might disagree with that statement because the Game Boy was not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know people have a lot of nostalgia for the Game Boy. The Game Boy was not a great system in my opinion. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it was also-
⏹️ ▶️ John It had great games for it, that’s the key.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. So I got this Palm Pilot in high school. It might’ve been the first like major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco electronic thing that I paid for with my own money, with the money from that job. And I just loved it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of the teachers in school knew what the heck it was, so I could just be like tapping around on it playing a game and they wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what I was doing. Like they would think I was organizing my life or whatever, or they might think it was just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a weird calculator, who knows? So I was playing with it all day in school. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love Palm OS. Like a few months back, it floated through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our RSS news circles that people had made this awesome web emulator for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you could just play all these old POM games in your browser. And so of course I opened it up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found my uh the meal-boring game I always played called Rally 1000 uh an implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the of the popular you know French card game meal-boring also called a thousand miles. Anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco booted that up and that’s the game that was like one of my big time waster games like throughout all of high school and college
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I loved playing it again Like it brought back those memories and I haven’t I haven’t owned a palm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pilot since probably 2004 2005 like
⏹️ ▶️ John an old person calling them all palm pilots I don’t think they they dropped the pilot name by the time this product came out, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah Yeah, like it was it I think even my palm 3x. I believe that was after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was bought by three company I think it had the three calm logo on it. I no longer have it so I can’t verify it But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the palm OS was really delightful. I think it was was extremely well designed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And keep in mind, like, the era these are from, these are from the late 90s. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked up the specs. It had like a 20 megahertz processor, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like four to eight megabytes of RAM, depending on which one you got. You know, the screen was 160 by 160 monochrome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or grayscale. Like, it was very, very basic from a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing standpoint. But they did some really clever things. And for instance, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the handwriting recognition system, graffiti. First of all, I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write graffiti on notebook paper just because I thought it looked cool. And- Oh my gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is a whole new level of nerdy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, of course, yeah. At the time, to have reliable handwriting recognition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asterisk, you had to write this certain way, but if you wrote that certain way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was very fast and reliable. And so when you compare it to the Newton, which I never owned, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them once or twice, And the Newton tried to have free-form handwriting recognition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it didn’t work that well, because the computing power just wasn’t really there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing about the Newton, though, yes, it didn’t work as well. But here’s the thing, especially the original version of the Newton,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could write cursive. And the first time I wrote cursive on a Newton and it changed it into print, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this is the future. This is the most amazing device ever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then I wrote another sentence and it totally mangled it. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that it could ever do it even once with my cursive, which is not particularly good, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, how is it doing this? What is this witchcraft? I think that later versions of Newton OS, they
⏹️ ▶️ John dropped the ability to support cursive, but I was amazed by it with the original Newton. Of course, the original Newton
⏹️ ▶️ John was humongous and massively more expensive than this, and that’s, you know, why Palm did so much better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the Newton in the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, like, you know, these were, like, when I bought the 3X, it was something like $300, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I later bought the Discounter 5X, it was something like $200. That was, for the time, relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inexpensive compared to like a computer or a newtons or much more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I believe and they were also much larger
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re more expensive. They were bigger. They were also substantially more powerful, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes But what was genius about about the palm you know whatever palm pilots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you call these what was you use about them? Is that instead of like you know the Newton was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s do Let’s tackle a really hard problem in a really big way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco palm was more like hey. You know what let’s scale it back let’s simplify what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking the hardware to do so we can be a lot more accessible and a lot smaller and cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a lot like the Game Boy in that way. And like saying like, look, we have a constrained environment.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what can we do in that environment? Let’s make a product that fills the role within
⏹️ ▶️ John those constraints. And Apple was like, there are no constraints. We want you to have something that’s even more powerful than a Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s almost like, I mean, look, see also like the Vision Pro, like that’s like, you know, they’re like, they’re shooting for the stars with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. and like we’re gonna have this amazing thing. Yeah, it’s gonna be, you know, this, this, you know, thing with this big battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pack, it’s gonna be really expensive, but it’s gonna be amazing. The Palm Pilot was like, you know, it was more like the Quest. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, we’re gonna simplify this way down, but it’ll be a lot cheaper and a lot, you know, simpler in certain ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Palm Pilot at the time, like it was revolutionary, but it’s interesting, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking back on it now, like what I see now is it was, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, But keep in mind, this device has no built-in networking, barely any built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound. There is a little PC speaker kind of buzzer beeper kind of thing, but it’s very basic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no headphone jack, there’s no way to play, there’s no MP3 built-in playing functionality. Later models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added stuff like that. But there’s no modern features on this. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to have your contacts and your calendars and stuff synced to it, the way you would sync
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was it had a cradle that plugged into a serial port on your computer. Mm-hmm. They had this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole hot sync system where you’d stick it on the cradle and you’d sync it almost like an iPod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it would sync with your computer when it was in the cradle and you’d take it
