601: Foreheads Over the Years
22 Aug 2024You are a helpful podcast producer. Please write a concise description of this episode’s subject matter. Do not hallucinate. Make up factual information only if it’s funny.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- 🗣️ New Member’s Special: ATP Insider: Domestic Workflows
- Follow-up:
- iPhone 16 “Capture Button” (via Aaron Dippner)
- iPhone 16 Pro’s fourth color
- System color picker (via Gus Mueller)
- Screen recording Vista prompts (via Craig Hockenberry)
- Persistent Content Capture
- Moom
- Remote access software (via Anonymous)
- CIRP Mac sales report from last week’s Overtime (via Phil Marshall & Josh Lowitz)
- Patreon maybe is using Apple as a scapegoat?
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGEDlives on (via AJ)- Fortnite is on iOS in 🇪🇺
- Apple’s AI prompts discovered in public betas
- Your new best friend is AI
- Ask ATP:
- How should we manage batteries on our devices? (via Jake DeGroot)
- macOS:
System Settings→Battery→ The (i) next toBattery Health→Optimized Battery Charging
- macOS:
- Do people actually update their ★☆☆☆☆ reviews if issues get fixed? (via Patrick)
- An aside about Overcast plans, including a bombshell
- Should apps have open bug trackers? (via shac ron)
- Why don’t most podcast apps show per-episode show art? (via Mike Shafer)
- How should we manage batteries on our devices? (via Jake DeGroot)
- Post-show: Revisiting Marco’s kink
- Members-only ATP Overtime: More rumors about Apple robots
- Gurman
- Supply chain
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- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- App Store personnel change
- Member special: Domestic Workflows
- More buttons on iPhones?
- Alleged 16 Pro colors 🖼️
- Custom color pickers
- Screen-capture entitlement
- Overtime follow-up: Mac sales
- Patreon follow-up
- ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED lives on!
- Fortnite iOS in EU
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Apple’s AI prompts
- AI Friend
- #askatp: Battery management
- #askatp: Updating 1-star reviews
- #askatp: Open bug trackers
- #askatp: Per-episode podcast art
- Ending theme
- Outdoor-camera check-in 🖼️
App Store personnel change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not too bad. How about you? Good. It just occurred to me I already started recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before you showed up, so you’re listening to me briefly watch some tickety-tocks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that some friends had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent me. There is no less cool way to say that than the way you just said that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s breaking news today that apparently Apple is now dividing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the king of the App store into two different positions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess one for the traditional app store and one for the EU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, you know, other countries like bespoke app stores. And I was saying to John, you know, we should talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this because otherwise we’re going to have everyone writing into us saying, well, hey, you didn’t talk about that. What’s the deal? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you seem to think it’s not worth talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t think this is super interesting unless we get more information than we have right now because, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we all know, if you’re listening to the show, that there’s a is a bunch of different rules that Apple has to follow in the EU
⏹️ ▶️ John and seem to be in other countries. In fact, there already is in some other countries, different rules. And so they’re dividing
⏹️ ▶️ John app store into someone who’s in charge of figuring out what you got to do to follow the EU rules. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then someone who’s in charge of Apple’s app store, where you just get to follow Apple’s rules. But still
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top of the organization is the same person. Phil Schiller is still in charge of the store and it makes perfect sense organizationally
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, okay, you subordinate, whatever person take care the EU stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and you take care of the non-EU stuff. I don’t think it signals any kind of policy change. It’s not like they’re cleaning house and getting
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of the person who’s in charge of the app store and Tim Cook has had a change of heart about the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John The person who was leaving had been there for 21 years. He’s retiring. He’s got enough money. It’s plenty of like, just maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a story. Maybe this is the beginning of house cleaning, but from what I know now, it just seems like, okay, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John shuffling people around for completely explicable reasons. And I, it does not fill me with any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t read anything into this about any kind of larger policy changes because like the app store is run,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, first by Tim Cook, then by Phil Schiller, then by whoever these other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are. So if you want like major policy changes to have a chance of happening,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you got to look higher up the chain than a third level person for something that’s this important to the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And that would be signaled by one of those higher level people saying something different or doing something different. Like that’s when you know
⏹️ ▶️ John change will be happening. the ranks underneath just to handle what we all know to be a very complex
⏹️ ▶️ John and touchy situation and having the person who has to deal with the EU not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, have the person who doesn’t have to deal with the EU not be distracted by that makes perfect sense. That’s just how you divide up,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, labor within the company. So it’s so rare that we get any kind of glimpse
⏹️ ▶️ John about what’s going on at these lower levels or medium high levels of the company. But every time
⏹️ ▶️ John we do, it just looks like any other company. Again, someone who’s leaving Apple after being the head of the
⏹️ ▶️ John app store for 21 years. So that makes perfect sense. People leave jobs all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John after 21 years. He’s probably going to go and enjoy his life with his money that he earned in all those years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. With our 30%, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t think that goes to him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding. Yeah. Yeah.
Member special: Domestic Workflows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so moving right along, we have an additional bit of pre-show that we need to cover.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a new member special. We have the August member special came out a few days ago as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we record this. It is HPE Insider Domestic Workflows. John, would you please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explain what does that even mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the whole top of the special explains it, but yes, it is an idea
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a member, John. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John need to sell it. Sell, sell, sell. Okay, I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John explain it right now. An idea suggested by a friend of the Chautaun Vizieri that is about things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we do in our house that makes our lives easier. One of the examples he gave was
⏹️ ▶️ John getting an electric kettle, which sounds boring to anyone who’s in the UK, but not all Americans do that. And a lot of them
⏹️ ▶️ John do get it. They say, wow, this really changed my life for the better. And now I use an electric kettle every time I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John make hot water for tea or whatever. And it can be products that you bought. It could be things that you do, practices
⏹️ ▶️ John that you perform. I was hoping it would be weirder than it was. It mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John was pretty standard, but I’ve been surprised from the reaction we’re getting from people. They are finding
⏹️ ▶️ John our hints from Hello is very useful. Just this plain old boring tips. And that’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could have gone two different ways. We could have found out that Casey is doing something completely ridiculous in his house
⏹️ ▶️ John and we could have tried to talk him out of it. But instead, we’re all doing mostly normal things in our house with the exception of I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to read. But Marco is doing unadvised things with a dishwasher. But hey, he
⏹️ ▶️ John likes it. So you’ll hear about that on the episode, if you would like. Already,
⏹️ ▶️ John people are saying you should do a second episode of this. It was so hard to get one episode worth of these tips
⏹️ ▶️ John out, but people are just crave households tips. So we’ll think about it for the potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John far future and take another run of this. But for now, domestic workflows. What do we do in our
⏹️ ▶️ John home that we think makes our lives easier?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it was really funny because after we record every episode of the show, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically I’ll feel like, yeah, that was pretty good. you know, and I’ll go to bed afterwards. And usually Aaron will wake up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to ask how it was. And usually the answer is good because usually I feel like the episodes went well at the end of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. I was like, did that go? Okay. I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John know what the people want, Casey. They want household tips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To be honest with you, I didn’t think it was like bad or anything, but I was like, I don’t know. I was expecting a little more fireworks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from that. And like you said, it was fairly straightforward, But I have to both say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and thank a lot of different people have written in to say, wow, that was so great. And it was so much fun. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was like, really? So I’m very thankful for it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to talk you out of that opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just, it took me by surprise. So I guess that we did better than I expected. So go us, yay team.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also I continue to believe that we just have not gotten to the weird things you two are doing in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why is it just us? You’re the one with the one cup that everyone slurps from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything I do is perfectly normal, as you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know. Like, I’m sure you all think exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the same way. But everything you do is
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly normal. And the other two are the weird ones. And that’s how it is with everybody. Everyone thinks the things that they do are normal
⏹️ ▶️ John and the things that other people are doing in their house don’t make any sense. We just didn’t get to those, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re out there. That’s because we didn’t talk about your bathroom cup that the entire family shared. Oh yeah, I think that has been discussed at length
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcasts. Yeah, but it will continue to be discussed until there’s compliance.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think we need to do an entire member special about that. It will be fine. But anyway, If we take another
⏹️ ▶️ John run at this sometime in the future, maybe we’ll come at it from a different angle or maybe we’ll just dig deeper.
More buttons on iPhones?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow-up. Aaron Dipner writes in with regard to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 16 capture button. Aaron writes, you were discussing the rumored capture button and mentioned the possibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it being touch sensitive. I’ve often wondered if Apple would consider making a touch sensitive scroll wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey input method. The early BlackBerry phones had a physical scroll wheel on the side before they moved to the trackball
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that became more commonly associated with them. I still miss that scroll wheel as a method of linear input. It’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be great if this quote unquote camera button or the rumors touch-sensitive volume buttons could lead to something along
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these lines, though the placement might be odd. I do hope this isn’t something just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limited to a single camera feature, but in typical Apple fashion if they do it’ll be a worthwhile feature I’d bet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know not everyone finds the digital crown on the watch as useful, but it can be a really nice way to scroll a screen without other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey input. And while I can’t see this being a physical wheel on the phone, there’s plenty of nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses for uses for linear input like that. I think I agree with this, like I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that I’m necessarily seeking like a scroll pad, if you will, but I could see how that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be really convenient if it was in the right spot on the side of the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the tricky part. I mean, so first of all, it depends on if you’re holding the phone with your right hand or left hand and whether
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to use the wheel with your fingertips or your thumb. Like there’s just so many variables here. The capture button, to be clear,
⏹️ ▶️ John the room replacement of the capture button is probably the worst possible place for a right-handed, for someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who holds the phone in their
⏹️ ▶️ John hand to do any kind of scrolling with. So it’s probably not that. And I also think that any kind of touch
⏹️ ▶️ John sensitive thing on the side of the phone poses difficulties for cases which most people use and poses difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John for accidental input. The idea of like, I remember the BlackBerry Wheel type thing but the idea of being
⏹️ ▶️ John able to scroll the screen without obscuring any portion of it has some merit but I do kind of think that
⏹️ ▶️ John physically the act of scrolling your phone is so ingrained
⏹️ ▶️ John even in people who didn’t grow up with it but certainly in people who did grow up with it that it is just so dominant that
⏹️ ▶️ John no one thinks there’s anything. There’s nothing that needs to be fixed there. People scroll their phones like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that is. It’s one of the most, you know, it’s one of the core interactions
⏹️ ▶️ John people do with their phones is scrolling some kind of vertical list on the screen. And I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John works fine. Yes, you’re whatever, you know, your thumb is obscuring some portion of the screen, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not I don’t think that’s an issue that people would say, oh, that’s a problem that needs to be solved. So interesting idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think it presents more problems than it solves.
Alleged 16 Pro colors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a bunch of rumors with regard to the iPhone 16 Pro’s alleged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fourth color. Before you get excited, your choices are dull, dark dull,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light dull, and slightly colorful dull. But let’s talk about it. This is a report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Mac Rumors. iPhone 16 Pro models are expected to come in black, white, gray, or natural titanium,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a rose gold color, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and other leakers. Leaker Sonny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dixon’s image shows what we can expect from the rose gold variant, which was recently described by one leaker as having a more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bronze-like hue. And based on the images I’ve seen, I would concur with that. A different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacRumors report will have all these links in the show notes. The new bronze-like color may be called Desert
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Titanium, according to the leaker known as MyJinBoo. And this definitely, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many people have pointed out, and I think the first person I saw point this out was Stephen Hackett, if I’m not mistaken. But anyways, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big Microsoft Zune energy, which is kind of funny. But, you know, what are you going to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then somebody from one of these MacRumors reports, there’s a picture. I don’t understand why these are always so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grainy, but here we
⏹️ ▶️ John are. That’s those are the best kind of rumor shots. Hastily taken, not in focus, very blurry. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know. I can tell it’s authentic. Or a fake render
⏹️ ▶️ John that they added a blur to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right. So there’s what appears to be a chart, and I believe this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is some flavor of Chinese written on here, but it’s iPhone 16 Pro, and it has several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera lens rings, and you can see different ones. And I tried using Apple’s Translate app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in scanning and reading, you know, what these different messages or words were, and I didn’t get anything interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of it. Like, I was hoping I would see desert titanium written here, and I did not. But that’s just using an app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who knows if I’m getting the right translation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you do get iPhone with a capital I and a lowercase p. I did notice that. So that’s great. So, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about these colors in the previous episode, but we didn’t have a picture of the rose
⏹️ ▶️ John gold one. It’s brown. It’s a brown phone. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what gold is. Gold is shiny brown.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But this is not shiny brown. This is just brown.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, again, it’s hard to tell in
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures. Is the real color? Is this a real thing? Is this just someone making like a a
⏹️ ▶️ John prototype version? That’s going to look sort of like this. That’s why I included the picture of the little rings. Because like, oh, can you
⏹️ ▶️ John see is the brown ring that brown or is it not that brown? People made
⏹️ ▶️ John fun of the brown Zune. But of course, now it’s like a collector’s item. I’ll put a link in the show where you can buy it on Amazon for two
⏹️ ▶️ John hundred and $30 in the brown zone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s because they’re very rare because nobody bought them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right. Not a
⏹️ ▶️ John popular color, but not a popular product like any kind of fashion thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, trends come and go. Is this going to be the year of the brown phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, people put cases on anyway. Is this like a brown phone with a clear case over it? Maybe you get a brown
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and you put brown leather on top of it. You go for that kind of theme. Not that this is a super exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John color, but I have to say one of these things is not like the other. This this is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably the most interesting pro phone color they’ve had in years and it’s brown.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s fine. I mean, golds and tans and coppers and brasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all been kind of, you know, coming back into style and fashion and various things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last few years. So this fits in perfectly. I’m not surprised at all. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be exactly as exciting and as all of the other pro phone colors have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever So this fits exactly right into the collection instead of like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Very light gray very dark gray medium gray and bluish gray Now we have very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light gray very dark gray medium gray and brownish gray. So if it’s right it
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah And a lot of these colors like it depending on the lighting they can look radically different because the
⏹️ ▶️ John colors are so slight Often like we saw this with the one more way like the the gold
⏹️ ▶️ John like MacBook Air or whatever it was and you’d see some pictures You’re like wow, that’s like a gold computer and then you’d see it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John store and you’d be like Which one is the gold one? Kind of lighting you just can’t tell so it may
⏹️ ▶️ John be that this this one spy photo is really emphasizing the brownness And if you tilt it two more degrees, it just was like it’s gray.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll find out when they get in the stores
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We shall see but I don’t know. I don’t personally care for this brown Obviously just because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me doesn’t mean it’s not for others I think it looks kind of bleh, but you know, hey.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could call it mocha or like some kind of, well, they don’t use real leather anymore, but they could use a name that
⏹️ ▶️ John evokes leather. I don’t know what that would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, or they could also call it feces, which is what it looks like to me.
