651: Your Judgement About Pockets
07 Aug 2025Apple’s Trump support, flagship TV UIs, beta design tweaks, Xcode’s appetite for disk space, and a safe space for Casey… but not his devices.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show:
- Brief vacation results
- Tim Cook kisses the… ring
- Follow-up:
- HDTVTest reviews Sony Bravia 8 II and Panasonic Z95B
- TV shootout results
- AppleCare One
- iCareCalculator Reddit post (removed by moderators)
- iCare Calculator web app
- John’s experience
- B&H
- Casey’s roughly equivalent Mac, available for special order
- Retro computing corner
- More on Tahoe
- Gus Mueller
- Beta 5 improves selection legibility
- Ejecting USB storage in Windows (via Justin Bradford)
- Art & science of UI design
- Game design concepts in software (via Wes Davis)
- iPhone 17’s rumored new MagSafe design
- Apple’s “Answers” team
- Ask ATP:
- How can one improve the experience of a permanent-mount SSD on a laptop?
- Why is Xcode so thirsty? (via Geoff)
- How are we dealing with spam? (via Alan Bailward)
- Post-show: Apple Express Replacement
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Post-Quantum Cryptography networking in the 𝓍26 OSes
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- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
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Chapters
- Vacation non-results
- Tim’s Trump trophy 🖼️
- Flagship TV follow-up
- AppleCare One follow-up
- B&H has BTO configs
- eWorld (yes, really)
- Tahoe updates 🖼️
- Windows drive ejecting
- UI-design follow-up
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- iPhone 17 MagSafe rumor 🖼️
- Apple’s Answers team
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- #askatp: Sleep-ejection issues
- #askatp: Xcode disk space
- #askatp: Spam-filtering for mail servers
- Ending theme
- Casey’s safe space
Vacation non-results
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We missed you all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. We did. But John and I, I assume, John, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a relaxing time on Long Island? Nice. Pretty, pretty okay weather.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw a lot of bird pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do we get any kind of, any kind of vacation dump here for like a technical side of it or?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even get to, I did record a rectifs last night. I didn’t even get to vacation results and rectifs yet because we,
⏹️ ▶️ John in typical fashion, got derailed on other things. But I will eventually have vacation results on rectifs. But for
⏹️ ▶️ John here, I don’t, There’s no real tech updates, I don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, cameras held up, everything worked the way you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted it. Yeah, although I think I might have, I’ve either lost my camera lens cleaning
⏹️ ▶️ John kit in the house or I left it there because I was gonna clean my cameras today and I couldn’t find my kit. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like a little, you know, microfiber cloth and lens cleaning solutions. Like it’s not expensive stuff. So I just
⏹️ ▶️ John ordered some new stuff from B&H in fact. But I ordered it in the hopes that as soon as I placed
⏹️ ▶️ John the order, I would find it in the house and that didn’t work. Don’t you wear glasses?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Okay, I’ve been wearing glasses for like two seconds and I already have like the huge box of Zeiss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens wipes and I use one almost every day.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I don’t use fancy camera quality lens wipes on my glasses. They’re the same wipes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Zeiss lens wipes. I know, I don’t use any lens wipes on my glasses. I use water.
⏹️ ▶️ John I use water on my glasses and soap. Oh, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John no, no. That seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nuts to me, but you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you. I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John wearing glasses since fourth grade. It’s perfectly fine, I assure you. You’re looking through smears all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time then. I’m not looking through smears. My glasses are pristine. My family is looking through smears because they don’t even clean
⏹️ ▶️ John their glasses. They make me clean their glasses for them because I don’t think they even know how and they get sick of looking through smears. My
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses are very clean. Oh yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m glad your vacation results were good. We did a good job this year and scheduled our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vacations concurrently, definitely on purpose. Definitely, definitely on purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I have one vacation result relevant to this show. Marco cursed me with all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John eye stinging sunscreen thing. Cause I’m like, oh, you know, yeah, it does sting if you get it in your eyes, but I’m usually pretty careful that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. I got the worst eye stinging of my entire life on this
⏹️ ▶️ John in like my left eye only on one particular day. I have no idea what happened differently that day, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think for next year, I got to get some of that fancy stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you’re going to come around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John huh? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John cursed me. I was like, you know, as normal, I was like, oh, it gets in your eyes if you’re not careful. And it’s just a little stinging.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I remember I talked about like, well, some people, you may seem like some people maybe don’t feel the stinging or you may feel it worse
⏹️ ▶️ John than other people. I don’t know if any of that is true. All I know is this was the worst thing I’ve ever felt
⏹️ ▶️ John in my entire life from suns. It’s the same sunscreen I’ve been using for like a decade, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And just, it was a disaster. I’m like, well, no, that’s, you know, this is a sign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I got news for you. Every sunscreen available in the US will have exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know, I know. Thanks,
⏹️ ▶️ John Avobenzone. Yeah, I’m aware, like I’m aware of the stingingness. I’m very familiar with the stingingness, but normally it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, just I got a tiny little bit, a tiny little sting towards the end of the day when you get sloppy with the sweat or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But, but like this was just, this first of all was not at the end of the day. It was early in the day and it was terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It only takes one little slip up, one misplaced finger or wiped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge or even just a drop of sweat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don’t, I don’t even know what happened. I didn’t, did I? It’s like cutting hot peppers and rubbing your eyes. Like at least you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John happened there. I didn’t even know what happened this time, but it was bad. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t know. Also it can migrate. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fun. I’ve heard about the migration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s amazing. And yes, we know mineral sunscreen has its own trade-offs. We talked about it a few episodes ago. Please don’t write
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I’d rather have my eyes sting than have that damage to my car. Yeah. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe me too. The eye feels better, but the car never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recovers. So honestly, since I have been using the Japanese sunscreen, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has radically changed my relationship to sunscreen. Like now I am putting it on every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m reapplying. If I put it on in the morning, I go out in the afternoon. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worn more sunscreen in the last two weeks than I have probably in the last five years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it becomes like, oh, there’s no downside anymore. Like every other, it’s major downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for every other kind that’s available in the US. And this has just had, oh, there’s no downsides. It’s like wearing moisturizer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fine, you just put it on, it’s fine. Life-changing.
Tim’s Trump trophy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, we need to acknowledge Tim kissing the ring yet again. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so fricking gross. I hate this so much. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a little bit of admiration for making a gold trinket. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have a little bit of admiration. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate it. I hate it. I hate it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so, it’s so transparently kindergarten. He likes shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John things. When does Apple ever make anything gold aside from the Apple watch edition?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can we drop like the the pretense that a lot of Apple commentators have that this is all part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some big strategy and he has to do this like he doesn’t have to but he’s choosing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah this is direct support and ass kissing. Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is clearly a Trump supporter
⏹️ ▶️ John and he’s not you gotta stop with that oh my god he’s not. What’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference between that like honestly between this and any other support what’s the difference?
⏹️ ▶️ John The difference would be that he would have campaigned for Trump to get elected and he would have been at rallies jumping up in the air making
⏹️ ▶️ John a giant X with his body and he would have been, you know, donating hundreds of million dollars to the campaign to get him
⏹️ ▶️ John elected before he was president. He would have expressed support for the president for the for
⏹️ ▶️ John him when he was running for president both times. He would be constantly saying how much he loves Trump and loves everything he does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yada, yada, yada. Now he’s kissing his butt because he thinks that’s what he needs to do
⏹️ ▶️ John as part of his job. He’s supporting. I disagree with that, but he doesn’t actually like Trump. He doesn’t actually support Trump,
⏹️ ▶️ John but he is debasing himself to essentially bribe our Corrupt president
⏹️ ▶️ John in our corrupt system embarrassing himself and our country and all Apple supporters
⏹️ ▶️ John To kiss up to this idiot. That’s what’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay So that’s a very generous read but I urge everyone out there who’s trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bend over backwards Into the shape that you would have to be to kiss your own butt trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco defend Tim Cook here Why are you working so hard to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to excuse this as obviously not him actually being a Trump supporter? When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he gave him a million dollars for the inauguration, he was there with all the other tech billionaires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who everyone says are obviously Trump supporters, he’s there doing all the same things that all these other people are doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s directly supporting him with money and gifts and trinkets and support and, you know, public endorsement effectively,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, publicly doing things with him. How is that different from support? I I honestly don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see a huge difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And by the way- There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a difference in motivation. It’s why are you doing it? And in this case, actually in this case- No, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know the motivation. Right, well, but it’s pretty obvious what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is it? No, see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is, and before, when he gave the million dollars, when it was just Tim Cook personally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving him the million dollars, and we could all say, oh, well, it’s distancing it from Apple. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, now, this is Apple. This is an Apple logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a gift made of gold sitting on Trump’s desk. Like this is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supporting, supporting Trump directly. Don’t you think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a clever manipulation?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think it’s direct support and it looks bad for, I’ll tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quick little story here. I, when I was, when I went to go pick up my kid from, from camp, it was a nerd camp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I always wear nerdy shirts when I go to, cause there’s like, you know, like a little like ceremony opening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and closing for the camp. So it’s an audience full of nerds. So I always wear my nerdiest shirts. In the past, I have worn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple shirts and I, and I, I actually put on an Apple shirt, like, you know, some Apple shirt I got from the visitor center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years. Like they have pretty fun designs. So I put on an Apple t-shirt and I almost, and I’m like, you know what, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I can wear this right now because Apple in the past, the brand of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be neutral to liberal and, and pretty, pretty widely accepted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Today, I don’t think it is. Today, Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple now are directly cooperating with, supporting and sucking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ass of Donald Trump. The brand damage that is happening here, not to mention the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact that it’s a huge middle finger to all of Apple’s employees, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not agree with this, which is many of them, and all the groups of people that Trump is actively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco committing violence against, who also happen to work for Apple. This is unconscionable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And why? The last time everyone said, oh, well, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook wants to make sure Apple survives the tariffs and everything. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it. By the way, those are problems that Tim Cook created, but okay, that’s part of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also Tim Cook wants the Justice Department out of Apple’s business. They don’t want regulation. They don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco antitrust. There’s a lot behind this. Also, Tim Cook’s a billionaire. When we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question why other billionaires support Trump, it’s obvious it’s for money and power reasons. Tim Cook might have those same reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know. We don’t know much about Tim Cook. So what I’m saying is not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Tim Cook obviously directly supporting Trump the same way lots of other billionaire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CEOs do, and we didn’t try to defend them at all, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has roped Apple in so much that he is doing profound damage to Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand. It’s time for Tim to go. What are we waiting for?