⏹️ ▶️ John with you. And the connector was like the iPod too. Remember the 30-pin connector? Yeah. The Palm connector was very much like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but even crunchier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but honestly, I think the Palm connector was a little bit more sturdy because there’s way fewer moving parts and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way fewer pins. But anyway, it had this whole sync protocol. And actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I was kind of aping with Instapaper was an app I used to use all the time on the Palm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pilot called AvantGo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AvantGo was basically like a web clipper that would run over the sync process. So it would,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think, I forget the details, I think they actually had deals with publications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like newspapers and magazine sites.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you could get your daily newspaper through AvantGo and it would be fully navigable. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would basically save web content for reading offline on your Palm Pilot. Again, synced just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPod. I loved that. Like, I went on a trip one time in high school,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t have any laptop or anything yet, or any cell phone, so I just loaded up my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Palm Pilot with as much as I could get on Avant Go, because I wanted to read a material for the trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, just used it for like a week, just totally offline. I had a couple of e-books, I had a whole bunch of Avant Go stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you could have put e-books
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Like I said, I always say that, when I say I read the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit on the 160 by 160
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel screen, this was that screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. Like, I just, I love this thing. It was so far ahead of its time. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so I had the Palm 5X, you know, as I mentioned in college.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I remember I was thinking back, like, man, it took a long time for cell phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to match what the Palm 5X was, like form factor wise. Like the Palm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5X is way smaller than you think it is. It weighs almost nothing. It weighs like 115 grams, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, It’s like half the weight of a modern iPhone. And it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small and light. It has a built-in lithium rechargeable battery. It doesn’t last very long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after 23 years, but 24 years, excuse me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, I’ve ordered myself a replacement battery. We’re gonna see how that goes. The installation process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not easy according to YouTube videos, but this whole thing was only 25 bucks. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I break it, I can just buy another one. It is remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many of these there are on eBay. Palm 5s, Palm 3s, all the different varieties. The later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, like the M series, they’re all over eBay for like 20-30 bucks for really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco condition ones. And it’s kind of fun. And the thing is, you can’t really do anything with it. I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually install the Sync software on my gaming PC. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting it installed was a little… You had to go to some weird places on the web to even get a copy of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the software that would run on modern Windows. And then you have to do a couple of weird things, like make it run as administrator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to get a USB to serial adapter from God knows who on Amazon. So there were some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoop jumping to go through, but I wanted to be able to install my games. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was nice for that. But it is kind of interesting, this device is just totally on its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it has no built-in networking. And yet you can get like modems and Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like add-ons, but they’re huge and most of them don’t work anymore. Like with no networking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is very limited in what it can do. It is closer to a Game Boy these days than to anything useful as a computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device. But that also means that it’s not broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. Like anything that relies heavily on networking that’s pretty old is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally non-functional today. Like the Palm 7
⏹️ ▶️ John that did have cellular. I wonder if that just doesn’t work anymore because it was analog cellular, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like what network would that even run on? Like that definitely wouldn’t work today. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if the networking part of it worked, what is it connecting to? With what SSL protocol? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSL breaks everything old. Like that’s how the modern internet is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically any devices that have to connect to the internet to do useful things, after 10 years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re useless. Because they’re gonna fall behind SSL requirements. But this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t because it is self-contained. If you want to be even more future-proof,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say get a Palm 3X or 3Xe because those were, I believe, the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models to use just regular AAA batteries instead of lithium batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that will be even more future-proof in the sense that you don’t have to worry about this battery that’s now 24 years old, any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible risks of using it or just it being very low capacity. So anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just started playing these games again last couple nights just like sitting on the couch, you know, everyone else was watching TV and I’m like playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my version of Hearts or my version of Mealborn on here. It brought back so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many memories of wasting time with this thing and it’s delightful. And yeah, the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard to see. Like, if, you know, you can like hold the power button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down for a backlight and the backlight is not much easier to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is old, like the screen technology is very, very old and it of course is very limited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is delightful to use this thing. And I gotta say, I have spent $25 on way worse things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very happy that even if it ends up only being like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fun desk toy, it makes me so happy to just see and hold and use this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would venture to say, again, the Palm 5 and 5X, both, I think, came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out in 1999. I would say it took at least until the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone before cell phones had caught up to this form factor. And maybe even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 5. Like because of how it made it much smaller and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighter and everything. I would say the Palm 5 and the Palm 5X, not only were these the best Palms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my opinion across the entire lineup that were ever made, just like form factor wise and like classic looks wise. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked the best, they feel the best. But also, they were so far ahead of their time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a decade ahead of their time. And yeah, they weren’t phones, you know, I get that. but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the form factor and the design and the hand feel and how it feels in the pocket. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these were amazing devices, super iconic, way ahead of their time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think Palm OS, as I was saying earlier, Palm OS, just like the fonts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the widgets, the interface widgets, the designs. I love the way this OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course it’s dated, but I don’t know the history of this. I would not surprise me if there were some similar talent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between Palm and Apple going on here, it is way closer to Apple-like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than to Windows-like. And I know because I also later, afterwards when the Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era of these things really came around, I switched to a pocket PC briefly. Between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Palm 5X and my phone eras, I had a pocket PC. It was better in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense, like technically, it had a web browser, it could very slowly load web pages and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was better in those ways, But the design of the OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the usability, the style, way better on Palm. Way, way better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so yeah, I… It makes me very happy to see this. I still marvel at the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is 24 years old. And it just was so far ahead of its time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, if you, like me, are nostalgic for old Palms, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly recommend getting one on eBay for 20 bucks or 25 bucks. You’d be surprised how easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cheap they are to get for being in relatively good shape. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John McLaughlin And don’t forget in the sort of death throes of the life of that company, they also had WebOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John which included lots of UI innovations that eventually iOS and Android would copy. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John it runs on your LG television.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jim Collison Yep, yep, yep. Literally, it happens on the rare occasions that the TV like fully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reboots itself. I don’t mean just powers off, but fully reboots itself. You see WebOS right there on the TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went through Palm pilot phase in high school because we are the same age. I think it started, I’ve told the story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before on the show, but it started with an IBM. They had, what’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less gross term for white labeling? I can’t think of it, but rebranded, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the early Palm pilots as, oh gosh, like message pads or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. I don’t remember what they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the IBM like work pad or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget exactly what they called it. And dad was issued one through work, didn’t used it like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey twice and said this isn’t for me let me you know screw around with it and then eventually I got a palm I think I also had a 5x if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not mistaken and then I had a pocket pc I had a Toshiba e740 which is important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know because this was one of if not the first pocket pc that had onboard wi-fi and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was when I was in college when Virginia Tech was just rolling out wi-fi on campus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it also had a what was it a compact flash port at the top of it or whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IBM microdrive was. And so what I did was, dad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had gotten his hands on a, like, I think a one gig microdrive. And so everyone around me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was carrying like Rio or Rio, whatever it’s called the the little crappy, like 64
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meg MP3 players, which I had one and it was delightful and also a piece of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The really fancy dudes or people had the nomads that looked like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discmen. Yeah, they had a whole hard drive in there, right, but they had a whole hard drive in there. That was what the fancy kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did. But what I did was I put a microdrive in my Toshiba E740 and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a gig worth of, or maybe it was a half a gig, I don’t know, it was a lot for the time. You know, this was early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2000s. And I had basically a gig worth of music in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pocket PC. It was a complete piece of garbage. It was slower than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dirt. And I loved this thing. And I’m looking at it on eBay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, not that I necessarily want one, but it would be neat to see one for a little bit. And it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s one that they’re making no claims that it works at all for 50 bucks, and then another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one for $325. And I can assure you, it was probably more than $325 when it was new. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t even worth that much. So it’s definitely not, you know, 20 years on. But man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did I love that thing, even though I agree with you, Marco, that the Palm was so much better designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and operated better. But this was, you know, the early 2000s, when it was no longer useful to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a thing that was a satellite to your computer or not as useful. You wanted a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that could actually operate on the internet on its own. And that’s what that’s what this Toshiba did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was it was pretty cool. John, you didn’t really talk about your time at Palm or the Palm.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you guys are all playing with your things. I was working for Palm when you’re playing with your devices in college. Yeah, that’s the only reason I ever got
⏹️ ▶️ John Palm stuff. I never wanted I wanted to really buy one myself. I really wanted a Newton, of course, but couldn’t afford one.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when I worked for Palm, I got the devices free, which is why I have an attic full of them. Not an unlimited
⏹️ ▶️ John number, but basically, you know, they give you a device when you got there, when new ones came out, and so yeah, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole bunch. I even have some handspring stuff over there, you remember them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. Like an offshoot, then got re-merged back in, right? Yep. Yeah, when were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you there? What years were you there?
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember I got laid off when my son was an infant, So, that was around 2004-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John was the one that ended, and I was only there for like a year and a half or two years or so. So, 2003, two, three,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty late. What was the stack at that point? Was it C, C++?
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t, I was doing the web part of it, so I don’t know, but I know the people who were doing, we had a
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows C Pocket PC person, we had a Palm OS person, we had a Mac OS person,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we had a Windows person. And the Windows and the Pocket PC person were the same person, and the Palm OS and the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac person were the same person. There wasn’t a lot of people in this company. And I was the web person.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was one other web person there as well. Golly, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, it was a skeleton crew, but yeah, I got to use all the devices frequently. I got to support the devices
⏹️ ▶️ John by telephone for people who couldn’t get their eBooks onto their Palm devices, because we would rotate who had
⏹️ ▶️ John phone support duty, which is, you know, people say like, oh, you should have a job working in fast food so you know what working’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like. And the technical equivalent of that is everyone needs to do support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s funny too, like all these games I was talking about, like my version of Mealborn, 25
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kilobytes. Minesweeper, 14 kilobytes. Go get vexed, it’s really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Reverse-y, seven kilobytes. Everything is so tiny that goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on here. I mean, the whole thing’s only eight megs of storage, but still, that’s really pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John great. You should look at, like Playdate games are like that now. It’s a lot like the non-black, the monochrome screen. There’s a game that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a 3D, like third person 3D flying a spaceship through space is
⏹️ ▶️ John like 25 kilobytes for the whole game. It’s like, how
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is that possible? It’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John programmatically generated. It’s really cool. Not that storage space is a real concern these days, but it is fun to see how small