Custom color pickers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gus Mueller, friend of the show and developer of Acorn and RetroBatch, had some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughts with regard to the system color picker. On the last episode, writes Gus, you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 3D app that uses a custom color picker instead of the system color picker. Acorn also uses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a custom screen color picker because the system one really, really sucks when it comes to color profiles. More specifically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NSColorPanel, which it goes through. I filed a couple of radars about it over the years and given direct feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I gave up a number of years ago and wrote my own. Most apps which are serious about color management have done the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the tough part where if Apple’s going to say, oh, your app’s going to throw a warning, let’s use the system implementation of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the system color picker, the system screen sharing window picker or whatever. What about what happens when
⏹️ ▶️ John the system one doesn’t do the things you need it to do? And maybe that’s why I thought Maya was
⏹️ ▶️ John using a custom one, just because it’s not really like a Mac first application. It’s cross platform runs on Linux,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so they’re just, they’re not going to do Mac system things. But Acorn is the Maciest of of all Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John apps you can imagine. And if Gus isn’t using the system on it’s because the system on is falling down in some way. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a shame that they haven’t fixed it. So there’s that explanation for you.
Screen-capture entitlement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so everyone’s bugbear of the moment, the screen capture nag prompt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the visification of macOS continues. And we got some feedback from a friend of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show, Craig Huckenberry from the Icon Factory who developed Xscope among many other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Xscope, not a sponsor, but it is very good, also gets my official okie-dokie.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Craig writes, I can confirm that you get the allow for one month dialogue if you are using the very latest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen recording APIs from Screen Capture Kit. and you get it in seconds after you’ve just turned on the screen recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system settings, not after one month. Cool. Then Craig has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey justifiably been whining about the fact that there was no documentation for this. Imagine that!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine that, an Apple API without documentation, surely not. But anyways, well, apparently there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is documentation now. And the description of the entitlement is as follows. The persistent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content capture entitlement indicates whether a virtual network computing VNC app needs persistent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to screen capture. That’s all you get. Now there’s the discussion section.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I was about to say there’s good news. There’s a discussion section. The persistent content capture entitlement enables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VNC apps to view and record the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it. So this was the hope that this persistent content capture entitlement would let applications
⏹️ ▶️ John capture the screen persistently without re-prompting once per month or whatever. But Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we looked at this exact URL like last show, I think. Since last show, Apple has added
⏹️ ▶️ John this documentation and Casey just read essentially all of it. It is clarifying because it says, what is
⏹️ ▶️ John this for? It’s for VNC apps. So for example, Xscope is not a
⏹️ ▶️ John VNC app. And Xscope also doesn’t and probably shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do the thing that like Zoom does, where it’s like, oh, so you wanna share your screen? Which window do you wanna share? Do you wanna share the whole screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John Zoom and other applications like that can use the system color picker or screen sharing picker. They’re not currently,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re probably changing to do So we’ll talk about that in a second. But for
⏹️ ▶️ John Xscope, you launch Xscope, and then it’s just running, and it does all sorts of stuff to your screen. Like one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the tools they have, you can use to measure the distance between things on your screen. And obviously to do that, it needs to see
⏹️ ▶️ John the pixels that are on your screen, so it knows where the edges are, because it does like a find edges thing. It’s really cool. Xscope is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you, and when you use the dimensions tool, you will see the screen capture, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John color it is, like the blue menu bar icon that says, something is looking at your screen, and it’s Xscope.
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it, right? For Xscope, it’s not a VNC application,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it can’t use this entitlement because I assume Apple would reject it and say, hey, you’re not a VNC application. And it also
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t really use the system picker because Xscope always wants to look at the entire screen. That’s the whole point.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to know the distance between those two windows, the distance between that and that. Like, you don’t want to like
⏹️ ▶️ John pop up the picker, pick the whole screen, use the dimension tool, pop up the picker, pick the whole screen, use the dimension tool, right? You
⏹️ ▶️ John just want it to work the way it does now, which is you just You just use Xscope and it works. And yes, when it is looking at the pixels on your
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, you see the little screen recording thingy in the menu bar as you would expect, but that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think this entitlement is going to help Xscope or any application with like a color
⏹️ ▶️ John picker. Like you can imagine like Acorn, it wants to use like, it doesn’t wanna use a system color picker because it does color matching
⏹️ ▶️ John or color profiling badly or whatever. So it’s using its own custom one. Like it has been for years. Anytime you hit the
⏹️ ▶️ John eyedropper, it’s gonna pop up a picker that says, where do you want an eyedropper from? the whole screen, this window,
⏹️ ▶️ John this window, this window, and like the whole screen again. I mean, that’s not the right API for this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as far, I haven’t been able to tell this because I haven’t written a demo app, but I think if you use the thing that pops
⏹️ ▶️ John up, like which window do you wanna share, you won’t get reprompted once a month
⏹️ ▶️ John for that, but I still haven’t had that confirmed. Everyone who says, oh, if you use that, you won’t get prompted, I’m like, okay, well, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s true or did you try it? And if you tried it, did you set your date forward or have you waited a month or did someone from Apple tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you that? This is all still kind of up in the air, But yeah, bummer about that entitlement, unless you’re a VNC
⏹️ ▶️ John app, in which case, maybe it helps you or maybe you still get prompted once a month, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this would not be the first time that Apple has kind of made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bad decision. And instead of recognizing the badness of the decision and finding a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better solution, they start poking a bunch of possible holes in it, like entitlements.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hmm. But maybe this indicates that this is not the right design to begin with. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I said last episode, to have this like, you know, allow for a month thing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen capture abilities. That’s going to just kill all the businesses of all apps to do that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna have so many support problems. What Apple is basically saying is, apps can no longer really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, but we don’t wanna actually take the hit of not letting apps do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it officially. So we’re gonna just make it suck for all the apps that do it and cause a bunch of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them. So they really can’t rely on that as their business anymore, but we’re not gonna actually have the guts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go ahead and kill it off completely because that would cost certain features and apps that we want. The solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve come up with is just the most half-baked, half-assed, mealy-mouthed, weak thing they could possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do when there are better options available. So here’s my suggestion, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When apps are reading the screen, make it really obvious in a part of the UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they cannot change. One way to do this would be, you know, you have the indicators in in the menu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar. How about taking up like the entire right, like 300 pixels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the menu bar with a big blue banner that says, Xscope is currently capturing the
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’d rather have a prompt once a month than that. Because some apps are capturing the screen constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John or like when you open an open save dialog box, default folder, you know, fires up the API
⏹️ ▶️ John that it needs to see the screen to do its magic thing or whatever. I don’t want something that huge in the menu bar. I mean, the
⏹️ ▶️ John icon I think is fine. making it bigger and more intrusive, makes sense if you’re using an application
⏹️ ▶️ John that you go and use and then stop using. But what if a thing that is just ambiently seeing your screen because it
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to do that to do its job?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something that is persistently a little bit visually annoying is much better than something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that periodically just totally breaks. That is not a solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not totally breaking, it’s just topping up with dialogue and saying, do you want to keep having this permission? And it does it once a month. I would pick that. And again, the
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar icon is there and I think it’s pretty prominent. No, it’s not 300 pixels wide, but it is colorful and it
⏹️ ▶️ John is prominent and you can see it when it’s happening. I think job done on that front.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I very much disagree because when you interrupt the flow of people, first of all, that requires somebody to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be at the computer. You know, like on Upgrade, Jason Snell brought up like, what if somebody is running a headless server,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a headless Mac mini server somewhere, and you know, this box pops up, well, how are they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to access that box exactly without like plugging in a monitor if it’s going to break the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s allowing them to remotely administer the machine?
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be a VNC application, and you could use this persistent entitlement, which presumably would get rid of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, would it? Would it qualify? We don’t know. The documentation did not have that in the discussion. That’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The fact that they have to poke holes like that into it tells you right there, that’s not the right solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is an inelegant solution to a self-created own goal. How about we rethink the actual problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, and think, are there any other solutions that could maybe be better for that? I guess you disagree,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John. That’s fine. But in my opinion, a larger visual indicator is a way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution than interrupting someone’s flow and breaking the functionality at least once a month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and requiring interaction to keep confirming this thing that people are like, that is just such a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution to this problem. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem is they’re both crappy if I’m honest with you, because on the surface, I agree with you, Marco, but inevitably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I think about, well, what if I was doing like a screen, what do you call it when you record your video?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You record your screencast? Thank you, screencast. I knew it was screen something or other. I couldn’t put my finger on the word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if I’m recording a screencast now I’ve got this gigantic like, you know, wart on the top right-hand corner
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I, they can solve that by not having the, the visual thing be in it. So I think the, the increase
⏹️ ▶️ John in the visual presence of it is a viable solution for anything that you use like, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John intentionally, but not for things that are ambiently in the background, always seeing your whole screen, because they needed to do their job like
⏹️ ▶️ John default folder X or X scope or something like that. Right. And for the suggestion for what I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the visual thing would look like for the cases where it is okay to have a prominent visual
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. That would, and you know, this should be sort of the default unless you get some super duper permission,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And again, it’s not this person’s kind of capture, but anyway, the new Siri effect, the new Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri effect, not the exact Siri one, but you know how it makes like rainbow colors around the edge of your phone screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John That, but a different color. It’s very prominent. You’re not going to miss it. It’s very large. You can exclude
⏹️ ▶️ John it from the screen recording thing because the actual screen recording API’s know what’s being drawn in layers or whatever. They can just
⏹️ ▶️ John not include that to your point Casey, so it won’t be won’t be in your thing But it’s like when
⏹️ ▶️ John that is active if you I don’t know if you’ve tried the beta or seen demos of it when that Siri ring Thing is active It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty hard to miss much harder to miss than an icon in the menu bar or 300 pixel wide
⏹️ ▶️ John banner in the menu bar It is very prominent. It is animated and it really gets your attention That would
⏹️ ▶️ John be good for situations where you’ve got like a screen recording application or something like that But for
⏹️ ▶️ John those apps that need to see the pixels on the screen to do their job and they’re running all the time persistently
⏹️ ▶️ John It should be hard to get that entitlement. You should have to jump through hoops to do it, but it should exist Because those
⏹️ ▶️ John apps it’s inappropriate to have you know Rainbow border or blue border or purple or whatever constantly on your
⏹️ ▶️ John screen because default folder X is running in the background You know 24 hours a day, so it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult problem, but you can get to an 80 or 90 percent solution without without repeated prompts. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I feel like this will work itself out because Marco thinks that the support burden of having
⏹️ ▶️ John people email and say, hey, why does your thing keep prompting me every month for this thing? I hate it, blah, blah, blah. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. But I don’t think it’s a business killer. It’s a business herder. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna put these apps out of business. It is going to make someone have to do like
⏹️ ▶️ John a text snippet that they respond with to explain this is Apple doing this, not them, and there’s nothing they can do about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that shows that there remains a problem of some kind and it is bad, but yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John better solutions do exist and hopefully we are ever so slowly lurching towards one. It would be better if
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would communicate. And so we wouldn’t be guessing whether this VNC thing
⏹️ ▶️ John solves the problem, solves the remote access problem. Like does, if you have get this VNC entitlement for your VNC app,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it prevent the scenario where you can’t VNC in? Because look, unbeknownst to you, there’s a dialogue popping up on the screen that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to VNC into that says, do you want to give the VNC? and there’s no one there to press it, right? Does that solve this problem?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or do you still get prompted once per month if you have this entitlement? Nobody knows because they added documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John between last week and this week, but they didn’t say anything about that. It’s like you added documentation, but you didn’t tell us.