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree with you. I agree with you on that point, but for different reasons. But I have to say, like in this particular case,
⏹️ ▶️ John what he’s, you know, his little dog and pony show and his little bribe and everything is actually about a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that Apple was doing anyway. And is a good thing in this case, like putting money into
⏹️ ▶️ John US manufacturing, like it’s not not that big of a deal. Like, again, we talked about this the first time they did this,
⏹️ ▶️ John that in the previous year, Apple had made basically the same exact press release with an inflation
⏹️ ▶️ John adjusted amount that is the same amount. But either way, Apple investing in US manufacturing is a thing Apple should be
⏹️ ▶️ John doing, and it’s a good thing that I think we can all agree is a good thing. So that is what is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John being done here. The embarrassing part is obviously doing a dog and pony show in public
⏹️ ▶️ John with Trump, which is essentially supporting him and lending him Apple’s name, and then give him
⏹️ ▶️ John the gold trinket thing, which is a very low cost bribe in the grand scheme of things because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, instead of having to give him a million dollars, you can give him a gold trinket that he’ll be just as happy about and is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John more effective when you’re, you know, bribing the idiot dictator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re ignoring the cost to the brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, so we’ll see what the cost of the brand is long-term. Obviously this is not good for the brand,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll see what the brand damage is. I don’t think it’s gonna be beneficial, but how much damage
⏹️ ▶️ John really depends on how much people pay attention to this and the specifics of Apple doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this versus all the other people who are kissing up to it. To give an example, I would think that the reputational
⏹️ ▶️ John damage to Columbia University is worse than Apple has endured so far with its
⏹️ ▶️ John bribes. So Tim continues to try to walk that line. But he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not walking the line. He fell over the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see, because Apple is reaping benefits from these bribes. I mean, they are avoiding some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the worst of the tariff stuff and getting exemptions for things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s it’s a terrible situation. Our company, our country is in a bad situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is how Tim Cook is dealing with it. And I don’t think he should be CEO anymore, but not for this specific reason. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s certainly on the pile of reasons. But if we had a different CEO who was acting differently and was stridently against
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever, there’d be other harms to Apple from that as well. And, you know, maybe that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John better way to go. But there’s no really good. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no win scenario in this, it’s just a series of loss scenarios and it depends on what kind of loss you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to endure. What damage are you willing to do to what parts of what
⏹️ ▶️ John things and which people? And obviously Marco disagrees with the damage that
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim is choosing to inflict on Apple and its employees and
⏹️ ▶️ John its reputation, but Tim seems to think this is the right thing to do. go for
⏹️ ▶️ John other reasons. But you know, whatever reasons you have for wanting Tim Cook to step aside and let someone else
⏹️ ▶️ John run the show, if we can all agree on that, then we’re making some progress.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, Tim Cook, he knows exactly as much about Apple’s brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as he does about computers, software, and design.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God help me for defending him because I think this is disgusting, but you’ve put me in this position, Dan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Explaining why something is happening is not defending it, right? I think it’s two different things there. Like I disagree with Marco about
⏹️ ▶️ John why this is happening, but I agree with him that it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, exactly. So the reason this is happening is because he’s the, Tim Cook is the head of this giant ass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company with thousands upon thousands of employees, and he knows that to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this company is screwed if he doesn’t bend over and kiss the ring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But no, honestly, are they? Yes. Are they? Like, can we challenge that for a minute? Because that’s that’s what everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not saying that you are wrong, that’s what everyone else is saying too. What would the actual damage be if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple had to pay the tariffs like everyone else does? First of all, wouldn’t that just be fair?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Second of all, like, okay, their prices would go up, they would take a hit to margin. Their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock price might suffer a little bit. They’re not gonna go out of business. We’re all gonna still have iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like every tariff, the cost would be mostly borne by the public. The public,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who by the way, voted for this guy, So they kind of deserve it. That’s what we’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Department of Justice would probably continue its, you know, various investigations towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior that Apple does. I think they’re gonna do that
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, by the way. I don’t think they’re getting out of the DOJ stuff, no matter how much they bribe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you’d be—well, we’ll see. We’ll see how that goes. That’s to be determined, right? But certainly that—I guarantee you that’s part of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, what everyone is arguing, who’s saying that Tim Cook has to do this for various strategic or financial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons, is that participating in direct support of this dictator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a better idea than taking a couple of quarters of a stock price hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they would be subject to the same rules that literally every company would be subject to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you’re putting some words in my mouth here and I understand why because if I were in your shoes I’d probably say the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. But what I’m saying to you is it is Tim’s responsibility to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right by Apple and I agree with you, Marco, that I I think I would,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to think I would make different choices, but ultimately he is responsible to do right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Apple that his literally his job is to do right by Apple. And when he looks at the chess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey board in front of him, the way you do right by Apple is give the toddler in the, in the oval office,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a shiny toy to play with. I agree with you. It’s disgusting. It’s deplorable. I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every bit of it. I’m not arguing any of that, but I can absolutely see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if I’m Tim and if I am willing to do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it takes to make Apple successful, then I’m doing this. Now, I don’t think I would make that same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice. I think I would say, well, you know what? Tough nuts. This is the world we, you know, like you said, this is the world we, that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey American public somehow voted for. So this is where we are, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I’m not Tim Cook. Right. And I think that his, his actions, while I simultaneously find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them deplorable are extraordinarily explicable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, it’s it’s the, you know, having to be subject to the same rules as everyone else is a situation where all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John big tech companies are doing essentially the same thing. And if everyone else is doing the wrong thing and Apple sits it out
⏹️ ▶️ John and does the right thing, presumably they would suffer more than their competitors. So whatever hit that we think it would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, maybe Tim Cook has numbers on this and we just have speculation about what it would actually be. But whatever damage it would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John would be magnified by the fact that they would be a standout in a company that is not kissing his butt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but I think the universities have shown, uh, that trying to kiss his butt,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, is a losing proposition. So, uh, well, so, so far it’s been working better
⏹️ ▶️ John for Tim cook than it has for the universities because universities that bent over backwards said, yeah, we’ll do whatever you want. They just have more and
⏹️ ▶️ John more demands, right? Whereas Apple and Tim again, with his, you know, his,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, one of his greatest skills as we’ve discussed in the past is knowing how to deal with, uh, dictators from
⏹️ ▶️ John his experience with China, right? knowing how to deal with governments that are,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, not working according to the normal rules. So, yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John he thinks he’s navigating this well. History will see how well he is actually navigating
⏹️ ▶️ John it. There are a lot of risks here, right? The risks probably outweigh the short-term
⏹️ ▶️ John benefits, but soon Marco will be, Marco, soon Tim Cook will be retired, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be the next person’s problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, he can tank the company’s reputation, and yeah, and then just pass it along. Great, good job as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco American CEO. That’s perfect.
Flagship TV follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s move on let’s do some follow-up HD TV test has done things. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think anyone cares, but John so let’s move on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey favorite TV reviewer of instant a oh from HGTV test
⏹️ ▶️ John He got around to reviewing the Sony Bravia to and also the Panasonic
⏹️ ▶️ John z95 be And so we’ll link to those two reviews in the show notes was they hadn’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ John from him on those two things He’s my favorite reviewer. Even if I don’t always exactly agree with him I like the way he
⏹️ ▶️ John approaches things and he always has lots of good information. Related to that, there was the
⏹️ ▶️ John TV shootout results, the Value Electronics TV shootout that the Verge and Ali Patel
⏹️ ▶️ John participates in. Put
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a link to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, hold on, hold on. You’re skipping something important here, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skipping? Now, how the tables have turned. Ha ha. So, almost immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to your credit, you did note this in our internal show notes, but almost immediately in the HDTV test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey review of the Bravia 8 II, he says the Bravia 8 what?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know that Margot did. Bravia 8 Mark II, but he lives in the UK. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, they say all sorts of weird things. I didn’t know anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Maybe I did. In case he put that in and forgot that he put it in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably true, because this was like two weeks ago. But yes, that’s probably true. And yes, he did say the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonya is apparently what I put in our show notes. Wow. Anyway, Sony Bravia 8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark II, which if you recall, a certain co-host of mine, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was making merciless fun of me for calling my AirPods Pro Mark II’s Mark
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not from the UK and that’s not what the company calls it. And also he says Panasonic Z95B. You
⏹️ ▶️ John want to start saying Zed? No, that’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But I’m taking a W on the Mark II. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. shootout the the the shocker headline from the verge
⏹️ ▶️ John was like actually put the word shocking there inside the LG G5 shocking last place finish
⏹️ ▶️ John so I just give some context on that there were four televisions in the route and the shootout it was the
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony Bravia to the Samsung s95 f the Panasonic Z 95 B and the LG G5
⏹️ ▶️ John and the LG G5 came in last place which means fourth place against the other top three TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can read the article to explain why I’m here to Say that having seen both of these reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John from Vince Tio on the Sony Bravia 2 and the Panasonic C95 B My recommendation
⏹️ ▶️ John to Marco is still the LG G5 because the Bravia 2
⏹️ ▶️ John Just isn’t better enough than the a95 L and has lots of weird compromises,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when it comes to gaming Samsung is out because of no Dolby Vision. I don’t like how they handle colors
⏹️ ▶️ John The Panasonic is weird and doesn’t flush mount against the wall very well and has a speaker on the bottom and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s ugly. And the LG G5 is just brighter than all of them. It does HGIG really well. Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John familiar with the LG interface and it’s a really good TV. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why it is still my recommendation for Marco. And I would personally probably
⏹️ ▶️ John get the Bravia Mark two. I would not get the Panasonic because it’s too ugly and I hate their fire interface
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but it’s actually a decent TV. But yeah, the LG G5 is just brighter than all of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I have faith that LG will continue to update its firmware to deal with whatever issues were causing it to end up in last place.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they already did fix the firmware problem that was causing it to lose out to some other TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John earlier. So they are fast on their feet. Still, my recommendation for marco specific case LG G5,
⏹️ ▶️ John a wall mounts real easily, it looks real good, has the LG interface you like. It gets real bright and it’s an OLED.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one one other, you know, point to add to the pile. So I do have an LG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OLED, you know, whatever, like the C7, the 2017 one, I guess. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forget whether it’s C5 or C7, whatever it is, like one of those. That has been fine, but that was a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. My more recent TVs are the Samsung Frames, which are terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them already has a giant blue striped through it. They were even terrible when they were new and working perfectly. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are the ones that I’d be looking to replace, at least one of them. The Samsung Frame, the other day, as I was watching a show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put up a big notification in the upper right corner saying something like, our privacy policies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been updated and I had to dismiss it I just like dig out like the Samsung remote which I never use I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the Apple TV remote usually find the Samsung remote and dismiss this thing from the that’s overlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the upper right you know third of my screen what I would like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also like Samsung’s interface also even when it is not bothering me about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of stuff the interface they have to switch inputs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the most convoluted like you it basically has its own like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app list on the bottom across the bottom of like the home screen because it’s trying to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smart TV and to switch inputs you can’t just push one button like on every TV that came before it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to like you know hit whatever like the home menu button is and like navigate through that giant menu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which as it very slowly tries to load whatever the hell it’s trying to load I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never had a TV that I’ve hated more than my Samsung TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the restaurant, there are two other Samsung TVs. They are just as annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re from different times. So I have to imagine that, you know, that whatever the five-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one I have in my house here and then however old the restaurant ones are, I have to imagine this is the thing that Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably presumably still doing. I don’t like Samsung’s interfaces either. Whatever TV I get next,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want, I don’t care if it has smart features or not, I wouldn’t use them probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to be able to turn off any of that complexity and just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me switch inputs with a button on the remote. Can you do that on
⏹️ ▶️ John I think so. I mean, I’m not as familiar with the new LG interfaces, but I think if you could do it on
⏹️ ▶️ John your C7, you should be able to do it. I know I can do it on the Sony one. It’s just, it’s a single button. It’s input. Although I rarely
⏹️ ▶️ John press it cause I have a receiver. I was always on the same input, but you know, I know I can do it in the Sony and I’m assuming on the current Sony’s you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it. I recommended LG too, because you’ve been using the LG interface and it hasn’t been driving you nuts. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope you can turn things off on that. I mean, all the TVs are smart TVs. There’s actually a video
⏹️ ▶️ John from Vincent Seo of HGTV Test on how to turn off all the things on the Sony thing, like turn off all the apps, turn
⏹️ ▶️ John off all the information gathering. Like it makes the interface faster if you use that interface, which I don’t. But there are
⏹️ ▶️ John things you can turn off and I’m presumably in LG, there’s other places where you can turn things off. But yeah, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no getting around the fact that every TV is a smart TV. There is no such thing as a dumb TV for consumers
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can buy that has as good a picture as the ones we’re describing here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but all this is to say like, even if Samsung made the best option available,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never buy it because I hate using Samsung TV so much. And they don’t, so don’t worry. Good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but so all this is to say like, the exact best specs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the number one model has an annoying interface and the number two model doesn’t, I would pick the number two model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it’s not quite as good as specs, just because I’ve learned that’s a thing that matters to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s one of the things that’s soured me on Panasonic is they have a, I don’t know if it’s just, I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just in the UK, but anyway, they use the Fire TV interface, which I really dislike.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they used to roll their own, which was very minimal and I kind of enjoyed, but yeah, you know, Sony uses Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I find passable. But again, I don’t use, like you, I never see the smart TV interface
⏹️ ▶️ John ever. So it doesn’t really matter what it does as long as it doesn’t present itself to my face. So again, I still
⏹️ ▶️ John say LGD5, get a return policy if the software has really annoyed you, but form factor wise
⏹️ ▶️ John and performance wise, I think that is your pick. And second pick, if you can’t tolerate that one, is I go with the Sony BRAVIA-H
⏹️ ▶️ John because I know their interface and it is fairly unobtrusive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s glowing reviews.
