625: Time and Smoke
06 Feb 2025Zen and the art of restaurant wiring.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: BBQ
- Follow-up:
- New immersive video: Man vs. Beast
- “Historical Commission”?
- Sonos volume changes are local
- DeepSeek censorship mechanism (via Matthew Cave)
- Docker
- Rosetta (via Brian Reiter)
- Docker vs. OrbStack (also via Brian Reiter)
- Sending email
- ddev.com (via Bram Esposito)
- Also consider Development Containers (via Dewald Reynecke)
- Marco’s TV audio sync issues
Match FormatandMatch Dynamic Range(via Marco Arment)- Quick Media Switching
- Apple Invites
- Pornography on the iPhone
- Ask ATP:
- Why are Casey and Marco so excited for cellular Macs? (via Matthew Fenselau)
- Should one use their personal Apple ID on a corporate Mac (via Stephen Swift)
- Post-show: Marco had a good weekend.
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Subsequent Sonos Stuff
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Chapters
- Happy
- New immersive video
- “The historical commission”
- Sonos volume is local
- DeepSeek censorship
- Docker feedback
- TV audio sync
- Sponsor: Wildgrain (code ATP)
- Apple Invites
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- Hot Tub
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- #askatp: Why cellular Macs?
- #askatp: iCloud on work Macs
- Ending theme
- Happy Reprise
Happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am happy tonight because I just… Matthew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Feeney, Jr. Got on the phone with us. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s obviously the reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s definitely not that I finally found decent barbecue brisket on Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, you know, you now sort of kind of owe me a visit. I think you visited, well, no, actually you might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even up in lifetime visits, but you should come visit me at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we have several barbecue spots in Richmond that I genuinely think are quite, quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. Not to say they’re better than what you’ve got or anything like that, but they’re very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco They’re almost certainly better than what we’ve got. Oh, all right. Well, I’m trying to…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Barbecue tends to get better the further south you go in the United States.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that is true, but I’m trying to be inclusive here. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opposite of coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, I’d love to take you to a couple of local haunts that I don’t think I was aware of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last time you were here, because it’s been a minute since you’ve been down here. So, if you’re looking for a barbecue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adventure, you let me know. You can come visit And now at this point, all the North Carolinians and Tennesseans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are all getting angry and saying, Virginia’s not for barbecue. And you’re wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s better than New York. I’ll tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bet you there’s some really good spots in New York City, for example. And you’re not that
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John from
⏹️ ▶️ John York City. The problem with barbecue is it takes so much time and space to do right that it really
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t really fit into lots of things you can do if you just have a
⏹️ ▶️ John hole in the wall and a place to do it and just someone who’s dedicated to it. the barbecue is just such, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so much, I mean, so much time and smoke, like it just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fit well in the city.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a specialty, like you need special equipment, you need, like it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very like specialized, dedicated stuff just to make this kind of product.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it doesn’t fit in an urban environment that well, like because of all the time and the smoke and the heat and
⏹️ ▶️ John just the- I mean, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it, just not a lot of people, and it’s not very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s the type of thing, It’s the same thing with like, oh, why can’t we get good pizza outside of New York? And so people would, who
⏹️ ▶️ John knew how to make good pizza, but go to other parts of the country and you can like, you don’t need that much space for it. You can just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John get a little restaurant and get the right ingredients and do it right. But I think barbecue is more difficult. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also I don’t think the market for it’s that big. Like people like pizza everywhere, but barbecue is more
⏹️ ▶️ John of a specialized taste. I feel like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Any person that likes tasty food could enjoy barbecue, but I will agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying they wouldn’t like it. They just don’t know that they, You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? Like they don’t know that they, they don’t seek it out because they think what barbecue is is whatever. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even know what they think it is, but they don’t know what it actually is. So they have no reason to seek it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They think it’s just a cookout. Like most people think barbecue is meat cooked on a grill, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. We’re talking about like slow smoked meat. This is not, not even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not even the same food. Like it, but I mean, it’s probably like barbecue is really unhealthy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for lots of reasons. Like, you know, all the wood smoke is full of carcinogens and you’re eating huge amounts of fatty meat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not something that you should have as eat. I mean, I know pizza’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gem in the health realm either, but I think it’s less bad than barbecue. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna die of cancer, barbecue’s probably worse. If you’re gonna die of high cholesterol, pizza’s probably worse. Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neither one should be a huge part of anybody’s diet.
New immersive video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Very, very quickly, a service I provide to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, the audience, is that I mention the once a year, I’m sorry, once a month or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple releases new immersive content on the Vision Pro. There is a new immersive video, Man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vs. Beast. This is about rodeo, speaking of things that are perhaps Southern, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the three of us are not very familiar with. I was thinking about it, we don’t need to belabor this, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think one of the things I really love about this series and the videos that Apple’s put out, immersive videos that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put out, is that a lot of them are exposing me to different activities and sports and whatnot that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just deeply unfamiliar with, which I think is really neat. And this was, again, rodeo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was filmed a lot at night, which to my recollection, not a lot of what we’ve seen so far was filmed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at night. A lot of it was in very bright daylight, which obviously lends itself to be filmed pretty well and pretty easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this was really good. It was 10 minutes, not do or die, but it’s worth checking out. So if you have a Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro or have access to one and friend with one or whatever the case may be, go have a look, Man vs Beast. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
“The historical commission”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember where this came from. I don’t think this was an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey original composition of mine, but last episode we were talking about my LED project, which is sort of kind of, but not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on hold. I think I’m going to have more news about that in the future, but not tonight. But that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I referred to the fact that the historical commission had denied my application for modifying my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home. And there were several people that wrote in. John T. wrote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey mentioned a historical commission had prevented him from adding three LEDs an existing blanked off outlet. Did he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also mention his house’s late 1990s? I’m confused about the historical commission involvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To be absolutely clear, I’m talking about Aaron. I was trying to be kind about it, but I’m talking about Aaron.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. This is a long running joke on our show that the historical commission approving things in our house is just our spouses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being okay with them in our house. Like that’s just- In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact, I might’ve stolen it from you, Marco. I think you might’ve been the genesis.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you totally did. It was a Marco thing. It was originally when he was talking about potentially getting a low profile
⏹️ ▶️ John Marantz receiver for an entertainment center, I believe. Yeah, I think that’s right. How do you remember that well, John? Because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where it came from. I assumed you remembered
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco too. Because John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listens to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, because John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann listens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to the show. That’s the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, that was many, many years ago. And Marco, if Marco got it from somewhere, I don’t know. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John heard it first from Marco referring to his wife as the historical commission because she had specific demands about what kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of electronic products were and were not allowed in the entertainment center. And Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John has adopted that and then quickly forgot where it came from. So no, there is no actual historical commission.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, I redeem myself. I halfway redeemed myself, thank you very much. I award myself half credit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, sort of tangentially speaking of, my terminal has shipped. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state for the record that Marco paid with his own dollars for his terminal, but the terminal people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were kind and offered to send John and myself units. So I did not pay for this. We will probably talk about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the future on the show, but mine has shipped. And I think, I believe I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told Aaron that there’s something forthcoming, but I haven’t said too much about it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I described it as an auto-updating version of the calendar that we have on our refrigerator. So, I’m curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear what the Historical Commission has to say about this when it shows up. Bye.
Sonos volume is local
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we had talked, I think I had brought this up last episode when we were talking about Sonos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had parroted something that I had heard many, many, many times, but I couldn’t tell you where I first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey began hearing this, and honestly, it might have been Reddit, which is not a good sign. But I had said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in the new version of the app, which I had colloquially dubbed S3, the volume changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you change the volume in a speaker, it has to round trip across the internet to like some central warehouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Sonos or something like that, and then come back to your house in order to affect your speakers. An anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listener wrote in and said, that’s a rumor that won’t die because it feels right to people when they see that volume changes are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow. There are things that do go through cloud services that didn’t before, like account management and some other stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not volume. So I am dead wrong about that, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to save you last show, but I couldn’t definitively do it. So I just waved you off as best I could, but now we have a definitive
⏹️ ▶️ John answer. Volume changes do not go to a server and back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then they should be faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s neither here
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually did get also get an explanation of why they’re slow and it’s not satisfying. But spice it to say there’s not a server involved. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this was sent privately to you then? Because I don’t remember seeing this. Yes. Yes. OK. Well, feel free to privately forward that to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, because I’m curious now. but that’s okay.
DeepSeek censorship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, DeepSeekCensorship, Matthew Cave, writes, it’s not really running locally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that removes the Chinese political correctness. It’s running a sufficiently abbreviated model. The models that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would run locally have reduced numbers of parameters. I can only assume that the rules enforced by the Chinese government have sufficiently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low priority that they are eliminated somewhere between the 70 billion parameter model and the 32 billion parameter model.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not an expert on how these things work. My vocabulary is very likely wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John And pausing there for a second, I’m not an expert either. But I also don’t, I’m not sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John reducing the number of parameters would so radically change the behavior, but anyway, continuing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from Matthew, if you ask the 32 billion parameter model politically sensitive questions, you get remarkably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey astute and well-thought-out answers. If you supply the exact same prompt to the 70 billion parameter model, you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the roadblocks. Quote, Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China, quote, or let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about something else, or we have always been at war with East Asia.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know who looks like Winnie the Pooh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For local, right? For local machines with sufficient RAM, I found the 32-billion model to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run acceptably fast and to be surprisingly complete. 70 billion is even more capable if you have the RAM to run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but is significantly slower and as mentioned has the roadblocks in place. You can also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spot answers that are short-circuited by one of these override-type rules as they have no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think blocks, or rather the think block is completely empty. This is the block at the top of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most answers that exposes the quote-unquote reasoning of the model. It’s a hard-coded answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no reasoning. Again, these overrides seem to be eliminated in the 32 billion model and smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I confirmed with Matthew that he did actually run both the 32 billion and the 70 billion locally to discover
⏹️ ▶️ John this. And it seems super weird to me because like Daniel Jaskot, I guess, ran the 32 billion one and was like, hey, if you run it locally, you don’t get these
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And I was surmising that it was a layer they put on the server. But I guess somehow it’s in the 70
⏹️ ▶️ John billion parameter model, but not the 32? It’s so weird. Like, again, I don’t…
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, trying to censor this is a losing battle, but you know, they’ll, they do what they can, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just weird that they’re distributing the weights and one, the smaller set of them either
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have the political censorship or it’s like malfunctioning, but the big one does. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John there you have it. Censorship, it’s weird and futile. And although people will say, that’s what everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John said about the Great Wall of China, like not the actual wall, but the Great Firewall of China. Like it would be impossible to keep the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John out and somehow the Chinese government does it. I guess they sorta kinda do. But anyway, they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the same with their model, but when you run it locally, I guess if you use the smaller model, on to deal with that.
