627: Dragged Across the Line
20 Feb 2025The iPhone 16e, a VoIP (mis)adventure, and the latest attempt at a status display in the Liss household.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Restaurant adventures continue
- Follow-up:
- Apple Account transfers
- The UK’s no-good, very-bad law
- macOS UNIX compliance
- Goodbye, Humane. We hardly knew you. And you hardly knew anything.
- iPhone 16e announced
- Apple TV app is now on Android
- Netflix and foot-guns
- Post-show: An update on Casey’s status board
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Robots are, like, so in right now.
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Chapters
- VoIP adventures
- Apple Account transfers
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Backdoors
- macOS UNIX compliance
- Humane’s dead
- Sponsor: Factor
- iPhone 16e
- Sponsor: DeleteMe
- Netflix accidentally got better
- Ending theme
- Casey’s status display 🖼️
VoIP adventures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m at the beach. I’ve been working on the restaurant all week. I’m making progress. I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have not done Dante. Of course. I was about… Today I was about to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I have to set up the iMac that’s going to be in the office and it wouldn’t fit under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the office shelves and we lift up the shelf, take everything off of it, redo the office. So everything has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been like… I’ll have a list of five things I want to do each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day and then I get through the first two and then I get sidetracked or they are more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I thought or something doesn’t work or something doesn’t fit and I gotta do something else. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting there making progress.
⏹️ ▶️ John If anyone’s listening to the show, they may be forgiven for thinking that Marco is currently
⏹️ ▶️ John working on opening a music listening space, but I believe they will serve food and drinks there as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t forget with really good Wi-Fi. With
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly good Wi-Fi. music listening slash internet access if you’re an employee
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re making an internet cafe is what you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John only the employees can get on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi I’ll tell you what no there’s a guest network I’ll tell you what they’re like so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went through some crap with trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VoIP so I so I haven’t Okay, I haven’t dealt with VoIP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since like the old 2006 era Vonage service, remember? Like that was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first like consumer VoIP that you could buy. It’s like you buy the Vonage box and plug your phone into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and you get free long distance. It was a very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was, and like in 2006 that was very novel. And in fact, so my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old boss David Karp, he used his Vonage, or this was like 2004, he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a Vonage phone number in New York and just moved to Japan for like six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months and didn’t tell his employer and he worked remotely. And so he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just take calls on his Vonage phone in Japan because it didn’t matter. You could get your phone number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the US and then take the Vonage box anywhere and that you had internet service and it would ring just the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So nobody would know where you were with your allegedly local phone number.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, now cell phones just work that way. but in 2004-2005 era this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was pretty novel. Anyway, the restaurant has, you know, it’s it’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic need for a phone, but most of the time they’re busy, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have time to answer the phone, and they don’t take reservations anyway. So there’s not a lot of reasons people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be calling and doing something on the phone. So the staff was like, could we please have like one of those messages when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you call saying, you know, hi, thanks for calling, we don’t take reservations, here’s our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours, you know, then if you, if you want to talk to somebody, press one or something like that to just deflect a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most common calls. Cause literally almost every call comes in. It’s sorry. We don’t take reservations. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every call. So I’m like, all right, I can, I can do that. Like there’s a thousand services that offer, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of thing these days. Well, the VoIP industry has grown a lot since Vonage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2005 ish. So I, I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around and I’m like, all right, well, they, and they have just a regular wired phone behind the bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then one in the back office. This is very, very simple needs. You know, we don’t need like extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t need a big menu. We just need something that can like pick up and give her a pre-recorded message and then ring the phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There should be very, very simple. So I ask my friend, Chatty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco G, to give me some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John VoIP recommendations.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve been doing that a lot now and you seem to just be taking what it gives you as the answer and continuing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is probably fine since you’re checking when you actually try to do it, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just waiting for it to lead you astray.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and in this case, I asked for, what are the big providers? Because I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick wrong. And this is an industry that I have not been following for the last 20 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what’s good and what’s not. Frankly, I don’t really care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about most of the features that it would offer. Because if you’re buying a VoIP platform for either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your home or for an office full of people, that those are gonna be very different needs. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of those are gonna have needs and features that I don’t have and possibly not cover needs that I do have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I just did some strategy research and I ended up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a service. I’m not gonna name it, I don’t wanna slag them, but I ended up with one of the big services. So I sign up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I buy the, because again, there’s already a phone there and it’s like an old style phone, they wanna keep it, so I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right. So I get one of those boxes that apparently is called an ATA, an analog telephone adapter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is basically what a Vonage used to be. Just network in, phone jack out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I got like a regular Cisco one of these, it’s like the one everyone buys from Cisco, I think the 192, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. It’s like the super common basic VoIP ATA box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I got that and I tried to set it up with the service, which officially supports this box, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took me an entire night of just banging my head against the wall. Factory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resets, reconfiguring, automatic configuration, manual configuration. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did could possibly get this thing to work with the service, and it was so unbelievably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated, and the Cisco—and let me tell you, Cisco, oh my god,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to—so one of the things I thought was, let me—let me try making sure the Cisco thing has the latest firmware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To download firmware from Cisco, firmware updates for a basic like $100 device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Cisco sells. You have to sign up for a Cisco login. Okay, how hard could it be?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to give them everything. Your EIN, your address, everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I finally get through their stupid process and then my account is blocked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a compliance hold. A brand new account! And I’m like, there is never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a moment that I was more happy to be a Ubiquiti user user, then when I’m trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most simple, stupid thing from Cisco, it took them like 24 hours to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco undo the compliance hold on my brand new account, which I used solely to try to download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a stupid firmware update for their stupid VoIP ATA box.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like you’re missing out on by not having a job all those years. You’re giving me warm memories of trying to get software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was horrendous. So, goodbye, Cisco. like, anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole process, during this time, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learned that there was, in fact, an omission from my chat GPT research. Matthew Feeney
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shocking. Tim Cynova Ubiquity makes one. They have a service. Matthew Feeney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was gonna say, I’m a little surprised that Ubiquity doesn’t do it. Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cynova They do. It’s called Ubiquity Talk. They have hardware and software. They have their own VoIP service, or you can integrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with other people’s VoIP services. So I’m like, what am I doing with this piece of crap Cisco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing box? I returned it to Amazon. I canceled the other VoIP service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the Ubiquiti box. It set up in two seconds. It has power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over Ethernet, of course, so I lose one wire. Thank God, I love that. It is nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s the same price. It was also like a hundred bucks. It is infinitely nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The box itself, infinitely nicer. The Cisco box was one of those things where you pick it up and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it feels like it’s made out of aero gel. This is the lightest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substance on earth. There’s nothing in this box. Where did this $100 go?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Ubiquiti one, it’s built well, it’s solid, it has POE. It even has a useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen on it to show you statuses and stuff. It is better in every possible way. Plugging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in, starting it up with Ubiquiti, with their service, everything about it is nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the workflow, it’s the design, it’s just it’s Ubiquity UI. So it’s just nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything about it is nicely designed. This was not the case for the Cisco thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the service I was trying to use it with. Even when I tried to call the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service to cancel it, because of course you have to call to cancel, it took me two hours on hold.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Two hours on the phone on hold to cancel that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service. Anyway, Ubiquity land, everything is like flowers and lollipops. It’s like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my god, I just plug it in and it worked. Wow, it’s done. And then, oh, I had this number, and the number porting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wizard, I’m still in the number porting process, so we’ll see how that goes. But everything about it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just nice. And I was just reminded, why do I ever buy anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not Ubiquity? If they have an offering for something, I should just buy their offering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time, unless I have a really good reason not to. So anyway, all that is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, I’m still going on this VoIP journey. It is not completed yet. It won’t be completed until I get the number port, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, successfully ported over, but, oh, it’s so much nicer already. Everything about it is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad that you worked that part out. Uh, and I am not surprised that Ubiquiti was indeed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the answer. It seems like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is always the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so nice. Like part of the reason Ubiquiti seems like it might be better is because Ubiquiti still
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to have, I don’t know, a toe or maybe a whole foot in in the consumer space still, because it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the prosumer brand, whereas Cisco and those other enterprise things are just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we sell to businesses, we have certification programs for people who are qualified to set
⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff up for you and contracts and this and that and the other thing, and yeah, you need to do jump through a thousand hoops to even
⏹️ ▶️ John get an account that you get a compliance hold on and blah, blah, blah, yeah. They don’t have to worry about being
⏹️ ▶️ John usable or nice or working quickly because they don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John have any presence in the consumer space that they care about, but Ubiquiti still does. So I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the great advantages of using sort of, I bet like Cisco and other
⏹️ ▶️ John engineers who work for those other big companies probably look down at Ubiquiti to say, oh, that’s not real stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like stuff people put in their houses. But it does mean that their products have to actually work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mean, where Ubiquiti has come from, like when I first got their gear, I mean, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost 10 years ago now, back when you had the separate, like the edge router
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a separate kind of cloud thing that you had to run somewhere, like a cloud key or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve come a long way since then. Even back then, their stuff was still better than everything else that I had used, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you had to give the caveat, like you have to be pretty nerdy to set this stuff up. That caveat is rapidly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disappearing over the last few years. The only thing I can say negatively about Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that their product line, it’s often hard to tell If you’re new to ubiquity, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often hard to tell what you need to buy to get set up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, absolutely. I would really like to get a ubiquity set up here, but I’m currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the opinion if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And we have talked, I remember, John, we have talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this show about what is the bare minimum in order to have a ubiquity set up in your house. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the life of me, A, I can’t remember, which is standard for me, but B, I’m not even sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data from like six months or a year ago is even still accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s not. And that’s the other thing, so it’s hard to know what to buy, and their product lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes pretty frequently. So you have to kind of be well-versed in Ubiquiti’s vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to look at the current lineup at any given time and say, oh, I need one of those. Like, I actually, I made a mistake. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, the first router I bought for the restaurant, they had this new compact line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, I think it’s called like, you know, Gateway Ultra, Gateway Max, something like that. Everything, Ubiquiti is now also Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max everything, all their names, it’s really stupid. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they at first I bought one of these small routers, it looked like it had what I needed for the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then when I went to go add the ubiquity talk thing, I realized the router doesn’t support it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it took a while to realize this, because basically the routers like they’re there, those two routers that are like the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that line, the compact line, they support everything you would need for a network,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not their other applications. They have a few other applications that can run on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their routers and Ubiquity Talk is one of them. So I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to upgrade to the next one up, not the Cloud Gateway Pro, but the Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gateway Max. I have the Max Ultra one, whatever the highest one is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that one supports the other applications. It has a faster processor and more memory and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even that, moving from one gateway to another, so basically taking my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network of like, you know, 15 different Ubiquiti devices that are all like adopted and configured and named and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Moving that to a different one, that process you would think would be awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not. You plug in the new one and it says, and there’s an option, restore from backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They apparently have cloud backups now to your Ubiquiti account for all your configurations. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just log into your account and restore the backup of your router onto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new router and replace it that way and everything all your switches come back it’s everything’s adopted like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it I’m telling you this like this blows me away how how incredibly advanced this stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is pro networking stuff but what they’ve done to make it easy and friendly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is remarkable it’s really really great compared to everything else out there it’s very modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very clean it’s very well designed this is not an ad for Ubiquity we are trying to get them to sponsor our show but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if they sponsor podcasts But we would love to get them, but this is not an ad. They have not paid us yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, I just keep paying them. But this is everything. Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need something they sell, it’s fantastic. And it just keeps getting better all the
Apple Account transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple account transfers. Derek Martin writes, I spent over two hours on the phone with Apple support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other night trying to do this. At first, my Mac and iPhone told me that I was ineligible to migrate. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t say which account had the problem or what the problem was. My support advisor was very knowledgeable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the issue seemed to be that I’m sharing my iCloud plus storage with more than one other person. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the organizer of my family, me, my wife, and two kids, which is two people, too many to migrate. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will need to have my wife create a family. then I must disband my family and transfer the kids to my wife’s family,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then migrate purchases, if it allows me, there’s no way to know if something else is blocking my migration in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advance, then join my wife’s family, then have her leave it so that I become the organizer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then have her rejoin it. That should have us back where we began. I feel like there’s way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too much that could go wrong with that many steps. Also, the migrate purchases support page makes no mention of iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Match, which I’ve been paying for yearly forever. And though my support person told me it will migrate fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on his word alone is not comforting, especially on day one of a new feature. Furthermore, iTunes Match
