652: You Have 24 Hours to Comply
14 Aug 2025Apple’s latest design updates, developing product sense, AppleCare One friction, and endangered mice.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show: Marco and Casey’s no-good, very bad days.
- Follow-up:
- Casey didn’t read the fine print on Express Replacement 🤦🏻♂️
- John cycled his mouse again
- AppleCare One
- Moving a device on a payment plan (via “Clark Griswold” and Anonymous)
- Tina’s iPhone
- Tina’s Mac Studio
- Tahoe beta 5: checkbox contrast improves
- iOS 26 beta 6 Liquid glass changes
- Smart TV interfaces over time
- Running your own mail server
- How does iCloud-on-your-domain work? (via potato.zip)
- Hide my Email (via Peter Puleio)
- Jason Diller thinks it’s not so bad
- Post-quantum cryptography
- Harvest now, decrypt later (via Lisa Ugray)
- Since iOS 17.4 for iMessage (via Saul Sutherland)
- Compelled adoption (via Brian Jarvis)
- Chrome adopted it in 2024 (via sayrer)
- 2024: State of post-quantum internet
- 2025: Update
- John wages war against icons
- Adopting Liquid Glass: App Icons
- WWDC 2025 #361: Create Icons with Icon Composer
- John’s Mastodon thread
- Václav Slavík’s solution
- FB19437407
- FB19497128
- FB17892659
- There’s likely to be a lot more of this
- Ask ATP:
- Is Liquid Glass on macOS a subtle move toward touchscreen Macs? (via Daniel Liu)
- How does one build a “good product sense”? (via Ian Anderson)
- How does one effectively de-duplicate photos using Photos.app? (via Keith Heaton)
- Post-show: Marco’s air-conditioning “update”
- Members-only ATP Overtime: AI voice control as a threat to Apple’s platforms
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Chapters
- 💔
- 💦
- Express-replacement follow-up
- John’s mouse
- AppleCare One friction
- Sponsor: Sentry (code atppod)
- Design updates
- Smart-TV UIs
- Running your own mailserver
- Post-quantum cryptography
- Sponsor: 1Password
- John vs. Tahoe icons
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- #askatp: Tahoe designed for touch?
- #askatp: Product sense
- #askatp: Merging duplicate photos
- Ending theme
- Marco’s AC “update”
💔
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a sad week in the Armand household. We had to say goodbye to our dog this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so sorry. We obviously John and I knew this already. I’m not going to feign ignorance right now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I speak for John and John will probably speak for himself, but I speak for John and saying, you know, we’re very sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having met Hops many times. He was the goodest dog. He was a great, great, great dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know that John and I will miss him to the degree that we can miss somebody else’s dog. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure that you guys are going to miss him for quite a long time. So I’m very sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. He was such a fixture in your family, like just seemed to fit in so well. It’s hard to imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone without him, but you know, dogs don’t live forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. He, you know, he lived over 14 years. Like he, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he, we were, we were very fortunate that he was really very healthy, the vast majority of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And it was, you know, it didn’t, it ended in, in, you know, a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable and, you know, fortunate way for all of us. He had a very good life. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, he picked a good family and the family picked a great dog and I will miss him and John will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miss him and I know that the three of you will miss him dearly. So again, I’m very sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, cheer me up. How’s your house going?
💦
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, my house is just freaking great. So we are electively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey redoing the primary and kids bathrooms, which are both in the upstairs of my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is the word electively in there? Is there some kind of way where you would be forced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bathroom? Yeah, like if there was some sort of catastrophic failure or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Okay, all right. So you’re now, you’re distinguishing it from repairing a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Foreshadowing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Diehard style crashed a car into the second story somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we got home. We actually took a trip to Manhattan over the last few days. Got home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yesterday, and then the demolition on the primary bathroom, which here in America, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called master bathroom for the longest time. And I’m really trying to get rid of that vocabulary from me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But apologies in advance if I slip up. So the primary bathroom, the one that’s on the suite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Aaron and Mai’s room, Mai and Aaron’s room, whatever. My English is terrible. It’s been a day, y’all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s Aaron and mine. Go ahead. Anyway, that room. So the demolition started today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The contractor, the broader contracting company that we’re using, we at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point are pretty friendly with the gentleman who owns it. He did the screened-in porch. He did the front porch. He did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the window, or his company did the windows in the house. So the house has become a ship of Theseus. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we started the process today with the demolition. That was going really well. In about 2.15,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron sends me a text because I was upstairs working. She was downstairs and says, I hear water running.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then within seconds, all of a sudden it escalated quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And she starts to like really get loud, loud enough that I can hear her.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know this is not good. And then the, the two people who are doing the demolition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are screaming about, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. I don’t even know what they’re talking about. I go sprinting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of the house to the crawl space underneath the house to turn off the master water feed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the house. And then I come into the kitchen, which is below the primary bathroom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and water is flowing from the ceiling to the floor, which is not something you want to see inside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your house. So the temporary fix was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to basically make Swiss cheese of the ceiling in order to make sure that the ceiling didn’t actually collapse. It will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously need to be replaced at some point. But there were a bunch of holes drilled into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ceiling. Meanwhile, the primary light fixture in the kitchen is just gushing water.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey water, there’s like a quarter inch of switch is what, like a half a centimeter to a centimeter of water. I think like a half a centimeter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of water. It’s one. It will say whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2.5, four, uh, you know, centimeters to an inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a centimeter of water is, uh, standing on the kitchen floor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that even in the midst of this story, you feel the need to offer both units to our listeners.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, Fahrenheit is the one true temperature measure, and I will freaking block you if you argue with me this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. But every other measure that we have is stupid. Inches are stupid. Feet are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid. They’re all dumb. But let me have Fahrenheit. Thank you. Yeah, well, you had at least one knuckle of water. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is that in fathoms?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s not too many fathoms of water, thankfully. But anyways, so it turns out that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this bathroom remodel is now also going to include new floors in the downstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I said to my dear friends here on the show, I might be a little bit late because we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be running to the floor and decor store to figure out what flooring we would like to replace the downstairs flooring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. There had been other minor issues over the last 15 almost eight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was like 18 years since we moved in something like that. There’d been minor issues over the last several years where a little bit of water
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has come in for some reason or another. And it wasn’t, it didn’t seem that bad at the time, but as they’re ripping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the kitchen floorboards, they’re seeing, oh, there’s a bunch of mold there. That’s not good. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all sorts of remediation will be happening. It is not off to a very good start here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the List household. So if Marco and I are cranky or sad or distracted or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco has a much better reason than I, but we both have reasons. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not our top performance on this episode of ATP, I’m genuinely quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. Also, apropos of nothing and definitely not apropos of needing to add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thousands of dollars to the bill that I was already footing. Uh, ATP dot FM slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re interested.