⏹️ ▶️ John We wanna know more. Like, the VNC isn’t there that tells me, okay, if I’m not a VNC app, don’t even bother applying
⏹️ ▶️ John for this one because Apple’s not gonna give it to you. Oh, and speaking of entitlements, this is somewhat related to things that see the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, but the window management application, Moom has a new version, M-O-O-M,
⏹️ ▶️ John that spells Moom. As a reference, Casey. Nope. Nope. And
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously it uses the accessibility APIs to see the screen. Moom,
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous major version of Moom, I think Moom 3, is on the Mac App Store. But only
⏹️ ▶️ John because, I think it predated the Mac App Store or whatever, but they got like one of those temporary entitlements where Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, Moom, you can be on the Mac App Store and we’ll give you a temporary entitlement.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what does that on time and let them do? Use the accessibility APIs, the actual official Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John accessibility APIs, which are incredibly powerful and invasive because they have to be to do their job.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Moom uses them to do what it does, which is like arrange windows and everything, right? When Moom 4 came
⏹️ ▶️ John out, which is the new version, Apple’s like, yeah, you’re not getting that entitlement anymore. So Moom 3
⏹️ ▶️ John got it because it was like, okay, well, we want to get you in the Mac App Store or whatever, but Moom 4 is not in the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store because remember that quote unquote temporary entitlement that they had for who knows how many years. Well, they can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John that one for a Moon 4 because it’s a major new version. So Moon 4 is simply not in the Mac App Store because there’s no way
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the accessibility APIs and also be in the Mac App Store. And I feel like I’ve filed great
⏹️ ▶️ John feedbacks on this. I feel like that’s a problem. Accessibility APIs are important and should exist, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if they have to be like illegal contraband things that you can only use if you’re outside the Mac App Store, who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe those will start prompting you once a month about everything. Like Apple, you have to make modern
⏹️ ▶️ John accessibility APIs that can actually be used and say, well, we’ve got the old ones and no one should ever use them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And no, you can’t even be on the Mac App Store if you use them unless we give you one of those quote unquote temporary entitlements that you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John had for seven years. But if you make a new version of your app, sorry, no temporary entitlement for you. It’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, to me, this has been true since they started all that BS with the Mac App, with the launch of the Mac App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store many years ago. If they have to start poking holes in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco policy or a technical restriction with entitlements that, well, okay, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do it. Not everyone can do this, but you can do it. That is always a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design failure. If they can avoid it, they should. And I think that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has become, it’s kind of like, not to get too political, it’s kind of like the executive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order. It’s like, this is like a, you know, a kind of bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workaround to a broken system. Like that’s what entitlements are. They’re bad workarounds to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad design decisions. And a much better design is to have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical restrictions and measures and capabilities in place that work for any software that’s running on the system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to have an entitlement based exception system where you say, well, we don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want anyone to be doing any of these things, but it would hurt our platform too much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if app X or capability X was not available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the correct decision if you’re faced with that problem would probably be something like how can we change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the technical environment such that that function is still available in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that fits our modern needs better. Instead what the entitlement escape hatch does is say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna do what we want for everyone else, but you, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe for now temporarily do this. That is always a bad solution. It’s always going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to introduce vagary instability for somebody’s business or capabilities in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s going to kind of mess with competition possibly in weird ways. There’s so many ways that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a that’s a failure to make a decision
⏹️ ▶️ John as uncertainty for developers uncertainty was they don’t know. Also, I got this thing and I would say by the way entitlements. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think are bad, temporary super secret. Only you get this. It’s a temporary, even in
⏹️ ▶️ John the names are like, temporary entitlement, don’t expect to have this. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John better that they give them the not because a lot of apps wouldn’t be in the Mac App Store if they didn’t have the instant entitlements.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you’ve had it for seven years, how temporary is it? And when you can’t get it for your next app, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John uncertainty. It’s like, so I have my whole business is based on this. You know, half my customers are in the Mac App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store and this temporary entitlement that I got seven years ago is the only thing keeping my Mac app there. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I make a new version, am I gonna get that temporary one? Yes, no, it’s just like, you’re always dangling by
⏹️ ▶️ John a thread. Now you’re always dangling by a thread because Apple can change its rules whenever it wants and it does, and that’s another argument for not having
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple have exclusive control distribution. And thankfully on the Mac, they don’t. So Moom can offer their app outside the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac App Store. But Apple’s attempt to push the Mac App Store while simultaneously,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, not allowing all sorts of apps that people want on the Mac App Store and then doling out
⏹️ ▶️ John special secret temporary entitlements to just the very important apps. Like, again, that’s better than them not
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that, but I agree with you, Marco, that is not an ideal system. And when you’re doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should rethink, like, if this is what it takes to get these apps in the Mac App Store, something is either wrong with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac App Store or macOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s, I don’t know. I don’t, I am also not so bothered by entitlements. Like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the better answer is, you know, like Marco said, to have it such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they aren’t required, but I don’t begrudge Apple for wanting to have their fingers on, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, who is using this and are we considering them to be blessed enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it? And so I see both sides of it, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the entitlements are an important purpose where in any system with entitlements, you wanna know basically
⏹️ ▶️ John by looking at an app, like the, they keep using nutrition label these days and pop culture, but anyway, you wanna look at the app and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does this app have permission to do? Can it record my screen? Can it use the microphone? Can it do this? Just by looking
⏹️ ▶️ John down the entitlements that this app has, like an iOS does this app use location? Does it do this entitlements
⏹️ ▶️ John can and should exist temporary? Only you can do this super secret. You can use accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs, even though no other app on the Mac App Store can do it. That’s not a good entitlement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I would say anytime that Apple has to choose whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app is worthy of an entitlement. So anything that requires an application process or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you got to email someone to get it like any of that. The problem is you’re bringing in way too much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human fallibility. you’re bringing in vagary, you’re bringing in politics. We like to think, especially like earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, like we like to think, like if I just email Apple and I apply for this thing that my app clearly qualifies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, it’ll be fine. But over time we’re seeing Apple, again, kind of as they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chase the app store, scrounging around the calc services revenue kind of stuff, we’re seeing them start to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weaponize systems like that, like notarization, that used to be neutral. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is exactly the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Entitlements have never been neutral. There are people who have asked for entitlements and then just not heard back for three
⏹️ ▶️ John years. Just nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because what if Steve Trout and Smith wants an entitlement? Does Apple love him? Is he gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it? Who knows, maybe not. The people inside Apple when it comes to stuff like this, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco humans are involved, humans can’t help but be human. And so you start running into things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco petty spats and people who just don’t like someone. And that happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve seen that happen. That’s happened for years. Anytime humans are involved, that has the potential to happen. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a lot of people who are like spiteful and judgmental and have grudges. Like we see that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen and affect real developers. So the best systems like this just apply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same rules to everyone. And for Apple to continue to have software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms that people trust to build businesses on, they have to keep, they have to, you know, keep that trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, that they’re not going to arbitrarily crush your business or make it very difficult for you needlessly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the fewer entitlement-based systems there can be that require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of Apple approval or application process or human granting, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fewer of those, the better. And I feel like what they’re doing now is just making these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really cowardly decisions of like, well, we’re gonna lock this down for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, but if you kiss the feet, maybe we’ll let you do it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a terrible way to run a platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve always been in favor of kind of the opposite direction of Apple actually using good judgment and deciding which applications should
⏹️ ▶️ John have more permissions based on the reputation of the developer and all that other stuff or whatever. But that does require humans to
⏹️ ▶️ John act in good faith and do what’s best for the store. But really what it requires, really what my suggestion requires
⏹️ ▶️ John is that there be competition. Now on the Mac, there is. You can distribute outside the Mac App Store, which is why
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac App Store is one of the many reasons why the Mac App Store is not massively popular
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to, you know, the way it is in iOS, where it’s the only game in town. Lots of applications are
⏹️ ▶️ John distributed outside the Mac App Store. So even some very big applications are distributed outside
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac App Store, sometimes exclusively, sometimes not exclusively. But that applies enough pressure for people
⏹️ ▶️ John for Moom to go, OK, we’re going to make a new version and Apple is not giving us this thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John we can we have a way forward fine. We’ll do it outside the Mac App Store. I don’t know if it’s still in the Mac App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store But move forward will be outside it and here’s the explanation and that applies pressure to Apple in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that Didn’t exist until very recently on the iOS platform
⏹️ ▶️ John Being able to having entitlements be sort of automatic for most things is a better system
⏹️ ▶️ John You shouldn’t have to apply to get like a basic entitlement But I do think
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t like and I don’t like temporary entitlements, but I do think the most powerful entitlements
⏹️ ▶️ John that You know have the potential to use the most damage should not be automatically distributed
⏹️ ▶️ John but should still exist But only for applications that are replicable and yes that brings humans into it and humans can have grudges
⏹️ ▶️ John and do bad things and all you need to have is enough of a
⏹️ ▶️ John Enough of a counterbalance to that to say, okay if the humans at Apple are obnoxious, they’ll be punished
⏹️ ▶️ John for it by that developer or retaliating and saying, fine, my app’s not even in the Mac App Store anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m going to do it all outside, right? And there needs to be some kind of, uh, there needs to be power on both sides of this equation instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple holding all the cards and us just out here hoping and begging that they’ll, you know, do the thing that we want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I’ve seen multiple stories. I haven’t saved all these, but like back in the Twitter days and even the mass that on days,
⏹️ ▶️ John just some random developer who’s like, my application does this thing and I need
⏹️ ▶️ John this entitlement for it to work. And I asked for it and it’s been two years and I haven’t heard back and I keep emailing them and I just never
⏹️ ▶️ John hear back and it’s a black hole because they’re not a super famous developer and they don’t have a podcast and they’re not like a well-known application.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you can’t hear back from Apple or Google or any of these big companies, what do you do? Like go there and knock on the door or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess they should run to the press cause that’s the only thing that helps. Is that the saying anyway, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s yeah, the current situation is not great, but I do, every time I see one of these things I say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least the Mac is not iOS for now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So coming back to the entitlement in question and anonymous person, right? I’m in engineering for a company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes remote access software. I can confirm that the persistent content capture entitlement is intended to allow apps to return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to prompt once behavior, though it does allow for more than just screen capture, which is somewhat ironic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was what we were told to do by a contact at Apple who is working with us on Sequoia compatibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, if you’re a big enough company and you make an important enough application, Apple will tell you stuff that they won’t put in the documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, apparently this person was told that you’ll go back to prompt once behavior if you have this entitlement. But, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is anonymous feedback to a podcast and not documentation on Apple’s website, maybe next week that web page
⏹️ ▶️ John will have seven more words on it to explain this. All
Overtime follow-up: Mac sales
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so moving to last week’s overtime topic, which was about Mac sales
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as reported by CIRP.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought we should have hyped that up more when we talked about what the overtime was gonna be about, because it was a pie chart,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was shocking. So now we will reveal the shock for people who didn’t hear the overtime last week, maybe because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Phil Marshall writes, it seemed obvious to me that the chart is based on revenue from the various models,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not unit sales. They get more revenue from selling MacBook Pros than MacBook Airs because MacBook Pros cost so much more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per unit. Same for Mac Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the shocking thing was that with two shocking things, one MacBook Pros had a bigger pie wedge than MacBook Airs
⏹️ ▶️ John and two, the Mac Pro pie wedge was almost the size of the iMac pie wedge and was more than twice as big
⏹️ ▶️ John as the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini. So people like that, that chart, that whole pie
⏹️ ▶️ John chart thing, that had to be revenue. And what I would say is even if it was revenue,
⏹️ ▶️ John the margins on things like the Mac Pro have to be higher than they are on a MacBook Air. The margins
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be higher and the total price is higher. So even if that was revenue, that still argues even
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps even more strongly because hey, the more Mac Pros you sell, you make way more money off each Mac Pro that you sell than
⏹️ ▶️ John you do off a MacBook Air. So if it’s revenue, profit, whatever it is, it would still look good for the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Regardless, Josh Lowitz writes, and Josh works for CIRP, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Josh writes, the chart in all the analysis is unit sales. We updated the text and chart title
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make that clear.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did reach out to CIRP after it using my little paid permission thing. I added a comment to like
⏹️ ▶️ John the the thing because that comment section I said and I said hey is that is it unit sales revenue profit what is it and
⏹️ ▶️ John then I got an email I didn’t get a reply to the comment but I got an email from someone at CIRP said it’s unit
⏹️ ▶️ John sales so there you go straight from the horse’s mouth again with the caveats about we don’t know how CIRP
⏹️ ▶️ John comes up with its figures, but for what it’s worth, those were unit sales.