AppleCare One follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk AppleCare One. Dave Penn writes, a Reddit user called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uindependent6915 has created an app called iCareCalculator, currently in test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flight, that you should take a look at. So reading from that Reddit post, that person’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reddit post, I made a small iOS app called iCareCalculator. It’s now available in test flight. Just add all your Apple devices to the list,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the app will recommend the most cost-effective plan, showing a quick monthly price comparison between AppleCare Plus and AppleCare One.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When possible, it even recommends a smart split that combines both plans to help you save even more money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then there was a different link where that, or we will put it in a link.
⏹️ ▶️ John a link to the, I was trying to save you from all of that, which I think you added in. That was the, in the Reddit link, if you follow it, you’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ John out, oops, it’s been removed by the mods for whatever, for whatever subreddit reason. And apparently the mod said that
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of post is not allowed. And everyone in that Reddit thread, the post has been removed, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the comments are still there. Everyone in the Reddit thread said, this should be a website instead of an app. So the test flight doesn’t work anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Test flight link doesn’t work anymore. I don’t even know if the app still exists, but guess what? Now it’s a website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And so you can go to iCare-Calculator.Vercel.app and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can try it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Uh, and this, I feel like this is something that Apple’s, you know, interface to AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ John One should be telling you just like it does when it initially gives you the come on, Hey, join AppleCare One and you’ll save
⏹️ ▶️ John X number dollars per month. That calculator should always be active. So when you add devices, it should be
⏹️ ▶️ John telling you don’t add that. You’ll be paying $2 more a month or do add that you’ll be saving this much more,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t. So that leaves room for this app. So check it out. We’ll put the link in the notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been battling with AppleCare One. I mentioned last time that I had added my son’s MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air and showed me some orange text that it was gonna be removed soon. And I had
⏹️ ▶️ John to like sign into it with my Apple ID because everything in AppleCare One has to be on the same Apple ID. So I made an account on
⏹️ ▶️ John my son’s Mac and signed into it and the orange text went away. And then I got an email that said it had been removed and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was this battle, right? And every time it gets added, it cancels the previous one and gives me
⏹️ ▶️ John a refund and gets impeded back or whatever. Anyway, a couple of things in this.
⏹️ ▶️ John One, people were asking me about this on Mastodon, and I realized, even though Apple’s own documentation,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we read last episode, said all the devices on AppleCare won’t have to be on the same Apple ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John it prompted me, with its initial come on, to say, you should add John’s iPhone 16 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tina’s iPhone 15 Pro, and one of the Macs in the house or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife’s phone doesn’t have my Apple ID on it. Because someone asked, do you share an Apple ID with your wife? So, no, she’s got her own.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never signed into my Apple ID on any of her phones. They’re her phones. And yet it
⏹️ ▶️ John prompted me that that’s one of the three devices that should be part of the $19 a month or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So currently, my AppleCare One plan has my phone, my wife’s phone and a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Or no, and my iPad, I think, as part of the three that you get for $19.99 or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what explains that. Maybe in the initial AppleCare one thing, it doesn’t care what Apple ID things are on.
⏹️ ▶️ John But every time I try to add my son’s MacBook Air, it lets me add it
⏹️ ▶️ John and then sends me an obnoxious email a day later that says, your AppleCare one add-on has
⏹️ ▶️ John been canceled per your request. Oh no, I’m sorry, it’s not per my request. You just did it yourself. And I keep getting
⏹️ ▶️ John emails, per your request, we’ve canceled your AppleCare one and issued you a refund for $3.86. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then what do I see when I go into the, you know, Settings General AppleCare on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see Alex’s MacBook Air coverage expired. And then Orange, Texas says eligible to
⏹️ ▶️ John add to AppleCare plan. Is it eligible? Because it seems like it’s not. It will let me add it. And then two
⏹️ ▶️ John days later, it will say your AppleCare one has been canceled per your request. And so I’ve given up. I cannot add
⏹️ ▶️ John my son’s MacBook Air because every time I add it, two days go by. And then I get an obnoxious email telling
⏹️ ▶️ John me it’s been removed from my request. And then my wife yells at me because our credit card bill is like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John minus $5.99 plus $3.86 minus $5.99 plus $4.24. Like it’s, it seems broken to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know what the deal is everybody. It seems like the come on that tells
⏹️ ▶️ John you how much you could save is real and adding your own devices should work fine. But if you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to add a Mac that happens to have an account with your Apple ID on it, apparently they’ll let you do it and entice
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do it and ask you, I mean, I’m being prompted everywhere, add this, add Alex’s MacBook Air, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will let me add it, but then it rejects it. So I’m a little bit soured on AppleCare One, but now I’m kind of committed to it.
B&H has BTO configs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to buying new Macs, Bruce Steinberg writes, One amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing about B&H Photo Video is that they stock built-to-order Macs available for express
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shipping overnight in the New York City region, often at a discount. Even better, they sell off their inventory of last-generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Macs at sometimes enormous discounts. Several years back, I got a MacBook Pro M1 Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with maxed-out RAM for 50% off. Not a reefer, brand new, shortly after the M2 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pros had come out. You can also add AppleCare Plus directly to your order and they have all the build to order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey options for the current generation Macs. There’s really no reason to choose to buy from Apple rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than B&H, especially because they provide a 30-day return window rather than 14 days. Aside from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac Pro, which they only sell via special order for obvious reasons. So I took a look at this and this is mostly true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I went to see if I could find my Mac or the M4 equivalent of my Mac because I have an M3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on in mine was a built order and blah, blah, blah. And I tried to find it and I couldn’t find an exact equivalent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I got surprisingly close. And this is an eight terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard drive. This is 64 gigs of Ram. Like this is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terribly commonly built computer, I don’t think. And it got really, really close. So I was, I was surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The key to this one is you have to wait until the new ones have just been released and buy one of the old ones, which is not what
⏹️ ▶️ John tech nerds want to do. they want the
⏹️ ▶️ John greatest, but you can get good deals. And these are not like refurb, it’s just them clearing inventory in the old-fashioned
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. So it’s a thing to watch out for. Sometimes you can get super good deals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, sorry, just to be clear, what I’m talking about was I tried to find an M4, a brand new equivalent of my current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer, just to see what build-to-order style options do they have. And the point I’m trying to make,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe I failed, was that they do have a surprising amount, as Bruce said, of build-to-order-like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey options, where you can get a lot more than you would expect, you know, a lot more different combinations than you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would expect. And certainly more than what it would an Apple store would carry. But your point is
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess they just buy the inventory and like guess at what people will want. And then that’s why they end up being on sales
⏹️ ▶️ John because they bought you they have to guess what configurations are going to sell and then eventually they’ve just got them hanging around and the new computers
⏹️ ▶️ John are coming out and they just got to get rid of these old configs that didn’t sell. Yeah.
eWorld (yes, really)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about retro computing on the web. This is, I presume, a carry on from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overtime last week, or two weeks ago, whatever, where we spoke about that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really cool website where you can use all the different versions of Mac OS and look at preferences and settings and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about eWorld, John. What the heck is eWorld?
⏹️ ▶️ John eWorld was, remember AOL? Remember the original AOL interface?
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe the company, I don’t know the historical details of this, but I believe the company that made
⏹️ ▶️ John that AOL interface, at least on the Mac, sort of like white-labeled that thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John they would make an online service like that for anybody and you just apply the artwork. So Apple essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John made their own AOL-type thing called eWorld based on the same software as the AOL client for the Mac, I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe, at the time. And it was a silly online thing in the sort of pre-widespread
⏹️ ▶️ John internet days. Anyway, this is an archive.org web link
⏹️ ▶️ John to a website that is no longer online that tries to reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ John the experience of using eWorld, similar to the control panel thing we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John in overtime last time that has like, it shows you the computer, right? With like the
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor and everything, and then it runs the, like the CRT has little scan lines on it and everything and then it runs
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But this is not emulation. This is not running the original Mac software.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like a reproduction using, I don’t know, does it use Flash, does it use, I don’t even know what it uses, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the real software. One of the fun things about it not using the real software is that it can
⏹️ ▶️ John do things that actual emulation has some difficulty with. So for example, making
⏹️ ▶️ John the modem screeching noise when you connect, like that’s not part of, the modem noise comes from a hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John device that’s connected to your Mac. So if you emulate Mac OS, you’re not getting that noise, but in this little thing, they’ll give
⏹️ ▶️ John you that noise, right? The reason I know it’s not emulation though, is
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s very convincing. They do a really good job. Like I recognize a lot of the software it’s running, is because of one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we discussed when talking about the control panel thing from overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way the menus work. Whoever wrote this forgot to implement the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where if you click on the file menu and hold down the mouse cursor, and then move the, hold down the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John button, and then move the cursor down and release, that it should select a menu item. They
⏹️ ▶️ John just forgot that that’s how one of the ways that you could use Mac menu. So that doesn’t work at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I’m like, okay, this isn’t running Mac OS. This is a clever web-based simulation
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac OS. And I thought that was interesting to see because that’s one of the beauties of
⏹️ ▶️ John like actually running the real Mac OS software through 15
⏹️ ▶️ John layers of JavaScript and WebAssembly or whatever they need to do, is because you get the real behaviors.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you try to simulate it, you’re relying on the person who’s creating the faked interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to know how everything worked. And this person obviously just assumed, well, of course you click on the menu and then you release the
⏹️ ▶️ John button and then you go down to the item you want and you click on it again. That’s how menus work. They work another way too.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least, first of all, they work that way now. So they should have known if they’re using a Mac now that you can do it that way. But second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John they definitely worked that way back in classic Mac OS days. So I thought that was funny. I also think it’s cool that this
⏹️ ▶️ John website works on archive.org because so many things with just images in them break on archive.org. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to see eWorld or a weird simulation of eWorld,
⏹️ ▶️ John check it out. Link will be in the notes.
Tahoe updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s talk about Tahoe and the new beta and so on. Apparently, a friend of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show, Gus Mueller, wrote, and we have a screen capture of this, I honestly thought that the checkbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button was missing in this macOS Tahoe screenshot. And there’s a screenshot, right folder in trash, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folder trash is currently in the trash. Then there’s a message, do not show this message
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, okay. And I looked at this after having read his message about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey checkbox for a solid 60 seconds before I found where the checkbox was. It’s to the left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the words, do not show this message again. I could not find it. I am not making this up. I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was deeply confused for a really too long amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this is, this is not beta five. This was, I believe, beta four. And it’s relevant because
⏹️ ▶️ John just like the day or two before I saw this post, I was talking to someone about the disaster that is
⏹️ ▶️ John the Tahoe interface. And I said, have you seen what unchecked checkboxes look like? That was the
⏹️ ▶️ John specific example I chose because I couldn’t believe it. Uh, and anyway, apparently people are discovering
⏹️ ▶️ John what unchecked checkboxes look like in Tahoe. And on the background
⏹️ ▶️ John of a dialogue, they’re basically invisible. I didn’t look at the RGB values for this, but I encourage you to look
⏹️ ▶️ John at his toot, see the original image as posted to Mastodon, and see for yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can see the checkbox. And if you think that’s what an unchecked checkbox should look like in any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It isn’t what it should look like ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I believe, and also I believe it is not a disabled checkbox. This is an enabled,
⏹️ ▶️ John actively clickable, unchecked checkbox. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco basically not bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, when the rumors were that there was going to be a big redesign of all the systems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe one of our concerns was that, you know, the Mac seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it hasn’t got a lot of attention recently in design, and that when it does get attention, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it is the last priority. it seems like its design kinda has like the least effort put into it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and problems take a long time to get solved, I think that’s panning out. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new design, all the liquid glass era stuff, like it’s on the Mac, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it makes the least sense on the Mac, and there has been the least testing. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the kind of thing, you know, like what we saw last time with the Disk Image Selector, which I guess we’re about to talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is one of the things, like we’re gonna have a lot of this kind of stuff on the Mac, of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like ways in which the new design just falls down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not because it can’t be good, but just because like stuff was changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it wasn’t tested enough or it wasn’t considered enough on the Mac. And that’s the reality of them doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a redesign these days. So it’s just kind of goes along with territory.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat room tried to pull up the RGB values from I’m assuming from Gus’s Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John post and it’s RGB 237 versus RGB 239. So a difference of two. They could get it better if they
⏹️ ▶️ John just did 238 to 239.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, anyway, one more thing from Gus Mueller, we had another toot.