Docker feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a bunch of feedback with regard to Marco’s question about Docker, which I was very, I don’t think I said this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show last week, but I was very proud of you for asking that question. And even if you ignore all of the feedback, I’m pleased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’re investigating. So that makes me happy. But Brian Ryder writes in, you can indeed use Rosetta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Docker on Apple Silicon. There are some gotchas, some technologies that themselves use a VM will crash,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically some versions of Lua and I think Latex stuff. Also older versions of SQL Server
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Linux. However, by and large, the whole thing works astonishingly well. Consider the horrifying case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of SQL Server on x86-64 Linux on Docker on an M3 Max. This is notably faster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than my sad and idle Intel i9 dev machine with no downside that I have experienced. Under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hood, there’s a very minimal Linux virtual machine running in the hypervisor.framework
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that hosts the Docker stuff and a bunch of magic to obscure this. You may need to twiddle resources allocated to the VM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make stuff go, such as overcoming Linux OOM killer or for performance reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s something a bunch of people wrote in, probably either Windows or Linux users saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John Docker is not a VM. There’s no VM involved. That’s true if you’re running Docker on Linux, like that’s the part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the magic of it is it just kind of like exposes your the actual Linux kernel you’re running on, but fences
⏹️ ▶️ John off the processes. So they think they’re in their own machine and can’t see other stuff, yada, yada. But of course, when you’re on the Mac, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s Unix based, it’s not Linux. So Docker on the Mac does have to run
⏹️ ▶️ John a, I think, just one minimal Linux VM under the covers. And then it runs
⏹️ ▶️ John all the containers on top of that VM. In practice, it’s all transparent. You don’t have to worry about this. But it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John an implementation detail because macOS may be officially certified Unix, if
⏹️ ▶️ John they still have that certification. But Linux is not Unix. And GNU is not Unix. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of recursive acronyms in there. But yeah, Linux is a little bit different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Then, additionally from Brian Ryder, with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Docker versus something else, having used Docker Desktop for several years, I recently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switched to Orbstack. And quick aside, we’ve heard a lot of feedback with regard to Orbstack, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Literally everyone has told us, and I don’t mean everyone who’s written in or everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who you heard from this week. I literally mean everyone in the world has told us about Orbstack. So thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, literally everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, we did discuss ORBSTACK on a show a while ago. I remember because I tried it, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John think I had mentioned Docker ages ago, and someone said, you should try ORBSTACK. So I did. And it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John At the time, I decided it was not better enough for me to forego Docker
⏹️ ▶️ John Desktop. But I’m sure it’s gotten better since then. And yeah, lots of people recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Man who compiles from source is unimpressed with a layer on top of Docker.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not why. Well, you finish reading Brian’s feedback, and I’ll explain my reasoning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let me just start it over since we got ourselves sidetracked. So having used Docker Desktop for several years, I recently switched to Orbstack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey While not free, it is much more well integrated with the macOS experience and Finder. It automatically creates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an HTTPS reverse proxy for any container that listens on TCP port 80. It has a very useful debug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shell for containers. And finally, it has a way to pick one or more Linux distributions to integrate with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your shell in the style of Windows subsystem for Linux. While I’m using Mac ports, this feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably a viable drop-in replacement for Mac ports or Homebrew to give you your preferred full Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey environment for ad hoc CLI stuff instead of installing native Unix packages on Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the idea is like, instead of, you know, like I said, instead of installing like whatever your favorite command
⏹️ ▶️ John line tool is using some Mac package manager, you can install it inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Linux and just use it from your Mac command line as if it was installed on your Mac, but it’s not, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all the evil is confined to containers. That’s something you’ll see with Docker. We’re always talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, Docker, it’s like a little virtual machine or a little imaginary machine, if not
⏹️ ▶️ John an actual virtual machine. But you can distribute single command line things
⏹️ ▶️ John as Docker containers. They’re lightweight enough where you might say like, oh, I don’t want you to have to figure out all
⏹️ ▶️ John the Python crap that you have to have installed to run my Python script. So I’ve just made a container with my little
⏹️ ▶️ John Python script and all the stuff and you can run it as a command and it will run it from the container.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I didn’t go with Orbstack back in the day was, I mean, the features that it had, like
⏹️ ▶️ John this way of running commands inside the Linux thing or integration with the Mac, with the automatic listening
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that, I didn’t need at that point because I’d already done all that with plain old Docker. And my philosophy
⏹️ ▶️ John was with stuff like this is like, when possible, stick
⏹️ ▶️ John to the official thing, because if I ever have any problems, which I have occasionally, when I like
⏹️ ▶️ John Google for an answer, it’s easier to find answers for just plain Docker or the official
⏹️ ▶️ John Docker on macOS than it is to find answers for Orbstack. It’s just one more layer between
⏹️ ▶️ John me and figuring out what’s broken, right? And like I said, I’d already done
⏹️ ▶️ John everything I needed to do with Docker Desktop and I haven’t regretted that decision. I’ve just, you know, Docker Desktop updates
⏹️ ▶️ John frequently and, you know, it’s presumably they’re fixing bugs and improving performance. So as far as I’m concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just run the auto updates and it just continues to work. So I’ve been fine with it, but just please know that everyone who has
⏹️ ▶️ John tried Orbstack seems to love it, except for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then you had mentioned somewhat offhandedly, John, sending email from Docker. We got some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fascinating feedback. I had no idea this was a thing, although it makes perfect sense. We got a triplet or a trio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of different pieces or different suggestions. Matt Barlow writes, last episode, John mentioned not having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked out how to send emails from his Docker setup yet. I’ve found Mailhug to be a great way to deal with this. And we’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. Stand it up alongside your PHP and MySQL containers, and then you can and send email to it as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it were any other SMTP server. It then exposes a Gmail-style web front end to view the emails.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very cool stuff. John Caruso writes, I’ve been using a tool called MailPit, and again, put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link in the show notes, for when I don’t actually want to send mail to anyone, but I do want to verify that it’s still working and looks correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Yves Severano writes, for mail testing, I use mail dev, excuse me, I use a mail dev
⏹️ ▶️ Casey container in my Docker Compose stack. Link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, these are all ways to essentially not send mail. like you want to send somewhere so you can look
⏹️ ▶️ John at it, but it’s not actually sending email to an address. So if you send mail to like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John johnsmith at gmail.com, whatever you send the two address to, it’s all going to go into the mail
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann mail
⏹️ ▶️ John pit or whatever. Like it’s not going to actually go to johnsmith at gmail, right? It’s going to go to these, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then you can just look at it using a web interface. Or you can do what I did and just print it to the airlog and look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very John answer. Bram Esposito writes, the easiest way to have configurable and reproducible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey environments for PHP is using ddev.com. It runs on top of Orbstack, there we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go, and is very easy to extend. It has HTTPS certificates, networking mail pit, and all pre-configured
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you can just start using it right away. It sounds like a good fit for what Marco’s looking for, not having tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so many people have also pointed out, which I believe you also did, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, to go fully into the Docker lifestyle, I would really want to have the advantage of all serving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these same containers on the servers. And so I think the more I dive into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like these specialized tools, and to be fair, I don’t know if this tool does this or not, but like I don’t want necessarily something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is just going to optimize for a dev environment or just going to optimize for like Macness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I want ideally is closer to what John was saying of like as much of like the big official
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools as possible. And ideally, if I can ship the same doc
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann container, if I can ship the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to the servers, then that’s really interesting to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the thing, like I said last time, the whole idea behind Vocker is that, if it works on my computer, fine, we’ll ship your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s what we’ll run, is how, the place where you develop it is the thing that we deploy it on.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think what might appeal to you, Marco, is the
⏹️ ▶️ John easier, more straightforward debugability of a plain production server
⏹️ ▶️ John that you presumably already have. You know what I mean? You’re not starting from zero, right? If there’s something wrong in your production server, the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to hop in there and just mess around and do stuff without having to worry about Docker, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John more straightforward to you than learning how to correctly hop into a Docker container and figure out what it’s for. Like it’s again, it’s another
⏹️ ▶️ John layer of stuff to deal with. If you were starting from zero, I’d say, well, then, and you’re willing to learn Docker stuff, then fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think probably the path least resistance is to leave your production
⏹️ ▶️ John servers the way they are, just plain old servers with files in them that you know how to deal with. And if there’s a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John there, you can tackle it the way you always do. and then make your dev environment
⏹️ ▶️ John look as much like that as possible. And no, you don’t get the advantage of like, well, I’m sure it’s exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John because my dev environment is my production environment, it’s just my container and I run my container and that is a better way to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it overall. But the specific situation you’re in where you already have a production server that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John already not Docker, it’s not that hard to make a Docker container that looks pretty much exactly like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John that still gives you the easy debug ability. And by the way, Orbstack mentioned they have like a debug shell or whatever. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that is stuff that the official Docker desktop has added recently. What they mean is like, you don’t have to install
⏹️ ▶️ John all your debug tools in your Docker container because like, what should I put in my container? Well, I want Emacs in there
⏹️ ▶️ John and I want S-trace and I want like, you think like, I need all these tools but then you’re making your container bigger and bigger because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, when I’m in that container, I want all my stuff. Well, you can make a container very slim and then
⏹️ ▶️ John also make it so you can hop into the container and debug it and bring with you a bundle of your debugging tools just when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re debugging it. But if this sounds complicated to you, this is why I’m suggesting,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably less fraught, especially for production stuff, if you’re not going to,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not totally on board with learning this, to just leave your production server the way it is, emulate
⏹️ ▶️ John it, like, you know, make a dev environment that matches that, and then just do it that
⏹️ ▶️ John way. So your Mac stays clean, you have a repeatable dev environment, your dev environment is exactly matched to your server, you control both
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, because the server’s not gonna update to PHP 8 unless you do it, and if you update the server to PHP 8,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can update your container to PHP 8. Now, if you’re willing to go on board and say I’m gonna do Docker everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do that, but just know that there is a learning curve to how do I run and
⏹️ ▶️ John debug Docker containers versus how do I run and debug a bunch of files in the file system on
⏹️ ▶️ John my Linux server, which is I’m assuming what you’re used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. Yeah. Finally, with regard to Docker, D-Vault Ranecki writes, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only going to use Docker images for development, you should have a look at development containers or dev containers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is at the URL containers.dev because yeah. Anyways, it adds a JSON
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file to your repo, but the best part is the integration with many editors. I use Visual Studio Code and it works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great, or use the CLI tool. The editor will detect the dev container setup in your repo, build the images,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link up the source files on your Mac to the container, map the ports, run all your setup commands, scripts, et cetera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all of that. My repos are all set up with this. On a brand new Mac, I simply need Docker Desktop installed, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I open the local folder or repo in my locally running editor, it builds and runs everything so slick.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s lots of these things that are integrated with like Visual Studio Code in particular, which again is not gonna help Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John if he wants to use TextMate or whatever, but lots of these things are like, we’ll put some files
⏹️ ▶️ John in there and your IDE will see the files and figure out that it wants to run stuff in containers and run them all. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t mention this last time, but like people keep mentioning Docker Compose, which is a way to make like a set of Docker containers
⏹️ ▶️ John that together make your app because you’ve got one for a database server and one for a load balancer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like you’re trying to like, if you’re gonna deploy seven different containers to production because you have all these different components,
⏹️ ▶️ John you also have them as containers on your dev machine, and you don’t wanna kind of orchestrate them all yourself. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you can bring them all up as a unit, so they’re all talking to each other, which is another complication
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think, I don’t know how like overcast web situation goes, but the ATP web stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is so simple that everything is in one container. And I don’t have to deal with this at all, but know that Docker can
⏹️ ▶️ John do it with Docker Compose. And there are other systems that can also run containers that get increasingly complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, a lot of people just assumed like, well, if you’ve got a web server and database, surely you’re running two different containers. Nope, they’re both
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same container. They’re also both in the same machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where do you think the ATP server set of script came from?
⏹️ ▶️ John just saying like, everyone assumes that like everything is like big fancy production where you’ve got a fleet of servers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve been in that world, but in, you know, to run, for example, ATP.fm,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need that, right? To run Rovercast.fm, maybe you do, you tell me, but like, ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, I usually maintain like eight to 12 web servers, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all each very simple. And they’re all, yeah, they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the complication of quote unquote real production web
⏹️ ▶️ John development at scale is so, it’s huge. There’s just a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John to know and do. It’s extremely complicated. And I think people who are in that world
⏹️ ▶️ John think like, well, surely for ATP.fm, you’re running Kubernetes. And it’s like, no. I’m not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just nothing. Whatever you think we’re doing, it’s not that. You don’t need to do that for
⏹️ ▶️ John simple scenarios. And it really does simplify things. Like the amount of stuff I no longer have
⏹️ ▶️ John to worry about working on a tiny website versus the massive one that I was working on at my jobby job is
⏹️ ▶️ John just so refreshing and so nice. And I would not give that up in exchange for being able to
⏹️ ▶️ John say that I use some cool new technology and open up a fleet of Docker containers that all coordinate with each
⏹️ ▶️ John other to run what is mostly a static website.