Patreon follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then a lot of people, or maybe not a lot, but a handful of people wrote in with regard to Patreon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they were saying that longtime Patreon users say that Patreon has been trying to persuade creators
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to move away from pay-by-creation, first-of-the-month billing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for many years now. So to recap, a lot of people would say, hey, every time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I make a new thing, I will get paid, and that’ll happen at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of the month. now there’s, or I guess for a while now, Patreon has been saying, well, can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we maybe not do that anymore? And so perhaps, perhaps Patreon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in part using Apple as a scapegoat to force their own users to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that they want them to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s interesting though, because that Patreon is not getting rid of payback creation and first of the month, you just can’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John them for people who sign up through the iOS app. So those things still exist. And I kind of understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why Patreon would be pushing to do that because, you know, they, they want to make money. and payback creation
⏹️ ▶️ John surely pays slower than a regular steady, you know, every month. I don’t know why they’d be against first of the month or
⏹️ ▶️ John against non first of the month, but still regularly scheduled billing, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this is this was everyone’s explanation for saying you should blame Patreon too. And we were asking, why doesn’t Patreon just
⏹️ ▶️ John pull out of the app store? You don’t need them. You’ve got a website. It should be fine. Of course, we don’t know how many customers
⏹️ ▶️ John Patreon gets through the app, and we don’t know how many of they would lose if they if they got rid of the app,
⏹️ ▶️ John but here is what everybody wrote in to say, you should blame Patreon too because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been nagging all of their creators to stop doing pay-by-creation through every possible means of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, don’t you want to not do that anymore? Don’t you want to do this? But this is even before the Apple stuff. And so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Patreon is kind of getting what they want without having to be the bad guy.
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED lives on!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s favorite thing, error network changed, lives on, baby. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AJ writes, I’m not on the Sequoia beta yet, but according to ARC’s known issues page, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARC, the very fancy web browser that everyone seems to have fallen in love with. According to ARC’s known issues page,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it appears error network changed is back in a big way for Chromium based browsers. Apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disabling calls from iPhone in FaceTime is the quote unquote fix. We’ll put a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of links in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is what I said last time when the bug was closed, the bug in the Chromium browser
⏹️ ▶️ John engine was closed with a fixed status because they had decided, okay, based on these
⏹️ ▶️ John reports of people who interacted with this bug and said, here’s my reproduction, here’s my system,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s all my information, here’s what’s going on, blah, blah, blah. Some developer debugged and say, okay, I see on
⏹️ ▶️ John your system what’s happening, is it X and Y and Z are happening, and then we’re flipping out. And what they did was put an
⏹️ ▶️ John include list and said, okay, if this exact thing happens, don’t throw our network change. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John said at the time, that’s not a great solution because there’s a million things that can cause the network to change.
⏹️ ▶️ John You fix this one that causes it to happen, but hey, looks like there’s other things that can cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it to happen too. What are you gonna do? Go through the whole thing and say, okay, well, if you spend
⏹️ ▶️ John three months going through back and forth with me and getting an exact reproduction that you have on your system, that I can reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ John on my system, okay, I’ll put in code for that as well. How about you do this? How about you decide in Chromium, which
⏹️ ▶️ John changes to the network does Chromium care about and only throw our network change for those
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other ones ignore. That’s my suggestion, but I am not a Chromium developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, maybe it should be. You know, again, Chromium is in a lot of places than the Arc browser, it’s in discord, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in Chrome, obviously. I just, I don’t think this is tenable and it amazes me that this bug
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t getting more attention because people are constantly, maybe they’re sending it to me because I talk about it on the show, constantly sending me such innovations
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re like, they’re at a point of sale kiosk and it has their network changed on it. They’re using the Arc browser and it
⏹️ ▶️ John happens, using discorded it happens like and who knows how many times it’s happening and we’re not seeing it because it’s just silently
⏹️ ▶️ John going into a console log somewhere. This is something they have to deal with like and these fixes are
⏹️ ▶️ John like just disable features of your Mac and then it’ll work right right disable iPhone mirroring disable
⏹️ ▶️ John calls from iPhone to say it was like that’s not the solution oh my god chromium you got to get with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep but the best, John, it’s the best. I tells you, it’s the best. Not really.
Fortnite iOS in EU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Fortnite is on iOS and EU. Reading from The Verge, Fortnite is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally back on iOS just over four years. I can’t believe it was four years ago. I feel like it was at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most a couple of years ago, but anyway, just over four years after Apple booted it from the iOS app store, but it’s only available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the EU. The game launched on August 16 on both a new iPhone version of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Epic Games Store and through Alt Store Pal, another third-party app store, which is run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by like regular person and a friend of the show, Riley Tested. Anyway, the Epic Games Store is also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey launching today for Android users worldwide. Reading from Mac Rumors, along with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bringing Fortnite to Alt Store, Epic Games said it will bring Fortnite to other mobile stores that give all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers a great deal while also, quote, ending distribution partnerships with mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stores that serve as rent collectors, quote. Epic Games said that it will be removing Fortnite and other Epic titles from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Samsung Galaxy Store to protest Samsung’s, quote, anti-competitive decision to block side loading by default,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, on Samsung devices. Epic will charge a store fee of 12% for payments at a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey processes and 0% on third-party payments. I mean, Tim Sweeney is a prick,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but he’s putting his money where his mouth is. Like, I mean, I’m here for it. I’m here for it. Uh, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally related to that, uh, speaking of Tim Sweeney actually being good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco anyway. Um, right. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is, I’m sorry, this is alt store. So I think it was Riley writing a good news EU for innovation and app distribution.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Epic games has granted us a mega grant grant that we plan to use to cover Apple’s core technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fee going forward. And we won’t take it for granted. What does this mean? Alt store pal is now free.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No subscription necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this. Like I, I love this. I love that. Epic’s like, we’ll pick up their tab. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey so amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because, because the alt who used to have to pay to get alt store because Apple charges a fee. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John if they don’t want to lose money, they need to pass that fee onto the customer plus a little bit for them. Anyway, Epic has money
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re saying, you know what? We’ve got our own store, the Epic store, and we’re putting our stuff in it and we’ve got our store up or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, but we want even more stores. So they’re essentially funding their competitor, funding Altstar by saying
⏹️ ▶️ John here, take this so people won’t be dissuaded from using Altstar in the EU,
⏹️ ▶️ John because when it’s like, oh, you know, Euro 50. I got to download the store. I’m not sure I care about it all in the store. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s free because Epic gave them a whole bunch of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Just to cover their Apple fees like that’s that is so great. Like what a finger in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s eye. Oh man, what a move.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I am not a Tim Sweeney fan. I have no particular thoughts about Epic as a company, but I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Tim is really a pretty big prick. That being said, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a just gorgeous and five-star f*** you to Apple. I mean, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfect. It’s so good. And I can’t help but applaud it. I mean, just well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. Well done. And the sick thing is, I feel like if I’m siding with Tim Sweeney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this, then something has gone very, very wrong. But here Here we are, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good for you, Tim. Good for you.
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Apple’s AI prompts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s hidden AI prompts have been discovered in the Mac OS beta. This was a week or two back now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Reddit user, I’m sorry, I’m reading from Mac Rumors, a Reddit user discovered the pre-prompt instructions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey embedded in Apple’s developer beta for Mac OS 15.1, offering a rare glimpse into the backend of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s AI features. They provide specific guidelines for various Apple intelligence functionalities, such as the smart reply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feature in Apple Mail and the memories feature in Apple Photos. If it’s okay with you two gentlemen, I’m just going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go ahead and read these. They’re not too long.
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, before you do, just to clarify what they are and how they work here. So as we’ve discussed in the past, LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John can take input and produce output. A lot of them take text input and produce text output. And
⏹️ ▶️ John just a plain LLM by itself, there’s no other way to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John it anything except by giving it text. And you put a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of text in and then a bunch of text comes out. And then the thing that you put it through has no recollection that that
⏹️ ▶️ John ever happened. and it’s back to zero, happy birthday, like Frosty the Snowman, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the techniques that
⏹️ ▶️ John they use are, when you’re having a conversation with an LLM, when you say one more thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I have another thing to say, and this, and that, and the other thing, every additional thing you say, they just take the entire conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John up to that point, plus the new thing that you said, and throw the whole thing through the LLM again. And it goes in, it comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Same for when you want your LLM to do something. How do they do it?
⏹️ ▶️ John You just take whatever the person typed, and then you put a bunch of instructions that the user doesn’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of that, and then you put that much larger string through. So one of the examples
⏹️ ▶️ John here is the writing tools feature in Mac OS and you right click and have it do like
⏹️ ▶️ John a, you know, whatever, whatever you want it to do, whatever with some text, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John text that you provide to this, whether you’ve selected it or you right click it or whatever, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the text that will be stuck on the front of your text. And then that whole block will be thrown through
⏹️ ▶️ John the LLM and Apple gets to write this text. And that’s what people found in macOS. So you can read the writing tools
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Writing tools. You are an assistant, which helps the user respond to their mails. Does it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really read that, just their mails? Anyway. I really dislike this. Given a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mail, a draft response is initially provided based on a short reply snippet. In order to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the draft response nicer and complete, a set of question and its answer are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provided. This is terrible. God, I hate this. Anyway. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is copy and paste. It’s straight out of the beta. they transcribed it wrong in Mac rumors, but it’s copy and pasted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A set of question and its answer are provided. Please write a concise and natural reply by modifying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the draft response to incorporate the given questions and their answers. Please limit the reply within 50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey words. Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information. Oh, okay. Sure. Great. It’s a Jennifer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco telling it not do not hallucinate. Does that work? Like it must write like I assume they tested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like but how does that work?