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not appear in my list of subscriptions. He said that’s because they are included as part of Apple Music, and even though I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay for music and Match as separate subscriptions. Lastly, there was no mention of what would happen to our private
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and shared photo libraries, in which we have over 150,000 items, during family disbandment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and recreation. I will interject very quickly that I also paid for iTunes match for forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And everyone told me, Oh, it’ll be fine. If you’re paying for Apple one or whatever the heck it’s called, you’ll be fine. It’ll, it’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll still work. And to be honest, it has, as far as I know, it has worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just fine. And, and so I can concur that Derek, you could probably get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the separate payment for iTunes match,
⏹️ ▶️ John but don’t do anything else. You’re listening.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also got rid of iTunes match and I think it’s mostly okay. although honestly who knows what it’s doing to my music library.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing that’s protecting my music library is the stacks of old computers in my attic that have my
⏹️ ▶️ John music library in an unadulterated state, slowly rotting on those spinning discs. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else that was listed is terrifying to me. That whole disbanding the family, moving the kids over,
⏹️ ▶️ John joining and leaving is just like you really have to, like, you really have to be in a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re like it’s untenable for me to continue in this scenario where I have my purchases split in this way and I need
⏹️ ▶️ John to get them joined because the stuff that was listed to try to get into
⏹️ ▶️ John a good state, not even knowing whether it’s going to work, just so much can go wrong. And this is what I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to emphasize last episode about Apple account stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though they have this purchase transfer feature now, whenever you are thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John about doing something that involves more than just the computer you’re sitting in front of, like there’s a server-side
⏹️ ▶️ John component part of it, there’s a service that’s run by another company, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John much more comfortable when the company or service that you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John has the ability to do all the common operations. Like they have a
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a feature set with a bunch of orthogonal operations where you can do things
⏹️ ▶️ John and they and they’re not all intertwined with each other and like anything you can imagine they can do. Like for example let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say buying something you buy something from Amazon you know you can buy things you know you can return
⏹️ ▶️ John things You know, you can search for things, you can add them to your cart, you can remove them. Like you can cancel an order
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s on its way. If it’s already here, when it gets here, you can do return and send it back. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can return it in the mail, you can return it at a person and Whole Foods. Like when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John ordering things, you can split it up into multiple orders. You can send orders to other places. Like anything you can think you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John with buying something and paying for it and returning it in any combination, Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John can do. And if you get on the phone with Amazon and you have a problem that involves
⏹️ ▶️ John buying something, did you not get something you were supposed to get? Did the wrong thing come? Was it damaged? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to return something? You can have some confidence that Amazon can do all of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you’re a little bit less fearful of buying things from Amazon because you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, all the things you can do related to purchases, I’m pretty sure I can get them done.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not not the case with apple accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should hold on. I should say I just had a horrific experience with Amazon like pretty bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I bought an ipad for the restaurant and it was the wrong. It was the base model. It ended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the base model is not going to fit where I want, so I’m using a mini instead. So I went to return the base on unopened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within you know a few days of getting it and the only way for me to return that ipad is in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person at a whole foods. The nearest whole foods to my house is forty minutes away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went on the chat, try to get him to give me anything else. There is no other option. This was not disclosed anywhere that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw. I didn’t even know this was possible. There is no way for me to return this iPad to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon that I just bought and unopened without driving 40 minutes to a Whole Foods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never had an experience with Amazon that bad, and I’ve bought a lot from Amazon over the years. So let me just have a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco return it, though. Yes, but like they didn’t say final sale or anything like there
⏹️ ▶️ John are some complications that Amazon when you’re buying from if you’re buying from a third party seller versus them and weird stuff like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John devices or whatever. But still, I would say that anything you want to do with an Amazon thing, you can eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John get done, especially in exceptional scenarios where you’re like, Amazon says they delivered it, but you never got
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You know, stuff like that, or it was damaged in shipping or whatever. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can probably, you can almost always solve these problems in some way, or you can talk to someone who can solve them
⏹️ ▶️ John for you, who is empowered to solve it for you. But Apple accounts is not like that. There are very few
⏹️ ▶️ John things, you’re even theoretically able to do with them. And practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John many of the things that you’re theoretically able to do, you cannot actually do. And no one
⏹️ ▶️ John can help you. You cannot get anyone on the phone who is empowered to help you. You cannot get it. You will get different
⏹️ ▶️ John people on the phone who don’t even know what the possibility space is. Is the thing I’m asking for possible or is it not
⏹️ ▶️ John possible? And if it is possible, can you do it? And they’ll be like, I don’t know. Maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s try this. Let’s escalate to this. And it just, so many stories of it going on They have
⏹️ ▶️ John not worked out all the different things. Not all of them, they haven’t worked out any of the basic
⏹️ ▶️ John things, right? Even just opening accounts and closing accounts. For the longest time, I was trying to create an Apple ID. I forget what
⏹️ ▶️ John I was doing. I was trying to create a new Apple ID. I think I spent a month trying to do it. Just to create
⏹️ ▶️ John a new Apple ID, any Apple ID, a new Apple ID with any address.
⏹️ ▶️ John Couldn’t do it from any version of macOS and any of my Macs. I couldn’t do it from my phone. I couldn’t do it from my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had people on the phone trying to do it. Eventually it started working. Nobody knows why, why did it not work? Why did it
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s like not being able to create an account on amazon.com for a month and not understanding why no one in Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John can help you. Like, it’s just an unheard of type of scenario. So when
⏹️ ▶️ John I see a message like this from Derek saying, oh, the person on the phone said, if I do these 17 steps,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’ll be able to get into a state where I want. I would like, the odds of this working
⏹️ ▶️ John successfully seemed very low. I’m not saying don’t do it, but just realize that like, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially signing up to get into a worse situation. You really, really have to want to get into that goal state.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not being able to answer questions like, oh, I have 150,000 items in a shared iCloud photo library. What happens to them? And people
⏹️ ▶️ John go, I don’t know. Well, I would want that answer before I started. And I don’t want that answer
⏹️ ▶️ John with some confidence. And say someone gives you an answer and they say, oh yeah, totally, they’ll be fine. And you do
⏹️ ▶️ John it and they’re not fine. You don’t have any recourse. You can’t call them up and say, I talked to this person and they said everything
⏹️ ▶️ John would be fine, but they’re not. And the person is gonna go, oh, that’s terrible, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John just no confidence in the Apple account system, which is why if you have your Apple accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John the way you want them or they’re working, don’t touch them. Just leave them alone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t anger them in any way. I mean, it’s bad enough that I’m still constantly getting locked out of my accounts. We’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John your Apple account has been locked. And it’s just, I mean, at this point it’s routine, so I don’t freak out about it too much, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a bad system where, you know, bots are coming and trying to get into accounts and causing my account to be locked. And every
⏹️ ▶️ John time it happens, it’s like, Will this be the time where I’m not able to get back into my account and lose everything? We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, Derek, if you undertake this, I wish you luck. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to do this, at the very least, give it a few more months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, couldn’t agree more. In Apple’s defense, they have added additional restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and guidelines and whatnot on purchase transfers. There’s a knowledge-based article that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will link in the show notes. And then our friend, Stephen Hackett, had a little write up about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things that was called out as something that you can’t do, or as an example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading from the support document, you can’t migrate purchases if your secondary Apple account is used with TestFlight for testing beta versions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of apps from a developer. Open TestFlight and select stop testing for each app to remove it from your account.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this was a solution to last week’s complaint where we were saying some people had some problems with TestFlight and the document
⏹️ ▶️ John said, oh, if you have TestFlight, you have to just stop them on one account and start them on another. And I had said that IconFactory had reported that
⏹️ ▶️ John they tried to do that and it didn’t work. Apple solution, change the instructions that say, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just can’t do it if you have test flights. Previously it said you could do it and it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John easy. After you do it, you can just remove the test flight from the old address and put in the new one, but that doesn’t work. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so they didn’t, I don’t know, are they ever gonna fix that? Or are they just gonna say, let’s just add one more restriction
⏹️ ▶️ John to the pile if you have anything to do with test flight. Nope, don’t do it. You gotta get off test flights before you do it, which I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John makes their life easier. but the number of restrictions that are required and the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of steps, like another thing you should look at in these documents is the number of things they suggest doing before you do
⏹️ ▶️ John the migration is very long. Like sign out of everything, don’t be renting any movies, undo
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things, like just, like just, it seems very
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated and very fraught and I really wonder how many people fall into the narrow alleyway
⏹️ ▶️ John that is left if you fulfill all the requirements and do all the things. What percentage of Apple’s customers
⏹️ ▶️ John can use this feature?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, Stephen Hackett writes, great Apple has built this tool, but my word,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this whole thing is complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put that quote in there because you can, if anyone who knows Stephen Hackett You can just hear him saying my word.
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Backdoors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about backdoors. So there is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey op-ed by Matthew Green and Alex Stamos on the Wall Street Journal. UK kicks Apple’s door
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open for China. And they talk about the implications of the ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey law that the UK has enacted and seems to be trying to leverage. And a quote that John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pulled out, which I also would have pulled out had I seen it first, which I didn’t, Congress must immediately enact a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey law prohibiting American tech companies from providing encryption backdoors to any country. This would create a quote, conflict
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of laws, quote, situation, allowing Apple to fight this order in UK courts and protect American safety
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and security. Hear, hear. Additionally, there’s a longer blog post from Matthew Green,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the two authors we just mentioned, which expands on all of this a bit from the blog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post to satisfy to satisfy the laws of one nation, Apple would have to break the laws
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of their home country. This creates a conflict of law situation where at the very least, simple, quiet compliance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against the interest of US citizens and customers is no longer an option for Apple, even if the shareholders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might theoretically prefer it. I hope this is a policy that many people could agree on regardless of where they stand politically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is an interesting angle on this that I heard is essentially passing a US law that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes it impossible for Apple to comply because if they complied with the UK law, would now be in violation
⏹️ ▶️ John of the US law and hoping that Apple will decide that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to secretly run afoul of a newly created US law is a worse situation
⏹️ ▶️ John and so Apple wouldn’t be faced with the idea of like where Apple has to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, disobey a UK law like of their own volition. They’d be like, we literally can’t do this because
⏹️ ▶️ John the US laws that we’re subject to say that we can’t. Now I’m not a liar, I don’t know about this whole conflict of
⏹️ ▶️ John laws situation, so on and so forth. But it seems like a good thing to do to like essentially not rely
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple doing the right thing, right? Which increasingly is a good thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like instead make it impossible for them to do the thing, for Apple to do the thing that we don’t want them to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John take it out of their hands. If we had a functioning lawmaking body, this would be a thing that would be good to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I saw some other feedback that I didn’t put in here saying that there really is no way around this.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s nothing they can do to appeal or change it. the only thing that can help with this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John UK deciding they don’t want to enforce this in this particular way against Apple, but this is all happening
⏹️ ▶️ John in secret so we really don’t know what’s going on. But fingers crossed that this resolves itself in some sane
⏹️ ▶️ John way and fingers crossed that we hear about how it’s resolved rather than just never
⏹️ ▶️ John hearing anything about this story again and not knowing what the heck has happened.
macOS UNIX compliance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got some very amusing anonymous feedback with regard to Unix compliance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Mac OS. This anonymous person writes, long ago I was part of the team that did the Unix compliance work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Apple. The Unix conformance suite is vast and comprehensive and the closest thing Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to unit testing for the command line tools and kernel interfaces. Cool. The conformance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suite frequently finds bugs before Apple’s largely manual testing. I think this is the most important reason Apple keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with it. with it. There are government contracts that require bidders to comply with various standards, normally not the Unix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey standard, but frequently some substandard that the Unix tests cover.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steven McLaughlin Yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s not surprising, but it is sad. Like, even in big companies with
⏹️ ▶️ John all the money in the world, it is difficult to allocate sufficient budget for testing
⏹️ ▶️ John and to maintain that budget, because it’s just a cost center. Those people never make anything, right? And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John explain their value and how they’re adding value to the product and making sure things don’t break. But
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, somebody somewhere is going to decide they are not convinced by that argument, and they can save
⏹️ ▶️ John money on next year’s budget by trimming just a little bit from all those engineers spending all that time
⏹️ ▶️ John working on tests. And it’s annoying because every time something changes, they have to change the test. And it’s like, why are we paying all the like,
⏹️ ▶️ John very frequently, they’ll look at like, here are the people we have making new features for our products. And here’s how much we’re paying for the
⏹️ ▶️ John people to test them. And they’re like, Why is that testing so much? Sometimes it’s almost as much as you’re paying for the products
⏹️ ▶️ John to make them. Sometimes it’s even more if you have a complicated thing. And just people want to cut it. People want to say
⏹️ ▶️ John we shouldn’t be spending money on that. Can we slim that down? Could we cut the testing team in half and just have them work smarter
⏹️ ▶️ John and not harder? And that’s how you end up in a situation where you have Apple with more money than they know what
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with. We just have incredibly insufficient testing, like
⏹️ ▶️ John so much worse testing than like open open source projects run by volunteers, like on a percentage coverage
⏹️ ▶️ John basis, right? If the Unix conformance suite is like the only thing that is testing the command line tools,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically just saying like, I hope nothing breaks and those command line tools no one ever uses because we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not looking at them. And the fact that we have this automated test suite for the Unix compliance is the only thing that’s ever gonna find them
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’re sure as heck not paying anybody to make sure that stuff doesn’t break, which is why
⏹️ ▶️ John over the course of decades, so many things break in Mac OS and other operating systems. Maybe they pay enough people
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it on iOS, or maybe there’s just fewer moving parts on iOS. Cause it seems like iOS has less
⏹️ ▶️ John breakage over time for like less used features. You know, even things like screen time, they were broken
⏹️ ▶️ John from day one, so that doesn’t count. But on the Mac, just so many
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of the operating system, it’s so clear that no one has looked at them for so long and they
⏹️ ▶️ John just slowly, you know, get ignored and fade into the background, and all
⏹️ ▶️ John of a sudden they break. And the question is, how long does it take or someone didn’t notice that they break. And then how long does it take to get them fixed?