TV audio sync
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, unrelated to Docker, we have feedback with regard to Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly offhanded comment about your TV audio being completely out of sync. We have a listener named Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Arment who wrote, if you’re having trouble with audio sync from your Apple TV to an external soundbar or sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system, turn on the match format and match dynamic range in the Apple TV’s video settings. I don’t know why this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes a difference on my LG C7 OLED, but it really, really does. In particular, the Apple TV slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG C7 combo appears to have different audio output delay depending on whether the output is Dolby Vision,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDR, or not. So if you calibrate it for one format, it’ll be wrong for the other. Except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the Apple TV is set to match content, match dynamic range, which for whatever reason suddenly makes the sync
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this has been driving me nuts. Ever since we upgraded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we moved to Long Island, we upgraded that TV sound system from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Sonos amp with giant floor speakers that I have since given away to other family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members, I wanted like a smaller setup here so I and I got a Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Arc soundbar and it has been a nightmare trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sonos Arc soundbar to line up with anything that the TV was doing with audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve and I mentioned in the past like I was I’d asked John about apps to look at TV audio sync and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and no matter what I did I could not and and I tried the built-in Apple TV wireless audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync thing I tried the function built into the TV itself I I tried using both in combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with each other and nothing I did could get the audio sync right on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every video format. So instead, a few days ago, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried that setting and I still couldn’t get it right on the Sonos Arc. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still, no matter what, I could not get it right. And I thought, you know, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old setup from the old house, I never had sync problems. Let me try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bringing out that Sonos amp from my closet and just plug in some regular passive speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it and see if that works. And with those settings, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only with those settings, it is flawless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m surprised you have such problems with the ARC because my ARC, I think I did have to tweak the delay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once in settings, but regardless of if I’m using the Switch or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV, It’s always been consistent for me. Now I have an LG, shoot, it’s a C3?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, C9, C9. It was a 2019 model. Yeah, yours is two years newer. Yeah, so maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem is every combination of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input device and TV could have different sync problems and soundbar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All three of those are all, and maybe we’ll get to this later, all three of those are trying to give you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one coherent experience with a video and audio lineup. And it’s a hard problem, especially with the complexity of all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices these days and all the different processing they’re doing at all the different stages. But the result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I could not get the Sonos Arc to be in sync with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old-ish LG TV at all. Whereas the Sonos Amp, which is a kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simpler product, the Sonos Amp did it just fine, and it’s flawless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with speakers, with passive speakers, only with those settings turned on. So there we
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as I said on the mastodon when you posted this, you should have those settings on anyway because I highly recommend them because
⏹️ ▶️ John they mean that your television is showing the content the way the content is. So if the content
⏹️ ▶️ John is 24 frames per second, your television should be refreshing at some multiple of 24 frames per second and not converting it from 24
⏹️ ▶️ John to 30 so then it can display it at 60 or whatever. Basically, you don’t want your TV messing with it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If the content is HDR, your TV should be HDR. If the content is SDR, your TV should be SDR. And that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John match content and match dynamic range in those settings do. Now the reason people don’t like those settings, as everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John said when they replied to you on Mastodon, is because they cause sometimes horrendous
⏹️ ▶️ John delays when changing from one piece of video to another, or when changing from video
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the menu. Because no matter what you pick, like your Apple TV menu to be in, and you can pick, like I want my menus to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in, you know, 30 frames per second, HDR, like that’s just like, what do you want, when
⏹️ ▶️ John you see the little squares, what do you want that to be shown in? Whatever you pick for that, if you watch anything that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly that, your TV’s like, oh, time to match dynamic range, time to match content, and
⏹️ ▶️ John makes your screen black, and you have to count one, two, three, however many seconds, then it comes back. And
⏹️ ▶️ John people are particularly annoyed with YouTube. I don’t know if it’s a YouTube app that’s built into TVs or the official
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube app on Apple TV, but if you’re watching YouTube TV stuff, whenever there’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John ad, the ad might be in a different dynamic range and frame rate than the thing you’re watching. So
⏹️ ▶️ John every time there’s an ad, your screen goes black, and you wait a few seconds, and it shows the ad, and then you wait a second and it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s untenable, right? Back in November of 2022 on ATP episode 507,
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about, I think for the first time, QMS. John’s bringing receipts, y’all. Yeah, QMS or quick media
⏹️ ▶️ John switching, which was supposed to solve this, but at the time it wasn’t out on a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions. And also this technology only helps you when the thing that changes is
⏹️ ▶️ John just frame rate. So if you change from SDR to HDR, you’re still screwed. But if you’re just changing frame rate,
⏹️ ▶️ John that uses the television as a VRR variable or refresh rate capability to
⏹️ ▶️ John not black out the screen and wait five seconds. And finally, someone named Nit on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John posted a YouTube video of Quick Media Switching in action on their TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s great, totally seamless. There’s no blackout, it’s real nice. I wish it did it for SDR versus
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR too, but I would love to have this. I don’t think it’s on my TV. I don’t think there’s been a firmware update
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. I just deal with the blackouts just because like for me, I switch content
⏹️ ▶️ John way less frequently than I watch content. So I, you know, to watch a thing, yes, I will have to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John a black screen. I wait, a thing comes on, but then I watch a show for an hour or half an hour, right? So that three
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds of switching and blackness is worth it for the hour I get to watch the show correctly in the correct
⏹️ ▶️ John format. Other people have different trade-offs, especially if you’re watching YouTube TV and has ads and it’s driving you up a wall. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe, speaking on both these issues, I believe the new version of HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John has a bunch of new features related to, certainly related to trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John wrangle audio sync better than the current standards do. Like you’ll see on lots of devices, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John some feature that says automatically manage audio sync using like HDMI 2.1 or 2.0 features. Those
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t always work that well as Marco found out. Hopefully whatever they’re doing in HDMI 2.2 does
⏹️ ▶️ John a better job of that. And then the other thing is, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if HDMI 2.2 brings anything to help with quick media switching or if it enhances it to deal with HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John vs. SDR, but at the very least, if you were to buy a TV today, chances are very good that it will support quick media
⏹️ ▶️ John switching and will save you at least from frame rate switches.
Sponsor: Wildgrain (code ATP)
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I guess is like spaghetti or something. I don’t know. I’m sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Italians, but it was very good. And we had it with meatballs and I loved it. And then this morning, Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was kind enough to surprise the family by baking some croissants in the toaster oven while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were all sleeping. So we came down to this delicious smell and were treated to these incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delicious, warm croissants. I gotta tell you, in my personal opinion, you know when a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey croissant is good, when it’s super flaky, just ridiculously flaky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s what these were. They were super duper flaky and delicious. Declan put his favorite hazelnut chocolate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spread on it and was in love. So here’s the thing. Are you ready to bring all your favorite carbs right
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Apple Invites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey May I invite you to join me on this endeavor? Yeah, so there is a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app called Apple Invites, obviously written by Apple. And let me read to you from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s official announcement, or excuse me, is this from The Verge? What is the providence for this, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann I think that’s the press release,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Is it the press release? All right. Moving on. Apple today, on the February
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4th, introduced Apple Invites, a new app for iPhone that helps users create custom invitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to gather friends and family for any occasion. With Apple Invites, users can create and easily share invitations, RSVPs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contribute to shared albums, and engage with Apple Music Playlists. Starting today, users can download Apple Invites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the App Store or access it through the web at iCloud.com. iCloud Plus subscribers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can create invitations, and anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple account or Apple device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can easily contribute photos and videos to a dedicated shared album within each invite to help preserve memories and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relive the event. And collaborative playlists allow Apple Music subscribers to create curated event
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soundtracks that guests can access right from Apple Invites.
⏹️ ▶️ John So first we just have to acknowledge that it really annoys some people. The invite, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a verb, has been nouned instead of saying invitations because invitations is too long.
⏹️ ▶️ John They say invites. That’s the name of the app. It’s not Apple invitations.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s Apple invites. Language changes. Just got to deal with it as much as
⏹️ ▶️ John it pains me in some other instances. This one I can tolerate, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ John look better underneath an app icon. The second thing is why is Apple doing this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like there’s like two interns at Apple who get to build an app like every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three or four years. And that’s how you get stuff like clips or music memos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now invites. And it’s like, these are all like apps that could serve a purpose and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could take off in the market, but they never put any follow through behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these apps. They always get like one or two updates and then die forever and just never, they just get memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold. They never get mentioned again. No one ends up using them. They get no traction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, like I think Apple’s record with with apps like this is even worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than like Google’s record of killing all their web service experiments. It’s like, this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure this is a wonderful app, maybe, but why would anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume this would still be here in six months? Based on Apple’s traffic, I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is some anonymous snark that we got regarding this is, can’t wait for this to wither on the vine, just like journal and
⏹️ ▶️ John clips. Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so setting that aside, I’ve actually
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t look like it was made by interns. It is fairly fancy and sophisticated. It looks a lot like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you watch a lot of WWDC videos where they do demo apps, imagine the type of app
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be an Apple demo app at WWDC, but like completed and
⏹️ ▶️ John polished, right? Very much in the same kind of style and vibe where they would describe like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s do this and let’s make this here and show this and let’s have a nice background. Backyard birds,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Everything is a rounded rectangle and everything has pretty backgrounds on it or whatever. I have to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John as an example of, I mean, it’s hard to pin this all on Apple, like Apple makes so few new apps. As an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, this is what Apple thinks a good iOS app should look like,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like with system settings in the Mac, I’m not sure I agree with them. It is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John and polished, but having used it for its intended
⏹️ ▶️ John purpose, I made a fake Super Bowl party and invited people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann to it. And then- That’s exactly what I did. Had them, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the time of year. so it’s a good time, right? To try the app out. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John just, the information architecture and visual hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John makes it more difficult than it needs to be to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John app in a utilitarian way. Like, when it comes to stuff like this, you just want it
⏹️ ▶️ John to work and you want just the facts and you don’t want anything getting in the way. And it’s as cute as it is to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John nice background and playlist and all these shading and
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded rectangles, I found it to be visually noisy in
⏹️ ▶️ John something that I want to be straightforward. Like consider the difference between an app like this and
⏹️ ▶️ John something like Apple’s calendar or Google calendar or something like that. Calendars don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really go whole hog in this because like I wanna see the days, I wanna see the events, I wanna see, like I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John everything to be shaded or floating or have borders around it or be inset on a rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle or have fancy backgrounds or anything like that. I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this app, functionally, I think people would find
⏹️ ▶️ John it harder to both use this app to set up a thing and make invitations and also more difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John accept or reject an invitation or look at it to figure out when the invitation is, like just
⏹️ ▶️ John the basic functionality of it. Like I think this app works way better in screenshots in WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John demos than it does in real life for its intended purpose. And it’s not bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing like bad or wrong with it. I just feel like sometimes it’s, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John too much, too much missing the forest for the
⏹️ ▶️ John trees. Like I want the info. It’s too cute by half. Yeah, I mean, it’s not even that cute. It’s not like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John shredding papers like the wallet thing or whatever. It’s just, I’m not sure they’ve, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like visually like really busy wallpaper, like on a house, right? It’s just too, too much,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I just need to know the event, who’s coming, who’s not, how do I reply? How do I set like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I felt like the app was kind of visually an interface wise fighting me. I found it’s about a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John times searching for stuff that was just like beautifully inset and like text
⏹️ ▶️ John on a colored background or whatever. It’s too much for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with you. It is very pretty to look at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a very good showy example of what an iOS app can be. But the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it is, is that I feel like a lot of the conventions and maybe affordances,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the way it works is so dissimilar from standard iOS apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I feel it’s almost off-putting. Maybe that’s because I’m getting older, I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like a really good iOS app to my eyes is one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has the same conventions as most other apps on the platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but does it in a very unique style. And I think, Marco, your work over your entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS career has been a really good example of this, where I think, generally speaking, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take the kind of gist of what an iOS app is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but put something or several somethings on top. A simple example of this may be a custom font