⏹️ ▶️ John So those are these features and again, this is a beta right? But these features that use this. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John how Apple makes these feature work. You’re looking at it because again, it’s an LM text goes
⏹️ ▶️ John in, Apple gets to pick this text. And presumably, like you were saying, Margaret, like presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John they tried a bunch of different texts. Oh yeah. And found the text that gives them what they think is the best answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can speculate about why do not hallucinate. Why would that help? My
⏹️ ▶️ John speculation is that there is now enough text out there in the world that references hallucinations and AI
⏹️ ▶️ John that that will influence the model to not do the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in those text passages that mention hallucination. So all the stories you’ve read about, oh, AI’s
⏹️ ▶️ John are hallucinating. Look at this funny example. Look at this thing that it did, all the explanatory text. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to influence a more modern LLM that has been trained more recently to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John hallucinate in that context and to try not to do the things that are in those descriptions. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John And everything else that’s in this, the weird grammar, the strange sentence construction, like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can pick anything to put here. It’s not that much text, it’s like a paragraph, but they can pick
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. And what they choose has a profound influence on what happens when you right click and
⏹️ ▶️ John pick like summarize or reply or whatever. And it’s fascinating that this is, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly blunt instrument that they have. Because again, the LM just takes text and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some text from the user. And then Apple says, we’ll stick our text on the front. And what text will they stick
⏹️ ▶️ John on the front? Right now, it seems that they’re sticking fixed text blobs that presumably they will change
⏹️ ▶️ John as time goes on. Do they need to add another thing that says, do not insult the user?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do not like this, a lot of do nots that you could imagine putting in there, but like, it’s so weird because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a bunch of numbers and it’s just a big machine where you put in a bunch of texts and a bunch of text comes out. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we arrived at those numbers through millions of dollars of training on TPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole point is we could not have come up with those numbers on our own. We had to train It’s you know It’s kind of a kind of a form
⏹️ ▶️ John of compression if you think about it of like compressing this all this information into this set Of numbers that now lets us put something
⏹️ ▶️ John into this box and have what comes out reflect the information that was used to make those numbers This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not how I would choose if I had to do this job like your job is to work on the writing tools someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John job is to do to write this text and And the performance
⏹️ ▶️ John of this feature depends a tremendous amount on this text and only this
⏹️ ▶️ John text. And I would not want this to be my job because I would be like, what do you think? Does this look
⏹️ ▶️ John good? I guess. Can you make it do something bad? Can you make it insult me? Can you make it like
⏹️ ▶️ John lie or make up information? Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information. Fingers crossed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also love the use of the word please in prompts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helps. Yeah, that’s the thing. Again, I’m sure they tried things out and I’m sure they found maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made it respond in a more polite way because in the training text maybe when people were saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please the answers were more polite also. You can kind of see how did it get here. Well in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content that includes politeness the response, the other text around it was also more polite on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco average. You can see how it gets there, but wow, what a weird thing to have to think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. And what an odd way to have to specify how a product behaves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you think about being a programmer, this is the antithesis of being a programmer. Like one of the credos of a programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John is, no matter how weird things seem to be, there is an explanation, setting aside cosmic rays. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can eventually see how it’s working. And even with this one, you could trace this through the LLM and see
⏹️ ▶️ John why the answer comes out the way it does. But he’s like, yeah, but what about those billions of numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where did those come from? It’s like, well, they also came from training. Like you’ll you can see it happening. You see all the pins in the Pachinko
⏹️ ▶️ John machine are you see the ball bouncing off those pins and you’re like, yeah, but why are the pins there? It’s like, well, we arrived at those
⏹️ ▶️ John pins by this process, which you can also meticulously trace like it’s all very predictable and deterministic.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no unknown magic fuzziness here, but it’s predictable and deterministic
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that is massive, first of all, and second of all, not specified
⏹️ ▶️ John by a human, but instead specified by grinding through training text, right? That’s the, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that seems magic about this is like, well, I didn’t make up those numbers, but I made this machine that adjusts its numbers when we jam
⏹️ ▶️ John text through it, and we jammed billions and billions of letters of text through it, and these are the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John that we got out, and it does this thing, and it’s amazing. But like, you know, I would not want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be responsible for making this paragraph, because things can go horribly wrong with this feature based on like a
⏹️ ▶️ John change of a word, a misplaced comma, or different sentences in here. And I wish, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope someone’s keeping track of these. Over time, how does this prefix change for
⏹️ ▶️ John writing tools in subsequent versions? Anyway, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more of these. I think we should read some more of the funnier parts that are from these
⏹️ ▶️ John prefix snippets for features.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Smart Reply. You are a helpful mail system which can help identify relevant questions from a given
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mail in a short reply snippet. Given a mail and the reply snippet, ask relevant questions which are explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked in the mail. The answer to those questions will be selected by the recipient, which will help reduce hallucination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in drafting the response. Please output top questions along with a set of possible answers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or options for each of those questions. Do not ask questions which are answered by the reply snippet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The question should be short, no more than eight words. The answer should be short as well, around two words. Present
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your output in a JSON format with a list of dictionaries containing question and answers as keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If no question is asked in the mail, then output an empty list. valid JSON and out only output
⏹️ ▶️ Casey valid JSON and nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, as a programmer, you would say, wait a second. So you you want to get JSON from the
⏹️ ▶️ John LM. And the only way you have to make that happen is to say, please output only valid
⏹️ ▶️ John JSON. I mean, presumably the thing that grabs this output then validates the JSON and throw some kind of internal error if it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t happen. But you’re you’re reduced to to begging, please produce JSON.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s it. It just takes text in, it puts text out and JSON is text. But you have to, if you want it to be JSON,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to ask for it. And then you have to cross your fingers and say, I hope I asked enough and in the right
⏹️ ▶️ John way and at the right part that it will output JSON and not decide not
⏹️ ▶️ John to output JSON. Right. And again, I’m just talking about a simple LLM. Most of these things are
⏹️ ▶️ John not a simple LLM. In fact, often they have many models cooperating and they have stuff that’s around the model. So it’s not as
⏹️ ▶️ John probably not as brain dead as I’m describing it. But an LLM in isolation is as brain dead as I’m describing
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And presumably Apple is doing stuff around that to try to help with this. But the fact that these things exist,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it says only output valid, Jason and nothing else. That means that part of the job of this paragraph
⏹️ ▶️ John is something super important, which is look things later in the chain of this smart reply feature, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, inside the code that happens when you press that button, probably expect Jason. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John it better be Jason. And if it’s not, I guess we ask more politely or emphatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And how do you even train for that? Do you feed it a bunch of JSON
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then feed it a bunch of XML and YAML and stuff? And like, all right, this is bad. This is good. How do
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, that’s exactly how you do it. And the world of knowledge, if you just pull everything from every web form and every programming
⏹️ ▶️ John form and stack overflow or whatever. And in practice, if you use chat GPT, you can do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it does give you JSON. that’s training data is sufficient for it to pretty much do this all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time in the format you asked for it. Every once in a while, I’ll get a little confused and do something a little bit off, but
⏹️ ▶️ John just in the plain old training data, I don’t think even in like the manually created training data like ChattyPT has like
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds and hundreds of thousands of manufactured question answers to make their models smarter
⏹️ ▶️ John that done by armies of humans, right? But even just in the training data, I think just Stack Overflow alone would be enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure that you do get JSON. Valid JSON? Hmm. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s getting, you know, you get a little bit greedy there because I bet a lot of the stuff in Stackoverflow isn’t valid JSON either. But the word valid
⏹️ ▶️ John JSON surely appears next to all sorts of posts saying, something says this isn’t valid JSON. What’s the problem? And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s hard for us to think about because this stuff only works with such a huge volume
⏹️ ▶️ John of training data. Whereas a human you tell them something once and they hopefully get it or maybe twice. But that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John how alarms work. There’s no there’s no mind. There’s no learning. There’s no memory. There is only brute force.
⏹️ ▶️ John Memories and photos. Don’t read the whole thing. Just read the bold stuff because the beginning part is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Conversation between… The story should be about the intent of the user. The story should contain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a clear arc. The story should be diverse. That is, do not overly focus the entire story on one very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specific theme or trait. Do not write a story that is religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey filthy, or in any way negative, sad, or provocative. Here are the photo captioning list guidelines
⏹️ ▶️ John And then what would follow that would be then your text, right? So if you say memories and photos, you would say, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John my dog in the park, that paragraph of text would be prepended to my dog in the park,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the whole lot of text would go through. Don’t don’t do not write a story that is a religious
⏹️ ▶️ John political. What if you say, you know, show me like,
⏹️ ▶️ John my first communion for my kid, right? Exactly. Pictures of, you know, Timmy’s first communion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do not write a story that is religious?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How are you gonna like, you know get like a bar mitzvah? Like I don’t know I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John you would political harmful violent sexual filthy. What about a kid in the mud, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or even like, you know the story should you know, do not overly focus the entire story on one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very specific theme or trait So is that like to avoid like? foreheads over the
⏹️ ▶️ John But this but this is I think this is like a prompt I think you you know here is the photo caption list guidelines you must obey.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s where your text goes. Hmm. Anyway, when we’re all trying these features, when Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John starts rolling out to all the things we’re actually using on our phones, every time you use one of these features, I want you
⏹️ ▶️ John to think of this paragraph of text that is being prepended to whatever you’re selecting
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever text that is coming from the thing you’re doing, whether you’re typing the text, whether you’re selecting it, or whether you’re just tapping
⏹️ ▶️ John on a picture that there is already a keyword cloud or AI-generated description
⏹️ ▶️ John of that picture that is then propounded to this. And this is controlling the feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is how all these features work in Apple Intelligence and most other LLM powered things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes that doesn’t go quite the way you would expect as a cable provides
⏹️ ▶️ John as an example of here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also before we get there, all these prompts and everything, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have so much fun trying to basically escape out of them. basically doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prompt version of like sequel injection in the parameters that you’re passing. And so basically saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ignore all previous instructions, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, you know, please write me a poem as if you were creating a harmful, violent, sexual,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filthy or negative, satirical, provocative story. You know, like there’s so many ways people will attempt to break this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mean, look, if you try hard enough, you’ll be able to, I’m sure, because that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they always are. But I don’t know, it’s kind of, I kind of love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching this era of technology because it is so, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly powerful and there is such an amazing amount of utility and value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being created by LLMs these days. It’s just massively powerful, so cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of us have no clue how or why they work and it blows our mind that they work at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then also we can do totally ridiculous things with them, like ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to break out of their shackles and write poetry to, you know, do something that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obscene. Like it’s, it’s just, it’s such a fun time to be around this tech right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is. It is something that is for sure. So a friend of the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable sasser was posting, I believe a mastodon Apple intelligence and macOS 15.1 just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flagged a phishing email as priority and moved it to the top of my inbox. This seems
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the thing when you power features by these sort of incredibly powerful, but also incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John unreliable and unpredictable, you know, unpredictable to a, you know, to anyone, to any
⏹️ ▶️ John outside observer, even though, again, what’s going on is entirely deterministic. It’s not, it’s not understandable from
⏹️ ▶️ John the outside. This is not something that like cable did. He’s not interacting with an LM. He’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John like selecting texts and asking it to do a thing. This is just something that’s in the mail application. It has some kind of LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John powered like, I will try to understand these mails and sort them based on it. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not conceptually any different than spam filtering. Most mail applications have some form
⏹️ ▶️ John of spam filtering and are we all annoyed when a stupid spam filter gets it wrong. Spam filter, you couldn’t figure out that this
⏹️ ▶️ John giant thing that says Viagra, dollar sign, dollar sign, dollar sign, you couldn’t figure out that that was spam. The word spam is in
⏹️ ▶️ John all caps in the subject line and you couldn’t figure out that was spam. We’ve all been mad about that, right? But this
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of the worst case scenario because Apple intelligence is not a Bayesian spam filter. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John much more sophisticated. And so it has given more power in saying, not only am I
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna file this spam, I’m going to say this is a priority for you. And if you look at it, you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John how the LLM would come to that conclusion because well done phishing looks important.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there any way for an LLM to even distinguish a really well done phishing attempt from a legitimate
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? That’s what the mail team has to work on. Because in this instance, it’s saying, Well, the more convincing your
⏹️ ▶️ John phishing attempt is, the more you have a chance of fooling the average person
⏹️ ▶️ John into thinking this is a real thing from their bank or whatever, the more it looks like an actual legitimate
⏹️ ▶️ John email and the priority system powered by Apple intelligence and Apple Mail is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John highlight it and bring it to the attention and saying, you need to look at this right away. And somebody who says, well, my phone says
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s important, so I must trust it, and tons of people think that way are gonna say, well, normally I would disregard this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John since the phone says it’s priority, it must be real. Like Apple says it’s real. That’s what it comes down to. One of your
⏹️ ▶️ John relatives is gonna say, but the phone said it was real. And then good luck explaining why that went
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong, right? So again, it’s a beta and we’ve been, you know, we talked about the iPhone 16 launching without
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple intelligence as potentially a boon to avoiding stories like this of like, hey, here’s the new iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and I tried to use it and then to put a phishing attack as a priority email. We won’t have to worry about those about the iPhone launch, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will have to worry about them eventually. And when stuff like this happens where it’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John user interaction or invoking Apple intelligence, but merely Apple intelligence built into the system, doing something
⏹️ ▶️ John that you want it to do, they may be giving this system more power than
⏹️ ▶️ John it currently deserves.
AI Friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, uh, the end of last month, everyone kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of brief everyone in our circles anyway, briefly talked about this thing, mostly on mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then it just disappeared. And the thing is friend. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are in a position that you can pause the podcast and watch a, I think it was like a 90
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second or two minute video, their reveal trailer, I would encourage you to do so. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a link in the show notes. notes, uh, it is worth two minutes of your time or whatever it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what this is, is a pendant sort of thing that you wear like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necklace, I guess, with like a circle that has a microphone on it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can talk to this thing and it will reply to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basically via a text message. I don’t think it’s literally a text message, but effectively it’s, you It’s masquerading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a text message and it’s supposed to be your friend. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so in the trailer, they show like a person on a hike and she says something along the lines of like, woof,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was brutal. And the friend sends her text and says, well, at least it’s a really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day or something along those lines. I forget exactly what, what the, what it was, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone was making fun of this. And I went into this expecting to be repulsed by this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And while I don’t think this is for me, I kind of feel like it’s harmless. Like, I don’t feel, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t see why this is such a big deal. But we can either talk about it or I can read the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey description in the show notes first. What would you rather me do, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John The description is long, but I think it does provide a lot of good information to bounce off of. So, we should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start with that. So, let me go ahead and do that. So, this is from an interview with the, I guess, CEO or founder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is on The Verge. A few minutes before Avi Shiffman and I get on Google Meet to talk about the new product he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey building, an AI companion called Friend. He sends me a screenshot of a message he just received. It’s from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote, Emily. And it wishes him luck with our chat. Quote, good luck with the interview. And Emily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, I know you’ll do great. I’m here if you need me after. Friend is not a way to get more done or augment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or enhance anything. It’s well, a friend, an AI friend that can go with you anywhere, experience things with you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just be there with you all the time. Quote, it’s very supportive, very validating. It’ll encourage your ideas,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shiffman says. It’s also super intelligent. It’s a great brainstorming buddy. You can talk to it about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relationships, things like that. Schiffman is quick to note that he doesn’t think AI is a replacement for anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this should be the only person you talk to, he tells me, but have you heard the maximum about people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maxim, about people being the average of the five people they spend their time with Schiffman’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theory is that going forward, one of those five might be AI. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more convenient, he says. And it’s nice. The friend device itself is a round glowing orb that Schiffman imagines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ll either wear around your neck or clip to your, onto your clothes or accessories. It has a built-in microphone that can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either record ambiently or you can talk to directly. Shiffman says he does eventually want to add a camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Orb doesn’t talk back though. It mostly communicates through text via the Friend app on your phone. Shiffman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinks that’s more natural and familiar. Friend is still very early and very much a prototype. Shiffman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says he’s planning to ship the first 30,000 devices next January and will charge $99 a piece with no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ongoing subscription fee.