⏹️ ▶️ John We just saw that with the disk cloning thing that SuperDuper relied on. Not an obscure feature, like being able
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a bootable version of the operating system, but it’s not something that Apple apparently tests anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John or uses for anything that they care about. And so when it broke, it took whatever, like three months to get a fix
⏹️ ▶️ John out the door. And they didn’t even notice it broke until, well, they would have noticed if they had looked at the bug reports, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know how that goes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, they did file feedbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ John They did file feedbacks that those things were broken, but who’s to say whether those feedbacks had any effect. We do know
⏹️ ▶️ John that the feedbacks were filed early in the beta process, that beta became a release, that
⏹️ ▶️ John release shipped, it shipped with the thing broken, and it didn’t get fixed until much later.
Humane’s dead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, what was foretold years ago has finally come to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Humane, the people who make the AI pin, they are shutting down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they have sold the festering carcass to Hewlett Packard because where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else would it go? This is from The Verge. Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million and will stop selling the AI pin. AI pins that have already been purchased will continue to function
⏹️ ▶️ Casey normally until 3 p.m. Eastern on February 28th, Humane says in a support document. After that date,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PINs will no longer connect to Humane’s servers. As a result, the AI PIN features will no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey include calling, messaging AI queries or responses, or cloud access. Humane is also encouraging users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to download any pictures, videos, and notes stored on their PINs before they are permanently deleted at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that shutdown time. Hewlett-Packard is buying Humane’s Cosmos, or Cosmo OS, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s their operating system,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah right, their operating system, bringing on Humane Technical Staff and will get more than 300 patents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and patent applications, Humane says in its press release. Humane reportedly started looking for a buyer shortly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the launch of the AIPIN at a price as high as $1 b-b-b-billion, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than the $116 million acquisition price announced today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, if you’re like, how much money would you like? Well, I’ll take a billion dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re asking me how much much money I’d like. I mean, that would be ideal, yes. But yeah, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to nobody’s surprise, the Humane AI pin didn’t work out. To nobody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprise, anybody who bought it, this weird device that had a monthly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan and was extremely server-based, is getting screwed that this device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you paid a lot of money for has lasted approximately a year before it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop working on very short notice completely. I mean, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happens when you buy weird stuff from startups that looks like it’s not going to work very well and not gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market success. The good news is this will affect basically nobody because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is still, first of all, who was using it to begin with? Second of all, who would still be using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now? My guess is the number of active users they had now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now like going into this week was probably measured in the hundreds at most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t think we’re talking about a lot of affected people here probably less than that
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, ten days notice isn’t very long. That’s what happens when companies fail. I’m kind of surprised They’re getting bought
⏹️ ▶️ John for that much money. I guess they had those patents must really be worth a lot I guess they’re getting some staff as well below
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows how long they’ll stay on Keep in mind that they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John the stories that talked about this is, tried to emphasize that they’re not buying the AI
⏹️ ▶️ John pin product, they don’t even want that, that product is just dead, gone, shut down. Right? So sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John when companies get bought out when they’ve failed, the company that buys them wants to sort of continue
⏹️ ▶️ John their product in some way in a modified version. They’re like, nah, no, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna make an AI
⏹️ ▶️ John pin, like at all. So you can just shut all that down, shut off all those servers.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not, that’s not what we’re buying. We’re buying patents, we’re buying people, and we’re buying whatever that OS is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And who knows what HP will do with that, but honestly, $116 million sounds like a lot. I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John raised something like $230 million or something, so not a great return
⏹️ ▶️ John on investment for those investors, but that’s the way in business sometimes. People take risks, the consumers take risks. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think most of the people who bought this knew they were taking a risk when they got it. Not all risks pay off. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope you enjoyed your year slash one week, or however long you spent actually
⏹️ ▶️ John using this pin thing didn’t work out for a lot of reasons. There was another story in the Verge that I
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t tell if it was a, I read the story, got angry about part of it, tooted about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and then realized, I think I got angry about the same exact thing in the same article in the past. So I think it might have been just like
⏹️ ▶️ John a repost of an article. It had today’s date on it. But it looks like an article that was
⏹️ ▶️ John written months ago, and they just reposted and maybe changed some part of it. Anyway, they
⏹️ ▶️ John were saying how like, Humane has failed and it’s all their fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of it is their fault, but as we discussed at length when we were considering the Humane
⏹️ ▶️ John pen and other things like that, there is some portion of the blame that goes to the platform owners because part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the reason Humane’s product was so terrible is they couldn’t do a lot of things that would make sense
⏹️ ▶️ John for a product like this because the platform owners wouldn’t let them. So arguably that’s a reason
⏹️ ▶️ John not to try to make this product. So still it’s kind of on Humane, but the headline specifically emphasizing
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s all humane’s fault, really misses something very important about these products,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the best way to make anything remotely like this is with much tighter integration with the phone platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the phone vendors did not want to allow that. Specifically Apple, but even Android, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really want to allow products like this to have the integration that would make them good products. If
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple decides to make one, you can be sure it will have great integration and work well, but third parties, Apple’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John no. So this is another example of, you know, stranglehold the platform owners have,
⏹️ ▶️ John narrowing the possibility space for products, leaving the only possibility, a terrible product
⏹️ ▶️ John like Humane’s Pin that never worked well and never had a chance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I mean, to be clear, it’s not Apple’s fault they failed. They knew all this going into it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so did every, like, we were all saying
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s fault that a successful product like this cannot be made. That was, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but it also should, you know, I mean, honestly, I think in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the investors got duped on it. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, what a mess of a product this was. It’s one of those things like sometimes when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we see, when Apple puts something out, sometimes it’s very clear like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t read the room here and it’s clear to us on the outside,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, that’s not gonna work. But, and you wonder like, well, how did this get through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the process at Apple? You know, you can point at certain things here and there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t happen that often with Apple because they’re a pretty well-run company. But you look at things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the outside eye display in the Vision Pro maybe. You can see why maybe some designers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought this would be a cool idea, but maybe somewhere along the process, the process failed in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that shouldn’t have made it out to the public. Well, the entire Humane AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pin product, and everything Humane seemed to do, should have been cut before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it went to the public. It was very obvious to everyone when it came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, like, um, it’s kind of a weird idea. It’s probably not going to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not a great selling proposition either. It’s shocking they lasted a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it being in the market. I think most of that time
⏹️ ▶️ John was spent trying to sell the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, and going back, I do think that their whole thing about being an AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device, that does seem like that was a later pivot, that the original goal of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Humane, the company, was before the LLM revolution, and the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goal of it was probably something else, and they probably pivoted to this because their original goal wasn’t gonna be plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ John was always gonna be a voice thing. It was just that you could imagine a device like this working
⏹️ ▶️ John with Siri level of intelligence if it actually worked and had good integration and wasn’t a terrible product.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s a lot of ifs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? But I’m saying like they didn’t need the LLM revolution to
⏹️ ▶️ John conceive of this product, because even just given pre-LLM or current
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri, which is also kind of pre-LLM, you can imagine this product being
⏹️ ▶️ John workable. As anyone will tell you who does anything in these investing world, every
⏹️ ▶️ John product that was huge has people saying this is terrible and it’s never going to work. So how do you distinguish between the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that everyone says are terrible and never going to work and are terrible and are never gonna work, and the ones everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just are terrible and are never gonna work and turn out to be the next big thing. And that’s the challenge of being an investor. And the way
⏹️ ▶️ John most investors work is, well, we’re just gonna throw money everywhere and the 1% that it pays
⏹️ ▶️ John off will pay for all the losers. Humane is one of the losers. Like you always hear that. It’s like, oh, we only
⏹️ ▶️ John need one unicorn to pay off and it makes up for all those other companies. But no one ever asked, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are those other companies? They’re companies that fail. Most startups fail.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes they fail after being given millions and millions of dollars. Like that’s the reality of the thing. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, we, in the tech world, you think, oh, I just hear about the ones that succeed. I’ll hear about like, who’s going to be the next
⏹️ ▶️ John Uber or the next Airbnb or whatever. But behind that are hundreds of companies that fail.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just so happens that this one, for a variety of dumb and non-dumb reasons, had so much press,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite, you know, everyone thinking it was going to fail and they got so much money behind them. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just not, you know, 230 million. Look at how much open AI has raised so far. So maybe we’ll be talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about them if it turns out they really have no moat and all that money goes down the drain and everyone else has
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs that are just as good as what they do. But anyway, yeah, sometimes companies fail and when they fail, it’s not pretty.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people who bought their products don’t end up getting their money’s worth, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the risk. And you know, if we, I would have bet good money that this product
⏹️ ▶️ John would fail before it was released and definitely after it was released, everybody pretty much agreed. But it is true
⏹️ ▶️ John that even the really successful ones, just if you described it to anyone, they would say that’s never
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna work, this is a stupid idea, anyone who looks at this will tell you it’s a stupid idea, I can’t believe you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John even thinking of doing this. And most of the time people are right. But one out of 100 or 1,000 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John turns out to be a huge success. And that’s what keeps the
⏹️ ▶️ John investment money going. Random rewards or whatever that experiment with the rat stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, if you hit the little paddle, food comes out randomly it makes people keep putting in anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry for all the people who worked at humane and tried to do good work on what ended up being a a not good product.
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iPhone 16e
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so earlier today as we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record, Apple announced the final entry in the iPhone 16 family, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 16E, which was a name I did not expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose you don’t read the rumors. This is one of the surprising things. This name, in case people were wondering, rumored
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time, although most people had a capital E, so rumor mill didn’t get the lower casing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And actually I was surprised by the lower casing as well, but to be clear, it’s iPhone One, six, lowercase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco e. Is this gonna be one of those things too, kind of like when they used to do S phones, where we all just put the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capital S, even though Apple officially lowercases it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I mean, it looks okay being lowercase. I think people will mostly go with the lowercase,
⏹️ ▶️ John but who knows? Like Casey just said the tagline from this, like the final
⏹️ ▶️ John member of the 16 family. And I heard that and I was like, the 16 family?