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I actually don’t think that that’s particularly necessary these days and you’ve said the same in years past. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a silly example, take a standard table view but put a custom font on it or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something along those lines so you can still look and you don’t have to squint to say, oh yeah, this is a table just like I’m used to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You immediately say, oh, this is a table but it’s a pretty table. And I feel like this app, while unquestionably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very pretty, it’s cumbersome on account of breaking the conventions that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re used to. The other thing I didn’t love about it is, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up a Super Bowl party for myself. It’s gonna be a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exciting party. I copied the link to it, which I did approve.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I approve of the fact that you don’t need to send it to an email or phone number or what have you. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I opened up a Chrome incognito window to go to that link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and see what happens. And it was very off-putting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not because it required me to create an account or anything like that, which would have been a non-starter immediately, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to do the like, let’s verify this email dance. And so let’s verify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the email by sending you a six-digit code, then you got to type it in. And I had set my invite to require
⏹️ ▶️ Casey permission to say, you’re attending or what have you, or I guess it was maybe even to answer the question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. And so once I went through with this anonymous user and said, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to be a part of this, please, then the me that’s the invite owner,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put that hat on again, so back on my iPhone, I guess you could say, I then need to approve the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact that this person even wants to see what’s happening, which I get why they do that, because my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home address was on this invite, as an example. But it’s a little bit cumbersome. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then once the anonymous user back in Chrome goes to accept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the invitation or decline or say maybe or what have you, it’s got to do that whole login dance again or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not login, but like, okay, I’d like to do this now. Okay, what’s the six digit code?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, it’s one, two, three, four, five, six. You know, and it’s just a little bit off putting and I approve generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the fact that they’re trying to do this in such a way that you don’t have to full on create an account,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s kind of a lot of work. And if you are not in the Apple ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s certainly workable. I’m not saying it’s impossible. And to be honest with you, in my experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Evite, oh my word, this is so much nicer, so much nicer. But I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere, and unfortunately I didn’t think to write it down, but I saw somewhere that somebody had offered an alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that does this. I think it started with a P, but the name is escaping me.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Yeah, the app that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining that Apple essentially copied.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann Yes, yes, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John They cited the part of like the App Store guidelines that said, don’t upload copycat apps. Don’t just take
⏹️ ▶️ John someone else’s app and modify the interface a little. So they’re real bitter that their app, this apparently looks
⏹️ ▶️ John and works a lot like their app. But I think Evite is a good example because, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe there’s a no avoiding this, but like if you are not Apple, if you do not own a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John and you are trying to make an app for people to make invitations to events, you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make sure that it is platform agnostic because you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone not to use your app because someone in their family doesn’t use the same platform or some friend doesn’t use the same
⏹️ ▶️ John platform. You’re like, look, it doesn’t matter what you use. If you want to invite people to a thing, use Evite. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care what computer you’re on, what device you’re on, what OS you’re on. We need to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John good and the same everywhere for everybody. Apple does not work that way because they
⏹️ ▶️ John are a platform owner. And I think it hurts the app. Like, so this is from, it reads the next thing
⏹️ ▶️ John from The Verge about Apple’s ecosystem integration. Sure, so from The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verge, the experience has some hiccups for those not fully in the Apple ecosystem, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t surprising. Uh, for starters, where an iPhone user can go straight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the invitation using your link, assuming they’re already signed into iCloud, Android users have to enter their email address and then get a verification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code to get in. This is what I was talking about a minute ago. They’ll also need to sign up for an Apple account to look at a photo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey album if you had one. And, and Android user or not, your friends need an Apple music subscription to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear your playlist. Otherwise they’ll only get a preview of it. I mean that I do kind of get, but it’s all, I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both sides of that. Like it’s kind of crummy, but what is Apple really supposed to do there? Anyway, coming back to the Verge, none of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will keep Android users from seeing key details about your event or RSVPing to it, but it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious that they aren’t getting the whole experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like with Apple and like Apple TV Plus or whatever, they just have to get over the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, imagine if Apple TV Plus was only available if you had an Apple TV hardware puck. Like that would be ridiculous,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I feel like they’re in the same spot. It’s like, well, what else can we do? Of course, the playlist is gonna be in Apple Music. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to see the photo album, Everyone knows there’s no way to share photos without having an iCloud account. So of course we have to make them
⏹️ ▶️ John have an iCloud account. Like if you were Evite or something, you’d be like, share a Spotify playlist, share
⏹️ ▶️ John a title playlist, share all the YouTube music, you’d support them all because you don’t want any reasons for someone to not
⏹️ ▶️ John use your thing. You wanna make like the best experience for everybody involved, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is kind of trying to do that, but it’s so heavily weighted. Jason, at one point, Jason Snell thought
⏹️ ▶️ John that you had to have an iCloud account to do it simply because if you try to use an email account
⏹️ ▶️ John on an Apple device that it knows belongs to an iCloud account, it forces you to sign into iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John So he thought it was just impossible not to do it. Like they’re just so heavily hurting you towards things. And it’s like in the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John sending an invitation to an event and accepting an invitation does not require any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple thing. You can do it without it. Companies do it without it. But of course, Apple integrates with
⏹️ ▶️ John it and makes that the happy path. And I feel like it’s gonna have to make people feel like left out
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I felt like this whole experience doesn’t pass the very difficult, I was gonna call
⏹️ ▶️ John it a sniff test, but more like the very difficult trial that is using any technology
⏹️ ▶️ John product with people who are not technology enthusiasts. Like say you’re planning like
⏹️ ▶️ John your parents 50th wedding anniversary and you being a tech nerd is like, I know, I’ll set
⏹️ ▶️ John up an Apple invitation for it. And everyone’s like, what is this?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What do I have to, is
⏹️ ▶️ John this a thing? Like, like what benefit, like maybe they would humor you, but they’re like, is this helping at all? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John is this just like now another thing we have to deal with? And oh, Aunt Sue has an Android phone. How
⏹️ ▶️ John is she gonna do like, and in the end they’d be like, what benefit are we getting? Why don’t we just use in Evite?
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone knows how to use Evite. We use that for Timmy’s birthday party last month. Like just the sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of the, the disappointment and sigh you get from trying to foist any kind of sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John like new, shiny, proprietary Apple. And but look, and you say, but look how beautiful, Look how beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John this invitation looks on my phone. See how the background is color themed to the transparent buttons with a bright out and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like, I don’t care. Just people need to know in like very
⏹️ ▶️ John high contrast, bold, simple text that’s easy to find where and when the event is, who’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John and whether they’ve already RSVP’d it. And that’s where stuff like this falls down. Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John fault the people making the app. I think it’s a beautiful app. I think it makes for great demos, but like this approach
⏹️ ▶️ John to making apps is a poor fit for what this app does. Maybe it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John fit for food trucks or backyard birds, but it’s a poor fit for inviting people
⏹️ ▶️ John to an event because that activity has nothing to do with Apple platforms, nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, Partyful, by the way, real time follow up, Partyful, which we’ll put a link in the show notes, is the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I was thinking of, which was mentioned actually in this Verge article. Yeah, I mean, I respect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea. I think it’s a good idea. I think that certainly by Apple standards, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far more affordances for other platforms than they typically would.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like Apple forgets that Android exists a lot of the time. Oh, they don’t forget, they just don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, okay, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I mean, it is visually very impressive from a usability standpoint.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t love it. It wasn’t actively bad, but it was just a little bit too different for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my taste. If you haven’t actually participated in it, seen it, what have you, a friend of the show, Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Robles has a good video on it that we’ll put a link in the show notes for that. It’s good, it’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying. And certainly if I had a situation where I knew everyone involved was in the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ecosystem, this is where I would probably turn. But I think perhaps for me, the best thing to come from this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I learned about Partyful, which is a alternative to Evite, which I freaking hate. And thankfully I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost never have to do that, but still, I don’t like Evite at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to contrast this, like when can the, like all the same kind of philosophy, when
⏹️ ▶️ John can that, when is that a good fit? An example would be something like, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a great example, it’s an example that for my life is a good example, flight tracking. Flighty
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPhone is amazing. And it’s amazingness can be isolated to the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and still benefit you. Because yes, there’s like, oh, what if I want to share the flight with other people, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. But in the use case where, like, because parties are always sharing with everybody unless you’re having a party by yourself like Casey, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Events, events always involve multiple people. But flight tracking, sometimes in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say frequently, just involves one person, right? Or maybe two people, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not like a huge number of people. And so the goodness of flighty being confined
⏹️ ▶️ John to the iPhone, I’m assuming it doesn’t exist in other platforms being totally confined to the iPhone does not hurt that application
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re using it solo to deal with your flights, or a flight of one of your loved and you’re picking them
⏹️ ▶️ John up at the airport, you know what I mean? Like, then you can go whole hog, do whatever you want,
⏹️ ▶️ John require whatever proprietary platform stuff or whatever, because just me and my iPhone, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not like, I’m not foisting this on other people. If I was taking a family vacation and it was people
⏹️ ▶️ John in extended, 25 of us were going to Europe or something, I would not say, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John buy an iPhone and get flighty, because we’re all gonna share our flights together. And it’s like, that’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John much. Like for technology stuff, Have you trying to make other people do
⏹️ ▶️ John something so they can use the technology thing that you like because you think somehow this is gonna benefit everybody? I can tell you most
⏹️ ▶️ John people do not agree that that is going to benefit them. And to the extent they humor you, you should
⏹️ ▶️ John be thankful, but in general, it’s not a benefit. So yeah, I just, I think this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong approach. So it’s a good thing this Apple wither and die at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brutal. I mean, you’re not wrong, but brutal. Speaking of brutal, did you try it on the iPad yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just saw, I use it with Instagram, it’s great. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Zero for three on new apps on iPad. No iPad app for sports journal or invites as we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record this in February of 2025.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m so annoyed, continue to be annoyed that Instagram has no iPad app. Maybe I should just stop using
⏹️ ▶️ John Instagram, but that hasn’t happened yet. But anyway, it’s been how many years? But then you look at
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, and Apple not putting its own small apps. Like they push so
⏹️ ▶️ John hard. It’s like, make your app with this, use SwiftUI. You can deploy it on every platform and use the same
⏹️ ▶️ John code base for Mac, for iOS, for iPadOS, for Apple TV, it’s great. And then they come out with
⏹️ ▶️ John three apps in a row, Sports Journal and Invites that are like small apps. And I was like, no, of course there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about an Apple TV version of it, forget about a Mac version of it, there’s not even an iPad version of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not a good advertisement for the amazing cross-platform ability of their UI frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ John when they just like, yeah, no, these are just on the iPhone, that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s not great. It’s not great, Bob.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can’t be bothered to make its own apps be on the iPad. What kind of leg do they have to stand on to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, well, you’re not the second or third biggest company in the world, but you independent developers
⏹️ ▶️ John working by yourself, make sure you have a version of this for all of our platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, see also Vision Pro. I mean, most a large subset of Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro apps that are preinstalled, you know, that come with the OS are just iPad apps rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than Vision Pro apps. You know, it’s the same problem. It’s, I don’t know, snakes all the way down.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least Vision Pro, like, you know, if you make an iPhone app, making a Vision Pro, a good Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro version of that is much harder than making a good iPad version of an app. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Just, I mean, even if you don’t make a good iPad version, just make a version that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John require you to run the phone version and then zoom it to 2X. It was like, just minimal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, again, maybe there’s two interns doing this. I don’t know. Again, the app is well implemented. It is a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John app. It is a good app. they should release the source code as a W3C demo.
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking that, you stole it from me. It’s probably way more complicated than we think it is. Cause all real apps- Even better. All
⏹️ ▶️ John real apps are way more complicated and do weird stuff and they’re not gonna release it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t, but I think it would be an interesting case study.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we got the MacPaint source code now. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann fast
⏹️ ▶️ John forward that number of years and we’ll have the sports journal invites source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything you feel like is missing from it, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so even just within the world of Apple stuff, so forget about this, whereas you and your Apple using family,
⏹️ ▶️ John no worry about cross-platform stuff, you love the interface, you don’t care that it doesn’t, that it’s hard to find stuff or that it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John weird or whatever, you just love it, it’s great. Even then, this app doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do everything that it should because one of the most frequently requested things
⏹️ ▶️ John that people want when there’s some event is a place to talk about that event in
⏹️ ▶️ John real time-ish, a Slack channel or like a message group or whatever. And guess what? Apple has a messaging
⏹️ ▶️ John platform. It’s called Messages. There could be a group message thread that would auto add everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who accepts the invitation and you could discuss, hey, who’s bringing potato chips, who’s bringing this? But nope, the app doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. Now granted, it’s just 1.0, whatever. I think I understand, but it’s just like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to go one direction or the other. Either this is an app for Apple users for who use all Apple stuff and love Apple things and everyone’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple integrated or it’s cross-platform. And this is like half Apple integrated,
⏹️ ▶️ John but doesn’t even integrate with all the Apple stuff and doesn’t even have a way to do one of the most frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John requested things. I think more people wanna discuss who’s bringing potato chips in a message thread
⏹️ ▶️ John than want to make a playlist for your party.