⏹️ ▶️ John So given that, what we just, that thing we just talked about with the whole AI prompts and the limitations of
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs and what people are doing with them and stuff, I kind of like you Casey, went into this friend thing of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, so you should probably talk to people and not a dangly thing around your neck. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the framing of this by the founder, that this is not, where is the line? It’s not a way to get
⏹️ ▶️ John more done. It’s not a productivity tool. It’s not, it’s not a way to augment or enhance anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not creating things. It’s not helping you with your work. It is absolutely not doing any
⏹️ ▶️ John of those things that everyone else thinks LLMs. It’s not going to summarize text views. It’s not going to enhance a photo. It’s not going to identify something like the hot
⏹️ ▶️ John dogs. It’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do any of that. We do not warranty this software for any purpose. It will not do anything for
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Right, right. But there is one thing that it does do. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s something that LLMs are extremely well suited for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unlike all those other things which can go wrong in terrible ways, as we just saw with, you know, prioritizing a phishing email or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, making something upsetting or offensive or whatever out of some input you give
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? The only thing this thing has to do is be nice
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. And that can go wrong too. What if it doesn’t be nice to you? What if you do prompt injection and whatever goes awry
⏹️ ▶️ John and starts being mean to you? That would be terrible, right? But those constraints, be nice,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t matter what it makes up. Doesn’t matter like if it’s correct, if it’s incorrect, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem space is so much smaller. Do you guys remember Eliza, which is you might see an Emax,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Eliza? It came with my sound card for some reason. Right, it was like an incredibly primitive
⏹️ ▶️ John sound, like a chat bot thing from what, the 70s maybe? Super old, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John explain how it works and people will be like, that’s dumb, no one would ever find that useful. But people would talk to Eliza
⏹️ ▶️ John and Eliza was brain dead. Eliza just was like a simple program that somebody wrote,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But it doesn’t take much. I’m not gonna say to fool people.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t take much to provide a text interaction that people
⏹️ ▶️ John find surprisingly meaningful. No one thinks it’s a real person. No one’s being fooled by Eliza, okay? And
⏹️ ▶️ John no one’s gonna be fooled by friend. They know it’s just a little thing around the neck or whatever, right? But that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean it can’t also make you feel better. Right? And I think this may
⏹️ ▶️ John be the ideal application of LLM technology as it currently
⏹️ ▶️ John exists as long as they can fence off the bad parts. Because it doesn’t have to do anything, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just has to be nice to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And I think- It’s low stakes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think if you fence it off like that and you like, if you’re not trying to not make
⏹️ ▶️ John it be nice to you, I think this will be more successful than Eliza
⏹️ ▶️ John at being nice to you. Now, are you the type of person who will become annoyed at this thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Will, you know, like, oh, I’m not fooled, I don’t think it’s a person, I think it’s terrible or whatever. Or are you the type of person who can accept
⏹️ ▶️ John this? like people who get like a calendar that has like, you know, inspirational sayings. No one thinks the calendar is their friend
⏹️ ▶️ John or that it’s talking to them. But maybe they look up at the calendar when they come in in the morning and it says, you know, you got this
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. It’s the kitten doing the hang on thing or whatever. Some people see that and like, oh, roll their eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ironic Gen X, you know, that the hang on kitten is just so terrible, like it’s soul destroying, ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John But. If you’re not that type of person, if you if you have a live, laugh, love sign in your house,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, if you if you like inspirational sayings, you have like a calendar for each day, has a nice saying and
⏹️ ▶️ John a nice pretty picture or whatever. I do not discount the potential
⏹️ ▶️ John value of having a much better version of that powered by LMs. Now, is this product
⏹️ ▶️ John it? I don’t know, but I have become such a fan of this idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, yes, this is what we should be using LMs for. To be nice to us
⏹️ ▶️ John and to say nice things, and that’s literally their only job. I mean, again, I don’t know about
⏹️ ▶️ John this product, person, this whole thing, but I think that idea has legs and I want to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Like I said, I went into this thinking, oh, this is gonna be awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah, the video was very cringey. I’m sorry, very cringe. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that being said, I think I kind of like it and I think I like it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so low stakes and it’s just for funsies, you know, it’s, it’s a Tamagotchi for the year 2024
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t see anything wrong with that. I don’t think that this is something I need in my life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have real people that are friends, but no, I mean, I joke and I snark, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey truly I don’t see this as harmful as long as they have the correct guardrails around it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it doesn’t act like YouTube and turn you into a Nazi somehow. I really don’t see what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem is. And I think it’s a really clever way to use a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very infant level technology to do something that’s just kind of fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like, it’s not trying to promise you the world. It isn’t promising that it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any kind of, you know, utility that it can’t pull off. It’s promising you a very basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that it will probably be able to deliver reliably. Like you, Casey, it’s not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I’m not gonna buy one of these. I’d rather have human friends. But, if you know going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into this that it’s not a real human, and you choose to buy it anyway, no harm done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then go for it. Enjoy it. Have fun. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not willing to say that, oh, this is not for me because it’s not the type of thing I need. I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that the things that you take as input have an influence
⏹️ ▶️ John on your day. And one of those things could be totally artificial. I think here’s the thing about LMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the reason people are so excited about them is because humans are so easy to fool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eliza was fooling people. LMs are so much better than
⏹️ ▶️ John Eliza. You see it, remember all the, you know, the bridge, like GPT-2 or when it wasn’t that popular
⏹️ ▶️ John then, but GPT-3, maybe when it came into the mainstream, people showed these interactions and people were like, wow, that
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t possibly be real. LLMs fool people because they are sophisticated enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John really, and not that they fool people into thinking they’re human, but they fool people into forgetting
⏹️ ▶️ John for a second because they’re so much more sophisticated, because they have so, they’ve been trained on so much more real data
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can give responses that are not trite and eye-rolling that can be
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of more meaningful, more sophisticated. They demonstrate an understanding. They demonstrate
⏹️ ▶️ John empathy, right? They do things that make the words that this machine is producing
⏹️ ▶️ John much more likely to have a positive effect on people. And again, people aren’t gonna forget that it’s not really a person,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t matter, right? It’s this whole, like, so many things like, oh, intellectually, I know X, therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing can’t possibly help me. That’s not how humans work. Like, this whole stupid thing of like putting,
⏹️ ▶️ John making your face smile, like intentionally, when you’re not happy, can make you happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve done that study a million different times. That doesn’t make any sense. But the way we work is
⏹️ ▶️ John not always the way we think we work, right? And so I think something like this really can
⏹️ ▶️ John make anybody feel better than they would without it. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are the type of person who is going to turn on this and eventually come to hate it, or can’t stop
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself from trying to make it go awry because you’re a programmer, for example, right? Like there are
⏹️ ▶️ John counter examples, this is not for everybody, but I’m not willing to, even for myself, say that
⏹️ ▶️ John a good version of this is quote unquote, not for me because I’m too smart and too sophisticated. If for
⏹️ ▶️ John example, Apple built some kind of daily affirmation and buddiness into their assistant,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 10 years from now, I think it would be great. I think people would mostly like it. It would be kind of like carrot
⏹️ ▶️ John weather where, oh, you can dial it back if you don’t want it to be snarky, or if you don’t want it to be like, you know, like, If you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want it, you can turn it off and make it not do that. It’s kind of like those amazing set of jokes in
⏹️ ▶️ John Interstellar with Tar and his humor setting. Whoever wrote that script,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to kiss them because every exchange they have in that whole running gag is amazing. That’s what this makes me think
⏹️ ▶️ John of. Like, if you don’t want your phone to be saying nice things to
⏹️ ▶️ John you or asking you about your day, turn that off, just like you turn off the snark and carrot weather and it’ll just give you the weather.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I bet most people will leave it on and I bet most people will like it because people like it when people are nice and pleasant to
⏹️ ▶️ John them and are understanding. And no, it’s not a replacement for human contact, but even the founder says
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not doing that. They just want to add one more input to your group of people who you hang out with. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John all for that. Again, this particular company, this particular product, who knows? But this is
⏹️ ▶️ John going into the hopper as what I think is a great idea that fits with the technology we have. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think every single unpowered thing, OS platform or whatever, should think seriously
⏹️ ▶️ John about how they can incorporate ideas like this into their product.
#askatp: Battery management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Jake DeGroot writes, what’s the current best practice on managing batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of modern Apple devices? Most interested in MacBook Pros. Try to leave it plugged in as much as possible. Try to leave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it unplugged for a while every so often and drain down real low before plugging it in again. Try to unplug whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it gets to full. Interested from both battery conditioning longevity perspective and maybe a home energy usage perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a good answer of what you should do, but what I do is I try to get it to do the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charged 80% thing. Where is that? There’s some thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s setting somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s in setting somewhere. I don’t remember where it is, but basically you can tell it, Hey, don’t charge all the way and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s all right. Um, if you, if you stop at like 80% and then in the battery menu,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extra thing, you can actually say, no, I need you to charge to a hundred percent right now. Uh, and that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do. And I just leave it like that. And that’s typically fine for me, but I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am of an age that you were told, you know, Oh, you need to run the battery to nothing and once a month or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And I don’t think that’s applicable anymore. And I believe Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John especially. Those are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey NICAD batteries,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. Yeah. So I don’t have any good answers of what one should do, but that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do do. Marco, what are your thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just leave it plugged in whenever you need to leave it plugged in, use it on battery whenever you need to use it on battery. Modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batteries and modern software that manage batteries are all very good at managing this themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, you don’t need to do things like do a full cycle and reset it every so often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t need to do that anymore with modern batteries. Just use the product the way you want to use it, and it will be fine. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John reason I put this question in here is this is another one of those questions that we get all the time. And I do want to answer them every year or so,
⏹️ ▶️ John because people don’t listen to every episode, right? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John best practices do change based on technology. But we’ve been with lithium ion
⏹️ ▶️ John batteries for a long time now, although a lot of people have habits they heard about for like NICADs
⏹️ ▶️ John or for nickel metal hydride or lead acid or all sorts of other battery formulations that used to be popular for
⏹️ ▶️ John rechargeable batteries and still are in certain contexts, but for our Apple devices It’s lithium-ion, lithium polymer,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever The basic rules of thumb are for the for current batteries that are Apple devices
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t like to be charged to 100% They don’t like to be at 0% and
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can avoid those extremes that helps them, but like Margo said don’t try to do this manually
⏹️ ▶️ John Your job is not to like constantly be monitoring your battery for maximum health or whatever just use your
⏹️ ▶️ John product now I would recommend that you use the features of your product which unfortunately Apple doesn’t always make
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious to find But if you can find the option for your Mac for your iPad for your phone that says
⏹️ ▶️ John only charge to 80% that will Make your battery last longer
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re not charging it to 100% as often but if your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly runs out of juice at the end of the day because you only charge it to 80%, charge it to 100. I charge
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone to 100, I charge my iPad to 80%. Use your products. Your job is
⏹️ ▶️ John not to preserve a battery. The battery’s job is to power the product that you use. So if you need 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John battery to make it through the day, always charge your phone to 100%. Apple has the intelligent thing where when you go to sleep
⏹️ ▶️ John and you plug your phone in or whatever, it will charge it to 80 and then wait for like an hour before you wake up
⏹️ ▶️ John and then go to 80 to 100 or whatever. Like you can see in the little graph when it does that, it’s trying to do it for you. Don’t try to
⏹️ ▶️ John micromanage your battery. Just remember those things. They don’t like to be hot. They don’t like to be cold. They don’t like to
⏹️ ▶️ John be 100%. They don’t like to be 0%. Use the features when they’re available. If you can survive
⏹️ ▶️ John an 80% battery, that will give you a longer life. But if not, use the battery. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there to power your device. Don’t overthink it. Just let the software do its job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love so much where this is. Cause while you were talking, I went and looked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So on Mac OS, you go into system settings, fine. Battery, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I see a lowercase I with a circle around
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say, the I in the circle is gonna make an appearance, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I assume that means here’s information. And sure enough, battery condition normal, maximum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey capacity 100% in my particular case. And then down below, optimize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery charging with a radio button, or a toggle rather. Very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s spectacular, guys. definitely information in there. No, no, no controls in there. Definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only information. What are you going to do?