⏹️ ▶️ John It says, trick question, is this Tahoe slider enabled or disabled? The answer is either.
⏹️ ▶️ John It draws exactly the same either way. Neat. So I found this as well when messing with
⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac apps that a lot of the times controls that are enabled look like they’re disabled.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then apparently in the case of this slider, the enabled and disabled state are exactly the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John That seems like a fundamental problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I’ve been adopting the new design for Overcast and just going through different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens and figuring out how to do certain controls and everything. One of the challenges I’m having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the new design in adoption is there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls or design consideration where I’m just like, I don’t think I can make this look good. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the current design language, and so I’m left with like, okay, do I buck the design language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and go my own way, which has a lot of downsides and a lot of costs, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is risky, or do I adopt the design language and make something that I think is a little bit hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see or hard to distinguish or hard to use, and that has its own set of trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has been a very difficult design language to adopt. You know, as soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as your app does not look exactly like Apple’s pretty screenshots, and even when it does sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, it’s very hard to work with this design language effectively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, certainly by us running into this as we try to adopt our apps to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, certainly Apple’s internal developers for Apple’s apps have probably had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar challenges. Like, it’s a really hard language to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in a way that is usable and clear and versatile across lots of different content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, I mean, I don’t know who uses computers more, Alan Dyer, Tim Cook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s hard to see, like, how do they get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this? Like, I’m not asking them to throw away the whole design, but there’s a lot of parts of it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need, I think substantially more tweaks than what we are likely to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the next handful of weeks before release. So this is what’s going to ship basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’re going to have a lot of stuff you can’t see on the Mac and we’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with it. Well, good news on the tweaking front. Now getting to Tahoe Beta Phi, which was released today,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe, they did quote unquote fix the startup disk thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by fix, I mean they changed it to be the same amount of contrast it had in Sequoia,
⏹️ ▶️ John which as I said in the last episode when we talked about this, it was already bad in Sequoia. So
⏹️ ▶️ John changing it back to be what it was like in Sequoia is not really fixing it, but at least it’s doing no harm.
⏹️ ▶️ John So previously in beta four, it was like a 1.5% difference in
⏹️ ▶️ John dark and RGB values between the gray of the background and the gray of the selection. Now it’s back up to 3.1,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is double what it was in beta four, which is pretty much exactly what it was in Sequoia. So I don’t know if that was on purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John or by accident, probably by accident because that seems a lot of things happen here. But yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ John should really be cranking up the contrast dial on a lot of things in Tahoe. And at least this one little corner of the U.S.
⏹️ ▶️ John is no longer getting worse in beta five, but who knows what beta six will bring. Oh, and they changed the hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ John icons to be the hideous things where there’s no vanishing point. But there was
⏹️ ▶️ John surprisingly large dust up about that across the entire little community, including multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John web. I think even the Verge ran a story on it over the hard drive icon. Anyway, It is hideous, it is bad, it doesn’t look good,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s dumb. It’s really bad. Like so much in liquid glass, but in the end it’s just a hard drive icon, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s like the perspective is so comically wrong. Like when you see it, it kind of breaks your brain a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it makes you wonder like, how did this get into, like how did this get out of Apple? How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did this get out of like the designer’s desk who made it? Like it’s really weird. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the perspective is so comically wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see the thing that I retweeted of someone who 3D modeled it in Blender to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like an L-shaped. And he
⏹️ ▶️ John made it L-shaped. So when you make it L-shaped, so when you turned it head on, the L-shaped one looks
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly like Apple’s one because it doesn’t make any sense from, it has no vanishing point and you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John the top of it completely, but also the front of it. And it’s just, it’s bad, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, hopefully they will tweak these icons in next year’s release and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get some kind of improvement. I’m mostly upset that they don’t look appealing to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I don’t think they look good, especially for things like hard drive icons. It’s like, it doesn’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ John much of, you know, it could have been a place for them to try to come up with it. It’s a difficult problem, right? Because hard drives are
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer physical drives inside our computers. They’re like chips that are soldered onto our motherboards
⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, like they’re, it’s hard to think of how I’d represent them with an icon. So it’s a fun problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple’s like, no, we’re not dealing with that problem. We’re just going to show, for the internal drive, we’re gonna show
⏹️ ▶️ John an abstracted version of what external drives look like in the past decade in an incorrect perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John and unappealing art style. So good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand, I mean, granted, you know, this is, this must, this has gotta hit home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with you with the hyperspace icon. But I understand that they wanted to get away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the old hard drive icon because it looked like a hard drive and no modern Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have hard drives anymore. A spinning hard drive. Yes, a hard drive. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand wanting to get away from that and wanting to freshen up the icon, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do it if you’re gonna do this. Like if you’re gonna freshen it up, do a good job. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if no one is forcing, they haven’t sold hard drives on Macs for a long time. This didn’t have to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. Like no one’s forcing you to do this icon today. Go back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a few days, do a better one. It’ll be fine, you have plenty of time. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I came up with the design idea for the hyperspace icon, I was talking with the artist at Icon Factory
⏹️ ▶️ John who was doing it. We discussed this very point, are we sure you want to do a spinning disk? And I was like, no, it should definitely be a spinning
⏹️ ▶️ John disk. Like, I’m not saying that people have spinning disks or that you should use my app with spinning disks, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John looks better in the icon for it to be a spinning disk and anyone who’s going to buy my app is probably old enough to remember
⏹️ ▶️ John spinning disks. And I was like, it’s going to, you know, and so to be clear, I’m not changing my icon. It’s going to be spinning disks forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Think of it as a retro thing.
Windows drive ejecting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Justin Bradford writes with regard to ejecting USB storage on Windows. In version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1809 of Windows 10, which was around 2019, Microsoft changed the default behavior of USB storage devices to disable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cache writes to allow removal of a drive basically anytime the drive appears idle. There’s an option for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the old method, but then it is recommended that you click the dialog that Marco was talking about to write the cache and then eject
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the drive. I have to imagine this was the result of many, many users corrupting a thumb drive by removing it while it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right was active. Here’s a link with more info, which we’ll put in the show notes. The default removal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey policy from that link, the default removal policy for external storage media was changed by Microsoft and Windows 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version 1809 from better performance to quick removal, which for some users may translate to faster removal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times with degraded performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Quick removal. Yeah. Well, just make it be slow all the time to give you the ability to yank it out whenever you feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John it, because you can’t be trusted to unmount things. This is why you you can have nice things.
UI-design follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally, we have a couple of topics with regard to the art and science of user interface design. Anonymous writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracuse is probably almost right in that the science is lost in UI design. It’s not lost in the games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey industry. I work at a very large games company. We employ UX researchers and all aspects of our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey games are tested on regular people. Their reactions to the menus, game mechanics, et cetera, are recorded and studied.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an interesting case here because what’s different about the games industry than the computer industry today?
⏹️ ▶️ John The difference is the games industry is fiercely competitive, especially if you are making a game and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not one of the platform like this, you know, there’s not too many platformers, but lots of companies make games.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you make a game, there’s not much barrier for someone deciding not to play or
⏹️ ▶️ John not to buy or not to subscribe to or whatever your game and to go to somebody else’s game because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not a lot of game lock in. So you have like there’s competition.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying people want to make games that people enjoy playing. And so in a
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive environment, yeah, you better believe they employ UX researchers to figure out, can
⏹️ ▶️ John people figure out how to play our game? Do they get frustrated? Is it easy to use? Like all these user interface things that
⏹️ ▶️ John the games industry wants those people because it contributes to their bottom line. In what situation
⏹️ ▶️ John would that not contribute to the bottom line? What if there’s massive platform lock-in like on Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John or Mac or iOS or Android or whatever, where there’s not a lot of platforms to choose from. And then once you commit to one, it’s a monetary
⏹️ ▶️ John investment. It’s an investment of skills and learning how the ecosystem works, buying apps for it, all that other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just shows how uncompetitive our technology market,
⏹️ ▶️ John personal computers and phones and iPads, all that stuff, is compared to another technology-based
⏹️ ▶️ John market of games where there are tons of game companies and tons of games fighting tooth and nail to get those
⏹️ ▶️ John consumers to play their game and not somebody else’s. And I mean, I think that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my explanation for why it’s so important for them and not important because just look what’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ John with Liquid Glass, which I will continue to call Liquid Metal, accidentally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re shipping it, people are grumpy about it, but people are like, eh, what are you gonna do? Switch to Android?
⏹️ ▶️ John It takes so much to, you know, there’s so much platform lock-in
⏹️ ▶️ John that, like Apple could be like, if we ship an interface that people don’t really like or ship a version
⏹️ ▶️ John of photos that people complain about or if we mess up the phone for a little bit or whatever, we can probably weather
⏹️ ▶️ John that storm because we’d have to really, really mess up for people to give up all the apps they bought and all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things they bought on all services and all the skills and experience they have with our platform for them to leave us
⏹️ ▶️ John versus like you come out with a cruddy version of Call of Duty and people go play a different FPS.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that happens all the time and people aren’t abandoning platforms as much. So I think this is a, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the lack of scientific rigor and user experience design in, in,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, at Apple and other major platforms is a further evidence of the lack of competition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then with regard to game design concepts and software, Wes Davis writes, when you guys talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using game design approaches for software, John talked about the coyote time approach of letting a player jump moments after leading, leaving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a ledge. For years, I’ve thought about exactly that concept. Every time an iOS notification pops in, right, as I’m about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tap a control at the top of the screen and hijacks what I was trying to do. Please Apple, give me a coyote time for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey banner notifications. Coy notification time. And, uh, the, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that name is ridiculous, but, and I know it was said in jest, but this happens to me for reeking
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a tricky problem. The reason I put this in here is because it’s not as simple as the coyote time for like
⏹️ ▶️ John ledge jumping and stuff like that. There’s no like, Oh, they should obviously do this and it will fix it. Because the problem is you
⏹️ ▶️ John see the screen, you have a thought, and then it take some time for that thought to translate into motion and your fingers touching
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that’s on the screen. And between the time you decide to tap that button and the signal goes down your arm
⏹️ ▶️ John and to your finger and you’re gonna tap like there’s between that, when that happens, a notification appears and it
⏹️ ▶️ John turns out your finger hits the screen just as the notification appears. You could kind of coyote time
⏹️ ▶️ John that to say, okay, notifications aren’t tappable for the first N milliseconds. But then if you’re really quick on the
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing, you know notification is coming and it comes up and you tap it and nothing happens, it feels broken. because you’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just tapped it. And so what do you, how many milliseconds do you set that time to be? So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, this is one of the things that’s really hard to like dial in unless you have a very controlled situation where you
⏹️ ▶️ John know exactly what the person is doing, exactly what their reaction time is, because both ways, like ignoring the
⏹️ ▶️ John clip, click or tap or allowing the tap, or like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey allowing the
⏹️ ▶️ John tap to go to the things underneath the notification, because that’s what you intended to hit because your finger started moving before the notification appeared.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a really hard problem. A lot of the problems like the coyote time thing and platforming are
⏹️ ▶️ John not that hard. There are sort of known solutions for them and you just have to implement them the right way. But yeah, this happens to
⏹️ ▶️ John me, this happens to everybody. It’s tricky. And that’s one of the things about interfaces. Like you have to rethink,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, say you were trying to make an interface for, I don’t wanna do the, like the Navy
⏹️ ▶️ John ship that crashed into something because of bad user interface. But if you’re trying to do an interface for like, steering a gigantic,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, boat on the water, maybe don’t have things that pop up on the screen over
⏹️ ▶️ John controls that people try to hit. Whereas on the phone, that’s part of the interface, is notifications appear and they just cover things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are on the screen. We just accept that because the mis-hitting a notification is not the same as mis-steering
⏹️ ▶️ John a boat into another boat. But yeah, that’s part of the design of the interfaces.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s really important for that never to happen, don’t pop up new interface elements
⏹️ ▶️ John unbidden on top of other ones.