⏹️ ▶️ John Excellent transition. So there’s a, uh, you mentioned before that, like, uh, Aaron,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, noticed the water and then became a lot louder. It’s interesting the things
⏹️ ▶️ John we can learn in these moments. Do you recall? Uh, when, when it became clear to her that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey something disastrous was happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 30 seconds, I think something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John What did she actually say? Did she call your name? Did she just yell inarticulately? Did she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this project is largely her spearheading it. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say that I don’t want to do the bathrooms. I very much do. Our bathrooms were gross. They were old. They were builder basic from 1998.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No matter how much you clean them, they’re never 100% clean. It’s just no good. So anyway, so I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very on board. I’m not trying to paint this as though this is her ramming this through. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was her baby. So thankfully that means, uh, you know, I, I, I’m not going to somehow take the blame
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it or anything. I thought that’s her style anyway, but, uh, but yeah, so to answer your question, she starts, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember. It was such a blur, but she started. Escalating very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and about the same time that happened, I get a notification from, from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home assistant that’s saying, oh, the refrigerator has detected a leak because I had a yo link sensor right there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the refrigerator and, uh, that’s where a lot of the water was coming in. And so it started screaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have the YoLink speaker hub play like a boop, boop, boop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it ever detects a leak because I want to freaking know if there’s ever a leak. And let me tell you, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a leak because there was a lot of water. But I don’t recall exactly what she said. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was just Casey. Casey, Casey! Well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point is like that she was calling your name specifically and not like the name of the builders or just yelling
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody do something. You are, it’s good that she thinks of you first to come and solve this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is funny because I’m useless in these
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of things. No, but you went right to the main water shutoff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, and that’s the other thing that was very frustrating is, you know, the two people doing the demo were like, how do we turn off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the water as I’m like pushing them out of the way to get to the crawl space? I guess Aaron is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I guess Aaron and Declan are tuning in a little bit because I’m getting real-time follow-up from inside the house. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was sitting at the kitchen table researching bathroom things and heard water moving fast. And it started coming out from the fridge and from the ceiling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I started screaming that water was leaking everywhere. So I guess it was just, it’s leaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it wasn’t involved. Okay. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure there were many colorful expletives. Again, it was all a blur. Like the thing of it is this sucks. It doesn’t suck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as losing a dog, but it sucks. Uh, and in the heat of the moment, like, you know, and all kidding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and snark and whatever aside, like she is bawling and she’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me in as we, as we continue. And the one dude was like, where is it leaking? And I was like everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s not it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I understand why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he would ask that question in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not super helpful Like in that when you have that scale of a problem, you’re like it we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beyond, you know Step one is like turn off everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John you did the right thing Casey and it reminds me of the the dad style fire drills that I Have
⏹️ ▶️ John done occasionally and wish I had done more when my kids were younger would actually listen to me one
⏹️ ▶️ John one version of this game is for young children Whoever can touch a fire extinguisher
⏹️ ▶️ John first gets a cookie. They were playing that game. Oh, that’s very good Because that means they need to know where they
⏹️ ▶️ John are and they need to know where the closest one is to win against a sibling Or a parent or whoever they’re competing against
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other one is how fast can we get to the main water shutoff or the main? breaker shutoff Which shows that you have to know where
⏹️ ▶️ John it is and know how to get there without falling down the stairs and so on so For the case you knew where it was and went right to it So good job Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there is there like a list of these like dad games that we’re supposed to know cuz like I know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to just come to you naturally. I’m sure you have your own. I’m sure someday
⏹️ ▶️ John when Adam has a podcast we’ll hear about them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like the great Syracuse book finally. Like, you know, it’s like you thought you’d known for the OSX
⏹️ ▶️ John Dad games your children will refuse to play once they get to a certain age.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So anyway, so yeah, so if Marco and I are not in top form, I’m genuinely sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re a little distracted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over here. Life happens. This is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top five worst weeks of my life, I would say. This is awful. I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish this upon anybody. You know, when you have a pet, you know that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to live a lot less time than you probably. And so I knew this day would come and I was fearing all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time when it would finally come and it has come and it is exactly as bad as I feared.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’re getting, we’re gonna get through and it’s a good time to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco therapist. I strongly recommend that for lots of reasons. But you know, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get through. In the meantime, if you want to, you know, win any arguments against me, today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day to do it because I got nothing left. I am shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What overcast features have I been begging for? I can’t think of any that I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John begging for. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s in a coding state of mind either, though. That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny though because I was thinking about telling you too. Now, I don’t have the brain power for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this today, but honestly, I think probably for Marco and certainly for me, I need a distraction for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here we go. And I appreciate all of you listening, giving us some grace.