⏹️ ▶️ John What is this 16 family you’re talking about? you released a bunch of phones at phone time. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John much later, you came up with another phone and you named it similar. Is this really a family
⏹️ ▶️ John or is this just like a long lost relative? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the parents, you know, had a surprise, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ John They did, but is it,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco well, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Suffice it to say, they’re trying to make this, the idea that this is a 16 family and we’ll talk about the possible implications
⏹️ ▶️ John of that in a little bit. But again, the rumor mill,
⏹️ ▶️ John so, so thoroughly, just even on these phones, even not like the flagship phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John so thoroughly have this phone nailed that we’ve been enduring weeks of people with physical mock-ups
⏹️ ▶️ John of this exact phone. And again, the 16E name leaked a long time ago, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, boy, whoever is just doing all the leaks related to phones is just covering like
⏹️ ▶️ John every possible base. Now, they’re not gonna get things like pricing and stuff like that, but just everything is leaking. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t follow all those rumors closely, you could have been surprised, but know
⏹️ ▶️ John that all this stuff did in fact leak. But here we are. In fact, we knew it would be coming out this day and this time as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know, here it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple today announced iPhone 16E, a new addition to the iPhone 16 lineup that offers powerful capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a more affordable price, kind of. iPhone 16E delivers fast, smooth performance and breakthrough battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life thanks to the industry-leading efficiency of the A18 chip and the new Apple C1, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first cellular modem designed by Apple. that was from the newsroom post. They did a, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was it like a 10-ish minute intro video, which was good. I have no particular complaints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. So let’s talk specs, I guess. So it’s got an A18, as I just mentioned, with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a four core GPU, one of which, or one core is disabled. Is that one of the, that’s not one of the four.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, normally, normally the A18 has five when they’re all working, but these ones have four. And I don’t think there’s any option
⏹️ ▶️ John to get anything different. So these are all four core GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to be clear, the A18 Pro has six, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, 18 Pro is a different, yeah, this is a four core GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has eight gigs of RAM, as all phones seem to want to have these days, on account of Apple intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was, I guess, confirmed by Mac rumors via some Xcode spelunking. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C1, this is the most power efficient modem ever in an iPhone, according to Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a chip that Apple designed and built and put into Apple’s iPhone. But here
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if we’re, are we running, that running out of single letters and numbers? like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John plenty of more letters and numbers, but it’s like, we sometimes get annoyed that the
⏹️ ▶️ John A chip numbers are close to the phone numbers, but not quite matching or whatever. But then you’ve got things like the C1 out
⏹️ ▶️ John here or just like we’re starting from one. And so I guess, you know, in a few years we’ll have the C2 and the C3 and the C4
⏹️ ▶️ John and just keeping track of all the different alphabet soup of numbers, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John as some of the numbers are gonna be pushing up into, you know, the 20s and 30s while the numbers are in single digits.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a bit of a challenge, but yeah, I mean, I guess I hadn’t used about what the
⏹️ ▶️ John C1, what letter would be on that, but C for cellular, makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, I mean, that’s huge. Like the iPhone SE, which is now dead and now replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the 16E, this is not an exciting product in most ways. This is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a product that I think most tech podcasters or listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about or even remember exists most of the time. But this, the fact that they have a cell modem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple made that is in this for the first time, that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for tech podcast people, that is probably the biggest news about this release. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive. And we’ll see how well it works. I mean, that remains a huge question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mark. But if this is indeed kind of the public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open beta of the cell modem, and then this fall’s iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what number are we on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 17 line, if the 17… You mean the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John iPhone 17 family. Yes, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the iPhone 17 family has more entrance in the Apple C modem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lineage, I don’t know, whatever, this is big. Like there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we mentioned in the past, like there’s a huge amount of risk associated with Apple making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own sub modem. There are substantial benefits they could they could you know reap from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So we’ll see how this goes. But that that to me that’s the story of the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So there are the line they gave about it in the video which is just quoted here is this is what they’re touting for like
⏹️ ▶️ John what. Why do you care that Apple that sell modern is from Apple if you don’t listen to ATP and haven’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ John us talk about this for the past five years. Why do you care. The most power efficient modem ever
⏹️ ▶️ John in an iPhone. This this cellular chip uses less power than any cellular chip
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve ever put in an iPhone. And, you know, less power, longer battery life, we got
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery life in a little bit. So that’s the pitch for this. You know, it’s good. It’s good for you, the consumer that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is making this because we give you more battery life, which is, you know, a good pitch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the reason they’re not pitching much more is because, well, this is the I was gonna say this is the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John SE, well, just whatever. This is the 16 E, I guess the E is for economy.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, it’s the cheaper phone. But that means it’s not the flagship. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John as as rumored, no millimeter wave, right? It’s one of the their first round of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s first cell chip is not gonna have millimeter wave. It’s gonna go on the S. E. First as a test bed. So you don’t ruin your flagship phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a flagship. Some Odum chip. It doesn’t have the fanciest of the fanciest cutting
⏹️ ▶️ John edge fastest of the fastest feature that Casey uses from his picnic table. No millimeter wave at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, they have on the spec page of like what? What
⏹️ ▶️ John cellular capabilities does this have? And there is just such an incredible alphabet soup
⏹️ ▶️ John of numbers and letters there. I had to textually diff it against the 16 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John to confirm that there’s no millimeter wave because I didn’t know how millimeter wave
⏹️ ▶️ John would be represented. And if you do that textual diff, you’ll see there’s other like bands that are different
⏹️ ▶️ John between them. It says 5G, NR, bands, N1, N2, N3, N5, N7, N8, and
⏹️ ▶️ John just goes on up to like N79. Then it says FTD, LTE, bandswell, like these are all very
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated cellular stuff that I do not understand, but they list them all. And so if you diff them against the 16 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see there are differences. And by the way, they list them by saying, model
⏹️ ▶️ John A3212, asterisk, and then they list all the things. And then they say all models,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they list some more stuff. The 16 Pro has multiple model A something, something things,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they sell different versions of these in different parts of the world. And then there’s a little support document saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John how can I tell if I have model A3212, which is weird on the 16E because I think there’s only one model.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s only the A3212. There’s no second line, but anyway, cellular is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated. Even just in the US, it’s complicated with all the different kinds of networks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so just glancing at what the C1 supports, it’s not entirely clear
⏹️ ▶️ John how much less capable this is than the Qualcomm chip they’re using in the 16 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think the one thing consumers, if they care about this at all, which they probably shouldn’t, but maybe Casey would care,
⏹️ ▶️ John no millimeter wave, which I forget what the rumors were about the 17 using this chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re saying the 17 lines, or at least the top end 17s are still gonna use Qualcomm chips, which is the reason Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John renewed that contract for a couple more years, because they’re probably gonna still want to have millimeter wave on their
⏹️ ▶️ John top end phones, and the C1 doesn’t support it, and I’m not sure they’re going to have the C2 or C1.5
⏹️ ▶️ John ready in time for the iPhone 17. So we’ll see when we get to those phones. I forget what the rumors are. Maybe like they’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John the 17 Air or the Slim whatever would use the C1 because that’ll be another like compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John that it doesn’t need millimeter waves. It’s so thin or whatever, but the other ones will use Qualcomm chips. But either way, 16E,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t sell as much. It’s not the flagship phone. Perfect place to roll out the first
⏹️ ▶️ John cell chip as rumored. And here it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I actually have been thinking about this, whether or not I would miss millimeter wave and when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was rumored to be falling off of the iPhone 16 Pro before the 16 Pro was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey announced, I was pretty upset about it. But to be honest with you, I haven’t been to my beloved picnic table
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in probably over a year now. And so I’ll still be slightly bummed. But if I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest with myself, it’s really not that big a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s a big deal for anybody because it’s just it’s such a limited, it has such limited applicability. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t even exist anywhere near you. And if it does, you have to be so much closer and so much like it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s it’s I don’t know if it’s exactly line of sight, but it might as well be right. It’s just very
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it makes a big difference. But the thing is, it is the fastest way. And it’s kind of hard to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John flagship phones that have that support this incredibly fast protocol and then say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what? Not enough. It’s not useful to enough people. So we’re pulling it out of the phone. They can do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like I mean, there’s no way to to slice it. I was saying this is moving backwards a little bit if
⏹️ ▶️ John for the people who care about the the fastest of the fastest speed on The other hand you’ll get back more battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life more space in the case because you don’t need those millimeter wave antennas like there are trade Offs and reasons they might do it, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John just for a marketing perspective Kind of difficult to say yeah, we got you all excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about millimeter wave, but just never mind Another thing this thing is missing. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty sure again. This was just announced today, but as far as I can tell no ultra wideband
⏹️ ▶️ John Which, I don’t understand, there’s a lot of things about this phone that I don’t understand, but I searched the spec page, I looked
⏹️ ▶️ John at other phones and how it is listed on other spec pages, the other phones list something
⏹️ ▶️ John called ultra widebands with the U, what number are they on? The U, they call it the U, the second generation,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want to call it the U2 for obvious reasons. It’s not the U1, but it’s the second generation ultra wideband chip
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. The iPhone 16E, as far as I am able to determine, does not have
⏹️ ▶️ John an ultra wideband chip or capability Is it built into the C1? Is that why I’m missing
⏹️ ▶️ John it? It seems really weird to me that it wouldn’t have this like for doing like air tag
⏹️ ▶️ John fine line with a little arrow thing or whatever. But that’s what the spec sheet seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to indicate. I would be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would think that would be integrated into like, you know, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio stack too. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. Right, but you should see it listed on the spec page. On other phones, you see the phrase ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John space wideband on the spec page And it’s not there on the 16e, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John In the place where it would be, it’s not anywhere on the page, right? And I just, I, it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell when these things just came out. The other thing is no Wi-Fi 7, right? Or the fancy,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other members of the 16 family, I believe all of them, even the plain 16 has Wi-Fi 7, right? But anyway, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is Wi-Fi 6, right? So like, this is supposed to be the cheaper phone. I get
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? But some of the emissions I find a little bit baffling.
⏹️ ▶️ John So millimeter wave I do not find baffling perfectly makes perfect sense like We
⏹️ ▶️ John were just discussing it might even be dropped from the 17s. Who knows like fine ultra wideband. I start
⏹️ ▶️ John to go Did you really you saving a lot of money on that? That seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John something that should be there But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I think it makes sense Like when you look at all the other things that the SE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line, which I guess is now the E line line. Maybe their S-key stopped working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s a 16 family. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore. Right. Anyway, when you look at what these phones have lacked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of it is just like, what are some things that we can cut that the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco casual, budget, or non-caring user doesn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about and is unlikely to use or unlikely to miss if it’s not there? And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there’s other things like MagSafe charging missing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John We’ll get to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think that’s weird. But I think if you, what’ll be interesting about this phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, I think Apple does not yet have a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of who is buying this phone, because what the SE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been purchased for before, you know, which this is replacing, I know it’s not part of the SE family, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what this is replacing is a phone model, a phone line in the SE that was basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to hold on to the old style of phone, I don’t want to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that that has meant in the past it meant a small phone It meant touch ID instead of face ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the home button instead of the swipe up a lot of people who were buying the SE Before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re buying it because they wanted to hold on to those old ways of the phone working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this phone Looks and works just like all the new phones. It’s the same size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as all the new phones roughly So, I don’t know that Apple necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a good idea of who’s going to buy this. So they’re going to find out. And so what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we see now is basically for people who want to cut another $100 off the price from their other lowest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end option, which is not the $16, but is actually the $15, which is still for sale. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-1 base model phone, Apple still sells that typically. In some markets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they even go N-2, I think. I don’t know if they still do that, but they did.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they just discontinued the 14 and the 14 plus. They discontinued all the phones with lightning ports, so they don’t sell any new phones with lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John ports anymore. So they can the 14, the 14 plus and obviously the SE.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But right now, the phone lineup is you have this at the bottom. 600 bucks for 700 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have last year’s iPhone 15 model or like a year and a half ago. iPhone 15 model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then for 800 bucks, you have the new baseline iPhone 16 and so on. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have every hundred dollars you have these increments. So if you look at like, you know, what else can they cut to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hit those price points? Okay, they’re gonna start cutting things like weird stuff that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to nerds like us We’d be like, I don’t know if I’d want a phone without that or wow That would be inconvenient to not have that, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like MagSafe and maybe ultra wideband like this kind of thing but to an average iPhone buyer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might not matter and they might just want you know, just give me the cheapest phone, but Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in the past the SE line was the cheapest phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was also the phone that lets me not change my habits from the old ways of touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and home button those buyers are now you know not being served anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they’re going to be forced to make a decision among the whole product line so the only people who are going to buy the cheap the SE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are people who want the cheapest current model which is different it was I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco partly overlap that but partly not so I will We’ll see how this all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works out, but I think Most of what I’m seeing here on like what it has versus what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco missing. I Think they’re all pretty good decisions, and I think this is still I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all pretty bad Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John no, I don’t I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I mean the only thing is that I think in for many people I think buying last year’s you know buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the n-1 model the iPhone 15 buying it now For a hundred bucks more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that for many people that will be the better phone But a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just won’t care and and you know the only people who would buy this over that are either people who want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to save a hundred bucks which is not a small number of people but I don’t think you know I don’t think that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive driver because these are all expensive no matter how you look at it or people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are who want like Apple intelligence for some reason but I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a strong selling point right now either Tim Cook thinks it is Well, yeah, their marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure sells it as one, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see. Yeah. So the thing about the, you mentioned the SC being like the, you know, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the people who want the old stuff, well, this is part of the Tim Cook philosophy of just continuing to sell old products, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as people will buy them. And that has been true of the SC line and it has
⏹️ ▶️ John always lagged behind. But here’s the thing, the iPhone, the iPhone as a product
⏹️ ▶️ John has recently gone through some major transitions. And that what that has caused
⏹️ ▶️ John is this trail dragging behind you these older phones, right? These
⏹️ ▶️ John older phones have been slowly being dragged up to the line where they have to cross over,
⏹️ ▶️ John we already dragged them past the line of the small phone, because the SE used to be the small phone. But it turns out that one of the transitions
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone line has gone through recently is no more small phone, right? And so the SE was behind there, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we were dragging it along, dragging it along, and all of a sudden, one year came along. And guess what the new SE is not small anymore because it got
⏹️ ▶️ John dragged past that line. And then, but it was still the one with the home button, still the one with an LCD
⏹️ ▶️ John screen instead of an OLED, you know, all that stuff or whatever. But that is another transition that the phones have gone
⏹️ ▶️ John through too. And this year it got dragged across that line. It’s not like they’re doing anything new with the
⏹️ ▶️ John SE phone. It’s just that the entire line has transitioned physically form factor
⏹️ ▶️ John wise and feature wise, has gone through a transition from phones that had a home button and LCD screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and they were smaller to phones that have no home button, OLED screens that are bigger. And finally this
⏹️ ▶️ John year, the lowest of the low end ones that they sell got dragged along on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Often talked about in the Steve Jobs era how he couldn’t tolerate once there was something better, he
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t tolerate the older things being in existence. So if it was like some new thing, like OLED screens
⏹️ ▶️ John that were better than the old screens, it would be like, we’re no longer selling any phones with LCD screens. Everything’s gonna be OLED.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not the Tim Cook philosophy. Much to my personal consternation, we’ll just keep selling the old
⏹️ ▶️ John technologies for as long as possible. But when you have this type of transition where it’s like we
⏹️ ▶️ John had a long time in this period where we had like a button on the front of it and LCD screens or whatever, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone 10 came along, and here’s the new era, it is somewhat nice
⏹️ ▶️ John and something that I think a lot of people were looking forward to with the quote unquote new iPhone SE to sort of get
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the iPhones across most of the important lines. They all
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have a home button. They all have OLED screens. They all are like normal, quote unquote, normal
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone size, right? To try to make it so that like there’s no there’s not this bifurcation
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, well, here’s the current modern iPhones. And then if you like the old stuff, you can still buy
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those weird ones. And this year they got pulled across the line. Now, do they get pulled all the way across the line? Not really,
⏹️ ▶️ John because this one has a notch and not the dynamic island, because that’s the line. It hasn’t dragged across the dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John island line yet. But still, if you look at this phone, as you noted, 6.1 inch screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John It is almost exactly the same size as an iPhone 16. It’s 0.1 millimeter narrower and 0.7 millimeters shorter
⏹️ ▶️ John than an iPhone 16. It’s got an OLED screen, 1200 nits peak instead of 1600 or whatever. 60 Hertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not promotion or whatever, but like what people,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of people were hoping for with this is like now finally the new SE, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like a different, weird, worse product. And finally there is a family cohesion and resemblance. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John and when designing a product line, I think it’s short-sighted to ditch stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John ultra wideband because, and this is part of the Tempco philosophy, every year you keep
⏹️ ▶️ John selling one of your products that doesn’t have a thing, it means that doesn’t become like the baseline for
⏹️ ▶️ John your product. Oh, you have an iPhone? Well, I know you can use this cool Find My feature. It’ll point an arrow to your Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John remote and your couch. Oh, you can’t do that. But I just got a new iPhone this year. Yeah, but you got the weird one that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have this. So when I look at the omissions, I say, Does this unnecessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John prolong a lack of unity in the line for a feature that you could otherwise tout as like the baseline?