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iPhone 17 MagSafe rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPhone 17 Pro’s rumored new MagSafe design. Well, we’re reading from MacRumors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Leaker MyJin Boo today shared a photo of the alleged MagSafe magnet arrays for third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 17 Pro cases. On existing iPhone models with MagSafe, the magnets form a complete circle, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new layout has an opening in it. And there is a link to MyJin’s official website,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we will also link the picture of the iPhone 16 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a MagSafe case where you can see clear as day that there is a circle of MagSafe magnets. The Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logo is pretty much directly in the center of it. And in the 17 Pro, allegedly the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logo has been moved down. So it’s kind of in the way of the bottom of the magnet circle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so there is no magnet circle.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the thing. If you look at the, the Maijin Boo things where like the parts that he’s got, if you scroll down
⏹️ ▶️ John the page and see like those teal little pieces. You see that?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no Apple logo on those. So while I’m willing to believe that
⏹️ ▶️ John this incomplete circle MagSafe circle is the design for the back of the phone, because these parts
⏹️ ▶️ John leaks seem, you know, it’s, it’s around that time that we’d be getting these types of leaks.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m currently wondering what does that mean for the Apple logo on the back of the phone, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re going to put it where this Mac rumors mock-up put it. Like they, what they did is they,
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of the iPhone 17 Pro basically has a full width camera mesa and
⏹️ ▶️ John then below it has another rounded rectangle and they put the Apple logo in the center of the lower rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle. But the center of the lower rounded rectangle is not the center of the MagSafe circle. It’s lower
⏹️ ▶️ John than that. So that’s where the mock-up put the Apple logo. I guess you could just move the Apple logo up
⏹️ ▶️ John and put it in the center of the partial circle. Or what do you think of this? No
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple logo on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro. No way.
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s what’s your what’s your guess for where will the Apple will be positioned or will there be one? Assuming that
⏹️ ▶️ John this mag safe design is true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’ll be where it is today. Just, you know, there’s just going to be less mag safe stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think it’ll be centered in the partial circle? Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John chose not to do that because I think one of the other rumors you’ll see. I think there are separate rumor stories that are like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple is going to be centered in the rounded rectangle, not where it used to be. I don’t know what to think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the actual back of the phone, you don’t see the MagSafe shape.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is only an issue when you have a clear case. This kind of thing, I can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple just maybe discontinuing the clear case if that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a big problem. Nah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think ultimately, the Apple logo, I think, will remain in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle of the circle, not in the middle of the flat area. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Apple logo in the middle of the flat area of the back of the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it puts it pretty far below the overall center of the phone, and I think it kind of just makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it look droopy. Like you don’t want the Apple logo to look like it’s beneath something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously Tim Cook is beneath a lot of dignity right now, but you don’t want the Apple logo. Couldn’t help yourself. No, of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you don’t want the Apple logo to be down on the shape of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone. You want it to be like prominent, center or up. Like you don’t want it to be on the lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half. And that’s what this is depicting. I can’t see Apple doing that. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still gonna have the clear case. I think the Apple logo does actually look better centered
⏹️ ▶️ John in the rectangular part, just because if it is styled as they’re showing here, where it’s like two color, two tone,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s a different color than the rest of it, so you can clearly see it. But I’m thinking back to, do you remember the case,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple case with a bunch of holes in it. I think it was on that. Was it on the C phones? Yeah, it was on the five.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I remember how badly those holes lined up with like the Apple logo or whatever that was on the
⏹️ ▶️ John back of the phone. And it looked very on Apple like I think they’re willing to have awkward alignment
⏹️ ▶️ John between the phone body and the case. But we’ll see. This is one of the more interesting rumors this because these phones have
⏹️ ▶️ John been so thoroughly leaked with like down to the fraction of a millimeter models of
⏹️ ▶️ John every single phone in the lineup of being out for months now that this
⏹️ ▶️ John is one thing that there seems to be disagreement on is where the Apple logo will go
⏹️ ▶️ John because the mock-ups for case designs don’t actually include that information because it’s not important when you’re designing a case because the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John logo is not indented, it’s not poking out, it’s just a part of the flat surface. So keep
⏹️ ▶️ John an eye out for where will the Apple logo be or will there be one? I agree that we’ll probably still be on.
Apple’s Answers team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Apple’s new Answers team eyes chat GPT-like product in AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey push, writes Mark Gurman. Apple has a new Answers team developing a stripped-down rival
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to chat GPT to help users access world knowledge. Earlier this year, Apple formed a new team called Answers Knowledge and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Information, or AKI. This group, I’m told, is exploring a number of in-house AI services with the goal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of creating a new chat GPT-like search experience. The AKI team is led by our former friend,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Robbie Walker, a senior director reporting to AI chief John G. and Andrea, Walker previously oversaw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri, but lost control of it after engineering delays. Following that shakeup, he was assigned to the New Answers Initiative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and has brought along several key team members from his Siri days. While still in early stages,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the team is building what it calls an answer engine, a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general knowledge questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A standalone app is currently under exploration alongside new backend infrastructure meant to power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey search capabilities in future versions of Siri Spotlight and Safari. Apple’s recently begun advertising job openings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the team on its career site, several listings specifically mentioned experience with search algorithms and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engine development.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t tell from this rumor whether the answer engine thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is a search engine or is an
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM or both because this is described as a chat GPT like search experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I think of an answers team, I mean I guess it depends on what they’re being asked
⏹️ ▶️ John to answer, but like I think there’s still a place in Apple software
⏹️ ▶️ John stack for something that can answer questions from like a knowledge base.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Not make up statistically likely answers from a knowledge base
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was trained on, but like literally look stuff up kind of like what, you know, Gruber is going
⏹️ ▶️ John on about when the whole thing about like who won the super bowls, you can just put all the super bowl winners and the scores and the info and like a
⏹️ ▶️ John structured database and have a thing that knows how to pull that info out. And it won’t be wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John because it knows as long as it correctly interprets which to roll you’re talking about it can look it up in the structured database and
⏹️ ▶️ John just give you the answer that it has in its database and I guess the info in the database could be wrong But you
⏹️ ▶️ John know once you get the database, right? There’s not a lot of variability it will give you the scores that will give you the teams will give
⏹️ ▶️ John you the years It will give you whatever is in the database. That’s not an LLM The LLM may parse your question
⏹️ ▶️ John But this could be a tool that the LLM uses say hey if anyone has to about Super Bowl if you interpret whatever remember mumbo
⏹️ ▶️ John jumbo they told you that they’re asking about the Super Bowl? LLM thing used this tool and then the tool would
⏹️ ▶️ John be the answer engine that goes and looks up all the state capitals, the populations
⏹️ ▶️ John of various countries, you know, like facts to have a fact, right? And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a place for that. Siri used to do that. Like that was basically how Siri worked. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John asked it sort of quote unquote world knowledge questions that either had some kind of database with the structured information that it could give you or
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t. And it’d be like, I couldn’t tell you that. But in the age of LLMs with quote unquote world knowledge,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll make up anything. You can ask them anything and they’ll tell you something, all right? And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why people are trying to make LLMs to be essentially like tool using devices where
⏹️ ▶️ John their job is to interpret what the request is and to figure out which tool to use. And then those tools are not
⏹️ ▶️ John probabilistic word generator things, but are instead specific tools that do a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John task, like look up some data in a database or whatever. I hope that’s what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making because one of the things that I feel like is a frustration
⏹️ ▶️ John with LM type stuff is we expect from our experience in the past with computers, we expect
⏹️ ▶️ John computers to be good at the things that humans are not good at. So computers can do math really, really fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Humans can’t. And computers get the answers right all the time. Unless it’s a hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John failure, humans don’t. But with LMs, that all changes. the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we expect them to be good at of like their, their speed and infallibility don’t exist anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s sometimes tricky to find out how to get value out of a thing like that. Like we want them to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, the computer says it must be right. I asked it about the super bowl and it understood my question. It told me this team won and this was the score,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it turns out that’s just statistically probable nonsense and it’s wrong. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having a plain old boring set of structured
⏹️ ▶️ John data retrieval tools, like an answer engine, that can be used
⏹️ ▶️ John by an LLM to look stuff up once it understands what the user wants, seems like a really great idea for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I really hope that’s what they’re doing. But then seeing the names associated with this, like Robbie Walker, who got all that bad press
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Siri stuff, it also seems kind of like, well, we kicked all these people off Siri, so we
⏹️ ▶️ John need something to do, so give them this other thing. And it doesn’t make me feel like it is a high priority project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we’ll see what happens with all their AI efforts and projects. Like it’s obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally in a state of significant flux. That’s good. We know that that’s where we wanted them to be because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we can agree they were heading in some bad directions before or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not heading in good directions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Heading nowhere. Right, yeah, exactly. There’s gonna be a lot of fits and starts and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big attempts, small attempts. I think this is great. At least they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying things now that seem like they are both achievable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and important to their customers. If they were gonna have some big Moonshoot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco projects, I’d rather than try to build a world knowledge AI than a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a VR headset, honestly. So I think this is good news. Even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it never becomes anything or even if they try it and it sucks, I’d rather they try this kind of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t tell if you’re saying Moonshoot as a humorous reference to your past saying of that word, or you’ve just forgotten that it’s a meme
⏹️ ▶️ John track? Forgot. Now I remember. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing, do you remember when they, whatever the announcement, it might’ve been a WRC, the Apple Intelligence one, they were like, and we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John fed it Siri knowledge about our products, and now you can ask it about our products, and then people tried it, and it would just tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you to go to settings that don’t exist in settings and stuff like that. The value of features like that essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to zero if you can’t rely on it giving you answers. And it’s kind of embarrassing for like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s own products that like they’re advertising the fact that you can ask your phone how to like, you know, how do I turn on dark mode?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it tells you, go to settings, go here, go this way. Like if it’s wrong, you’re like, you’re the phone. The
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing you should know about is where the stuff is in you. It seems it’s. And once you get a wrong answer once
⏹️ ▶️ John or twice from that, you’re going to stop asking it because it seems like it’s just wasting your time. This is where an
⏹️ ▶️ John answer engine come in handy. I feel like you could structure that data in some way that
⏹️ ▶️ John it would always give you an answer that is relevant to whatever operating system your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John is running. Whatever, you know, like it should know this, like this is a knowable, tractable thing. It’s just so much more
⏹️ ▶️ John work to do it that way than to just feed all the knowledge-based articles and documentation to an LLM and then cross your fingers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is what everyone wants to do. They’re just like, well, just throw all the stuff at it and then put it in front of customers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s right most of the time, so that’s good, right? And it’s like, eh, yeah. So my fingers are really crossed
⏹️ ▶️ John about this knowledge engine thing Because I want this to be a deterministic tool that is used by the
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs. And I don’t want it to be, we just fed a bunch of documentation to a different
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM so it can give you a different set of maybe right answers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, I agree with you that I think this is definitely something that they should be exploring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also agree that if the reporting about Robbie Walker in particular, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gene and Andrea actually, is anywhere near true, and they are not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as great as maybe they should be to be put in these positions. I don’t know. That scares me a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit. And it’s certainly like a, well, we don’t want to fire you, but just go over here and play for a little while, like a toddler,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Like distract, distract.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It doesn’t seem like it’s the a team. Oh, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe. Exactly. Which I mean, may, and maybe we’re darn wrong. Maybe Robbie Walker and John Jean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andrea were completely, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John riddled. Well, I mean, all we know is that they didn’t produce results. We don’t know why, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we do know that they had a job and they didn’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. But we’ll see. I mean, I, I, I’m, I’m really hopeful that this will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn out to be something fruitful. I don’t even really care if it’s an LLM or not as long as it works, but
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#askatp: Sleep-ejection issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP where Steve writes, I have a desktop laptop, MacBook Air, it has an external SSD permanently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attached, which I use for time machine backups. Whenever the MacBook wakes from sleep, it pings a notification disk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not ejected properly. Eject M1 time machine before disconnecting it or turning it off. Can I stop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this from happening without having to dismount and remount the drive every time I walk away from the computer, it’s annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and worrying that I might be corrupting my backups. Before John starts fussing about desktop laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we know that desktops would solve this problem, but you can’t move a desktop, John. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John other problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if desktops would solve this problem because the problem is like going to sleep and waking from sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Desktops also go to sleep and wake from sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. All right, see, I was trying to get ahead of all the complaining and moaning about laptops, but it turns out you’re not complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and moaning.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I’m saying is, are you worried you might be corrupting your backups? Yeah, you should be worried.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it says disk not ejected properly, That’s not an annoyance that you should live with. That’s an indication that