Express-replacement follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with some follow-up. It turns out I didn’t read the fine print. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was all excited with myself that I was getting my Express replacement done for the low, low price of $30. And although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not seen the bill come through yet, enough people have told me that this is the case, that I presume it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case. Apparently Express replacement is not $30, my friends, but $100. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it did expressly replace my phone, which was great, and it did only cost $100.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that was not what I had signed up for. And I feel real dumb and guilty about that. Life goes on now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. But I guess Express Replacement is treated in the quote unquote, other damage category,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I was not aware of. And I guess, again, I did not read the fine print appropriately. So that’s a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP.FM slash joint. That’s just a public service announcement. I mean, all all things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being equal, like if you have the money, it does work really well. It was great. I got to do the transfer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think John pointed this out last episode. I got to do the transfer in my own timetable, in my own house,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was lovely. I got a new battery and new everything, I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey refurbished, but you know what I’m saying, like a new to me battery and so on and so forth. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it did work out really well. I just, I wish that I, and I’m not saying this is Apple’s fault, but I wish I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read a little closer and realized that it was $100 and not 30. Had I known, I would have saved the 70 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and gone to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John store. But- You would
⏹️ ▶️ John have, that was my question. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John you had known, wouldn’t you have just done the express price and a replacement anyway just to save the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, in this case, maybe, because I was trying to slot this in. I forget what day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone thing happened. I think it was Sunday. It doesn’t really matter. But I was trying to slot this in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the three days, three or four days we were home, yeah, I think it was Sunday night, and we were leaving Thursday morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Manhattan. And so I only had a little bit of time to do it. Now, the Short Pump, which is the name of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area of town that the store is in, the Short Pump Apple Store, yes, it’s a funny name, ha.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do love that name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Shore Pump Apple Store is not usually overrun, and so I probably could have gotten an appointment had I sought, sought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever, I’m tired, had I tried to find one. But I don’t know. In this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one instance, I might have done the $100 thing, but in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any other instance, I 100% have spent the time to save the 70 bucks for sure.
John’s mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what’s going on with your mouse? And hopefully we’re not talking about a rodent.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, this is, uh, it seems to be my lot in life to, uh, be in
⏹️ ▶️ John this situation where I find a product that I like, uh, that product
⏹️ ▶️ John stops being manufactured. Uh, and that product has a fatal flaw that causes
⏹️ ▶️ John it to break after a short period of time. And so I have to troll the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for backup copies of this product that I like that is no longer made. And I just wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to note as a milestone and for myself when I let Google later to try to figure it out that yes The
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse that I like has once again died Just like all my cheese graders that I like always die
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have to get new ones I have been building up a back backlog of backup
⏹️ ▶️ John mice But it just the way we’ve talked about this mouse before we’ll put a link in the show notes It’s the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John surface precision mouse. There are a lot of similar sounding products that are not this product in particular There’s a Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomic Bluetooth mouse, which is not wired, which I can’t use because Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John signal to my computer is not Satisfactory as far as I’m concerned from
⏹️ ▶️ John my distance and yes, you can get extenders blah blah blah Anyway, this one connects with wire. That’s how I use it. Even though it does
⏹️ ▶️ John have Bluetooth I have it connected to an actual wire that plugs into my computer And
⏹️ ▶️ John I like it and I like how the mouse The shape of the mouse the size of the mouse. I like how the scroll wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John feels. It’s a Microsoft mouse I thought I was making a safe bet then Microsoft stopped making it then when they
⏹️ ▶️ John sold their stuff to in case in case does Not make this mouse. They only make the one that’s only wireless yada yada Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what happens to the mouse as discussed on past episodes. It doesn’t just stop working like it starts
⏹️ ▶️ John working worse You move the mouse, you know, like is it is it losing tracking?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm This is by the way, this is exactly how the sculpt ergonomic keyboard fails to like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t just stop working it just, you start getting lag or repeated keystrokes or missing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keystrokes and changing the batteries doesn’t fix it. That’s when you know it’s dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s so weird because I’ve been using optical mice since they’ve been invented and I’ve never seen an optical mouse fail in
⏹️ ▶️ John this way. Honestly, I’ve never seen an optical mouse fail, like it’s fail at all. Like I don’t know if it’s the optical sensor or
⏹️ ▶️ John some circuitry, but it’s, at first you think, maybe it’s just me and maybe it’s always been like this
⏹️ ▶️ John or like, was there something high CPU for a moment that caused a blip or whatever? But then I pull out a backup mouse, plug
⏹️ ▶️ John it in, you’re like, oh, it’s perfect. So another one bites the dust. I cycled it in
⏹️ ▶️ John for another eBay special because it’s not precision mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, time marches on. But I really wish I could find another mouse that I like to see past
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes when I tried a whole bunch of different mice that were probably a lot more reliable than this one, including like the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that my wife has been using on her computer for so many years. It just does not It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John Logitech mouse. These Microsoft mice kind of suck, but I’m doomed
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep doing this I’m just like I’m doomed to troll eBay for my particular eyeglass lenses, which I’ve actually
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco My cheese really
⏹️ ▶️ John breaks. I mean my actual thing that greats actual dairy cheese And
⏹️ ▶️ John now my Microsoft mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your eyeglass lenses you get from eBay eyeglass
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like I thought you said lenses He did say I
⏹️ ▶️ John probably did. I probably said liquid metal. Yeah For many years, like every time I get like a
⏹️ ▶️ John new prescription, I was like, let’s try some new frames and I would pick out some frames and I get, you know, sometimes I pick ones that I didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but the family approved. Sometimes I would pick ones that I like, but the family hated. But in the end they just
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t feel better than my, I have two frames that I use. I have my smaller frames, which are for distance
⏹️ ▶️ John and my bigger frames, which are for computer just for historical reasons. And that’s what I’m buying backups of now,
⏹️ ▶️ John my computer glasses, frames and my driving glasses frames. So I do have backups of them and plus a bunch of other frames that I
⏹️ ▶️ John spent way too much money on that I don’t really use anymore.