⏹️ ▶️ John Every iPhone has wifi, every iPhone has cellular, every iPhone has an OLED screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John every iPhone has face ID, whatever like the baseline you want to be. The Tim Cook philosophy
⏹️ ▶️ John makes that baseline constantly be dragged behind you by many years and
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are interested in technology or of my, you know, of the mindset
⏹️ ▶️ John that I have for wanting it to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to see older stuff being sold for a long time because every year they keep selling it is another year that we
⏹️ ▶️ John have to deal with it still being in existence and you can’t just assume that everybody has this cool feature. It becomes a question of
⏹️ ▶️ John what exact model you have. And so for ultra-wideband, I look at it and I say, how much money,
⏹️ ▶️ John space, and power did you save with that specific thing. I would understand if this phone had
⏹️ ▶️ John an LCD screen more than dropping ultra wideband because the screen is the most expensive component
⏹️ ▶️ John in the phone. Is the ultra wideband chip saving you that much
⏹️ ▶️ John time and energy, even though if nobody uses it or whatever, just to say that the new baseline, I mean, they put thread radios
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey even though no one’s using it for anything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just to say every Apple product has a thread radio and that will become important later, but you won’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. Ultra Wideband has been so foundational to every phone that they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John sold, except for the lagging behind SEs, this year when they’re finally bringing
⏹️ ▶️ John it across the most of the lines, to not have it have Ultra Wideband
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like just family disunity that is, it’s like penny
⏹️ ▶️ John wise and pound foolish, right? Whatever you save, whatever power and space you save leaving Ultra Wideband is not
⏹️ ▶️ John worth the family disunity that it causes. And I guess we could jump to the big one
⏹️ ▶️ John here, which is the perfect example. This is MagSafe. The 16E
⏹️ ▶️ John does not have MagSafe. Does that mean you can’t wirelessly charge it? Oh no, you can wirelessly charge
⏹️ ▶️ John it with Qi charging, but there are no magnets in the phone. So there’s no MagSafe. It Qi
⏹️ ▶️ John charges, but no MagSafe. And you can put a MagSafe case on it, I suppose, if you buy a third party one, although Apple’s ones
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have it. But boy, talk about a family, like sacrificing family unity.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I kind of get this because the magnets are probably surprisingly expensive and
⏹️ ▶️ John they do have thickness but like an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John with the numbers 1 6 in the name that does not have MagSafe part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 16 family I’m sorry, MagSafe was like the iPhone 12, right? Yeah, like this is not a new
⏹️ ▶️ John feature But they put wireless charging up and no MagSafe is one of the best features of the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone It’s one of the best recent features they added the phone to not put MagSafe on this phone
⏹️ ▶️ John again I would sacrifice the screen for MagSafe I would say give me a worse screen give me an
⏹️ ▶️ John LCD screen Just so I can get MagSafe because what matters more to people the beautiful blacks of OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John on their phones or MagSafe I feel like MagSafe will have a larger impact on people’s lives just for making the
⏹️ ▶️ John charging easier to be able to stick it to the phone mounts and cars and stuff I Just this is a baffling
⏹️ ▶️ John feature set to me and on top of all of this Okay, so they did all these things that I think they shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have done for family unity, but at least this phone’s real cheap, right? It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John much more expensive than the SE that it replaces. Now granted, the SE that it replaces was from 2022. Had an A15.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco get it. It wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John a 400 bucks? Time marches on, this is better technology, it’s gonna be more expensive, inflation, yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I do see the price increase and as you noted, Marco, like the marching
⏹️ ▶️ John up of the hundred dollars is nice and uniform and makes sense or whatever. But my point is,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t strip out these features and it’s like, well, we had to do this to hit this really, really low price point.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not really, really low. It’s kind of what you would expect for this phone given the specs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But no MagSafe, no Ultra Wideband is just really,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s the wrong call. I think it is sacrificing family unity, is sacrificing sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John standard feature set that we expect to be in phones. I think ultra wideband and especially MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John are part of that base feature set. Wi-Fi 7 is not part of the base feature set, right? Millimeter Wave, not part of that base
⏹️ ▶️ John feature set. But MagSafe and ultra wideband, I feel like they are part of the base feature set and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just not on this phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the MagSafe is I think one of the weirder ones because not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has it been there since the iPhone 12, but I think don’t most Android phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also support magnetic charging that is MagSafe compatible in recent years also? So I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like people who buy this phone who expect that would probably feel like the phone is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken the first time they try to put it on something magnetic and it just falls off. But that being said- Yeah, especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John it will charge. Like it does have wireless charging, just the old bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but you know, that being said, like if you wanted to add magnet charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this, people make like $8 stickers of magnets on Amazon that-
⏹️ ▶️ John like cases can do it, but like Apple didn’t even do it with its own cases. Like why didn’t they put magnets in their own case? But they just didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MagSafe is the kind of thing that you either use all the time or never. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, for all the people who are the nevers on that, I don’t think they’re gonna notice or
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, what is the cost in space savings versus like the baseline feature set? Maybe it doesn’t get used all the time, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the whole point of like the potential, the reason a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John people were looking forward to this phone was it would be finally a unification, right? And it’s why the people were not looking forward to it
⏹️ ▶️ John because they liked the smaller phone, like the home button, blah, blah, blah. But like the unification of all the phones kind of look
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re of a piece now and there’s not this weird one that’s kind of back there across those lines. And omitting
⏹️ ▶️ John features like this, that I think if we had asked beforehand, like what are the baseline features of the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John family that you think every iPhone should have? MagSafe would be on that list. And maybe U1 wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John for you, it would be for me, but MagSafe is definitely on that list. It’s been around since the 12. It
⏹️ ▶️ John should be on every single iPhone, whether people want to use it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think both of them would be on my list, both MagSafe and Ultra Wideband. I’m very surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that both of them, we think, have been omitted.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, MagSafe definitely has, but yeah, like the synergy with Apple’s other products, like Apple sells like the AirTags, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s synergy with that product. Why would you do that? Why would you ever sell a phone in 2025 called iPhone 16 anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t give you the best feature of the AirTag, which is finding exactly where it is, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just like what room or what house it’s in. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the Ultra Wideband is there we just don’t know, this could be a mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ John But MagSafe is not a mistake. This phone does not have magnets in the back of it. There is no MagSafe that’s Qi charging,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is, again, I’m sure there was a good reason for that, but the omission
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of MagSafe is weird, because it seems like it would be really cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not bring any major downsides. You know, it’d be one thing, like for instance, if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 17 Slim or Air, that’s rumored, if that didn’t have MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we would assume Maybe they couldn’t fit it thickness wise. Still be a
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible mistake, but at least there would be a reason. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mean, that’s kind of the reason for this, by the way. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John this seems like there’s no reason. Is that like, so what’s good about this phone? What does it have to recommend?
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things that Apple doesn’t really tout, but people are picking up on in the spec sheet, it has better battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life than the iPhone 16, slightly better battery life than the iPhone 16, which ostensibly has the same processor,
⏹️ ▶️ John although one fewer GPU core, right? and Apple touts in its video,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially by leaving out stuff, there’s more room for a bigger battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do they leave out? We haven’t talked about this yet, but might as well now. There’s just one camera on the back of this phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a sensible cost saving, and there’s a nice symmetry. The cheapest phone has one camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cheapest one has two cameras. That’s true, I didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John think of that. And the third, the most expensive one has three cameras. And the camera that’s in this is a good camera. It’s this 48 megapixel
⏹️ ▶️ John slash 12 megapixel 2X, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seems like it’s the same camera that’s in the current base model 16. Just, it just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the ultra wide. And so you can’t do things that require two cameras and you can’t do macro cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s actually done by the ultra wide. So it just, it’s the 1X camera from the iPhone 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-pro, which I think is again, like for, for something that replaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone SE, that’s a great pick. It is, you know, as you mentioned though, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important to distinguish that the iPhone SE was a lot cheaper than this. So it isn’t quite directly
⏹️ ▶️ John Saving money, you’re saving money. Those cameras are expensive and you reap some benefit for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. First of all, I think the back of the phone looks nicer. With just one camera. Yeah, it does. Yeah, it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ John and smooth and simple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I say, by the way, on this point, like the rumors that we have of the 17 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like big camera bar, I think look hideous. Like I hope the rumors are wrong on that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we’re getting close enough to it in the timeline that I’m fearing that they might be right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s, Pixel phones have been like that and so many other phones have been like that for ages. I think it’s unavoidable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the devil’s in the details now and we’ll see how it looks, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, it’s funny because, just to very quickly throw in my two cents here, I, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told me, when one would say to me, you know, or if I read, oh, there’s gonna be a camera bar, it’s not gonna be like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this weird triangle thing in the back of the phone. On paper, the way I imagine this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds great, sign me up, I’ll take two. But I agree, Marco, the renderings that I’ve seen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not really liked.