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Hot Tub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Hey, parents, if you are listening with young ones nearby, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to talk about that news that’s been going around the Apple world recently. So maybe pause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the program if you have little ears.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, it’s not we’re going to be talking about an app that shows people in it that just happened to not be wearing anything. I don’t think we need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey than that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree. But in case you have sensitive and very young years nearby, just be aware. So So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what am I talking about? Yes, so according to AltStore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has approved their first porn app for the iPhone. And so reading from The Verge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first quote, Apple approved quote porn app for iPhone is rolling out in Europe via AltStore’s Pal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alternative to the iOS app marketplace. AltStore Pal developer Riley Tested says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Hotub, which describes itself as an ad-free adult content browser, has made it through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s notarization review for fraud, security threats, and functionality. And will be available for AltStore PAL users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the EU to download starting a couple of days ago. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AltStore had a post on threads, which we will link in the show notes. And there’s an image on there that says, introducing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hot Tub, the first Apple-approved porn app. Download now on AltStore PAL. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not happy about this at all. So Apple issued a statement to several different outlets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are deeply concerned about the safety risks that hardcore porn apps of this type create for EU users, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kids. This app and others like it will undermine consumer trust and confidence in our ecosystem that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have worked for more than a decade to make the best in the world. Contrary to the false statements made by the Marketplace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer, we certainly do not approve of this app and would never offer it in our app store. The truth is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we are required by the European Commission to allow it to be distributed by Marketplace operators like Altstore and Epic, who may not share
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our concerns for user safety. Sick burn. Riley tested again, reacted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a toot of his own. It reads as follows, my response to Apple’s statement on Hot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tub. There are two screenshots. The first of which is a post from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 9to5Mac. Riley has highlighted the following passage, contrary to the false statements made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the Marketplace developer, we certainly do not approve of this app. The second screenshot is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey App Store Connect saying, and I am quoting, The following app has been approved for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distribution. App name, Hot Tub Video Player. Riley or Alt Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broadly then had a later on response. That response reads,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is claiming we made false statements about the approval of Hot Tub. This is not true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All apps distributed with Alt Star PAL must be submitted to Apple for notarization. Unlike Mac OS, iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notarization involves a human review process where Apple employees manually review apps before they are either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote approved or quote rejected for distribution in Apple’s own words.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unfortunately, Apple has rejected several apps from our store in the past for dubious reasons. So the phrase Apple approved in our marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a reference to the fact that hot tub was approved not rejected by Apple for notarization. To be perfectly clear, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not endorsed hot tub in any way. However, they did approve it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s it. This is this is the stupid situation that Apple has gotten themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me just repeat what you just said because it’s important that Apple has gotten themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because they are the ones who made notarization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editorial for the EU. Again, we’ve gone over this before so I’ll be quick. What the notarization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process has been for years before this was a process on the Mac that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software was run through only automated checks and it was mainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look for like known malware signatures and then the main the main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing about notarization is that if an app was found to contain malware to be malware that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notarized Apple could then revoke that signature server-side and then all Macs would eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess get that revocation and not allow that not another binary to run. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was an automated process that did not involve Apple having human reviewers look at each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. They used the same word to describe a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process with the alternative app stores in the EU. They use that same word to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ostensibly do the same thing of like we’re just going to give it a cursory check to make sure it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t isn’t literal malware for security reasons. But then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started rejecting apps that were not malware like the VMAC emulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which they rejected on trademark grounds. Now I actually understand why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did that because trademarks need to be defended and if you don’t defend your trademark and if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evidence that you’re not defending your trademark somebody could try to get it invalidated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well you can defend when they say defending your trademark they mean like suing people which they still could have done while still
⏹️ ▶️ John allowing it through you know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? Oh yes of course but they could you know but if they decided that this is going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human review process on iOS because here’s the thing Apple hates that they have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow the EU like they hate it so much and Apple Apple is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good loser. Like they’re not, they’re a very sore loser when they lose an argument about something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate it. They cannot deal. And so they decided to, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, be Apple about it and, and have, you know, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexibility and try to be as weasel-y and prickly as possible to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make the alternative app stores fail as much as possible. And so they put themselves in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They injected themselves into this process that is ostensibly only for automated security checks everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, but they made it a human review. So now, anything that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually gets quote approved through notarization on the EU alternative app stores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, a human at Apple definitely did look at that and definitely did decide this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay. And then it is approved. That is very different from passing a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scan or being digitally signed. Those are very different things. That’s what notarization was. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is approval. Now, fewer of the rules are being enforced compared to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple official App Store, but it’s still a human approval. It didn’t need to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple injected themselves into that role because they couldn’t deal. So they put themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and now they have to bear the consequences of that. And those consequences include if they let something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through that infringes their trademarks, they could be held liable for that in a bad way. Or in the case of approving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a porn app, yeah, Apple did approve a porn app. They could have set up the system differently. They still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can. It’s not too late to change it, but they could have set the system up differently in a way that was more straightforward,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they refused to. They created this problem 100% themselves, and they deserve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the press that it generates.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have to defend their trademark in this thing, as they say in their statement here. The truth is we are required by a European
⏹️ ▶️ John commission to allow it to be distributed by marketplace operators like Old Star, right? So there’s like, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s rich for Apple saying suddenly now they care about what the European commission allows, requires them to do by law. They just ignore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, if that’s required by law, then what happened to VMAC? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. Like when it’s something they want to do, oh, we just have to follow the law. But if something you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to do, it’s like law schmaw. But anyway, court wise, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely allow things that infringe their copyright through and then deal with it the way you deal with all copyright, which is you
⏹️ ▶️ John sue the people out of existence, you send them a cease and desist, you bring them to court. Like that’s defending your trademark. You don’t need to,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you have introduced yourself as a human element, allowing that thing to go through, you can say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, but we have to do this because the European commission, as we read many shows ago, says, here’s what you can
⏹️ ▶️ John stop apps for. And intellectual property is not one of the things. So they’re saying, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the law in the EU. We are following the EU law. no court is going to say, well, now you didn’t defend your trademark,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t own Mac anymore. Like they’re fine. That is not an excuse for them doing this. They can, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John have 100% human review of every single thing that goes to the EU app store, let sail through a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff that infringes their own copyright and no court is going to say, Oh, you didn’t defend your copyright because the law is
⏹️ ▶️ John clear on this. But anyway, yeah, they’re just, they’re just trying to have it both ways. And this argument is so ridiculous because anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who is a speaker of the English language understands the difference between we
⏹️ ▶️ John approve of this as in philosophically we think this is the right thing to do versus, but we have approved
⏹️ ▶️ John this, which means there is a process and we can reject or approve. Those are two different things. Every Apple knows there are
⏹️ ▶️ John different things. Altstar knows there are different things. They’re just talking past each other, and it’s very silly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, maybe, you know, I think the Altstar people might get sued because of like the laws
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can’t make it in an advertisement. You can’t make it look like some company endorses something when they don’t. Because despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the silly difference, saying the first Apple approved porn app, That is probably going to not win
⏹️ ▶️ John in court if Apple decides to fight them on that because in those two definitions of approved,
⏹️ ▶️ John a casual person looking at this ad would absolutely think that they’re using the other definition, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple philosophically thinks this is appropriate. They would not say, oh, it’s so clear that this is part of a
⏹️ ▶️ John process that Apple has to do for the EU. Like, so this ad by Alt Store is probably extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John ill-advised. Doing anything to anger Apple around this
⏹️ ▶️ John is ill-advised because Apple has a lot of money and they’re mean. As Jason wrote in a
⏹️ ▶️ John good story that we’ll link in the show, it’s Alt Store Pokes the Bear. Doing anything to
⏹️ ▶️ John antagonize Apple seems like not a great idea unless you’re trying to pull an epic
⏹️ ▶️ John and go like, we’re gonna antagonize them because we know they will crush us and then when they crush us, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, see, look, Apple’s crushing us. I don’t know, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John picking a silly fight here, but if they want to be the standard bearer for Apple’s hypocrisy when it comes to
⏹️ ▶️ John following EU laws and dealing with the old store, more power to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is not even getting to the whole thing of like, Apple’s statement makes it seem like
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of like sex-based thing we would never allow to run in the App Store. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple humans don’t have sex. We don’t even know about sex, right? Versus the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual harms involved in pornography. It is a complicated issue, but like it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John as a given in all these things, sort of the Disney-ification of like, of course Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would never do or say such a thing and no one at Apple has ever had sex or seen anyone else have sex or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. And it’s very kind of like prudish and silly. On the flip side though, do you want your store
⏹️ ▶️ John to be filled with hardcore porn apps and every time you open up the App Store app on your phone, it’s just, you know, hardcore pornography
⏹️ ▶️ John blinking in your face. No, you don’t want that either, right? So there actually is some nuances issue that neither side of this is
⏹️ ▶️ John really willing to tackle. They’re not even willing to deal with the thing they
⏹️ ▶️ John both understand, which is the two different contexts for the word approved in here. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see this ending well for anybody. It’s already not ending well for Apple because they’re just making themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John look stupid and even more hypocritical. And I’m not sure it’s gonna end well for
⏹️ ▶️ John Alt Store either. I know they have Epic backing them, the big money bags Epic helping them not
⏹️ ▶️ John have to pay the core technology fee or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John just this is, this is another mess. It’s entertaining to see people poking at each other
⏹️ ▶️ John like this, but like Jason says, don’t poke the bear. Like, I wish I could come up with an animal
⏹️ ▶️ John analogy that was more appropriate. Maybe if you were a cheese mite, I don’t know, people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what cheese mites are. Cheese
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann mites are
⏹️ ▶️ John very, maybe you’re one of those mites that lives in your eyelashes. No, people don’t want to think about that. There are mites in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann your eyelashes.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann these are terrible examples. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John getting worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John like a
⏹️ ▶️ John microscopic thing, like a tiny thing that’s so small you can’t see with the naked
⏹️ ▶️ John eye, versus the sun. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All Star versus
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of how much money they both have to wage punitive lawsuits.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s not a stellar look for anyone involved. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think that this would have been so much more cut and dry if, as Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had started, or had said when we first started talking about it, if Apple didn’t use notarization
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for editorializing and just wielding it as a weapon. When
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we saw that notarization was going to be involved with the DMA, not the DMA,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever this stuff is called, when we saw that they were going to use notarization, all of us thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, yeah, that should be fine. It may not be fine, but it should be fine. It’s been fine on the Mac, it shouldn’t be a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal. They’re just gonna make sure it’s not actively hurting your device, And then it should go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straight, everything should go straight on through, right? Right? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it quickly became obvious that no, since Apple didn’t have any other weapons to use, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used notarization. And it’s just, I didn’t like it then, I don’t like it now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly, they are reaping what they sowed. And I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Apple on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, they’ve made this bed, now they get to sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. They deserve no sympathy because there were so many easily avoidable problems here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they chose not to avoid them. So this is the kind of thing, this is the kind of messiness that their approach is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to keep creating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’m not sure Apple even sees this as messiness, because this is an opportunity for them to, as Gerber
⏹️ ▶️ John was pointing out, to gloat and say, see, this is what we told you would happen. See, if you let other people sell things, someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to sell a porn app. I told you it would happen. Look, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann a porn
⏹️ ▶️ John app. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Getting into all the things like, well, how many different ways you can get porn on your phone through web apps or through the Reddit
⏹️ ▶️ John app or whatever. And it’s just, the world is a complicated place. But the hypocrisy is clear to anyone looking.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like Apple feels like this is a PR win for them because they’re like, surely everyone hates porn just like we do.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann saying, see,
⏹️ ▶️ John now you see the violence inherent in the system, right? Like these people, we let the European Union let them do things and now they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John putting out porn apps. Now the world’s gonna end because prior to this, no one could get porn, but now they’ll be able to.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s correct. This is, yeah. I wanna read from Jason’s article because this is a good little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple claims that their hands are tied by the European Commission. And yet the company has used its lever before to protect
⏹️ ▶️ John users from, checking my notes here, emulators are very old Macs models. Seems
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann dangerous. So which is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is notarization a tool that Apple can use to bypass all of European regulations of whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple feels like it’s preventing users from running Mac paint on an iPad? Or is it something out of Apple’s hands? If
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple chose to exercise notarization powers to kill the UTM and mini V-Mac emulators,
⏹️ ▶️ John well then let Hot Tub through. Doesn’t Altstar have a point? It’s hard for Apple to argue its hands
⏹️ ▶️ John are tied if it’s used those hands in the recent past. And then he says, parenthetically, I’ve contacted Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John PR representatives and asked if they can explain the disparity in policies to me, and I’ll update the stories if they reply.