AppleCare One friction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk AppleCare One battles. Everyone’s battling something this week. What’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on here? Do you have any preamble or do you want me to start going through the list?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re battling AppleCare One. Dive in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Clark Griswold writes, here’s another weird detail about AppleCare One. If you have a device on a payment plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you added AppleCare to it, then it won’t be eligible for AppleCare One until you take a few extra steps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When trying to add it to AppleCare One, you will get a warning that says the device is on another plan and can’t be added.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You will have to to cancel the existing plan. But of course, the settings page won’t let you do that. You have to open the Apple support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app and search for cancel AppleCare. A couple hours after canceling the existing AppleCare plan, the device will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now be eligible to move into the AppleCare One plan. Yeah, so this
⏹️ ▶️ John is specifically for devices that you chose to pay for with a payment plan.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that what they mean is like, instead of paying with the whole sum up front, how about you pay X number of dollars a month or whatever Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John gives that option during like the checkout process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you don’t wanna mess with Clark Griswold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes, my iPad was marked as ineligible for AppleCare One, despite having gotten the prompt from Apple to convert on that device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I called Apple support, they did some research and determined that since I had a two year AppleCare Plus plan that I bought when I purchased the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, and I chose to pay in monthly installments, the iPad is not eligible for AppleCare One.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The representative made it seem like I’d done something abnormal when I’d simply accepted an option offered by Apple at the time of purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cancelling the existing AppleCare Plus plan would create a refund, but the monthly installments would continue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this sounds like the same situation, but this person actually called Apple and Apple said, oh yeah, no, you can’t do that. But they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John determined, I don’t know if experimentally or by talking to the support person, that if
⏹️ ▶️ John they were to cancel the AppleCare Plus plan, they would get a refund, but then they’d still
⏹️ ▶️ John have to keep paying the monthly installments with the refund that they received. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John this message sounds like to me. But anyway, edge cases. Edge cases exist and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, as always, does not seem to be handling them very well. And speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John edge cases and other cases with AppleCare One is an update on my AppleCare One situation. When I talked about it in the last
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, I was saying how it was complaining about my son’s computer, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that it made me log into it with my Apple ID, which I did, and it was satisfied, but then he yanked it off the plane
⏹️ ▶️ John again, and I was going back and forth. Eventually I just gave up trying to add my son’s laptop, because even though it will let you
⏹️ ▶️ John add it, and it will give you a warning, and you’ll satisfy that warning, it will still yank it away from you eventually. So I’m like, I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John its problem is, but whatever, fine. And then I also mentioned, you know, people had questions
⏹️ ▶️ John because isn’t it weird that when Apple’s thing prompted me, hey, you should use AppleCare One.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can put these three devices on it and you’ll save this number of dollars per month. And the three devices it gave
⏹️ ▶️ John me were my phone, my wife’s phone, and like one of my iPads or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people were asking, how can your wife’s phone be on there? It has to be on, it has to be devices on your Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID. Do you share an Apple ID with your wife? And no, I don’t. Well, the other issue dropped this week And I got an email that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, we’re yanking your wife’s phone off of AppleCare One unless you sign in with your
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID. I don’t know why it waited so long. I don’t know why it prompted me to add that phone if it thought there was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be a problem. So I thought, well, what’s going on now? But that was part of my like three devices you get for $19.99 a month. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John the jig is up. Now it’s like, well, you just gotta remove that phone and now does that
⏹️ ▶️ John invalidate the entire plan? But I figured I would try one last thing, which was to sign into
⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store with my Apple ID, which normally I’m signed in with my Apple ID to the App Store on all my devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is before the family plan, that’s how you sort of shared family purchases and everything. Anyway, I did that on my wife’s phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and it seemed to satisfy it. Like I didn’t log her out of her Apple ID or anything. All I did was log
⏹️ ▶️ John her out of the App Store, in the App Store app, and then sign into the App Store app with my
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID, which is the family organizer Apple ID. And that satisfied it for now.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now it’s just like a real problem with this. if Apple’s come on as saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should put these three devices on it to save this amount of money. And then they tell you, oh, one of those devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to sign anyway. It’s because again, I’ve never been signed into any of my wife’s homes with
⏹️ ▶️ John my Apple ID, like actual signed in like the iCloud. So super weird to me. But then also
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio that is, it’s technically my wife’s Mac Studio, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I set that computer up. I created my account on it before I created hers. I have always had
⏹️ ▶️ John an account on that Mac Studio. It is always signed in as me. And in particular this week,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been using it a ton, signed into my account with my Apple ID going back and forth to my Tahoe Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is I’m booting my Mac Pro into Tahoe to do dev work, and going over there to do Sequoia stuff, because again, no Mac simulators.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I got an email in the middle of doing that saying, oh, yeah, well, first of all, the wording of this email is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John They all say the same thing, right? They all say, a new Apple account has signed into your Mac Studio. To avoid
⏹️ ▶️ John losing AppleCare One coverage, you must sign into the Mac Studio with the Apple account associated with your AppleCare One
⏹️ ▶️ John plan. It’s like, dude, I’m signed into the Apple account associated with my AppleCare One plan
⏹️ ▶️ John right now. I’m like, I got this email on the computer while signed into this account and
⏹️ ▶️ John a new Apple account has signed into your Mac Studio? This is a reminder that Apple account is what Apple IDs are called now.