⏹️ ▶️ John the renderings don’t have a lot of imagination. They just imagine the current design philosophy extended to that, especially the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that render the 17 Pro and they just take the 16 Pro and leave the cameras exactly all the way they are and make a bar
⏹️ ▶️ John across it. But if you wanna see, just look at Android, the world of Android phones. Many, many Android phones have had
⏹️ ▶️ John a camera bar for ages now, and they all do different treatments. There are ways to do this so it looks reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ John but boy, the 16E, the back of that phone looks so nice with just the one camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, you know, and that’s cost savings, makes sense. The benefits
⏹️ ▶️ John you get from it is maybe you get a little bit more room for battery in there, which gives you better battery life. Like, thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of what this thing has to recommend, that is like, if you don’t care about the fanciest of the fancy specs, if one camera
⏹️ ▶️ John is plenty for you, here’s a pretty good phone. And by the way, you get even better battery life than the expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John one, because you don’t have the extra cameras, the extra GPU for core in there, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John the other compromise is the lack of MagSafe, the potential lack of multi-wideband. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John would have sacrificed the SoC number. I would go with a 17 Pro or something
⏹️ ▶️ John in exchange for getting back MagSafe. Like you don’t need an A18 for that. I know they did it for Apple intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I understand why it’s the way it is, but like what do people who buy the cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, Will they care about Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John for that matter? Apple cares about it. Or the A18-ness or any of that stuff versus
⏹️ ▶️ John caring about MagSafe. I think for the people who want MagSafe, that feature makes
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more difference in their life than the neural engine that’s gonna allow them to use
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple intelligence, right? We’re in another transition period where everyone’s getting
⏹️ ▶️ John eight gigs of RAM, which is good that by the way, this is eight gigs of RAM. Like that’s a thumbs up and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, but practically speaking, like, first of all, I don’t know how much money you would even save on that because
⏹️ ▶️ John the SoC is not the most expensive thing in this and Apple makes them themselves, so it’s pretty cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, if I had to design, what is the feature set that you actually want to put in
⏹️ ▶️ John the lowest end iPhone, I would probably sacrifice RAM, Apple intelligence, and the SoC
⏹️ ▶️ John if I can get back the ultra wide band and MagSafe, because I just feel like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in the baseline And I mean, again, Apple wants Apple intelligence to be in the baseline,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just, I don’t think that’s, I don’t think that’s an important feature
⏹️ ▶️ John for pretty much anybody using these phones, let alone the cheapest one. So yeah, and this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John to get the hard numbers in this, the previous SE at 128 gigs of storage was 480 bucks, and this one is 600.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it’s a big spec bump or whatever, but then of course Apple storage prices
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that if you spec this thing, the 16E all the way up to 512, Now it’s a $900 phone. So you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John sell me a $900 iPhone 16 something that doesn’t have MagSafe? No thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s obviously, I think, in a mode now where I can’t see them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling any products that don’t support Apple Intelligence from this point forward. That seems like that’s baseline.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I get it. Like, I understand how it’s not gonna happen, right? And I thank them for the RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and the reality is, so far, Apple Intelligence is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not very compelling. And so far, it’s the kind of thing that, yeah, If you can get it, cool, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t pay extra for a product based on today’s Apple Intelligence features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just for that support alone. But obviously, that’s not what Apple has in mind, and when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were making these kind of decisions of what chip is gonna go in this product, they made those decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably a year and a half, two years ago, so at that time, they probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought, by this date, Apple Intelligence is gonna be so big and so important and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good all these different features that it’s going to be a really compelling thing. And the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it’s been hard and it’s been it’s been, you know, not it’s probably been like, you know, off track
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and underdelivered and overpromised. But two years ago, they probably did think by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this date in 2025, it’s going to be so compelling, everyone’s going to want it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, their marketing seems to suggest they still think that and maybe someday we’ll get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re not there now. So right now in the release, this seems like a weird tradeoff. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe two years ago and maybe one year from now, it’ll seem
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t say it’s not a weird trade off at all. I’m just saying that I would be willing to sacrifice that. I mean, honestly, like it’s kind of like the 17
⏹️ ▶️ John pro in the iPad mini. They they got a bunch of 18s that only have five for a GPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ John that work. Like this is just economically like it is probably cost them less. Like they have that waste anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we put that in a product? The answer is yes, we can put it can go in the 16. It’s better to do that than to
⏹️ ▶️ John make perfectly manufactured 17 pros or 16 a 7 16s or whatever If you’ve got a bunch of a 18s with with one
⏹️ ▶️ John What else are you gonna sell them? And I don’t think they’ve ever sold them with this number, of course and so that just it just makes economic sense like
⏹️ ▶️ John I Understand that and I was just promoting the whole family idea of family unity Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John for my lack of enthusiasm enthusiasm about it is part of that family unity. The baseline
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple products period is Apple intelligence. They put more RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John in the M2 MacBook Air for crying out loud. Clearly I think this is a baseline
⏹️ ▶️ John feature of not just the phone, but of all Apple products. That’s exactly the philosophy I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to endorse for other things. Setting aside my difference of opinion
⏹️ ▶️ John about the value of Apple intelligence, if Apple has decided that we just want you, if you buy a new Apple product,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should know that it will support Apple intelligence unless it’s on pod.
⏹️ ▶️ John That, right, so when they can do that, that they bumped RAM, which they didn’t, they’re not, they don’t want to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the cheapest phone’s gonna have eight gigs of RAM. The cheapest two-year, two-generation-old
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac is gonna have 16 gigs of RAM. Like, they did it because this is the new baseline.
⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe should be part of that baseline. I think ultra wide band, if it’s not on this phone, should also be part of that baseline.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, the pricing on this being 600 bucks and going up to 900, I feel like gives them
⏹️ ▶️ John the headroom to put in MacSafe at those prices and still have pretty healthy margins.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m trying to look at other places where they could save money. Like the notch is probably less expensive than Dynamic Island, right? So it’s older
⏹️ ▶️ John tech there. One camera instead of two or three, they’re saving money there. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you where they’re saving money. And I haven’t seen anyone talk about this yet, which maybe means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m misled, But the going understanding was that for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some devices, and there’s been a lot of arguments that this is why we’ve never gotten a cellular Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The going understanding is that Qualcomm’s licensing agreement or whatever requires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to give a portion of the cost of the device to Qualcomm. So like-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John cap on that, we’ve discussed that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is a gap, and I remember talking about that, which is why I don’t think it’s necessarily a big deal for Macs. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, if they’re not using a Qualcomm modem, whatever the licensing fee would have been is now zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I don’t know if that’s a savings of a dollar. I don’t know if that’s a savings of a hundred dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would guess somewhere between probably closer to one, but that’s still a savings. Like that’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one more thing that they don’t have to pay for. So that could have been where some of these savings could and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should have come from. Um, I saw a tweet, uh, I will probably forget to put it in the show notes, but I saw a tweet from a friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the show, John Voorhees earlier today, where I think he was saying it kind of tongue in cheek, but it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been one of those like brain worms where I can’t help but wonder if maybe he’s right. Wherein he said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder if the reason you can’t have MagSafe or whatever, choose your piece of internals,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because the Apple C1 is physically larger than the Qualcomm equivalent. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no earthly idea if that’s true. And again, John might’ve been trying to crack wise and saying that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t help but wonder what if he’s right? What if that is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, crack it open. I doubt that’s the case because one of the advantages has with the C1, I think, is they’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John TSMC to fab it on a really good process. Oh, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey good point. That’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it shouldn’t be bigger. It seems unlikely. Yeah, and also I think like they touted that the one thing they touted about the
⏹️ ▶️ John physical design of this thing is that there’s just so much more room inside for a bigger battery. And again, obviously you save so much
⏹️ ▶️ John space by not having two more cameras in there. Like there’s so much more room physically to put stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I bet you do save space by not having the magnets. You can make the battery that much thicker,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So like, I get that they’re reaping some savings from it. I just think it’s a foolish savings
⏹️ ▶️ John in this particular case. Yeah, anyway, so this is the new baseline. I don’t mind the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that it has an option instead of dynamic island. I wish it had MagSafe. Everything else I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly willing to sacrifice. You know where else they save money? You can get it in black and white because those colors just cost too
⏹️ ▶️ John much money. Right? Which seems kind of punitive. The black and white look fine. They
⏹️ ▶️ John look nice, but it’s like, the iPhone 16 comes in so many fun colors. And it’s like, that’s the only place where you
⏹️ ▶️ John get fun. If you get the expensive phone, Oh, that’s too professional. We can’t have fun colors there. If you get the cheap phone, oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John get the cheap phone, all you get is black and white. Only exactly in the middle, with two cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get fun colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My theory on that, teenagers. Yeah. My theory is that teenagers will not let their parents get them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the boring black and white phone. They’ll push them for the higher one and they can’t push them into the pro territory.
⏹️ ▶️ John Teenagers put cases on them and Apple does sell fun colored cases. Although interestingly, like Apple’s cases
⏹️ ▶️ John for this phone, they don’t ruin the look of it, but like the back of it
⏹️ ▶️ John with the single camera looks so nice, but remember you also have the flash and the whatever thingies. So Apple’s case
⏹️ ▶️ John has a lozenge shape opening because it encompasses the round camera and also the
⏹️ ▶️ John flash and other stuff that’s to the side of it. And that kind of ruins the cool look
⏹️ ▶️ John of the back of the phone, but yeah. Anyway, I’m not a small phone fan
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it is well past time when phones with lightning connectors and home
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons, we should move on from them. I feel for people who like them, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, everyone has to deal with this. The products, the attributes of the product they like
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually change over time. And I feel like with the Tim Cook era, those people have gotten the longest
⏹️ ▶️ John time to enjoy the features that they enjoy that has ever been the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I don’t, you know, I feel for them, but like technology
⏹️ ▶️ John marches on, keep using your old phone if that’s the thing you like. I feel especially for the small phone people,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I still feel like there’s room in the iPhone line for an actual small phone. Apple disagrees. Maybe they’ll come
⏹️ ▶️ John back to it someday.
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Netflix accidentally got better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a little bit of Apple TV related news. Surprise, surprise. First of all, the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV app, so not the hardware of course, but the software, is now available on Android.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from Apple’s newsroom, the Apple TV app is now available to download from Google Play on Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mobile devices, including phones, tablets, and foldables. Android users can subscribe to Apple TV Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and MLS season pass using their Google Play account on Android with mobile and Google TV devices. Apple TV Plus also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offers a seven day free trial.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so show of hands, how many people didn’t know that Android didn’t already have an Apple TV Plus? That’s me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it was there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just assumed they did. The whole thing with Apple TV Plus is like this is a streaming service for everybody. It’s not just for Apple users.
⏹️ ▶️ John Surely there’s an Android version, but I guess there wasn’t until today. I mean, I guess it was just all, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s built into smart TVs these days and most streaming, but like, yeah, I guess you just couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John watch on your phone. So now Android users get to use the wonderful interface that is the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus app on their Android phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we had, I mean, granted it’s early in the year, but I think my favorite tech story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the year thus far, on Valentine’s Day at just shy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 9.30 in the morning Eastern there was a post on the Verge, Netflix finally decides to play nice and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support the Apple TV app. So reading from that post, some Apple TV 4K users in the US are being prompted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connect their Netflix accounts to the Apple TV app. This would appear to signal an end to the streaming services
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long time refusal to have its content aggregated into third party platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Users who link their accounts are able to add certain Netflix originals like squid game and stranger things to their Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch list, their Apple TV app watch list, which shows also with shows also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appearing in the continue watching section. The verge has also verified that Netflix is now listed as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a participating service within the Apple TV app alongside the apps that were already supported, though this isn’t yet reflected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple’s website. The integration appears to still be in the process of rolling out the entire Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey catalog isn’t available yet and only us based users haven’t reportedly been able to get it working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Netflix both have yet to announce the update again, this was Valentine’s Day, just about 930 in the morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eastern, and the world rejoice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So many people were so incredibly excited and justifiably, I’m not trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imply that’s bad. So many people were so excited about this. I am no longer a Netflix subscriber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and beyond that, I almost never use the Apple TV app. My mental model for the Apple TV app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which full stop is incorrect, but my mental model is that’s where I go to watch Apple TV plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. That’s really the only time I ever use it. I cannot emphasize enough. I know that’s weird and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably by any metric wrong, but that’s just the way I think of it. But I can tell you, I can tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone was super excited about this during the morning of Valentine’s Day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then about 2.30 in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same day, a new post from The Verge. Netflix says its brief Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app integration was a mistake. Again, about 2.30 PM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eastern, Netflix spokesperson Momo Xu has told The Verge that this morning’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey window where Netflix appeared as a participating service in Apple TV, including temporary support for the watch list and continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching features, was an error that has now been rolled back. Stupendous work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Netflix. Just incredible job. And I think my favorite summary, which this made the rounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it was tweeted or actually posted, but a friend of the show, Joe Rosensteel, wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on both a tweet and a post on Mastodon and a post on his website, Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply regrets accidentally making Netflix a better product for its customers. I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even get through with a straight face, but Joe is so right. It’s so right. Ah, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff drives me bananas. And honestly, it’s stuff like this, this, this, I guess, hubris.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we use that word a lot, but the hubris of Netflix, they, oh, we’ll charge extra for 4k.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know why? Because we can. Eat crap. Oh, we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, we don’t have to be in the Apple TV app. Why not? we don’t want to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eat crap. It’s just this like, I don’t know, I find this kind of behavior very off-putting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and very anti-customer, anti-consumer. And so here it is. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so funny because everyone rejoiced on the morning and early afternoon of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Valentine’s Day that this had finally happened. It’s so clear that everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of Netflix users want this integration to be a thing And Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just doesn’t want to listen. I don’t get it. I just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get it. I mean, it’s easy to understand, but I think it’s an interesting contrast with the other
⏹️ ▶️ John situations where there’s like a battle of wills, a battle of market
⏹️ ▶️ John share between platform owners and products. So the classic one that we’ve talked about many times in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John has been Apple owns the iPhone platform. Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John has a Kindle app on it. Apple does not want you to be able to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John Kindle books without giving Apple 30%, but unfortunately there’s not 30% to give Apple in the book business,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so they were at a standoff. For customers, it would be better if you could launch the Kindle app on your phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a book, and you didn’t have to know that you had to go to a web page and do blah blah blah. Be better for consumers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think even Apple would agree this would be better for consumers. But financially and strategically,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple demands money that Amazon cannot give them and will not give them and so
⏹️ ▶️ John the reality is that for customers the experience of reading ebooks on
⏹️ ▶️ John their phone through the Kindle app is worse. And in that case it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much more cut and dry where it’s like this is just a money thing, Apple wants 30%, 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John is not available, they’re at a standoff and consumers get hurt.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the Netflix thing, I think it’s a little bit different because you’ve got Apple who who
⏹️ ▶️ John has an app called the Apple TV app on the Apple TV puck, where
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey watch Apple TV Plus. Anyway, they have an app
⏹️ ▶️ John that tries to unify your viewing experience. Go here, here’s all your stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can connect it to all your other services, unified, continue watching, watch next list or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John In theory, this is a unified interface to all of the streaming services that you might want to watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you have this app on your phone or on your television or on your Apple TV puck, this can unify your
⏹️ ▶️ John experience. But Netflix, because they’re the biggest, most important, most popular, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like said, we’re not going to participate in that because we think we should be the top level
⏹️ ▶️ John destination. And it looks a lot like the Kindle scenario where you’re like, wouldn’t it be better for consumers
⏹️ ▶️ John if Netflix, the lone holdout, didn’t think they were too big to
⏹️ ▶️ John be involved in this and just let themselves be subsumed into the Apple thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the situation is slightly different and the Kindle app being able to buy books in the Kindle app, because