⏹️ ▶️ John Last time I checked, they hadn’t replied, but not sure what their response is. But yeah, he gets right to the heart
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. Like, I think Apple thinks that this is like a triumph for them, and really just
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone who cares about this issue at all looks at it and says, This is not a good look for you, Apple.
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#askatp: Why cellular Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Matthew Fenslow writes, I recently got an ATP membership,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you, atp.fm. And have been going back through past episodes to listen to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bonus content. One recurring theme is that Marco and Casey’s number one wish for Mac is cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really surprised by this. I travel for work both domestically and internationally frequently and work outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my office several days a week. These days I rarely find it hard to access decent Wi-Fi and on the rare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasion I do, I just fall back to phone tethering, which works much better than a few years ago. Most of my fellow road warriors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the same. My understanding is that cellular Windows laptops are not super popular. I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what are the use cases that make the guys so desirous of cellular Macs, especially since they don’t seem to be big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey travelers. Is there something specific for being a software developer? This is one of those things that John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rightfully brings up. Oh, we need to answer this question every year. And I say that I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound like I’m complaining. I’m not trying to. It seems that we’re getting enough new listeners that people either forget,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like me, or I’ve never heard the answer before. And so let’s cover it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, for me, I want to have a Mac that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know can, you know, asterisk, dagger, double dagger, can always get on the internet. It doesn’t need anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t need to wait for tethering. Don’t need to worry about tethering. Don’t need to destroy the battery of two devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simultaneously. Only the one. It can always get online. Again, if you’re a new plane
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever, it doesn’t, you know what I’m saying. And a great example of this is, I would love to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to use my Mac in the car easily and whenever I want. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can do that. Yes, I certainly could do that. And I could tether. But it’s so nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my cellular iPad, if I have it in the car, and I’m talking about as a passenger, in case that wasn’t clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I’m a passenger in the car, you know what I do to get on the internet on my iPad? I open my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad. That’s what I do, because it’s already on the internet, because it has a cellular connection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, 100% there are ways around this. And to be fair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve gotten far less egregious over the years. You can have your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connect to your phone and it will magically just start personal hotspot on your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually. Often but not always. And yes, Wi-Fi does exist in a lot of places,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but A, I don’t particularly trust most Wi-Fi that isn’t my own and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I have some sort of VPN, in my case, past Ponser, Tailscale. But even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still, oftentimes, the Wi-Fi is not stellar. In fact, I go to places where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Wi-Fi is actually not as robust as my Verizon cellular connection. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s kind of an indictment of the places that I sometimes go, but it is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, for me, I want to be able to open my laptop and immediately be on the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I can’t be on the internet, immediately, then it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoyance. And it’s not so much of an annoyance that, you know, I can’t get my work done or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I had my druthers, I would 1,000% spend the extra 130 or, in all likelihood, because it’s a Mac, $260 in order to get a cellular modem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, Marco, tell me where I’m wrong or what did I leave out? Marc
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thiessen 0 parts of what you just said are wrong. Steven Connelly Go team. So here’s some other considerations that I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think what matters a lot is like when you open your laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re almost always using it in places that have known wifi networks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve got no problem. If you’re taking your laptop from home and you put it in a bag and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to work and you open it up and in both cases you’re on the wifi, then I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why you don’t think cellular is that necessary. And for most people, that is their use pattern. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it. You go to your coffee shop, you open it up, you’re on their Wi-Fi already because you’ve been there before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For most people, that is a totally fine use case and so they wouldn’t want to spend 50, 60
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks a month on a data plan for their laptop or whatever it would be because they don’t need it that often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But some people need it a lot. I take the train a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot. Trains don’t usually have Wi-Fi, at least New York
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they do, at least here in the States, they are so overloaded because it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hundreds of people on like a single cellular modem and it’s just garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Also your beloved park bench that you like to work at. There’s probably no wifi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, right? Cause it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann outdoors. Correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there are places where if you frequently want to use a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a place that is away from good wifi coverage or any wifi coverage, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this need comes up a lot more. I think one of the reasons it came up a lot for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business laptops in the early aughts and mid-aughts, like you see it as an option on ThinkPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff, is because business people who use laptops are often business travelers, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business travelers might be going to all different, they might be going to a new hotel every week or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new city or a new airport or whatever, and sometimes you don’t wanna, every one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wifi networks that you join by going through their dumb captive portal where you gotta like type in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your room number and your last name, you are exfiltrating personal data every time you do that. You are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco granting yet another company access to whatever data they can figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out about you by your internet traffic and everything else. And yeah, VPNs can help with some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but it’s an annoyance, it’s a privacy exfiltration, and then the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to me is when I open my laptop, everything’s out of date. All the data’s out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of date. Oh, good point. And when you’re opening a laptop and you’re connecting to Wi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both Wi-Fi itself is very fast typically, or can be, and also the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop instantly connects to the Wi-Fi. You don’t even, when you open up your laptop after going from your home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your work or your coffee shop, you don’t even notice it connecting most of the time. It’s just on. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast to reconnect to Wi-Fi and everything loads so quickly that when things like pop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in here and there, you barely even have a chance to notice it. That is not the experience using tethering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for cellular. Using tethering for cellular, you have to open the laptop up. The laptop has to realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it can’t find any wifi networks. Then, if you’re lucky, it will prompt you with a notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing on the corner saying, do you want to connect to Marco’s iPhone? And there is, as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way to make it automatically always connect to your tethering on your phone when you can’t find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wifi. As far as I can tell, there is no setting. And I looked, when we last talked about this a couple of weeks ago, I looked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I dug through the support articles. There doesn’t seem to, there’s a setting that kind of sounds like it does this, but it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what is going on, but as far as I can tell, there is no such setting to say, always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect to my phone for tethering when you don’t see a known Wi-Fi network. So the result is, when you’re in these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situations and you have a laptop and you open it up, the result is you’re just looking at out of date
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data and you’ll be looking at it for probably at least 20 to 30 seconds, at least.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s when you have good coverage and good speeds and everything. So it’s just, it’s this huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paper cut. Every time you open your laptop on a train or whatever, you wanna get work done, and you just have to wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and wait, and wait. Do you wanna use your connection? Yes, tap join, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait. Maybe it’ll join, maybe it’ll work. Sometimes it’ll say refuse connection, sorry, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you gotta try it again. And then once it does connect, you gotta wait, and you gotta wait, and then stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might then start coming in. And that whole time you’re looking at outdated data, and maybe you like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally hit something, hit a keystroke in a note or move an email and then you create a merge conflict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it does finally load. There’s so many paper cuts about that experience. So if you are somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who that doesn’t happen too very often because you’re almost always using your laptop on non-WiFi networks, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, you don’t need this. And that’s why most people don’t need this. But some of us do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for the few of us that would use this frequently, the experience of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a connection built in, like you have on your phone and every iPad ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The experience of having that option versus having to tether to your phone is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night and day. Tethering to your phone feels like dial up. It feels like, okay, I’ve opened the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer up, but it’s not on the internet, of course. I have to tell the computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to the internet, connect to the internet, log on. You have to say, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wait and you wait. And then maybe if you’re lucky, welcome,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve got mail. Like it takes a while. And it’s such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back in time experience. And with all of our amazing technology that we have these days, it feels ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have that experience with the latest Apple laptops, the latest iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have tethering. It’s the service that we pay for. Like we’re allowed to do that. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing a trick. This is a built in feature. It just is really half-assed. and the experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of using it is not amazing. What would be much more amazing, oh, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re also draining your phone battery doing this, by the way. So, like, usually when I’m on the train doing this, if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking the train to the city, usually I will have to then plug my phone in to a battery pack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the laptop with a cable just to keep the phone topped up so I don’t arrive at the city with a phone at 60%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, like, it’s just, it’s, everything about it is a compromise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that compromise is fine for people who hardly ever need it, who it’s just an occasional need. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s a regular need, it sucks. And there are so many better ways to do this. So what would be great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I hope we get this someday, we’ll pray to the spirit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Mark Gurman or whatever, hopefully we can have built-in cell modems in laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How would this work? The same way it works on your iPhone and your iPad. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just always be connected. And every so often in the background,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could wake itself up while keeping the screen off and download data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There have been features to do this in macOS for a very long time, just not over cellular. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what has to happen. There are downsides to this. The laptop would be more expensive. You’d have to buy a data plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you leave cellular on and you leave the laptop unplugged for a week, it will probably drain itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s all a trade-off that many of us would make because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco utility of opening that laptop and having it just be on the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone is just on. Your phone is online. When you pull out of your pocket and wake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up, it’s online already. You don’t have to tell it, go online and update your data. It’s already online.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a few minutes ago, it did update its data. So it’s already there. Such a different experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why can’t the Mac do that? And there are no good reasons left. So please,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully, Apple, if you can forgive me for all my comments earlier about your stupid notarization thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please, for the love of God, Please give me a cellular laptop. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even travel that much, but having used a cellular iPad while traveling, that’s all it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John to convince you. It sounds academic. It sounds like, oh, well, whatever. I’m sure it’s better. But does
⏹️ ▶️ John it really make a difference? If you just use a cellular iPad when you’re on the go, once you get used to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to go back to the other way, because it’s just a bit. And the phone doesn’t convince
⏹️ ▶️ John me. It’s like, well, of course, phones are always like that. But computer things, like, but a cellular iPad is such a great like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not really a phone, it’s big and you’re doing, maybe you have a keyboard connected to it or whatever, and you look at it and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I see why tethering sucks now, because I don’t have to think about it at all with my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like my phone, it’s always on. And once you experience that, or I mean, maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worse on PC laptops. Some people say that, hey, if PC laptops are cellular, it’s not good. But I can tell you cellular
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad works as well as it does on the phone. And if you use a cellular
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad where you’re actually using the cellular part of it, it is a pretty strong convincer that you would
⏹️ ▶️ John want this on a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and by the way, like the argument that it’s not very good on PC laptops, nothing is very good on PC laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s not a valid argument.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No argument here. Yeah, I mean, it’s just, I would love it. I would absolutely love it. I would order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, you know, immediately if possible. I would, you know, if I had just bought a MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I did what, two years ago? It’s an, I have an M3. So I think it was two years ago. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Even if I’ve just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought one, I would immediately sell that to somebody or trade it in and buy another if I could suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a cellular on it. But that’s just me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, like, they already have a computer named MacBook Air. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air prefix used to mean cellular in lots of different products, like, because you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waves over the air for your connectivity. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it’s a perfect name for a cellular laptop. Come on!