⏹️ ▶️ John something is going wrong. And we’ve talked about this in past episodes. What’s going wrong? Was it whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John chipset is running the interface on your external drive mechanism? Is it some driver issue with
⏹️ ▶️ John your version? Whatever it is, it’s a problem and you should do something about it because you can’t allow
⏹️ ▶️ John this to stand. Anyway, one of the workarounds, believe it or not, there is an app for
⏹️ ▶️ John from St. Clair Software. What else do they make? They got a keyboard maestro and a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of other stuff. Anyway, it’s called Jettison. The tagline is manually take control of your external
⏹️ ▶️ John disks directly from your menu bar. Automatically eject disks before your Mac sleeps or after your
⏹️ ▶️ John display powers off. With Jettison, just close your MacBook, unplug and go. This is working
⏹️ ▶️ John around this apparently issue that is common with external disks with macOS by saying
⏹️ ▶️ John install this software and you don’t have to remember to manually unmount your things when you put your thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John sleep. We will automatically unmount them before your MacBook goes to sleep and maybe remount
⏹️ ▶️ John them or whatever, but like what you’re trying, this is a, not hacky, but this is an unfortunate
⏹️ ▶️ John workaround for a disc that keeps remounting itself. Really, your disc should not be
⏹️ ▶️ John remounting itself when your Mac goes to sleep. As someone who has had many, many external drives connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to many, many Macs, you should be able to put it to sleep and wake it up, and you should see no messages
⏹️ ▶️ John about volumes unmounting. You shouldn’t, it’s not happened, but you know, we don’t live in a perfect world, so
⏹️ ▶️ John check out Jettison.
#askatp: Xcode disk space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jeff writes, I started working with Xcode in January and something has been bothering me specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it pertains to the amount of space that Xcode uses on your hard drive. I have an M4 Mac mini with 24
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of memory and a 512 gig SSD. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been using Xcode a lot and I noticed that my storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available space dropped from close to 400 gigs to under 240 gigs over that time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I figured it had to be Xcode because in system settings, developer was taking up around 50 gigs. So I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting Xcode onto an external SSD. I already store my projects there. It seemed to make no difference. So I moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it back to my internal hard drive. I was about to pull the trigger on a $2,000 Mac mini with 48 gigs of memory and two terabytes of storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When this morning I checked my storage and a hundred gigs had suddenly rematerialized, can you explain this or give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me some insight on how the storage relating to Xcode works? John, tell me about file systems,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So free space in Mac OS is tricky because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy features of the Apple file system. It’s just it’s just a fact of life. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have these fancy features without some confusion about free space. There is no obvious thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple should do that would make it clear to everybody all the time. That just isn’t. So that’s that’s an unfortunate
⏹️ ▶️ John complexity of modern computing life. The workaround is just by so much storage, you never need to
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about it. But that’s very expensive, especially in Apple world. So one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be making your hogging your space and then having your space suddenly reappear, are local
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine backups. If you are running time machine, and it’s not clear if Jeff is, but if you’re running time machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine does this thing where it makes local snapshots, where it takes a point in time snapshot of your entire volume,
⏹️ ▶️ John periodically, sometimes several of them. And those snapshots keep
⏹️ ▶️ John data alive, even if it’s subsequently deleted. Because as long as data is referenced by
⏹️ ▶️ John any existing snapshots, it can’t be actually freed up. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you take a snapshot, or time machine takes a snapshot behind the scenes without you knowing, and again, this has nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with like an external time machine disk. I’m saying if you’re running time machine and like you
⏹️ ▶️ John unplug the time machine disk, doesn’t matter. These are local snapshots on the volume that is going to be backed up.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes these snapshots because that’s what it can back up from. It takes a snapshot and then you delete 200 gigs worth
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff. You’re not getting that space back until the snapshot that references those 200 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John also goes away. Time machine will delete these local snapshots periodically. It doesn’t make them forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they sort of go off the end. I don’t know how many it keeps. I don’t know how long it keeps. The policy always changes or whatever, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John within a few days or hours or whatever, the snapshot that referenced those 200 gigs of files that you deleted,
⏹️ ▶️ John that snapshot will be deleted or discarded and now nothing references that 200 gigs worth of data and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John get it back as free space. You can see the complexity of the finder trying to show what your free space is.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you delete those 200 gigs, don’t you wanna see the number grow up by 200 gigs? but what if it didn’t really delete it? What if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still referenced in a snapshot? Should it lie to you and tell you that’s free space? Sometimes it does because in
⏹️ ▶️ John theory, there’s this system in macOS that considers that space quote unquote purgeable.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if it needs space and it doesn’t have enough, it can say, what can I purge? And one of the things that can purge is your
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine snapshot. So it might show you that you have that 200 gigs free knowing that if any app tries
⏹️ ▶️ John to use that space, it’s the macOS will be like, oh, actually that space isn’t free, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I can make it free, just hang on a second, I’ll just delete the snapshot and that’s time consuming. It’s tricky. And the big complaint about Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS is it doesn’t purge the purgeable space fast enough or in a timely enough manner. So even though there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly space available, it doesn’t become available fast enough. Anyway, we’ll put a link, a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of links in the show notes explaining what time machine local snapshots are and how you can view them. You used to be able to,
⏹️ ▶️ John used to have to use a command line tool to do this, but now plain old disk utility will show you your time machine
⏹️ ▶️ John snapshots and will let your local time machine snapshots and will let you delete them with
⏹️ ▶️ John a little minus button in disk utility. So no longer do you have to do command line hacking.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have found in my experience, I often have to manually delete local time
⏹️ ▶️ John machine snapshots to free up space in a timely manner because macOS is
⏹️ ▶️ John just too slow and too reticent to purge that purgeable space. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing. The other thing is Xcode taking up space. Xcode does take up tons of space
⏹️ ▶️ John in places that people might not realize, so much so that there is a pretty good app
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated to this called DevCleaner that I’ve been running for a long time. Do you guys run DevCleaner? Yes, I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go, Casey, you found an app for you. So it runs periodically, even if you forget
⏹️ ▶️ John to run it, it will periodically pop up a notification and say, hey, you haven’t run this in a while, you should probably run it now. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows you all the space being taken up for Xcode stuff that you can safely delete.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, safely is, you know, one of the things that will show you is how much space is being taken up with archive
⏹️ ▶️ John builds of your app. You probably don’t wanna delete those. At least I don’t, maybe I’m just hoarding them or they’re good for debugging
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but like, it will show you those. So don’t think you can just delete everything. You have to have some knowledge to use this tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will show you things like SDKs that you’ve downloaded that you’re not using anymore. Oh, I’m not doing iPad development
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. And in fact, there’s two different iPad SDKs downloaded. I can delete those. You can delete those because if you ever
⏹️ ▶️ John need them again, Xcode will re-download them for you or you can re-download them from Xcode. It’ll show
⏹️ ▶️ John you locally cached documentation. It will show you everyone’s favorite derived data.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It will show
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of other stuff. It will show you, and the sizes, and you can decide which one of these things do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to delete. And I always forget about it until a notification appears and says, hey, you haven’t run DevCleaner, or do you want to run
⏹️ ▶️ John it? And that will find some stuff that you can delete. Now, I don’t think it explains Jeff’s situation where hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ John of gigs are disappearing. It shouldn’t be that big, but it does let you get a handle
⏹️ ▶️ John on Xcode Xcode and the space that it’s using. I would also
⏹️ ▶️ John check if you have like multiple versions of Xcode or like if you have the.zip file sitting in your download folder
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know this gets into just general like using something like grand perspective or daisy disk or whatever to
⏹️ ▶️ John find what’s using space on your disk. But for Xcode in particular, there’s an app for that. It’s called DevCleaner,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Yeah, and if you are on the Xcode beta train or just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you use Xcode for long enough to have multiple versions of Xcode or have gone through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple versions of iOS or whatever the platforms are, when Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloads the iOS runtime files or the watchOS runtime files or all those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloading those components after you install the actual app, it doesn’t delete the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. So if you’re on the beta train, like this summer, we’re on the beta train, we’re on beta five, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time you download the new beta, it downloads the iOS support files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that version of the beta, which are like seven gigs. When you get the new beta, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old files stick around. They’re no longer used if you replace beta four of Xcode with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta five of Xcode or whatever, but those stick around. Recently, those have moved to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a system folder that tools like DevCleaner can’t clean, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode itself, if you go into the Xcode settings, there’s a tab called Components,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you scroll down to the bottom, it will show you all the old versions of those components of basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an old iOS built and stuff that you probably can delete support for because you probably don’t need them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore because the version of Xcode you’re running, you usually can’t even use them if you wanted to. Or if it’s for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some ancient version of Xcode, do you really need separate support files for iOS 18.4 and 18.1 and 18.0?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, probably not. And you can always redownload that kind of stuff if you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So go into the Xcode components menu and you’ll be able to delete a lot of stuff from there. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secondly, if you are running the iOS simulator, say on your Mac to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test out things on iOS, I run into this problem a lot because my app that I’m testing is Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it downloads files, downloads podcasts. And so if I like launch a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simulator and I log into an existing test account that already has some podcasts subscribed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna start downloading those files off the internet to my Mac and it’s gonna keep those in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a file container for that instance of that simulator. So it could be downloading like a gig or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of MP3s if it’s like a big enough account, and those are just sitting in some container folder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere, and I’m testing with them and everything. But then later on, if a new version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Xcode or iOS comes out and I start building my simulator against that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a new copy of the simulator with its own container, and the old one just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets abandoned. And so buried deep inside your, your usually your library folder somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s like device support, um, or simulator fault folders that contain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the data that has been downloaded by your app running in the simulator in various times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, and if you aren’t actively going and cleaning those out, those will add up too. So, so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do have to be fairly diligent with Xcode development for disk space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both Xcode itself in the component menu and in, if you’re running simulators, Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s going on in those simulators and are you then abandoning them with gigs of data just sitting there forever? Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s, there’s a lot of potential to reclaim disk space by kind of watching Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a hawk and almost none of it has to do with, as Jeff said, like moving the Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app itself to an external desk, cause that won’t change anything. It’s still going to be storing all these other folders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your boot drive or, you know, whatever that is. And that being said, I would suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have the ability, no computer from Apple that you intend to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Xcode with should have less than a terabyte of SSD. And even the terabyte you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to babysit. The terabyte is what I use for my travel laptop. And the reason I know all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff about where all these folders are right now is because like two days ago it was down to like 30 gigs free. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, what? Out of a terabyte? What happened? And sure enough, I had like 200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs of Xcode waste going on across the computer. It was quite something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find. But even a terabyte, like if I had the 512, I wouldn’t fit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would not be enough for all the stuff that I do, even for a travel laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m also doing Xcode. Terabyte if you can, should be your minimum. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think next time I buy one, I might even go two terabytes, just because these things are only growing over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, especially as we’re getting into LLMs and downloading models and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s only going to keep getting bigger over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s also worth noting that the DevCleaner thing is apparently open source on GitHub as well. So it’s on the Mac App Store, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can also see the source code and try to build it yourself or whatever. So that’s nice. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen a bunch of stories recently about people who are like, my Mac was fine, had plenty of
⏹️ ▶️ John free space, and then overnight I lost 500 gigs and it turns out to be like
⏹️ ▶️ John And a spotlight importer That just got it caught in a loop and was just making tons of little files
⏹️ ▶️ John or some driver that kept crashing and every time It crashed and made like a four kilobyte crash log and it was crashing hundreds of times
⏹️ ▶️ John a second And there was a director with six literally six million files in it
⏹️ ▶️ John Stuff like that can happen With first party and third party software. How do you
⏹️ ▶️ John find that? How do you find what’s happening? How did these people find what the problem is? We’ll put a link in the notes
⏹️ ▶️ John to the app that I use, which is Grand Perspective. What was the other app before Grand Perspective?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always, there was Omni Disk Sweeper. I always was a big fan of Space Gremlin, and Daisy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Disk is the one that everyone else likes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I like Daisy Disk. But Grand Perspective is a clone of an app that was exactly like Grand Perspective that had