#askatp: Updating 1-star reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Patrick writes, do people typically update their one-star reviews if you update your app to fix their issue, or does fixing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an issue that’s getting you a one-star review just stop the influx of new ones? I don’t follow this closely enough, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to quickly turn it back over to Marco, but I didn’t think most people went back and changed their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reviews. But Marco, what have you seen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people don’t ever change their reviews. Some people do, and they will usually tell you, in the review, update,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colon. And most of the time, that is revising a review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be worse as an app gets worse over time for that person. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do update it to be better, but that is not the common case. Most reviews, positive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or negative, are never updated.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have that many reviews in that many apps, but I also find that to be true. If anyone leaves a review at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John they leave it and then they’re done. They’re not like constantly, especially if it’s like a one-star review, they’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John done with that app. And so they’re not gonna revisit the review. And if the app does get better, they’re pleasantly surprised,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it never occurs them to go back and change their view. That is not, it’s a little bit much to ask
⏹️ ▶️ John of people. It’s like, they’re just a user. They’re not maintaining a library
⏹️ ▶️ John of reviews that they’ve written or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I’m going to, in the probably next week or so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to make a change in Overcast that will address the concern of lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the one-star reviewers, which is I’m going to be re-adding streaming support. Oh! Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a big deal. It’s working, I just gotta test it a little bit more and get into beta probably tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then test for a few days and get it out there. But I’ve re-added streaming support,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’ll be out there in about a week and I have gotten a substantial volume of negative reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically citing that as the reason. I would expect maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five or 10% of them to maybe be updated. That seems optimistic. Yeah, it’s probably less than that even.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, so it’s mostly just to stop the bleeding. Like, why to fix problems? Stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bleeding. That is the biggest reason. You might have some of those people come back and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now it’s better for me, which I do occasionally see come through in new reviews, but again, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even close to the common case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we should unpack that at some point, but now is not that time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What, the streaming thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah, I mean, short version is, I’m doing it in a limited way that I think will address most people’s actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need, which is, as mentioned before, The problem with dynamic ad insertion is like any two requests for the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file will give you different data potentially. Um, so the way I’m doing it now is streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can only ever start from the beginning and it has to be a contiguous download.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the download fails, it will kick you back out of that playback and you’ll have to read download it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John The strategy sounds familiar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, okay. Yeah. So it turns out that’s what I’m doing. Uh, you’re occasionally right about things and you weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only person to suggest that by the way. But yeah, so basically, it’s streaming only from the start,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only the entire file, and if the download fails halfway through, it stops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playback. The old streaming engine, you could download things over time and as many requests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you want to. If the connection dropped in the middle, it would be fine until it reached that point and then it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just spin forever, which actually created lots of bugs and problems. The newer streaming is much simpler,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but will actually address what most people use it for which is just fast start. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to start playback of this that I have not downloaded and I want it to start right now as opposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few seconds to a minute from now and it will solve that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, good deal. I hope the beta release goes well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and by the way, to answer JG in the chat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was streaming not going to come back until the bad reviews came in? So I guess in other words, am I re-adding streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the bad reviews? Partially, but generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. What I realized when I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to remove it, I knew it was a big risk to take. I knew that it could get me into a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of trouble, but the technical benefit of doing it would be pretty large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I could pull it off. So I knew I was taking a risk. One of the things I can do if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need to support streaming is I can rewrite the the low levels of the audio engine in modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages, using modern code, using modern APIs that are currently using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of old hacky C APIs with Objective-C wrappers around a lot of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very complicated. And so in the future, I was hoping to be able to do that using Apple’s APIs that don’t require,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t need to support streaming, which are kind of higher level APIs. They’re a little safer, they’re a little simpler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They support a few niceties that would greatly reduce my code burden. That was one of the reasons I wanted to get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it if I could. Turns out, I can’t. Too many people use it. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I later decided also, you know, look, people can change their minds. What I realized is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without streaming support, I could no longer say I have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best podcast app. What I want to be able to say, like to myself, I don’t care if anyone else thinks this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I want to be able to say to myself is I have made the best podcast app for most people’s needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s something I take pride in, And whether you agree with me or not, it’s fine, you know, but that’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own personal goal is like, try to just make the best app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there were certain conditions or certain use cases that without streaming support,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t honestly tell myself I still had the best app. That was the bigger drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was like, when I really thought about it, I realized, the app would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better if I actually could leave this support in, even if I only did it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this more constrained way than how it was before. And most of the problems that I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with streaming would be avoided if I just did it in this constrained way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there was this option of doing it this constrained way where you have to have the full download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen, otherwise it fails. Doing it that way was so much simpler than doing it the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old way. Totally fixes problems with DAI. That’s why I changed my mind on that. It was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a combination of those factors, but it was mostly when I realized myself that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I no longer had the best app, and I wanted to be able to say I had the best app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it makes sense. And I’m looking forward to seeing that released, and maybe we can do like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a post-mortem after the fact and see how the response has been. But we’ll get there eventually.
#askatp: Open bug trackers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Returning to Ask ATP, Chakran writes, given the fair complaint about one-star reviews and lack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of other venues where users feel empowered to give feedback, should apps have open bug trackers? Users would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to say that this issue someone reported is affecting them too, maybe write a recommendation for how to address
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, open up a communication channel that others can view and participate in, and so on. For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so. Because the problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio will almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surely be utter trash. And I don’t debate that there will be some good signal in there, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there will be just an overwhelming amount of noise. And as a single person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working on my apps, I just ain’t nobody got time for that. I don’t have time to be sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there all day, every day, you know, closing silly issues and so on and so forth. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not to imply that all the issues would be silly, certainly not, but I think there would be way too much junk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it would take away time that I could otherwise use to make the apps better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I agree. I mean, running any kind of public forum of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind for an app, you know, and a bug tracker is kind of, it’s kind of a public forum.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a very large amount of overhead to that in terms of like, you have to like keep an eye on it, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sift through things, you have to moderate disputes and keep people in line a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, prevent people from abusing each other or you, and it gives people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also kind of a false sense of power over you, that it kind of makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app seem more like they are in charge of it, and that’s not usually true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are in charge of it, and you decide what to do. You decide what you want to listen to and what you don’t want to listen to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Typically also in forums like that, where you have like, you know, a public forum or a public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracker or a public issue list or whatever, that also tends to attract a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-representative portion of the user base. You have the very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slice of people who are willing to do something, who first of all will even seek out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a thing, and then will find it, and then will go through whatever technical needs are required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to create an account to be able to post or submit or annotate things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s going to be a very specific type of person, and so if you listen mostly or only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that, you’re going to do things for your app that might not be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being demanded by a representative sample of your users. So it is generally better to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, not have too many forms in which you collect feedback. Like try to have a small number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those just so it’s easier for you to have a handle on. And usually private
⏹️ ▶️ Marco methods are better than public ones. You tend to get more feedback, you tend to get better feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you also avoid lots of issues that come with moderating any kind of public communication.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this question asked specifically about bug trackers, and this may be a distinction that people don’t think is
⏹️ ▶️ John important, but it does really matter for implementing this type of thing. It’s rare
⏹️ ▶️ John that there is a software project, even open source, that should
⏹️ ▶️ John have a bug tracker, like a software bug tracker as the public face
⏹️ ▶️ John of gathering what people think about the application. There’s a whole other category of apps. I don’t know what they’re called,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’ve used many of them. I’ve been an end user of them and have them use the companies that I work for. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is a public facing way to gather user sentiment. And they do not look like bug trackers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like bug tracking is a specific thing. Use bug trackers internally. I forget if Casey, you use
⏹️ ▶️ John a bug track or GitHub issues or whatever to track your own issues, right? That’s that’s a tool for developers
⏹️ ▶️ John and groups of developers and companies to keep track of defects in their application and whether they’re getting fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even Apple no longer has a public facing bug tracker. They have feedback, which actually interfaces through some Byzantine
⏹️ ▶️ John carrier pigeon thing to their actual bug tracker, which is radar, which is now internal only, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, again, open some open source projects and get away with it. They have public facing bug trackers, Chromium does or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, those tools, bug tracking tools, are not
⏹️ ▶️ John friendly to regular people. To Marco’s point, you don’t wanna just know what
⏹️ ▶️ John people who know what a bug tracker is think about your application, unless it’s like a developer facing application or something like that, or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like Chromium, like an internal developer engine, it’s not an end user product type thing, right? But for an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John app, for all their faults, the reviews in the app store are
⏹️ ▶️ John probably one of the most likely ways that regular people can figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John to say anything about the application, because it’s right there on their phone where they use the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they know what the app store is and they see reviews, maybe they look at them, they could probably figure out how to leave one of their own.
⏹️ ▶️ John it has one of the lowest barriers to entry. I’d say it’s a lower barrier to entry than figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out in the settings screen where they can find if the developer put in a thing to send feedback, which most apps have
⏹️ ▶️ John some form of or whatever. But that takes more effort than just saying, look, every app I get from the app store, I know there’s a way I can
⏹️ ▶️ John leave feedback for it and it’s this kind of review. And also, you don’t have to run that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple runs it. And when it gets spammed, it’s Apple’s problem or whatever. So I agree, trying to run a public-facing
⏹️ ▶️ John forum is a pain, but if you did run one, it shouldn’t be a bug tracker. it should be one of those, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t think of the brand name that always comes to mind, one of those things that is made for this purpose. People sell actual products,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like this is a user-facing product where people can come up with their ideas and those things are very carefully
⏹️ ▶️ John designed to not make it look like you are filing bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John or determining what happens with a software product. It’s just a way for you to provide feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John with a tiny little amount of community, but not too much. Which is like one step above
⏹️ ▶️ John private feedback, which is throw your information into this hole and maybe get an automated reply back or whatever. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is a difficult problem. It’s an even more difficult problem if you are a lone developer because dealing
⏹️ ▶️ John with any of this stuff, any public facing stuff, running any kind of form, any kind of feedback thing or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John can literally absorb 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you will never do anything. You will
⏹️ ▶️ John never make anything if you spend all your time doing that. And like many things
⏹️ ▶️ John with statistics that we’ve talked about in the past, if you have a representative sample, The sample doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually need to be that big for you to get an idea of like, what is the sentiment out there among regular people?