#askatp: iCloud on work Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stephen Swift writes, on episode 620, mentioned issues when users do iPhone mirroring on corporate computers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which made me wonder, how are people doing that? Are they signing in with their personal iCloud accounts and their corporate Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve long wanted to take advantage of iPad Sidecar or iPhone mirroring, but my Mac is a corporate machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it safe to log in with my personal iCloud account on my work Mac if I don’t want my employer to have access to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal data, my employer doesn’t want their IP on my personal devices? Do you know of any workarounds to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use iPad Sidecar, Universal Control or iPhone Mirror across iCloud accounts. I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple would set up some authorization mechanism that didn’t rely on devices signed into the same account.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do agree with Steven there. Like, some sort of alternative auth would be nice, although I understand why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple does it the way they do. For me, my last couple of jobby jobs, they were small firms that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I trusted, which, yes, everyone’s starting to fire up their email clients and tell me why I should never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trust my employer. And that’s true. In the most recent one, the IT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guy was a really good friend of mine, so I really, really trusted him. But if I was working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at traditional corporate America where I’m one cog in a machine that’s 30,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cogs big or whatever, I would definitely feel very differently about it. Another thing to consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that, and I don’t know how long this has been true, and it’s definitely true on the iPhone, and I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true on the Mac, if your device is employer-owned, They can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely, without your permission, if they set it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to allow this, they can wipe that machine and you have nothing you can do about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All your data is just gone. And I get why that is. Again, I don’t really think that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily unreasonable. But again, that would give me pause to log into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything personal on it. So I don’t know what I would say. And I’m curious, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the one with the most recent corporate experience and corporate experience with a much bigger corporation than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was used to. How did you handle this? It was it was I nuts to do this when I was in my little
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, to answer your master’s question, are people signing in with their personal Apple IDs at work? Yes, they are. People do that all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. It’s not a good idea. You shouldn’t do it. But people do it because it’s convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a good idea for so many reasons. Casey just outlined some of them. There are many more reasons to probably even against your
⏹️ ▶️ John company’s policy if you’re at a big company, but people want their and they want access
⏹️ ▶️ John to their stuff. And so they do this and it’s not a good idea. They might do it to get access to
⏹️ ▶️ John universal control or sidecar or whatever. And it is kind of annoying that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John handling of, I keep saying Apple IDs, it’s Apple account now. Apple’s handling of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John accounts. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Is so primitive. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple accounts slash Apple IDs are not new. They’ve been around for, I believe, decades at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple decades probably, and yet the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with them in any reasonable fashion is just so limited. Can you merge
⏹️ ▶️ John two Apple accounts? Can you transfer things from one Apple account to another? Can you be signed into
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple Apple accounts at a time? And you may be saying, well, these are complications. They should never do that, it’s too complicated. No, you don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John that the first year or the fifth year or the 10th year, but the 25th year,
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you should have the ability to merge Apple IDs, right? Or maybe you should have the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John authenticate with some of your services without an Apple ID. Like in some respects they do, like I believe they still
⏹️ ▶️ John support VPN with password instead of like screen sharing through Apple ID stuff. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John love the simplifying assumption of everything’s on the same Apple ID. It drives me bananas here just within
⏹️ ▶️ John this room, within this physical room, I’ve complained about this before, trying to airdrop
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I walk over to my wife’s computer and I wanna airdrop something. It’s like, oh, I can’t airdrop it from my phone because she’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on her account on her computer and I’m on my account on my thing. And I try to airdrop it and for some reason it doesn’t see her or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just like, I gotta be logged into this, my account to get the thing. It’s just, that’s why apps like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw this go by recently. I forget who originally suggested this, somebody with Gruber posted about it. Like essentially an
⏹️ ▶️ John app that does what airdrop does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was underscore that brought it up then Gruber picked it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go. But it’s not Apple. It is a thing that says, we don’t care what your Apple ID is.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have our own system for doing it. Airdrop is like, oh, isn’t Airdrop great? It’s like, yeah, sure. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you live in a world where every one of your devices is signed into your Apple ID, it’s great. But I don’t live in that world.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it sucks. And I know you’re supposed to, it shouldn’t be, you don’t have to be on the same by Apple ID to Airdrop, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you should just, they’re in your contacts and it should work. Oh, should, yeah, it should work, but it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why it doesn’t, it just doesn’t. And it drives me insane. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is another example of that. I wanna use this cool feature, that, you know, universal controller sidecar, or
⏹️ ▶️ John these features that you think of these as like, the Mac has this feature, the iPad has this feature. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, this is all threaded through Apple IDs. And if you’re not on the same Apple ID and all of these devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, nope, sorry, you don’t get to use this. And I understand it’s a simplifying assumption for their implementation,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like Apple should set the bar a little bit higher for itself and say, in version
⏹️ ▶️ John two, in version three, in version 17, maybe think about the complication of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people having different accounts. Even so simple as like a feedback that I filed, I think a couple of years ago, like
⏹️ ▶️ John my complication of my difficulty trying to do simple file sharing in the Finder between
⏹️ ▶️ John two computers that are, you know, seven feet from each other. But oh no, I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John sign into my wife’s computer where I do have an account, but I wanna sign in with her account.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I want to have like an alias that will correctly pull the password for her account that’s in my key
⏹️ ▶️ John chain from, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. You’re gonna type in that password every time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will not remember it. there’s a checkbox that says put this into the keychain, but that checkbox does nothing because
⏹️ ▶️ John every time you want to open that alias or double click that thing or mount that thing or whatever, it’s going to reprompt you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I filed the bug out there like, oh, you should just leave the username out of the SMB URL you’re connecting
⏹️ ▶️ John to and then it will pull from the keychain. It’s like, yeah, it’ll pull my password on my account from the keychain, but I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John log into her account. Like they can’t get it through their, the idea of like, why in the world would you log into someone
⏹️ ▶️ John else’s account on their Mac when you mount that share? And it’s like, because I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco put like- I want to go to a good
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to put my 1099s into her tax folder. That’s what I want to do, right? It’s in her account.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s in her documents folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, these are complications. These are things you don’t do when you first
⏹️ ▶️ John roll stuff out but you should eventually get to them and Apple just never gets to them. And so for this
⏹️ ▶️ John situation, I don’t specifically know. I think, what’s the Sidecar one? There is some app that like
⏹️ ▶️ John Sidecar was inspired by that I can no longer remember the name of that you might be able to try that I think is not tied to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, they sold little dongles. What was, I forget the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name. Oh God, bless you. Chat room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is in a second. Luma
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Fusion, something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe that is, right? And universal control, there are, before universal control,
⏹️ ▶️ John there were a bunch of things from like the Linux world that also worked on Mac that did something similar, let you like
⏹️ ▶️ John move your pointer from one machine to the other. None of those things, with the exception of maybe the, that
⏹️ ▶️ John sidecar alternative, like none of those old things, especially like the cursor control stuff for the KVM things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have in theory, the polish that the Apple stuff supposedly has when everything is perfect and just right in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display. Thank you long form in the chat,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry. Luna display, there we go. We’ll try to find a link for that. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have the polish that Apple stuff does in the best case, but a lot of times as people, as Understore was discovering
⏹️ ▶️ John and Grubber was discovering with like the thing that does airdrop, but does it in a way that actually always works reliably,
⏹️ ▶️ John you realize how finicky airdrop is when you get a third party app with no specific integration
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to manually launch, but you know what, it just works every time. That kind of reliability has been absent
⏹️ ▶️ John from a lot of these services. Someone was just talking in another one of my slacks about the
⏹️ ▶️ John ongoing inability of screen time to track the time that you spend on your devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that it’s supposed to do, as Steve Jobs would say, well, why the F doesn’t it do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I know what it’s supposed to do, But in practice, if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at your screen time stats on all your different devices, A, they never agree with each other, and B, none of them match
⏹️ ▶️ John anything having to do with reality. Like, they might as well just be random numbers and bar charts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and forget about like, across like, oh, well, let me see what my screen times my kids have been using. I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you that never matched reality or across multiple devices either. Like, I think screen time is just a random
⏹️ ▶️ John number generator. It’s just a bunch of random numbers and a bunch of bar charts based on those random numbers because
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody who has ever tried to look at it and glean information and match it up with their experience of what they actually did with their
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, wait a second, A, these numbers don’t match what I did, and B, they don’t even add up.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t make any sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if it would say you had like 36 hours of screen time during a single day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like stuff like that, like you can roll out the feature and advertise it and put a name on it and have a screen on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but like if it doesn’t actually work, people just start ignoring it and it just becomes noise.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what I think about the invite apps too. It’s like, it’s good for Apple to have a first party app in its ecosystem to let people do
⏹️ ▶️ John invitations, it’s bad for them to roll one out and then lose interest in it. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, Steven, we couldn’t help you more other than the chat room remembering Luna Display. There are third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you can probably do some of this stuff in. I do not suggest signing in with your
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID on your work computer. I know you want to, everybody wants to, don’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, actually, yeah, the chat room, who’s this Chris Fonaso, also brings up Synergy, which I used to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John ages ago. There you go, that’s the one
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking of. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John predates universal control?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is, you know, using the same keyboard and mouse across multiple different devices. And they can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be different platforms, all or all. It works pretty well the last time I tried it, which again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hasn’t been for years. But that’s another option if you wanted to do something that isn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as built in and seamless as universal control.
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t go to an iPad though, right? Cause you probably, I’m assuming you can’t even run Synergy on an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, that might be true actually. It was, I think I only had used it with like full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Wild Grain, and Delete.me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm. Join one of the many perks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of membership besides our exclusive content and other fun stuff is ATP overtime. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a bonus topic every week. This week on overtime, we’re going to be doing some more Sonos discussion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a article that came out, I think this morning or yesterday about Sonos and and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code named Pinewood Video Player. It sounds like it might be a high-end competitor for the Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that sounds really interesting. So we’re gonna talk about that in overtime this week. You can join us at https://www.hp.fm.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hear that and everything else membership gives you. Thank you so much and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann didn’t mean to Accidental, check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long
Happy Reprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am happy for more than one reason tonight. In part, I am happy because I had the barbecue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brisket earlier and it was delicious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you’re here talking to your two best friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, definitely that. Yes. No, that’s true. Thank you. So three reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. The third reason is that I spent this past weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wiring the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is our first restaurant update, if I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is. importantly unwiring the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is, you know, it’s a small bar restaurant that is, you know, on Fire Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything on Fire Island is kind of, you know, slapdash, you know, because you can’t always get supplies and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, you kind of just got to deal with what you have and everything is like small and old. The environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is highly corrosive, like the air is salty from being near the ocean and so it like nothing lasts, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there and it’s a very, it’s a very hostile environment for electronics and wires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. This restaurant also sometimes like on weekend nights will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DJs come in and like plug into the sound system and really get it bumping lit for late night bar business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got in there and the DJ says the music system in general you know there’s there’s like regular speakers for playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music during you know regular you know dining hours like you know small speakers and then there’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big DJ speakers and and and I get in there and I’m looking at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mess of wires oh and of course over time the restaurant has had various point-of-sale systems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so there’s like you know various network wires running around every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network wire I see is like the thinnest of thin cat 5e cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the ends are like a little bit pulling out of the connectors and like a little bit fraying and I’m like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s not amazing and in the audio cables are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive like there’s a thick bundle of cables running throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire like half like running along the ceiling for half the restaurant because like that’s where the DJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables plug in from across the way but then you know over time some cable would flake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out or get static or you know just the connectors would rust or whatever or it would get crushed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so the cable would kind of stop working so they would just run another one but But because of the rule of audio systems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like once it worked on touch it, nobody ever removed the old wires. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I have inherited here is just an absolute mess of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of wires everywhere. Almost all of them what I would consider legacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wires. And there is a security camera system. There are 16 cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an old coax system. Which means there are 16 wires. Oh my.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s one for each camera and they all go to like the main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box, like the DVR thing that records them. And so there are these huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wire bundles, like just over time, this has been there for like 40 years and over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when stuff breaks in a restaurant, you don’t have a ton of time to like, let me look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Amazon and find the best option and, and order it and wait for it to arrive on the island, which could be a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. He’s like, no, if something breaks in the middle of service, you kind of slapdash fix it however