⏹️ ▶️ John What new Apple account? Certainly they’re not gonna tell you in the email because they don’t have that information. And then the kicker,
⏹️ ▶️ John all these emails end the same way. You have 24 hours for when this email was sent to
⏹️ ▶️ John sign in or your Mac Studio will be removed from your AppleCare One plan. So I just
⏹️ ▶️ John restarted the Mac Studio, logged into my account again and it satisfied it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m here to declare AppleCare One, I no longer recommend this service. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been roped into it. If it worked as advertised, great. I don’t think, if you haven’t signed up for
⏹️ ▶️ John AppleCare One, even if it tells you you can save money, don’t do it because right now you are
⏹️ ▶️ John always 24 hours away from some device being yanked off of AppleCare. And what if your device has an accident
⏹️ ▶️ John during that time? Right, or what if you don’t notice that email or it gets filed as spam? 24 hours from when this
⏹️ ▶️ John email was sent to do a thing that you think shouldn’t be necessary. There’s no rhyme or reason for how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like screen time all over again or any of the other features that Apple introduced, but that never works right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s no recourse and no one can help you. And you can call support and try to do things. I got so many stories that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put them all on and follow up here with people saying, I had this problem with AppleCare One, I talked to support and they couldn’t figure it out either.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they said, cause it’s a new product or whatever. It just doesn’t work right. I don’t know what it wants us to do. Here’s the thing, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Either let people put any device they want on AppleCare One because again, you pay 599 per device, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John let it be a bundle or let it work in families, in Apple families. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John in an Apple family is allowed to add it to one AppleCare One. How is it called AppleCare One when it’s per Apple ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not really per Apple ID because it will suggest that you put your wife’s phone that you’ve never been signed into
⏹️ ▶️ John on your AppleCare One plan. Anyway, I, that’s it. AppleCare One, do not recommend this service until
⏹️ ▶️ John and unless Apple fixes it. And historically speaking, when things like these don’t work well, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John always a sure thing that Apple will ever fix it. So AppleCare One, I wish it was dead to me. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John dead to me. I’m still using it, but it should be dead to you. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t even know where to go from here, which is too bad. Cause I, I hadn’t done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the math in the literal or figurative, of figurative senses to see if I wanted to move to this. I’ve been a little busy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but on the surface, it seemed like a pretty solid idea, especially because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan to keep carrying AppleCare at least on my phone, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have it on my Vision Pro, at least for now, and potentially on my laptop. I think it is actually on my laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So on the surface, I think those three devices would be a great combination for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AppleCare One, but yeah, I’ve heard too many horror stories. I don’t know if it’s worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can save money. So it’s very tempting. And the what is the name of the iCloud bundle service
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? Apple one, Apple one. I know it’s anyway. I signed up for Apple and that actually
⏹️ ▶️ John did seem to work again. I’m in favor of bundle things that usually if you’re already paying for a whole bunch of stuff individually,
⏹️ ▶️ John bundles can save you money. So I was inclined to like this because it would actually say like
⏹️ ▶️ John even just the three devices would save me like eighteen dollars a month. So it’s not, you know, it’s not chump change here.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is just a disaster. Like I’m just every day I wake up and say, you know, what 24 hour
⏹️ ▶️ John timer started when I was asleep, where I have to do some kind of weird dance that makes no sense to allow Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John care to continue. I never had to worry about this before when I either paid when I did the monthly thing, which by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the monthly ones got canceled for this because whenever you put added device to AppleCare, when it cancels and refunds the existing
⏹️ ▶️ John one, I wish I could get back those month to month ones because they just build me every month and it always worked or they
⏹️ ▶️ John build me two years up front and it always worked. I didn’t have to worry at any point. Some weird thing is going to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you’re now no longer in compliance with our nonsensical rules that aren’t consistently enforced. You have 24
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this seems like the kind of thing that like in like a year that maybe maybe they will have worked out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these kinks and like maybe like as you buy new devices in the future, like enrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things and keeping things on might be easier. But this seems like a pretty bumpy initial setup and transition
⏹️ ▶️ John Or it’ll be like screen time and never work. Like I’m not I’m not totally confident they’ll ever fix it. Like they need to
⏹️ ▶️ John change it. It should be families, anything in a family instead of anything. Per Apple, I do. They’re just making their own lives more
⏹️ ▶️ John miserable with whatever code they had to implement, buggily to try to figure out if people are violating their rules
⏹️ ▶️ John and they can’t do it proactively because technically, like you could put a device on, but they didn’t take it out of the box yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re not going to say you can’t add it because you’re not signed in with your Apple ID. So let’s let it let’s let people add any device they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then after the fact, scan them or do some kind of polling to make sure they’re in compliance
⏹️ ▶️ John with our rules. But again, this made me sense. The Mac Studio has always had an account signed into my Apple ID on it. Had
⏹️ ▶️ John it at the time I got it, it’s just broken. It’s just plain broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Given that this is probably a pretty important component of Apple services revenue going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward, you know, because keep in mind, like, again, services revenue, it’s impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to overstate how important that is for Apple’s financial narrative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there it’s it’s performing well, it’s growing well. It’s pretty high margin compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hardware. and a lot of Apple’s reputation and stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price and everything in the financial market is based on continued growth of that. That’s why they squeeze so hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at every opportunity for things like App Store fees, because so much of it is stuff like that. Well, you know what else will serve as revenue?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppleCare and any kind of warranty, extended warranty service. And extended warranties