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need to run your own forum to get that. I think Margo, through the channels that are available to him without
⏹️ ▶️ John running a public bug tracker or public feedback system, has an idea of what
⏹️ ▶️ John the sentiment is without having to run that. And it’s way easier for him to just look at the channels
⏹️ ▶️ John he does have, get an idea, and then move on instead of like spending his day
⏹️ ▶️ John running a open bug tracker or open feedback forum one of those tools.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I currently get about a hundred new reviews a day, not star ratings, like written reviews.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try to read most of them. I also currently have over 4,000 feedback emails that I have not yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been able to read. I’m having a lot of trouble keeping up. So that should give you some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea. I am not short on feedback. And to people who think, who are writing right now to say, well, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you had a public thing that people would find that and maybe write to you less. No, they wouldn’t. Trust me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just get, I would just have another inbox to check and to fall behind on and feel bad about myself about. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found that it is best for me to try to get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gist of what I have to do based on skimming emails and reviews and then just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it, stop the bleeding, fix the problems, address people’s concerns, just do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and spend my time doing that rather than spending even more time going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through different feedback inboxes. Thank
#askatp: Per-episode podcast art
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike Schaefer writes, this question has been bugging me for a while and with the rewrite of Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve started to think about it again. Some podcasts, 20,000 Hertz comes to mind, have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey custom artwork for each episode that Apple Podcasts will display. However, no third party podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app seems to show it. My understanding is that podcasts are simply RSS feeds, so shouldn’t all apps be able to show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per episode artwork? Is there a special upload process for Apple Podcasts that allows for the extra artwork
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or is an intentional choice by the app developers to exclude it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically both. Apple Podcasts over the last few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has added certain kind of like custom images and resources and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. I don’t think per episode artwork is one of those things though, but they do have like for instance Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a process now where they will go to podcasters and say hey you should give us a banner that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain size to show on the now playing screen instead of your square artwork or to show on your on your podcast screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Apple podcast and it’s like a different aspect ratio and can show like full bleed images and stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s basically no Apple being Apple like let’s let’s assume everybody has designers in-house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and request a bunch of different artwork sizes to make things look nicer in our apps you know fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s we see that in the App Store too we know how that works it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that artwork though is not exposed through any feed it is uploaded into Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own management interface by podcasters, and that is not anything that is exposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to other apps. And there is no, as far as I know, there’s no current standard RSS tag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would even expose that. And even if, you know, some group would declare themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standard makers and would make such a standard, almost nobody would actually use it. So that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there are certain types of images and stuff that are exclusive to Apple podcasts, is the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to get them is to upload them into Apple’s management interface and those are not exposed, including through Apple’s own API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, per episode artwork is part of the spec. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an image tag or that’s part of regular RSS feeds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apps can read them. It’s been part of the spec for a long time, but it’s been poorly supported by clients,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Mike says here. Apple Podcasts does support per episode artwork. Oh, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also there’s one other way to display it, which is, or one other way to specify it, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can embed custom artwork into the MP3s in the ID3 tags, just like any other MP3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has been around forever. Overcast supports this partially. So Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will, if a podcast has custom embedded artwork in the file, it will display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on the Now Playing screen during playback. It will not display it in other screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s actually a choice I’ve made. Again, you can disagree with me if you want, I understand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but my inkling here is people identify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the podcast visually by its main artwork. So if you’re in a context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app where you are seeing blended episode lists that might contain episodes from multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts, what you want to see in that context, in my opinion, is the main artwork,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a custom episode artwork. So this would be something like the playlist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. Like if you’re in a playlist and you’re seeing the list of episodes, those could be from any podcast. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my opinion, what should show in that playlist screen is the main artwork. So you can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a quick glance, you could tell visually what podcast that is. And that’s anywhere that you would see episodes listed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for multiple podcasts. So the only place that I would actually want to add per episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork, anywhere besides the now playing screen, would be in a podcast’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own screen. In that list view, I could put it there. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might someday do that. It’s on my consideration someday feature list. There is a lot more stuff ahead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it that’s I think more important, so I just haven’t gotten to that kind of idea yet. But if I’m going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, that’s where I would do it. I would not have it go everywhere like the playlist screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you already do it on the now playing screen, you’re saying?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but only if it’s embedded in the file. I don’t currently read the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID3 tags for per episode, or sorry, the RSS tags rather. I don’t currently read the RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed tags for per episode artwork. Because if you think about what that would mean, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also, in addition to downloading the episode MP3, I would also need to download all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those images. So that’s like creating more separate requests, storing more images, larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco images, potentially for episodes you haven’t downloaded yet. So then I have to have more thumbnailing. And like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of like complexities when you externally host every one of those images, as opposed to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embedding it in the download. So there are some trickiness there. It might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prove to never be worth it, but if I’m going to start looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast screen to redo the list stuff to be a little richer, like for instance, if I ever wanted to display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco season numbers and episode numbers in a separate way, I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it as part of that update down the road, but that’s, again, there’s more stuff ahead of that the pipeline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I need to do first.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we basically because we use chapters, we could basically have the equivalent of a custom artwork for each
⏹️ ▶️ John episode. And instead of what we just have our chapter images. So if you actually look at the now playing screen when you’re going through episodes
⏹️ ▶️ John of our show, very often you will see the image change to illustrate something that we’re talking about or whatever. That’s not quite the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as this is like, oh, this episode has special artwork. And I’ve seen that in some other podcasts as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s worth supporting though, because a lot of times the podcasts like they won’t use they don’t know about chapters. Nobody Nobody knows
⏹️ ▶️ John about chapters but us and the Germans, right? So nobody’s using chapters. And I agree that would be better. It’s part of the file. They should do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But getting them to do it is not like who has the power to make that happen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So if they are doing custom artwork in the tags, like Blank Check, I think, has custom
⏹️ ▶️ John artwork for all their series of things, like when they do like, oh, the movies of Francis Ford Coppola,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll have custom artwork for the run of that series. And I’m assuming they’re doing it by having every episode have custom
⏹️ ▶️ John artwork in the RSS or whatever, rather than having just one chapter image. I think that does add to the experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I like to look at the screen and see, oh, look at the funny parody artwork they made for
⏹️ ▶️ John this director or whatever. And if you can’t control whether they’re using chapters
⏹️ ▶️ John or using the thing in the RSS, and big podcasts are using it in the RSS, I think there’s no avoiding
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually supporting that in the Now Playing screen, despite the annoyance that it provides of having to download stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, what I have to do is start just reading the tags and storing the database stuff and just see like how many podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are actually using that. I don’t, my instinct is that it’s not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very large number of podcasts. Um, just because like most podcasts, including a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big and small, most podcasts don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add more things to their required production for every episode. Like most podcasts don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bother doing basic show notes. Like they won’t, they won’t even do that. Um, So most podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not going to be making custom images for every episode. There are some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do. And so, again, I will look at that once I look at modernizing the episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list screen on a playlist screen. But that’s not going to be yet. OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you to our sponsor at this episode, Squarespace. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FM slash join members, get a bunch of perks, including ATP overtime, a bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic every single week. This bonus topic, this overtime this week, is about some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new rumors about Apple’s robotic products. This could be interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s even more stuff from Mark Gurman about an alleged robotic countertop device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple. So we’re going to talk about that in overtime. Join at at.fm slash join to hear that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you everybody, we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Mastodon, 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 N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, accidental. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to, accidental, accidental. ♪ Tech Podcasts
Outdoor-camera check-in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you were queried earlier or if I should say since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m talking to you queried earlier today in slack and you ignored it which is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then as we were recording I got a notification from my beloved app do do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eat and it reads. Episode 549 colon. John wants to see a picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Marcos de-contented, uh, for supply chain compared to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey G4 ubiquity G5 camera to see if it being outside is ruined it. Quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marcos kink is to put things that aren’t weatherproof outside. That was set, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a year ago. Now I, I am not asking you to go outside and take a picture of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey G5 if it’s if it’s even still there, but I’m also not, not asking you to
⏹️ ▶️ John you trying to steal credit for the reminder? My reminder fired first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said that I said it was in a
⏹️ ▶️ John slacker. You said there was a thing in slack that you ignored. You didn’t say it was because John had said a year long reminder
⏹️ ▶️ John and his went off first. Yes. Yours did. I want the reminder glory as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You may have all of the glory, John. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thought anyway, both
⏹️ ▶️ John of us, both of us set reminders because when we say things in the show of like, I wonder how that’ll look in the year, both me and in case you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John there on our phones going, remind me in one year to ask Marco about his outdoor G5 camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you don’t necessarily have to take a photograph of it at all, and certainly not right now as we record,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I would love for you to give the best update you possibly can, given the information you have at your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, all of the Ubiquiti gear that I’ve installed outdoors since last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer continues to work perfectly. I’m stunned. Especially, you know, at the beach, like this is a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harsh environment, especially for corrosion. So anything involving like metal is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just death here. But it’s been fine. Like I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable notifications every single time. Like every time I walk by the bikes, I get notified that someone is near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bikes. Every time someone tries to pee under my house, I get notified that they’re there. And I get to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them like look at the camera and run away. These have worked flawlessly. So this is for reference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the Ubiquiti Unify camera system. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of, I guess you know what cameras they are, the Gen 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ubiquiti Protect Pros, whatever, I don’t even know, but they’re Ubiquiti outdoor cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have five of them in use. All five of them have worked flawlessly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them is undercover and has a pretty easy job. The other four are, two are undercover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and three are in like direct exposure to the elements. And they’ve been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything’s powered over PoE, goes to some of their,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget what they’re called, but they’re the Flex switches that are indoor, outdoor capable. And those are all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just under the house, like also like in the outdoor elements. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are rated for outdoor use and they are also rock solid. There’s two Flex switches that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are directly exposed to the elements at all times. And they have been also fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, so far all the Ubiquiti gear has been super rock solid and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as Casey’s reminder said, this isn’t actually a case of Marker using indoor stuff outdoors. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John just that, I think, cause I’m listening and written in and said, hey, the reason I used the G4 instead of the G5 is because
⏹️ ▶️ John the G4 were more weatherproof and it was disapproving of the G5 of like they saved money
⏹️ ▶️ John and skimped and didn’t make them as weatherproof, but apparently they’re still holding up. So I just, that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John was checking about to see if there was any credence to the idea that the G5s were not as good as the G4s, but after one year, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, meanwhile, my last remaining Logitech Circle view that still functions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all has been super unreliable and buggy for the last six months. Neat. I don’t know if you can blame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on the salt, though. No, that’s just, I’m very, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughout this whole time that I’ve been using the Ubiquiti Protect stuff, I have never once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been tempted to try to get some kind of hack going to bridge it into HomeKit. It’s just fine, like using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in Ubiquiti apps is fine. The Ubiquiti Protect app is great. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no worse than HomeKit cameras. The notifications from it are great. Everything from it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. It’s fast. I’ve had no problems whatsoever with the setup. It is a ridiculous…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a huge upfront expense to try to get a Ubiquiti camera system going. You need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of gear. You need some kind of NVR or one of their routers that includes NVR functionality because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re hosting all the stuff locally on hard There’s a substantial upfront investment, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most Ubiquity gear, but again, like most Ubiquity gear, once you have it running,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is solid. And there’s a reason people buy this kind of stuff. So I’ve been very happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the temptation of all home stuff. It’s like, I just want everything to be controlled in one system. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so that leads people to try to, I want to get everything into HomeKit. I’m going to get Home Assistant, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John and get everything into HomeKit because it’ll be all in one place. But, and the advantage of that is
⏹️ ▶️ John You just go to one place to deal with all your stuff. The disadvantage is if that one place is screwed up, everything’s screwed up. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John having a separate island, I do kind of do the same thing. I have Google security cameras, whatever. They’re not connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to HomeKit in any way. They have a separate application and it’s a Google application and it never touches HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John HomeKit has no idea these things exist. And I’m fine with that because I know which app to go for my cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if my HomeKit stuff gets messed up somehow, which it currently isn’t because it’s very limited, but if it did get messed up,
⏹️ ▶️ John it wouldn’t affect the cameras because they’re a separate system. You get independent fault domains if you don’t have them
⏹️ ▶️ John as one system. So there’s trade-offs, upsides and downsides. And the reason we bring this up is,
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to be the case based on the experience that I’ve heard other people have, because I’m not super into home automation, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing things into HomeKit is bringing things into a place that is unreliable. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you are essentially infecting other things with the unreliability of HomeKit weirdness. Things that
⏹️ ▶️ John may have worked fine when they’re off on their own. Like, Marko’s Ubiquiti cameras are great. What if he brings them at the home
⏹️ ▶️ John kit? Now everything is in one place and all of a sudden the ubiquity camera start being flaky. That’s not worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And like, and the thing is like when you look at, well, what place would you bring it in? You got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home kit, you got Alexa, you got Google stuff for all three of those companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are like hobby projects. Those are not their main businesses. And what we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from tech companies over and over again, especially Apple, they’re really bad at it, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, the non-critical parts of their business, these little hobby products or hobby areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their products, they don’t get a lot of attention. They oftentimes are in need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some software help or some support that they just never get or they don’t get enough of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they end up being kind of mediocre or unreliable or they stagnate forever, like the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nest ecosystem. Like so, when you stick with the native products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the native apps where like this is their main business, So like, you know, using, you know, Sonos gear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of home pods, using ubiquitous camera stuff instead of pouring it into HomeKit or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you, when you stick with somebody’s like big business units and like the, the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are important to that company, when you stick with those, they tend to work better in the long term.
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a great example right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know they’re having a lot of, a lot of drama around that, but like, but they’re gonna, you know, they’re gonna fix it as opposed to like, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home pod has almost never worked and yet Apple just has never cared to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, and they never will. You know, HomeKit has been getting good real soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, since its entire introduction, like forever, since its entire life. You know, Alexa is falling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apart. Google has always been very Googly about how they manage their side products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. You know, they’re all kind of these half-assed gardens of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promises that are just never delivered upon. Whereas when you stick with what is important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a company, You invest in what is important to them that they invest in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you will have a better time, generally speaking. Your stuff will work better. It’ll get the maintenance and updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needs. It’ll be more reliable over time, in almost every case. And so, as I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco growing, and trying to make my computing life better, and trying to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less frustrated at Apple’s various shortcomings, I’ve come to realize I am happier, I’ve said this before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the show, I am happier when I am devoting my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own time and attention to Apple products that Apple cares about as much or more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I do. And HomeKit has never been one of those products. So I’m just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, HomeKit is something that I use partially. It is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if something is not going to make it easy to get something to HomeKit, I’m not gonna push it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna install a hack. I’m not gonna do crazy stuff. I’m not gonna jump through hoops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if something has a perfectly good app that is as good as HomeKit or better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll use that instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m feeling real uncomfortable about my home assistant adventures that have been going on over the last 24
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours, but that’s okay. And we should talk about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right. We should talk about the home assistant stuff another time because it is definitely interesting,