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple is doing here is not as straightforwardly consumer
⏹️ ▶️ John benefiting as being able to buy books in the Kindle app. Like that just benefits consumers.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, it’s something you should be able to do technically, and there’s not really a lot of downside to it because you can,
⏹️ ▶️ John just makes it more inconvenient to do something. You just have to go to a webpage and do it, right? But allowing
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, the reason, one of the reasons Netflix doesn’t do this is allowing Apple to be sort of the top
⏹️ ▶️ John level of the funnel, the interface to watching television,
⏹️ ▶️ John surrenders a bunch of control that Netflix thinks, and is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John right, that it has now. A lot of people, when they wanna watch something, they go to the Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John app first. And maybe it’s the only streaming service they subscribe to, but there’s a lot of stuff in Netflix. Giving
⏹️ ▶️ John that up and saying, oh, they won’t come to us first. will just be another alphabet soup of
⏹️ ▶️ John connected services. What they’ll do instead is they’ll go through this Apple interface
⏹️ ▶️ John and this Apple interface will essentially erase and smooth over all the services
⏹️ ▶️ John below it so that what people think they’re doing is that whenever they wanna watch TV, they launch the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John app and there’s all their stuff, right? And that actually is a struggle for
⏹️ ▶️ John control between Netflix and Apple. They both want to be the place
⏹️ ▶️ John where you go to begin with, because that, being in that position, gives you power,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Just ask Google. Websites exist out there, but the fact that people will go to Google first
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to a website, to the point where, instead of typing, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon.com, they’ll type Amazon.com into the Google search box. Instead of the address, rather,
⏹️ ▶️ John go to Google.com, type Amazon.com into the search, right? Being that top level of the
⏹️ ▶️ John funnel has a huge amount of value. And in this battle between Netflix wanting
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the top level of the funnel for the people who just have one streaming service and it’s Netflix, and Apple wanting to
⏹️ ▶️ John be the top level of the funnel, I kind of feel like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna give Apple any more control over any more funnels than they already
⏹️ ▶️ John have for two reasons. One, we’ve seen what it’s like when they have control over
⏹️ ▶️ John the top level stuff, exclusive control with like the App Store, they’re not very nice about it, right? And two,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like the Apple TV interface. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco want that to be the top
⏹️ ▶️ John level to anything. I think Netflix makes it easier to find stuff and organize stuff. I have complaints
⏹️ ▶️ John about both of them, but like, it’s not as so clear cut as like, I just want to be able to buy Kindle apps
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Kindle ebook, Kindle ebooks in the Kindle app. That’s just such a clear win. It’s all in the Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John family. There’s no exchange of control. Amazon already controls all Kindle books like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no structural change there, right? But Netflix holding strong
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, we think we have the power to not be subsumed into the Apple thing, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s Apple wanting to be the top of the funnel and specifically because their top level of the funnel, I think is cruddy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of rooting for Netflix here. And I know people don’t want it. Like people who use Apple TV, the top of the one, they’re like, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix, you’re the only holdout. Why can’t you get with the program? But as someone who does not like
⏹️ ▶️ John that program, I kind of wish more people would
⏹️ ▶️ John not be subsumed by the Apple thing, because I think their interface is terrible and I don’t want to give them any more power.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, maybe this is like, maybe I’m the minority here, but I kind of feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like most people, the people who are enthusiastic users
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Apple TV interface to watching stuff are specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John the very Apple focused nerds that are in our tiny circle. and that most people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even know that app exists, or if they did, wouldn’t know what it’s used for. And I think Casey, a lot of them are much more
⏹️ ▶️ John like you just described. That’s where you go to watch Severance or Ted Lasso, and
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise you go to Netflix or Hulu or whatever. They don’t even know that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can go there and watch stuff that’s on Hulu or whatever. Because it’s not like connecting the things
⏹️ ▶️ John up or whatever. It’s just, I feel like that is a narrow market. And I don’t want that to be any more prominent
⏹️ ▶️ John than it already is. I kind of prefer the world. That’s why I have my Apple TV set up. My home button
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy or whatever takes me to the big grid of apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I launched the
⏹️ ▶️ John Hulu app. I launched the Netflix app. The only reason I personally go to the little
⏹️ ▶️ John black and white TV thing, the Apple TV thing, is to watch Severance.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how I prefer it. And that interface isn’t great, but it actually is a uniform
⏹️ ▶️ John interface. It just requires you to know what services everything’s on, which I understand is a weird thing or whatever. but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this is as cut and dried as Joe seems to think it is. They deeply regret making their product better for its customers. They made
⏹️ ▶️ John their product better for some customers, potentially at the cost of giving more control to Apple, which at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not inclined to be in favor of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t entirely disagree with you, but I don’t know. I think most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people with an Apple TV probably leave the home button or whatever you want to call that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to be- Yeah, because they change the default.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, to be the Apple TV app, which I agree with you is barbaric.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really dislike the Apple TV app a lot. I have complained and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moaned about the information architecture on that app a thousand times and I’ll do it again right now. I think everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is laid out in a confusing way. It’s gotten better, but it’s very challenging to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find the thing you want to find. Maybe my brain just disagrees with the way it’s designed. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s intentionally hiding it from you because it doesn’t want you to continue watching the thing you were previously watching. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it’s preposterous. but I do think that is most people’s interface to the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, I mean, maybe you’re right that maybe most people do the thing that I would suggest and that you would suggest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I presume that Marco would suggest, which is to switch the home button to going to the grid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John apps. Most people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have an Apple TV box. Fair. Like that’s the reality. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John have a television that has an Apple TV app on it, but I think they launch it to watch Ted Lasso and Severance. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how it works. Yeah, you very well could be right. Except for in our little circle where everybody has an Apple TV puck and everybody actually uses that
⏹️ ▶️ John interface. Like I feel like the vast, vast majority of people who watch streaming don’t subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to every streaming service in the world, like I do. Don’t have an Apple TV puck because that is just a high-end
⏹️ ▶️ John weird Apple nerd thing. Do have Apple TV on their television because it comes built into all their
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions. Which kind of gets me to the point of the earlier story about Apple TV being available for Android. Like Apple TV seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on board with the whole idea of we need to be everywhere. We need to be in every TV. Like there should be no
⏹️ ▶️ John reason that you can’t watch Ted Lasso. which is why I was so surprised to see that you couldn’t watch it on an Android
⏹️ ▶️ John phone until recently, right? So they’re all signed up to that type of thing. But I feel like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that is the actual world that most people live in, that the Apple TV icon means Severance and Ted Lasso,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that so few people have the Apple TV remote with that
⏹️ ▶️ John button, with that default, with all that stuff. It’s only in our little circle. And within our little circle of people who like
⏹️ ▶️ John that interface, I feel for them. I understand you’re one service away from uniformity, right? and you like
⏹️ ▶️ John the interface, like I get it, but there is a, that comes with baggage and the baggage is,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want Apple to be to give Apple more top level control over streaming stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be more inclined to give them the control. If I felt like their interface was tons better than everybody else. Right. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like the interface and I don’t think they need more things that to have control over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. See, but I think I really, the more I hear you talk, the more I strongly disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you here. First of all, I think that there are people in our little click that do enjoy the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV app. And I might be putting words in his mouth, but I could swear I’ve heard Jason talk about how-
⏹️ ▶️ John No, as I’m saying, in our circle, some people really do like that interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the thing, I’m glad you brought up the Kindle because to my eyes, it’s actually a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very different situation. With the Kindle, everyone involved wants a piece of the pie.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like they all want a little cut of the money. And you can squint and say that that’s still applicable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Apple TV app, but to me it’s very different. To me, it’s not about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting a cut of Netflix’s money, and it’s not really even necessarily about them getting more of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention. I really think to my eyes, having everything bubble up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the Apple TV app is to just make a unified better experience, in the same way that the Apple TV hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me is a better experience. Again, with the caveat that I completely concur with you, John, that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV app is a dumpster fire. But if we take it, if we can put that large caveat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aside and take it and go off with the assumption that the Apple TV app is at least serviceable for most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, then I don’t feel like Apple’s trying to take a cut of Netflix’s money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John time. Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they are, but Netflix just doesn’t sell subscriptions through.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t sign up to Netflix through the Apple TV because, just simply because, Netflix does not want to give Apple a cut anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, I meant in this context. You’re totally right, but I mean in this
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, just like that whole control that Apple has over that has already warped
⏹️ ▶️ John the space in that way to drive away all of the people who did not want to give Apple a cut. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, we should accept that as the status quo, but just remember, there was a time when Netflix actually did allow you to sign up
⏹️ ▶️ John right on your Apple TV, right inside the app, and they gave Apple 30% and they stopped doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All fair, but what I’m driving at is, from my perspective, and I have been quick to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, as all three of us, I think I’ve been quick to point out a lot of ways where we think Apple’s making really BS decisions these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This smells to me like they’re just trying to do right by their users. They want their users to have one place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go that will be omnivorous and slurp up all their, you know, watch habits and whatnot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hopefully not in a, you know, data Vendee gross way, because this is Apple and they’ll just present,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, here’s what you, what you were watching and here’s what the next thing is, which again, John, I agree with you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app sucks, but leaving that aside, I think the motivation is pure. And whereas I feel like Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just like, meh, we’re too cool. We’re too good for that. We don’t need you. And it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s, it, the motivation is not pure on Netflix’s side. And that’s what, that’s what makes me feel
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the purity, like, so unified interface is good. I’m in favor of that. I’ve been in favor of that for years,
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole episode about it on all hypercritical podcasts. Like, it just, having a single interface to television
⏹️ ▶️ John is good. But what I’m trying to say is there is power that comes associated with being
⏹️ ▶️ John that unified interface. No matter who does it, doesn’t matter if Netflix is the unified interface, if Apple is, if Google
⏹️ ▶️ John is, if your TV vendor is, whoever presents a unified interface that subsumes all the other services,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they are successful in that endeavor at scale, it gives them tremendous power.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t doubt that the idea behind the Apple TV app and connecting services is to provide a better user experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I do doubt is if they were successful, that that power would not be leveraged to do bad things.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s my problem. Maybe, maybe. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix, if Netflix was able to successfully become the dominant
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and all the other streaming services went by the wayside, they would have tremendous power and probably also do bad things with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I think we’ve been spared that because Netflix is not massively dominant as it once
⏹️ ▶️ John was. The space is fairly well divided up into a couple of significant players.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think those couple of significant players keep each other honest. That’s kind of why I feel like Netflix will
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually bend on this one because they’re not, it’s not, it’s not hubris. They’re just it is
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly surmising how much power they actually have. But I feel like their power has been
⏹️ ▶️ John decreasing over time. So at some point, someone’s gonna look at this again and say, can we afford to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to not be in the Apple app? At some point, I feel like that will flip back
⏹️ ▶️ John when they were the biggest by far and there was hardly any other popular streaming services, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John afford to it. It was clear cut. And they were like, they did the Apple thing, which is like, we don’t need to go to see Yes, why the hell will we go
⏹️ ▶️ John to see Yes, we have our own things. Why would we do that? Oh, we’ll just have one conference for all the technology. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a great unifying experience. But all the Apple’s like, no, we don’t need to do that. Like people come to see our stuff. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to be subsumed into CES, right? It’s exactly the same thing. That I don’t think that’s going to change
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple because they continue to not need to go to CES. But Netflix, I think eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John if trends continue, will correctly surmise that they are not big enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to stop this. And I do wonder, this is part of the mystery of this thing. What happened? how did this integration
⏹️ ▶️ John happen? Clearly, this integration is like one feature toggle away from happening, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Who accidentally flicked the toggle? Like, is there a deal in the works? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Netflix is getting to the point where they’re gonna have to end up doing this anyway. And I don’t doubt the
⏹️ ▶️ John motivations of the people working on this featured app. I don’t doubt the motivations of creating this featured app. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a pure power grab. It is, this is a better experience, right? I fear
⏹️ ▶️ John what will happen if they are successful. Even just within the little world of Apple, what will happen if they’re successful?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I’ve seen what Apple does with power that it happens to acquire. It kind of, not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, fell blank backwards into the App Store monopoly,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, they didn’t seek out to become what they are today, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John did get there. And when they got there, everything they did with that power has been upsetting
⏹️ ▶️ John and not good for anything. So that’s what I’m worried about here. Now, maybe it’s silly to worry about this, but again,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many people even use that interface and they’ll never do it. And really Netflix should just be incorporated
⏹️ ▶️ John into the Apple TV app, because there’s no fear of the Apple TV app ever becoming the dominant interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to streaming simply because too few people use it. And I can see that argument and it makes sense. And Joe should really
⏹️ ▶️ John have Netflix in his app that he likes because it would make his life easier and there’s no real fear of it. But my instinctual
⏹️ ▶️ John reaction to this is, hold strong
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Netflix for as long as you can, because A, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be that much longer, and B, I just don’t wanna see Apple come to dominate another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Delete.me, and Factor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna be talking about the recent obsession with quote, humanoid robots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which seems like Apple and Meta are rumored to be working on humanoid style robots. We’re gonna be talking about that in overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join to listen at https://www.hp.fm.com/. Join. Thanks everybody and we’ll talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
Casey’s status display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have some news that I know the two of you have been waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with bated breath. I have a yet another update about my status board. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confident that you are so very excited for this. But no, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a very kind listener. Chris R. was kind enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey send me a one of the home seer switches that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had bought a while back and didn’t end up needing. And this is the thing, if you recall, so to back up just a smidge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to have a couple of, like a trio of LEDs in the kitchen or kitchen area that will illuminate when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s something going on, either the mail’s waiting for us, the garage door’s open, or the car’s charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I had thought I was going to put this, like make a bespoke solution in a decommissioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RJ11 outlet, and the historical commission, otherwise known as Aaron, said, yeah, I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to fly. And so then I went back to the drawing board, and I hadn’t really come up with any good answers and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of listeners had suggested, uh, you know, Valley, if I recall correctly, switches, which are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar to what I’m talking about, but basically it, in addition to just a standard paddle switch, the inner Valley has like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a single diffused or a, a single diffuser with several LEDs behind it. So I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of get what I wanted, but it would all kind of be visually one led with different colors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that bleed together. So I didn’t really love that. And a handful of people had written about the home seer switches, H O M E
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S E E R. And Chris R. had an older one, but that did,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or that would hypothetically do what I wanted to do. And he was kind enough to send it my way. And I got it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a week ago, I’d say. And I decided, since Erin had very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strong opinions about how she really didn’t want any sort of status board in the kitchen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to install this on the sly sometime when she was out. But she hadn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out in a long time until last night when it was book club night. She goes to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey book club once a month with a handful of girlfriends and last night was book club night.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I installed a HomeSeer HS-WD200+, Z-Wave plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scene capable RGB wall dimmer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, if people who haven’t seen this product, they should follow the link in the show notes and look at it. And I think they’ll have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John question that I have. How can you, you can sneakily install something, But
⏹️ ▶️ John how can this thing with colored LEDs on it sneakily exist
⏹️ ▶️ John in a place where your wife does not want a thing with LEDs to exist, unless the LEDs never turn on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, no, no. She will notice, and as I sit here now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John has noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ John it called? Casey, you should know this. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Robert Moses strategy building thing with tearing things
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey down before it’s a permit. What is that called? State driving? I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what you’re thinking of. I don’t recall the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John term for it. Oh, it’s remind me that I can’t. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re thinking of, though. The idea is that if you have to, like, we’re going to cut down these trees to make
⏹️ ▶️ John way for a parking lot. And someone says, you can’t cut down those trees. I’m taking you to court to sue about it. And they take you to court.