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are generally extremely profitable. Like Best Buy is basically an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retail chain that sells extended warranties and happens to have electronics in the store to help you buy these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of warranties. To justify these kind of warranties. What gets you in the door
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the car stereo or whatever, and then they make all their money from the warranty. There’s a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that retailers push these things so hard. They’re very high profit. The car stereo?
⏹️ ▶️ John How long ago did you make that? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the same thing. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dating yourself. But again, we’re giving grace because it’s been a long week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, have you been to a Best Buy in the last couple of years? They’re ghost towns. They are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically like, it’s basically full of car stereos. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John nothing. I think I got my
⏹️ ▶️ John most recent washing machine from them, like online, not in person. But I actually did go to the Best Buy in
⏹️ ▶️ John person to see appliances in person. They still exist and have appliances in the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, so extended warranties are a very high profit item for retailers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who sell them. And so Apple has a very good reason to expand their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services even more with even more ways for you to buy AppleCare. So all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, like, you know, cynical takes aside. I think they have a pretty strong incentive to keep working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this to the point where it’s very appealing to lots of people, because anything they can do to get you paying them monthly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for even more stuff is very important to the Tim Cook Apple. So they’re going to keep pushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like this and they have a pretty strong incentive to make this better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I hope that does motivate them. Um, is it does seem really weird that like these bugs are working counter
⏹️ ▶️ John to their interests. It is yanking products off and refunding me money. I was paying $5.99 a
⏹️ ▶️ John month additional for that device. And you just took it off and refunded me $3 and change. And now I’m no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John playing $5.99 a month. So somebody somewhere hopefully has some metric that says, hey, how many
⏹️ ▶️ John devices did we yank off AppleCare? One that the user just tried to put back on. And we keep saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no, we don’t want your $5.99. Take it because reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, there’s a KPI somewhere. Just a question of whether or not the KPI measures this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, like the problem is like when they had the argument of like, how, who should we allow to do this? And
⏹️ ▶️ John the decision that came to it is it all has to be on the same Apple ID, which we read when we first introduced this feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John like on the show, like it was clear that it should all be on the same Apple ID, but then no one else got the memo on that
⏹️ ▶️ John one recommending the default devices or anything like that. And how did they come up with that? They said, well, if we let people do it within
⏹️ ▶️ John a family, it’s too much, people will save too much money and our revenue will go down. Like I get it, it’s complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John But this, this just seems like a stinker of a plan for now.
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Design updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s talk a better news. Tahoe beta five apparently has improved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the checkbox contrast. So if you recall last episode, I think it was last episode, we talked about the dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that says right folder and trash. The folder trash is currently in the trash. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then there’s a checkbox. Do not show this message again, except you couldn’t see the checkbox. Like I’m looking at it again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowing full well, full well where it is and I can barely make it out. Well, now in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beta five, it looks a lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we know beta six is out now. This is screenshot from beta five. I think it has retained its contrast
⏹️ ▶️ John in beta six, but yes, they have fixed the completely invisible checkbox to being the
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit too low contrast checkbox that we all dreamed it could be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well said. All right, with regard to the iOS betas and specifically beta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six, reading from Mac Rumors, the lock screen clock has been updated with additional transparency, allowing more of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey background to peek through. The clock also has more of a 3D floating look, which is in line with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rest of the liquid glass design.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is notable, we’ll link to the MacRumor story where you can see these screenshots. It’s notable because I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, like, oh, you know, they’ll roll something out and they’ll tweak it during the betas. The tweaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, let’s say, the attempt to make things legible seems to have peaked, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on which part of which OS you’re looking at, sometime in the past. because now a lot of the tweaks have
⏹️ ▶️ John been going in the other direction. So here’s iOS beta six making, for example, the gigantic clock
⏹️ ▶️ John on the lock screen, less legible. I don’t think it’s illegible, it’s really big. You can still kind of read it, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John less legible. So you’re thinking, oh, well, during the course of the beta, they’ll fix things and it will just get better and better.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, sometimes, because there was like the backlash of like, now it’s not liquid enough. Now it’s not glass enough,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so we are, you know, regardless of what changes before
⏹️ ▶️ John release, people say, well, this is it. It’s not gonna change for release. I think it will change, but I think now the changes, the average
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the positive and negative changes, this is gonna average out to be like, this is like, we’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John going, you know, we’re pushing and shoving a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, without
⏹️ ▶️ John any clear direction of like, let’s improve legibility everywhere. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is what it is. Maybe we’ll have to wait for, like this is the big wildcard. I’ve heard lots of discussions about this online.