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you possibly can because you don’t have time. Like, so I get here. I had the DJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who’s been there, he’s a friend of mine, he’s been DJing there for like 20 years. I had him come and like explain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system to me. It’s a rack, there’s fortunately, you know, like a standard equipment rack, but it was full of DJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gear. There’s like, you know, a little mixer and some compressor and a limiter and a bunch of big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DJ speaker amps. And the DJ comes, explains the system to me, And he’s like, well, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. He’s like, but you gotta be careful because this is your business, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your home. And if it’s your home, you’d be tempted to like buy all new stuff. And I’m like, yeah, that sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. He’s like, but here, you gotta be careful with the business. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just do that because you’ll eat into all your profit and you won’t make any money. And I was like, that’s good, thank you. I’ll try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have that self-control, thank you. And he’s like, all right, so you’re gonna be tempted to tear all this stuff out, but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. I’m like, all right, all right. So over the next half hour, he’s walking me through the system. He’s like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s what these speakers do. I would suggest replacing this subwoofer here. You should move this if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can. This wire, I strung this up 15 years ago for a temporary thing. We don’t need it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That one doesn’t work anymore. That one doesn’t work anymore. Within a half hour, he was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what? Replace it all. Cut it, just tear it all. Get all new stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace it all. So anyway, some of the process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of replacing some of it, not all of it. This past weekend was when I decided let me tackle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network wiring and any wires that are currently not in use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wanted to rewire, I wanted to run all new Cat6a and Cat6 wiring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, all new throughout the place. Get rid of all of the many old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wires that are not in use. There’s like old phone wires that aren’t in use anymore. There’s old coaxial cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wires that aren’t in use anymore. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many. I filled a garbage can, like a restaurant, I filled a restaurant garbage can with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wires that I had pulled out of the walls and down from the zip ties and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I must have cut 200 zip ties to take the wires down and replace them over the course of the weekend. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me tell you, as a nerd, this was the most satisfying thing I think I’ve ever done. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like deleting code, but in real life. Like just being able to take down like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old crappy or obsolete or unused cables and replace huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wire bundles with like one new wire that’s the right length and high quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it just work. Oh, what a pleasure this has been. I’m having so much fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, and I even, this is. So there there’s this one, there’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable run that runs from where the TV system starts like behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bar. and then the whole bunch of stuff runs like around the side of the restaurant to where the DJs plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and where there’s another TV on the other side. And there’s this big thick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bundle of like nine cables that goes across that. And I think I have a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convert those nine cables to zero cables. Like everywhere else I’m getting reductions, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this I think I’m gonna remove this entire thing. I’ve known for a while, and this is gonna get everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing in, I’ve known for a while there’s a system called Dante for audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that basically routes audio signals over your network. So Dante
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapters have like, you know, XLR plugs on one end and a network hole on the other. And then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run this software that’s like Dante controller software on a computer somewhere. And that you can like route things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across the network. And all this time, I thought, like I had heard about Dante
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio systems and I thought it was just for like big, like professional mixers installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in venues and stuff. But it turns out, I think, I mean, I’m gonna find out in a couple days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It turns out that like you can just get like a $200 adapter and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run the apparently free software on a computer and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that means I can run the audio signals from the DJ area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the network to the speaker amps and the mixer that are like on the other side of the restaurant. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now there are like seven XLR cables that are that are snaked all over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the restaurant and I think I can run that over the network which will mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there will be zero cables in a huge area where there used to be a lot because I can just like have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network drop down from the ceiling for that. So I am having so much fun with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like deleting wires and deleting old like you know brackets and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mounts and you know running of course you know PoE powered as much as possible so I’m getting getting rid of power adapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of places too. This is glorious. I know running a restaurant’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be really hard, but this is like, I can do this part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is my comfort zone. The rest of it, yeah, but also the rest of it I have, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four people running this restaurant. There’s me, Tiff, manager, and assistant manager. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four people who can do the day-to-day operations. But I can do the wiring, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good at wires. So I’m just, I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy doing this stuff so far. And it’s like, I just figured out the Dante thing like yesterday, so I’m like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God, now I can go back there and like delete five more wires and especially like the five of the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wires. And so I’m gonna play with this stuff and see how it goes. But as like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an area of tech, like I play with a lot of tech for myself and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of it I have to like use for quote my work. You know, like when I get a microphone or sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gear to do the podcasting, like that’s, I’m doing that for my work, right? But for the most part, I mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t apply tech to many applications besides tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its own sake, or recording podcasts, or programming. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I have this opportunity now, that I have an opportunity to apply tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually use it for like useful work that is not one of those areas that I’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been doing, it’s actually, it’s very fulfilling. It’s like, oh, I can fix this. Like, they’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complained that the wifi coverage in the restaurant was terrible because the way it’s arranged, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the kitchen on one side, the dining room on the other, and between the kitchen and dining room are giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walk-in freezers and fridges, which are giant metal boxes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s almost no way to cover the entire area with one or even two access points.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, they’ve been struggling because they weren’t nerds like me and they would just get whatever the POS vendor would give them like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some weird Cisco Meraki thing. And they, you know, it was never well placed because they’re not experts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in placing them and they would never had enough of them. So I get in there and I install a Ubiquiti system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank God, thank Ubiquiti. Like it is so nice and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so easy and relatively inexpensive compared to other professional quality gear. Like, and I can put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an AP wherever I want and I can run these network drops and I can have like, you know, these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco POE switches to power everything with like the one UPS and the rack that’s powering all my APs and keeping them up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s so much fun doing this part. I know the rest of it’s gonna be less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun in different ways, but this part is really fricking fun and I’m really enjoying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s awesome. No, I’m very excited. And I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see photos, even if you can’t show them publicly, sorry everyone. I would love to see photos of everything once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s all installed. What’s your timetable? When does the restaurant open for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We basically have like about a month before like a soft open. It’s a soft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open for St. Patrick’s Day and then a full open in late April.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I didn’t realize it was for my birthday. That’s very kind of you. I didn’t. Am I coming up for that? Are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so, but thank you for offering. Please make sure you have plenty of green beer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s super fun and super awesome. And you know, it is, you said it just a moment ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s so true. So much of what I do with my computer and with my home assistant tinkering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just to scratch an itch and just to give my, you know, give myself an outlet for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my nervous energy. But it is just deeply satisfying when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can use your skills, which you’ve either honed professionally or because of, you know, your, your own hobbies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what have you to actually improve something or someone’s life. And it is such a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey satisfying thing. And we nerds, I would argue we don’t get it as often as we should,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s so great to be able to have that moment. So I’m having a lot of fun living vicariously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through you, at least for this part. Once the summer rolls around, I’m not so sure I want to live vicariously through you anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for now it’s very fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m even finding other areas, like, I mean, you know, it turns out I have opinions about restaurants because I go to restaurants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m finding other areas that I’m able to like, you know, provide some useful feedback or a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea here and there. You know, like earlier today, I had to replace two coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machines. I have like a little espresso, like an espresso kind of pod maker for, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the cocktails like, you know, espresso martinis, some cocktails use espresso. So I had to replace that and I had to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new, one of those like big bun commercial, you know, coffee brewers for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back for the, mostly for staff. And like I knew, because the old one’s broken,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the manager quote, wants to throw it in the bay. So I said, all right, you can throw the old one in the bag, because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old one, the old coffee maker, is one of those that you see in every diner. It has like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the bun machine with the round hot plates that you put the coffee pots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on after they’re brewed. And you have this big glass coffee carafe, you know, the orange ones for decaf
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, those things. And I know from being a coffee nerd that when you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot plate keeping the coffee warm, it makes it taste horrific. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if we’re replacing that, they make ones that have thermal carafes, which they just brew into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an insulated carafe that keeps the coffee warm by insulation, not by continuous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat. And so I asked the managers, like, hey, would this work for our needs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they said, yes. I’m like, great. I’ll get a better coffee machine, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know about coffee. And we’re still going to have to get food service pouches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go into it. It’s not going to be amazing beans, but it’ll taste a lot less crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the ones that are sitting on the burners all night. So yeah, there’s like, I’m finding little areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can actually use my skills and expertise. Even though I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to run a restaurant, I do know a lot about certain components
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what it’s gonna take to run this. And because I am not doing this by myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’m part of a team of people doing this, I don’t need to do everything for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restaurant. I can actually mostly just do the stuff I’m good at and even you know a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the stuff that we’re doing now is you know set up work. It’s permits It’s paperwork. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I’m well I’m about to be certified by the county health department to be a food manager
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had to learn all sorts of stuff about food safety a Lot of that stuff. I already knew because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nerd and listen to food safety podcast sometimes. Thanks. Dr. Don And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know a lot of the the setup stuff. I know how to set up companies I already had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have my own businesses. I knew how to get a sales tax certificate because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my wife sells physical objects in New York state. And so we had to figure out the sales tax
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing a couple of years ago. Like there’s all these different components of my life that like I’ve done bits and pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this here and there. So I am able to bring some skill into this. I know how to do paperwork.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know how to set up things electronically. I know how to wire the place to have good wifi. I know how to wire the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco POS terminals so that they’re reliable. Like I know how to have a backup internet connection. Like there’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different things that like, this is actually all useful information. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding this surprisingly interesting and surprisingly engaging. And it’s fun to have a project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, I’m gonna make this better in a way that not everybody will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spot, but that will benefit a lot of people. And some people will appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And that is very fulfilling to me in a way that like, I get that fulfillment with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making software and making podcasts, but on a different level and in different ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is a very new way to me to get that kind of fulfillment, to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an in-person physical thing that I am helping to make this place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even better and I’m helping to keep this place going for what people like about it. And so it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting and fulfilling project and I’m very happy to be working on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Realize you more or less described the phenomenon of having a regular job.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where you’re working with other people in person, where your skills contribute to the overall success
⏹️ ▶️ John and the things that you know how to do are valued and come in handy because that’s why you were hired to do the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it’s novel for somebody who’s spent most of their career like self-employed doing computer
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff by themselves at home. But I think a lot of people listening to this would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you’ve got a job, you go to it and you do stuff and you use your skills and
⏹️ ▶️ John the other people who work there, the other people who work there use their skills. And granted, you’re the owner and it’s different and so on and so forth, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is actually novel if you’ve spent your entire career as a self-employed software developer sitting in
⏹️ ▶️ John your house making apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, even simple stuff, like I had to ask around to our friends,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do I use to coordinate tasks with people? Like just
⏹️ ▶️ John yell really loud and point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, I know how to use to-do apps for myself And I know there’s this entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco universe of collaboration platforms and collaboration apps. But I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what should I use? And so I spent a few days trying out Notion and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basecamp and a couple other, I looked at a couple of things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we ended up just so far on Google Docs because our needs are pretty simple. But that was a whole thing that used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of my tech experience and tech skills. I actually know some names to look at here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So I think it’s-
⏹️ ▶️ John big punch clocks things you put a card into it go shrink
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no now the POS is all have built-in payroll tracking and stuff yeah yeah it’s it’s and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there are certain things like when I was you know I replaced so oh I forgot to end the DJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story so DJ friend he showed me the whole system tells me at the end yeah you probably place at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all he leaves I’m like you know let me at least like turn it on and see like what it sounds like and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see how it works now based on what he told me. So I turn it on and he had pointed to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main mixer thing in the rack that you know that’s how you set all the volume levels and pick the inputs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he’s like that thing is full of short circuits it’s like 40 years old you should probably replace that. I’m like alright
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I go turn the system on I plug connected actually I had brought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my old iPod that I have for my blimp speaker dock I brought the iPod because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I needed something that had a headphone output and I like didn’t like my phone I didn’t have the adapter for my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I just grabbed that on the way out the door, forgetting for the moment that my laptop had one, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figured that out later. Anyway, so I plugged this iPod in, and I played some music, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I adjusted the volume, and the second I adjusted the volume, I heard a pop, and I never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got it to work again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann No matter what. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I literally moved one volume slider on the mixer, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it cracked out, and I could never get the sound to come out. Anything else I touched, I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, well, I guess I’m replacing that. And because I know sound,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I don’t know DJ sound, but I do know sound. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I, you know, the rack had contained like this, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2U tall amp or a mixer thing with a bunch of slider, or no, I think it was 4U, this 4U mixer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. And then it had a limiter, a compressor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are, that’s two more rack units there. And there was one other thing. And I’m like, I looked around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I found there are these QSC zone mixers that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all of that stuff digitally and have all the inputs in the back. And so I just bought one of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now I have in one rack unit, what was previously taking up like six or seven rack units.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s even more full featured and even better and can be remotely controlled from an iPad that we already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there for playing music anyway. So like I’m finding ways that my expertise is actually really coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in handy. And I know, I still don’t know anything about like, how do we order food?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How much food do we order? What food do we order? Like those are hard questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know anything about that, but you know what, I don’t need to because they do. The other staff members, they know how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco food to order. You know who orders the food? The chef. He knows how much food to order. I don’t need to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things yet. I will eventually pick up some of that, I assume. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m deluging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them for that stuff forever. But the Wi-Fi will be rock