⏹️ ▶️ John And before the first court date arrives, you’ve already cut down all the trees. So then you go to court. And it’s like, well, we were here to
⏹️ ▶️ John sue to stop him from cutting down those trees. But he already cut down all the trees. That was a strategy that Robert Moses,
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear, bad guy, employed. So Casey is employing that strategy, which I know
⏹️ ▶️ John you said that I can’t install colored lights here, but while you were gone,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? I already installed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excuse me, excuse me. This is the classic man approach, which is not good for the record, but it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey classic man approach of, you told me I couldn’t do it over there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I did it over here. That’s totally different. How, what is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distance? It is almost none. So, there is actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew you were gonna ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this. Steak driving? Steak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe? So I’m putting in the show notes and in Slack for the two of you. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already taken an image, and it will be in the show notes, like I said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So if you look. It’s like a foot and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a half. So if you look, I’ll paint you a word picture. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know if I ever put a picture of this publicly up until just now. But there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a blank, if you will, wall plate, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not quite eye level, a little bit higher. That’s where the RJ11 outlet used to be. And just recently, which kind of started this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole process, I had taken away the RJ11, the phone outlet, and put on just a blank because there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no need for the phone outlet anymore. If you look to the right, about a foot and a half and about six inches down, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is that, like a half a meter and I don’t know, several centimeters down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a trio, a three-gang set of switches, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one is in the middle. And it is not a great picture, But you can see that there are seven LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the left-hand side of the middle switch. Oh my God. Going from the bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bottom one is currently illuminated red, then it skips one. Then the next one is illuminated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey white, then it skips one. And the top one is illuminated blue. It looks much better in person than this picture would lead you to believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because it doesn’t look stellar here, but it does work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so there’s a few different issues here. of all, I installed it, you know, I said, what did you call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? Steak driving or whatever. I installed it on the sly last night and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron got home and we chatted for a little bit before we went up to bed and I conspicuously and conveniently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stood in front of the light switch while this was going on because the white switch or the white LED.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John This is a scalable strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll just constantly stand there from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing of it was I wanted her to notice it organically and I would, and I prefer that she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notice it when the lights were not illuminated, so sometime the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning. Because I wanted to see what she would say and what she would do. And coincidentally, I sent an email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Chris R. about this, and I said, oh, you know, I installed this while she was gone, and I’m expecting her to give me a huge, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WTF when she finally realizes it. To which Chris replied, which was so great, he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, that’s great. I hope the commission accepts the fact that it was already installed as enough of a hassle to not require removal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for lack of proper permits ahead of time, which is very well put. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this morning, I forget when it was this morning, but it was not very long after getting downstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perhaps maybe it was when I was gone at Wegmans studying up for the episode today. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something doesn’t matter when but at some point, I’d come in or come downstairs or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kids were like, Oh, dad. Mm-mm. And I look up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Erin and she’s pointing at the light switch saying, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this? And the funny thing is, there’s so much more to the story that I haven’t told her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you guys. So you didn’t pick up on the important phrase that I mentioned when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I read this earlier. I will repeat myself, HomeSeer HS-WD200 plus Z-Wave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus scene capable RGB wall dimmer. I don’t have any Z-Wave devices until just now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let me tell you, if you want to think about what it would be like for the most nerdy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nerd to design a home automation or home, a smart home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of thing, let me tell you all the good news about Z-Wave. It is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user hostile and so awful to interact with. So what I had to do was I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew that Chris was kind enough to send this to me. And genuinely, leaving aside Aaron’s opinion, which I’ll come back to in a minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely, I think this is the right solution for my problem because I have up to seven LEDs that I can use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re super easy to control within Home Assistant once you get everything wired up, which we’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here in just a second. But they’re super easy to control. It works really well. It’s a pretty good dimmer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The button feels pretty great and pretty decent. I wouldn’t say it’s great, but it’s decent. And so on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surface, this is a win-win-win. You know, it’s not as much of an eyesore as my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three LEDs popping through a wall plate would have been. You know, in a lot of ways, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think this is the rightest answer. Um, if it remains, which is yet to be seen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but to get this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get this all to work, not now I have Z wave in my world and let me assure you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone, you do not want Z wave in your world if you can help it, because what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to do was I needed to get like a $30 dongle, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will try to remember to put in the show notes, a $30 dongle that will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allow you to communicate via Z-Wave. And so this is a USB-A dongle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure maybe that USB-C once exists, but it was getting plugged into my Synology anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I needed a USB-A dongle that was something like $30 that I got off Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then I need more containers because Comb Assistant doesn’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey natively talk to via Z-Wave. you need to get Z-Wave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JS UI, which is a combination of, I believe it’s Node,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Node interface to Z-Wave, and then a user interface on top of that. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needed all of that. And a lot of people will then also add an MQTT broker, which I happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to already have in my collection of Docker containers that run my home, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I needed that. And so now I needed to get a dongle and I needed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get that USB device passed through to Docker, which I had never done before. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I assumed would be ruinous, but actually it was pretty straightforward, which I was very happy about. I then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to get this Docker container talking to that dongle. I need to get all that squared away. I need to then get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Docker container talking via WebSockets, my favorite thing in the world. Here we are, everything is full circle, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I needed to get the Docker container to talk via WebSockets to the Home Assistant Docker container. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot. Then I get everything installed physically And I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running against the clock because as everything is hanging out of my wall, you know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two switches that preexisted in this new one that I’m trying to plug in, including tapping a new neutral wire, which I’ve done before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But all, everything’s hanging out of the wall. And I get a buzz on my watch that, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, Aaron has just added a new calendar event to the shared calendar for book club for next month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no. That means they’re wrapping up. She’s got like 15 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive to get here and this wall, everything is just hanging out of it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I’m trying to like quick Carl, shove everything back in the wall, put the face plate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back on and then act nonchalant when she gets home, hopefully when this is all done and be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, oh no, nothing’s weird. What are you talking about? Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco walk away whistling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly, exactly. I was able to do so. Thankfully she ended up chatting with a friend who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she gave a ride to two book clubs. so that gave me a little spare time. But then I needed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connect this device to this, I needed to connect it to my Z-Wave hub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. This terminology I’m sure is wrong, but I needed to get the device, the dongle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that acts as like the Z-Wave hub and this light switch to talk to each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which you would think would be easy, but have I told you the good word about Z-Wave? Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Z-Wave makes no fucking sense whatsoever. And so what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needed to do was I needed to put the device and the hub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in inclusion mode. Because when I think I want to add a device, I think of the word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inclusion. It makes no damn sense. And then on top of that, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s like 17 different flavors of Z-Wave, not unlike USB-C. And there’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stapled on feature called smart setup or something like that. I already forgot what it was called. Where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scan a little QR code, smart start. You can scan a little QR code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it will allegedly make things faster or better but I did that and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically nothing happened. So, it might have been user error but who knows. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to like figure all this out and you know Aaron is now about to walk in the door and thankfully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally after some help from a friend of mine I was able to put the hub in inclusion mode, I was able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure out how to get the switch to be in inclusion mode because you basically got to do this dance on both sides. The hub will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only stay in inclusion mode for 30 seconds at a time. It’s such a mess, but I finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got them talking to each other. And once I did that, it all ended up being very straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use in Home Assistant. The only problem I really had at that point was you needed to tell the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch, oh, I would like full control over the LEDs because by default it shows like how dim or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bright the lights are. And once I found that switch, then everything was good to go. So Aaron gets home,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, we chit chat for a little bit. We go up to bed. I stand conspicuously in front of the light switch we are, she’s grabbing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stuff to bring upstairs. And then, you know, today we get home, I get home from Wegmans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and she says, what the hell is this? And I think at this point she has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resigned herself to the fact that it’s already been done. Thank you, Robert Moses. And she’s resigned herself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the fact that these LEDs are very physically small. They’re like a couple of millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across. They are very small and not very obtrusive. Whereas if I were left to my own devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and if I had used that RJ11 panel, they would have been quite a bit larger, quite a bit brighter, and quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit more intrusive and obtrusive and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ John of those colored light bulbs that are in those metal cages, you know, that hang
⏹️ ▶️ John down in mine shafts, like giant incandescent colored blue bulb inside a metal cage, and put just three
⏹️ ▶️ John of those on the wall?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know, people had suggested, you joke, but people had suggested,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there’s an easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John problem. Traffic lights,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Just put three full side light bulbs and pick, like, yeah, basically make a traffic light. And I thought about it briefly, but even for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, that was too much. But I got to tell you, right now, at least for the next five minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyhow, and before somehow Z-Wave all falls apart, it’s all working pretty well. And because my wife is a damn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angel, and she knows that I won’t just leave this well enough alone, I think she is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly acquiesced to the fact that this is a pretty decent happy medium. And let me remind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone that the steady state of this whole setup is all of those LEDs are off. The garage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey door is closed. there’s no mail waiting and the car’s not charging, which is the way it typically is in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All the LEDs are off, so nobody’s any wiser. But I am pretty happy with myself and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it worked out really well and I have learned a whole lot, which is probably the most important thing at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you two saw this, you would absolutely hate it, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m seeing it in the picture now, I already hate
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. Yeah, me too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On our inside. I’m on team Aaron on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Although on my
⏹️ ▶️ John side, I feel like you should just have a full-fledged screen with actual text on it that explains all the things want instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny lights that you know the meaning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that’s too true. When this tiny light is pink, that means your car is charging. But if it’s green, that means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the garage door is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s like the mail comes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the blue light turns on, but only if the red light is on at the same time as the blue light comes on. That means
⏹️ ▶️ John mckale is coming home from school.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I thought about that. I don’t think there’s an API for that, but I would I would totally do