⏹️ ▶️ John a different name. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yes, I know what you’re thinking about. I can’t remember the damn name of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Grand Perspective gives you a bunch of visual squares, each square, the area of each
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle. each, the area of each rectangle represents the number of bytes. Uh, the, uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, I forget if it’s free or cheap, but anyway, it’s well worth the money because you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see the big boxes, like it takes a long time to do a scan, but just look at, look for where the big rectangle is or look for where
⏹️ ▶️ John the giant fleets of tiny rectangles are. And you’ll find you’ll very quickly, if there’s a directory with 6 million files in it,
⏹️ ▶️ John after you run grand perspective and let it run over like 48 hours or however long it takes to do it, you’ll, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see the 6 million files that you didn’t expect to be there because they will dwarf everything else. The only
⏹️ ▶️ John advice I will give on grand perspective is in this modern age and in any kind of multi-user type
⏹️ ▶️ John environment, if you have more than one account on your Mac, keep in mind that it cannot see
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff happening in other people’s accounts when you run it on your account. So you should go to that other account
⏹️ ▶️ John and run it there as well to get a complete picture because you’re not gonna, because it can’t like, it can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John read those directories. I don’t think it like it runs as root. At least the Mac App Store one doesn’t like run as root and have admin
⏹️ ▶️ John permissions. but that’s how you find those things. I mean, you can do it from the command line. There’s a million different ways you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but if you’re looking for a GUI app, run this thing, let it run, it will take a long time and it will show you a graphical representation
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can then hover your mouse cursor over all these little rectangles and show the little info pane, and it’ll tell you exactly what file you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John hovering over or what directory, and then you can reveal that on the finder and you’ll find where the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Fixing the problem might be tricky, especially if it’s a spotlight importer or something, but that’s part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the detective work that’s required. So yeah, I recommend you do the same, Marco, if you’re pushing
⏹️ ▶️ John up against the limits of a one terabyte thing and you only found 200 gigs of Xcode waste to delete, so maybe there’s something else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and you know, also part of it is like, you know, I have, there’s 200 gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos that were downloaded, not even with Keep Originals. Oh, yeah, if you’re gonna put, try to put your photo library on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and not even with Keep Originals, just like, you know, with the automatic storage thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the problem with it. Oh, optimize storage. Sure, we’ll use every ounce of free space you have and never purge
⏹️ ▶️ John it when you want space back. Is that what you wanted? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember back in the day, I used to keep my iCloud photo library file in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disk image that had a quota set on it. I haven’t done that in a long time. I wonder if that still
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m surprised it ever worked, but I understand the motivation, but just like there should be a setting in photos
⏹️ ▶️ John that says optimize storage underneath that, it should say, and never use more than X amount. And it can put a minimum on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, you have to let me use at least this much because you have this many photos or whatever, but it doesn’t. And so it just does whatever it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s doing. By the way, the chat room has told us all that the grand prospective predecessor was called Disk
#askatp: Spam-filtering for mail servers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally tonight, Alan Bailward writes, how do you recommend dealing with spam for those of us running our own mail server?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I can stop here. Don’t run your own mail server. It’s it’s that simple. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not trying to be a turd, but like I am happy to read the rest of this, but truly I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the motivation for not wanting to do Gmail or not wanting to do fast mail, even though I cannot overstate how good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my experience with fast mail has been. I get the motivation. I am super duper in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into self host self hosting these days. I get it, but this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a bad idea. It’s just not a good idea to run your own mail server. I cannot stress enough, it’s not a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan. I’m going to read this because I’m not trying to be cruel to Alan, but that is truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my answer is don’t run your own mail server. Alan writes, for those of us running our own mail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server or not using Gmail that has a good spam filter, there doesn’t seem to be any spam filtering on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or iPad OS. The best solution I have is running spam sieve on my Mac and leaving mail open all the time. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there a better way other than switching mail providers? No, if it matters, I’m using open SRS for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my few domains used by myself and a few friends and family, which costs 50 cents per mailbox per month, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than the $18 Canadian per user per month from G suite.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this question isn’t just saying if you run your own mail server, which I agree, you should not do it because it’s just asking
⏹️ ▶️ John is a nightmare, which is a shame by the way, it should be possible to do it, but the, the current
⏹️ ▶️ John situation, the current spam environment makes it pretty much untenable for you to do that. But even if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John running your own mail server, but you’re simply not using a service that has its own decent spam filtering built
⏹️ ▶️ John in, like Gmail tries to have. For example, Apple’s mail services,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing something related to spam that you have, see if this sounds familiar, no visibility into
⏹️ ▶️ John and no control over. One
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never used my Apple email account as my main email account is because I have learned
⏹️ ▶️ John so many hard lessons about their spam filtering. A, that’s not good at filtering spam,
⏹️ ▶️ John and B, it has stopped me from receiving legitimate messages many times with no explanation and no recourse.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t like Apple’s email service for that reason, but a lot of people use it and find it fine. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John SpamSib I used for years, but of course, Alan has identified the problem. SpamSib is a thing that runs on
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac. For it to do its work, it needs to be running, and it only works on the Mac that it’s running on. That was
⏹️ ▶️ John good for the days of Pop before we had even IMAP, where all the email was just downloaded onto
⏹️ ▶️ John each individual Mac. That’s not the world we live in. Although SpamSip is really good, and it’s tunable
⏹️ ▶️ John and configurable. And if you are in a situation where, and if you’re using it with IMAP, it will be reflected back up on the server,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, because when it files things in Spam, it’s filing them in an IMAP Spam folder. So SpamSip is not just for POP. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John do actually recommend that, but if you’re not running your Mac, then SpamSim isn’t doing its work. And if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have an always on Mac, I see the problem there. MailRoute, MailRoute, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco former sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ John of the show ages and ages ago, that I’m still using, is a server-side
⏹️ ▶️ John mail filtering service where you basically have your mail delivered to MailRoute and then they filter spam and then forward
⏹️ ▶️ John it onto where it was really supposed to go. I like that because it runs on a server that I don’t have to deal with someplace
⏹️ ▶️ John else. It’s basically transparent. It doesn’t matter what mail client you use or whatever because as far as your client is concerned, when the mail
⏹️ ▶️ John arrives, it’s already been filtered. And I think they do a pretty good job. I use that for a bunch of my
⏹️ ▶️ John non-Gmail account things and it blocks a lot of spam.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I never need to do anything with it. Now does it block all the spam? No, but it has rarely caught a message
⏹️ ▶️ John that I wanted to get through. And it does send digest emails saying, here’s some messages
⏹️ ▶️ John that were questionable about, and you can click on individual ones and say, no, let that one through. I don’t know if it learns
⏹️ ▶️ John from me doing that, but every once in a while I have to say, no, let that one through. Anyway, mail
⏹️ ▶️ John route, that’s another option. I’m sure there are similar services like that. That’s what I would look into. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have something that’s running all the time, where you can run spam sieve on a Mac or whatever, look
⏹️ ▶️ John for a server-side solution that runs on a server that you do not run. Like, again, you can just go to
⏹️ ▶️ John Fastmail, as Casey was suggesting, which would do presumably all this for you, but if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to assemble your mail life experience from pieces, and why am I using MailRoute? Why don’t I use
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Well, because I have a bunch of email addresses for domains that aren’t real. I didn’t want to use Google Domains
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that. I just wanted them to be freestanding, and eventually I started getting enough email that spam became an issue,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was looking for a solution to that, so I plugged in MailRoute, and it’s so far been working for me, but I’m sure there are other alternatives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would say I used MailRoute for a long time and they were a sponsor and my experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them was pretty good overall. However, I did have to go in and like occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check their, their kind of like maybe quarantine to say like, cause it would occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco catch messages that I did want and flag them as spam. So I did have to kind of babysit it a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it did do a very good job of filtering out spam in the meantime. But overall Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the most right among us. don’t do this. Don’t run your own mail server in this day and age. There’s lots of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do that in a way that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that both you can, you know, reliably deliver mail to everybody and that you can reliably
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the Cloudflare situation. Because it costs so little to send
⏹️ ▶️ John email, spam became prevalent and then spam eventually overwhelmed all the legitimate mail and that allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John a a few powerful mail providers to become so big that then they could do deals amongst themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John about sort of mail exchange and who they’ll trust and the rules that they’re set. And now if you don’t have a mail account on one of the big
⏹️ ▶️ John mail providers, it’s very difficult to be independent. So now those big mail providers have an inordinate
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of control over the mail ecosystem. So whatever they decide to do amongst themselves, you
⏹️ ▶️ John are subject to that. You are, if they just decide, we’re not gonna accept any mail unless it does X, Y, and Z, you better
⏹️ ▶️ John do X, Y, and Z, otherwise you can’t deliver to millions and millions of people. And this is just another, I mean, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s two things. One bad actors, rune stuff for everybody. And the bad actors in the cloud flow case would be the AI
⏹️ ▶️ John crawlers that are crawling too aggressively. So they make an environment where we can’t have nice things,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Someone’s in there just making a mess and stomping around and breaking everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you need someone to try to create order and that creates these big powerful companies which now have too
⏹️ ▶️ John much power. So yeah, I’m sure, I don’t know if this is tragedy of the commons or there’s some common
⏹️ ▶️ John cliche parable or lesson that repeats itself over and over again that I don’t remember the name of that this is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you very much for listening, everybody. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and delete me. And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at ATP that FM slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join one of the many perks of membership is you get to hear more of us every week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our ATP overtime our weekly bonus topic. This week’s overtime we’re we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post quantum cryptography which is exactly as cool as it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post quantum cryptography support in the 26 OS’s in the networking stack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re talking with that you can hear us by joining at atb.fm join thank you everybody We’ll talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t mean to Accidental, check podcast so long
Casey’s safe space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a safe space, right? I’m not loving that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neither of you has confirmed that this is a safe space for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll do our best. Yeah, there’s no promises here. I think once you say what you have to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John once you give us the situation here, I want us all to do our counts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. I got home from the beach on Sunday and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went out to dinner with some friends of hours and I forget what was, I think it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a late breaking dinner in the sense that we hadn’t really, really planned on going. And then all of a sudden it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right, let’s get in the car and go. And I was in my workout clothes, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a ATP, uh, athletic shirt. You know, the it’s kind of under armor style athletic shirt that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love. And, uh, a pair of exercise shorts from a former sponsor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I adore. I really, truly do. Uh, that being said, the zipper on these shorts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has given up the ghost on both sides. So, uh, I don’t generally go out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in like do social things in this outfit, uh, in no small part because I often stink,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but here we are. Uh, but occasionally exceptions have, have to be made. And this is one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those exceptions. And so we went to dinner and then I was getting back into Aaron’s car in the passenger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seat, uh, as I was leaving dinner and Aaron said, oh, I just heard something fall. Was that your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone? your phone to which I said, Oh no, yes, it was. And sure enough, I shattered the back of my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is, I believe the third phone I’ve done this to. I had a very long stretch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of never having done this. And then we had the incident where I jumped up to wash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her former Volvo while I had the phone in a back pocket of regular shorts. Terrible decision, a hundred percent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my fault. Uh, and it shattered on the ground thereafter. Uh, and then I’m pretty sure I broke another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, although I don’t recall how now. And then I think this is my third.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, what is your case situation?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am caseless caseless. And I have dropped this phone several times, not on concrete like I did this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to offer this, this additional information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know full well the risk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know full well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the risk I’m taking.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you think your count is three. You have, you have shattered three phones. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s right. And that one watch, That also happened when washing Aaron’s car.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not talking about watches.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is just phones. It’s not actually that. I believe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John correct. You’ve had an iPhone since what, the first one? The 3G? The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3GS was my first. That was the third one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So that’s a pretty good run for only three shattered phones. Although it is concerning that all three of them are fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey recent. Yeah, yeah. Something has changed
⏹️ ▶️ John in your judgment about pockets or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently. I don’t know. But I mean, this was ultimately my fault. It’s still my fault. but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was put, I put myself in a position that I’m not usually in. I’m in a pair of shorts that I know is not the best phone containment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanism. And I was doing, I left the house, which isn’t something I don’t typically do in these shorts. And so it’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault, but mistakes have been
⏹️ ▶️ John made. Well, so what, you know, what actually happened though? Was the phone in your pocket and the act of getting into the car squirted
⏹️ ▶️ John it out? That’s right. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Uh, what’s your, what’s your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Uh, how many phones have you shattered?