⏹️ ▶️ John How will people who don’t listen to TechPod guests react to this? Again, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John is citing, rightly so, I think, the iOS 18 photos thing. Everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John in the tech nerd circles knew about the Photos app and iOS 18, and we discussed it along with the rest of the features on iOS 18.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it wasn’t any more or less notable than any of the other changes, but boy, when it hit the general public,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the thing that they cared about and noticed. And so it’s very difficult to predict
⏹️ ▶️ John how, I don’t wanna say regular people, how non tech nerds, how
⏹️ ▶️ John non tech enthusiasts are going to react when this starts appearing on their devices, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re buying a new iPhone this fall, and it comes with this OS and there’s no option. I’m going through
⏹️ ▶️ John this right now with my daughter because she’s going to get a new phone for college, but like, Oh, you should wait until the 17th come out. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so close. Just you know, we’ll get a 17 when they come out. I have to have the discussion with have to have the talk,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, you know, if you get an iPhone 17, you’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John no choice but to use iOS 26. You can’t put the older OS, let’s just know
⏹️ ▶️ John what iOS 26 is, right? You can’t put the OS that you’re used to on it. So do you want to get a 16 now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or do you want to get a 17 later knowing that you have to use this keeping in mind there’s no going back like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, eventually you’re gonna have to get a phone that probably event unless you use that phone for seven or 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ John or however long this liquid glass hangover lasts, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna you’re gonna have to do it someday. But yeah, I’m I’m just this is like the the the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I am paying the most attention to with his OS releases, not so much like me using the OS or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is seeing what the public reaction partially because yes, I’m having this
⏹️ ▶️ John this wonderful sliver of hope, like maybe the general public will hate it so much that it’ll actually fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because obviously, the feedback from developers and stuff has caused them to,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the first few betas make things more legible and then say, eh, we did enough. Let’s just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, and yeah, I feel like this is the extent of, you know, how, how much
⏹️ ▶️ John can feedback from developers and podcasters and tech websites
⏹️ ▶️ John and people inside Apple, how much can that influence what Apple’s going to launch? And we’re at the limit
⏹️ ▶️ John of that now. And somewhat rightfully so, because at a certain point you’re like, look, this is a, the audience
⏹️ ▶️ John that is currently using the betas is not representative of the public. We’re committed to this design. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not let’s not pre declare it a failure and lose our courage. Let’s ship what we have and see how it
⏹️ ▶️ John goes. Like I understand that ethos that’s wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John disagree with it, but like you can’t you can’t be in the mindset of like, oh no, a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of developers don’t like it. We need to really backpedal. No ship your 1.0 and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a bit of a different takeoff. So first of all, you know the difference in legibility on the lock screen clock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in betas five and I can’t use my clock anymore on my phone. Like, so I have the always on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, but that when the always on screen is in like dim mode, it just has a black background,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just a dim version of the wallpaper. In Betas 5 and 6, you, that you get a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco translucent clock placed upon a black background. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you basically have like almost total darkness and the clock, see, like the widgets are way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brighter. You know, you can see all your widget content just fine. and the clock is barely visible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they change this, but that being said, we are at the point now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this OS is very likely to ship in a month or less. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are at the finish line. It is probably going to ship within the first two weeks of September.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is mid-August. Like we are less than a month probably away from this OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping. We are probably, I would say, at most two or three betas away from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GM release. So what we have now, like they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be making major changes to this. You know, John’s right. You know, the feedback from us, like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had our time, we had a very narrow window to influence minor changes. They were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never going to make major changes. That’s not how Apple works. When they put out a design, they say this is the direction we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John As well, they should. Like I said, like that’s the right attitude. You can’t like do something and then get real scared and just reverse it all before
⏹️ ▶️ John the public sees it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, that does presume, I think, a higher level of care and craft that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it presumes the design is good, which I disagree with. But you know, as a general philosophy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say that if you come up with a design, take your feedback, make your tweaks, but let the public see
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Because again, we are not a representative audience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Correct. You know, there was no chance that after they showed this off in June, there was no chance of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, oh, never mind. We’re not going to do liquid glass. That wasn’t gonna happen. And there was no chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of major changes. They did do a few minor ones. Here we are in beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six, and there are still a large number of animation bugs, which are concerning to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are still like, there’s still like, you know, designs and components and animations and APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I try to use. And when I use them, there’s animation bugs. And I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it ships like this, I can’t ship this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and you can’t assume it’s gonna be fixed. Like you just can’t. That’s the thing that if you’re not a software developer, you don’t understand. Like you think
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I’m working in a beta SDK and there’s a bug, but it’ll be fine by release. You can never make that