⏹️ ▶️ John Zero. I’m a zero as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m impressed. Genuinely. I’m going to add iPod touches because although I didn’t get my first iPhone until
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone 7, I had the iPod touch since the very first one. So I have always had phone shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John things with screens on them, although granted, it probably didn’t take the iPod touch out of the house. Although I did, but I had it in a pouch,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anyway, I’m at zero. I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think. I don’t think I have ever broken an electronic device. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t remember anything off the top of my head. Like maybe I’m forgetting something, but. Didn’t you sit on, someone sat on an iPad in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Someone did sit on an iPad in my house. It was not me. It was not your butt, huh? No, it was a different butt in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. I don’t think I’ve ever broken anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very impressed. Like I said, I had a very long run. This is, coincidentally, I think this is actually all Stephen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hackett’s fault because Stephen was breaking phones left and right for years and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had never broken one. Now, to my recollection, Stephen hasn’t broken a phone in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John he start using case?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John He traded, he started
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey using case, you stopped.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So, no, that’s right, I just listened to Connected and I believe he said he is caseless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the winter, if I recall correctly, and case in the summer. So, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have saved me if I had followed his strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, speaking of the sounds of phones hitting the ground, once your children get a little older, you
⏹️ ▶️ John will start to become more familiar with that sound. I cannot count the number of times that I
⏹️ ▶️ John can now recognize whose phone it is and where they’re dropping in the house. The phones have
⏹️ ▶️ John been dropped down the stairs, dropped onto the floor, just like onto onto the concrete,
⏹️ ▶️ John like what you’re getting into a car and falling out onto the ground has happened so many times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thus far, I believe cases have saved it in all circumstances, although there is a very deep scratch on my daughter’s
⏹️ ▶️ John phone screen. She says she doesn’t know where it came from, but I’m not surprised because it’s dropped
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. Like she’s literally dropped it down the stair, like boom, hits, You know, from the top of the stairs to the bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ John hitting all the stairs on the way down and somehow to survive with just an Apple clear case on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That phone is getting
⏹️ ▶️ John replaced with her graduation gift slash college phone because she’s used this phone for like
⏹️ ▶️ John five years, I think four or five years. So she’s getting a new phone to go off to college. But it’s been it’s been a trooper.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, you’ll probably be more familiar with that. So I’m sure saying is get cases for your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kids phones. Oh, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. And that will be a requirement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I was doing the, you know, AppleCare is my case, which I do not advise. I do not advise this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John insanity. I mean, it seemed to
⏹️ ▶️ John work out for you because in the notes here, like you had AppleCare on it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did. So I did an express replacement because I’ve learned from my mistakes with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you dropped it, because you just wanted to use the knowledge you had gained from past episodes before you forgot it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shoot. And now that I think about it, I could have written off the 30 bucks, whatever it is to repair it. But what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did was that night, which was Sunday night, I went on Apple’s website and said, I would like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey express replacement, please. You know, I broke in the back glass, blah, blah, blah. That was easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey peasy. It arrived yesterday, which is Tuesday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did the transfer, which took forever. No matter what I do to transfer phones, I always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make the wrong choice and always, it always takes forever. And I think some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that- You just have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was about to say, I think some of that is, I just have a lot of data. But some of that, I think I’m just making maybe not the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best choice, but either way, it did transfer most everything worked just fine. I didn’t have any major issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then I wiped the old phone, put it in the box that the new phone came in, dropped it off this morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at FedEx. And, uh, current, the way this works is there is a $1,300 hold on my credit card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because if I don’t return the old phone, they, they basically think that I’ve stolen one, so they’re going to bill me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it, which fair enough, but sometime in the next, you know, 24 to 48 hours, presumably they will get the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old phone. They will look at it and laugh at my misfortune. And then they will refund or I guess release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all but $30, um, in order to, because I’m pretty sure the repair is 30 bucks. It used to be a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more for the back class. Now it’s 30 bucks. And I got to tell you. Apple express replacement. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish I had listened to everyone when they’ve told us this numerous times over the years, but it was pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. I don’t have any particular problem with my local Apple store. They’re always very nice there. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually relatively quick, despite serving a tremendous geographic as I’ve whined about many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times on the show, but it worked out pretty great. So I really do suggest if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a position where you can do an express replacement for a product, you should give it a shot, it worked out well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think also regarding you dropping your phone and being lucky enough to shatter the back glass,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of people would just put a case in that phone and just keep using it. I mean, obviously if they didn’t have AppleCare, but sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John even I see so many people using phones with shattered screens, which I don’t advise,
⏹️ ▶️ John but shattered back, it’s like, oh, just put a case in that and just forget it even exists. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But if I were to get a case I would want some sort of leather case. Maybe not the exact one that you like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but something similar. And that’s the cost of two replacements of the back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John glass. Oh yeah. No, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that you should. You had AppleCare, you should get a new phone. But I think a lot of people without AppleCare would have just chosen to
⏹️ ▶️ John continue using that phone. It’s like, I see a lot of beat up phones in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely. If I had to pay the like $400 or whatever it is in August when I’m likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a new phone, let me check my math, next freaking month, There’s no chance I would’ve got this repaired.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that being said, I do intend to pass this down to either family members or perhaps resell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or what have you, maybe trade it in. Um, and so because of that, I would like it to be in at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent shape when that happens. And so, uh, yeah, I paid my, well, I presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be eventually build 30 bucks, which kudos to Apple for bringing that down from, I think it used to be a hundred bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on for the back glass. Now it’s 30 bucks. I believe maybe, maybe I’m in for a rude awakening, but I’m pretty sure that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. and it was basically zero time without a phone. I guess it was the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours it took the phone to transfer, which I feel like if I were to go to the Apple store, maybe they would replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back glass, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they just handed me a refurb there as well. So one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, Express Replacement gets two thumbs up if you already are paying for AppleCare.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you got a fresh battery for your kids or whoever gets that phone next.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also thought about that too, very true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the really remarkable thing is that, You know, like if you totaled your car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then within a few years, you totaled two other cars, I would be surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your insurance company continued to want your business. In this case, it is kind of remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple isn’t dropping you from AppleCare.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I never thought of it that way, but you’re not wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John The risk is spread over a very large risk pool of billions of iPhone users. So I’m not sure they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna start narrowing it down to finding people who are prone to breaking phones, because we just all pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John all our AppleCare plans that we pay for that don’t result in any kind of repair that helps pay for the cases of
⏹️ ▶️ John the world. That’s how risk pools work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so yeah, that is my follow-up, if you will, about Express Replacement. You should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try it. Oh, you know what I didn’t mention though is that I’m on my like sixth screen protector
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, that is just, obviously it’s a bad screen protector that doesn’t agree with your life, but you’re just like, if you keep giving me
⏹️ ▶️ John free ones, I’ll keep taking them. Exactly. Which I don’t, like at a certain point, like you should just maybe try a
⏹️ ▶️ John different screen protector, maybe for your next phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, but here’s the thing. I actually had this conversation with myself because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought I was going to quote unquote, lose my screen protector because it didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think it was damaged during the fall. It was all in the back. And I’m not gonna like, even though I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would like to, I’m not unfair or untruthful enough to deliberately damage it. So I can send the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture to Belkin to be like, oh, guess what? It’s broken. As it turns out though, there was a little bit of damage on the front that I just didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see it at first. And so just seconds ago, as we were recording,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got the email from Belkin saying they’re sending me what I think is literally my fifth or sixth screen protector.
⏹️ ▶️ John Belkin’s gonna be the one who drops you, you’re gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, sorry. Yeah, 100%, 100%. But that being said, I was thinking, Mel, you know, these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Belkin ones, to your point, John, I’m constantly freaking breaking them. And some of that is surely on me, but some of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be the screen protector. And I thought about doing like one of these other ones, like I forget which one it was, I can look it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, but somebody had recommended a particular kind of screen protector, like just strong recommendation for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different kind of screen protector. And I think they had like two in the screen protector box that you buy. Now, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this one was like 10 or 15 bucks and Belkin one was like 40, but two apparently is not enough for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. And I don’t think most other screen protectors do this, like basically infinite conga line of replacements.
⏹️ ▶️ John more than one in the box doesn’t give me a hope that it’s going to be very sturdy.
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s something to knowing it’s going to break.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s more like whenever I get screen protectors like from Amazon, Brando brands,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they always come in batches of like six, $9. I think the reality is screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protectors just don’t really cost anything to make. And it’s fine, like they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really care if they throw in a bunch of extras, compared to like the cost of, okay, so obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the challenges of screen protectors is if you apply it and you got a speck of dust under it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes you can fix it, sometimes you can’t, sometimes you just kind of like ruin one, try again and like imagine all the people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would like be angry and leave one star reviews if they only had one or whatever and they’re like oh we gave you two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you can just try again like I bet it’s worth the companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who make these things like giving a bunch of extras in lots of cases because it you know it’s just so cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s you know no sweat off their back meanwhile you know the customers have better experiences with them and you feel you’re