⏹️ ▶️ John assumption. It’s just not safe because what’s going to happen if it’s not you just wait until the last beta and it’s not fixed. Now you got to rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ John your app in a scramble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. So what we have, like whatever we have today in beta six,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like chances are most of what you see is shipping.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s very little time to fix much else. And the only things that will be likely to be fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between now and shipping are very small things or critical bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the stage we’re at in this. Secondly, I hate to tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all out there who are like us, old,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think people are going to like this just fine. I don’t think there’s going to be a big backlash against it. The only thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I suspected there’d be a big backlash against is its performance. It is much slower,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially on older phones, but even on modern phones, the frame rates of the animations are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great. They’re still dropped frames. Again, there’s still animation bugs. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was very illuminating when my son installed the beta on his phone, without asking me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first whether he should do it. When he installed the beta, he likes it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And young people tend to look at this and say, that’s really cool. I like it. It’s all clear. It looks cool. that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approach that reaction from most people. I think most people are going to think it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fresh and new and cool. I don’t think we’re going to see a big backlash about the design itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again performance probably, maybe, but the design itself I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just going to be people are going to say this is cool. On the Mac I think it might go a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse than that just because I think it’s a significantly worse design on the Mac, but on the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are going to be fine, or they’re even going to like it. And I think we as nerds who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel a little bit more ambivalent about it, I think we need to prepare ourselves that we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already, and we’re going to be in the minority in our opinions of this OS compared to everyone else who’s going to think it’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s, you know, what I’m trying to do as a developer here is just try to embrace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the design and try to do a good job of adopting it for my app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one of the ways I’m doing that is my mini player
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redesign. If you look at the Overcast app on iOS 18
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, the part that looks the most out of place in my opinion, the part that looks the oldest when you’re used to 26,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is those solid top and bottom bars and the navigation screens, and the bottom bar being the mini player.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So of course I’m reusing the mini player to be a liquid glass blob design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can do things, you know, it’s within my control to adjust that blob and to figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to put on the blob And what I’m going to put behind the blob. So one thing I’m doing is I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am NOT setting up the design in such a way that will scroll, you know, brightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colored artwork behind text in the blob So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the mini player, you know, the album artwork is on the left now You know what else is on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the left in the content behind it all the other album artwork in the list So, when you’re scrolling the list,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a bunch of images show behind the glass, it’s only showing those images behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s on top of the glass, an image. So, the issues of having brightly colored images
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind text on glass won’t usually come up in Overcast. So there’s ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can design, I can embrace this design, like I’m not going to deny this design exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going to pretend like I’m never going to use it, because that will just set me behind. set me behind because again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think people are overall going to like the design. So I’m embracing the design as best as I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while trying to do a good job to avoid its flaws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to minimize the impact of its flaws. That’s the path that we need to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as developers and designers. This is what we’re stuck with. This design, parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it are really good, parts of it are really bad, parts of it are tricky to use or have big downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we just have to work around those things. Because Apple’s not going to change. This is the design that we’re going to have. What you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see now, this is going to ship effectively unchanged. So this is what we have for probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least a few years. So might as well make the best we can of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you’re right that the average person is not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as upset with it as perhaps we are. I haven’t put it on the beta yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I haven’t put the beta on my carry phone yet, but now that we’re back from all of our summer travel, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to happen sooner rather than later. And I’m excited to have it on anything but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my iPad, but I’m also scared because I don’t know if I really want to live with all the problems, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I say live with all the problems, I mostly mean like crummy battery life, crummy performance, animation hitches,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you were talking about earlier. Um, so I, I think I expect that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to largely like it and largely think that the contrast or the readability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and eligibility is not what it should be, which is what everyone has been saying. I think I will echo everyone else. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and from the rumblings I’ve heard from like friends of friends who have tried it and, you know, oftentimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, with that without permission, if you will, like Adam did, uh, most everyone I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to think it’s pretty good to your point, Marco. So I don’t think it’s going to be as ruinous as perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we expect, but I also think it will be a more vocal in vociferous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is what I’m looking for a Response than then Apple is expecting also
⏹️ ▶️ John Just to be clear like what I said before was that the tiny glimmer of hope that there would
⏹️ ▶️ John negative reaction I was not predicting anything and I might the example the photos app is a great example First
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, like even if there was a negative reaction They wouldn’t direct it at the new design because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a concept in their head really like it’s not unless they watch the keynote and all that other stuff. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it could just be some obscure corner of the some app that they change, like the photos app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like what a what a weird thing to latch on to with all the other changes. So you never know what people are going to be cranky about. But no, I
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish people would be angry about this. I have a tiny sliver of hope that might happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m not making that prediction. Oh, no. Oh, I understand. The chat room said, Marco, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to make your numerals more legible, change the clock style from glass to solid and see if that helps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I will try that right now. Thank you.
Smart-TV UIs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk smart TV interfaces. Damien Shaw writes, I’m an LG G4 owner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So G is the line and four implies 2024. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It helped. Thank you. That’s right. Yeah, there you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. All right. So Marco is now resolved. Marco, if you need to buzz off you, we can take it. We could take it from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. Your work here is done. No, anyway, so Damien Shaw writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m an LG G4 owner, which means the G line from 2024. I love this TV, but your pain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points about notifications and input switching are probably its two weakest points and the G5 gets a little worse. You can turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off most notifications in the LG interface, but certainly not all. The best solution is to run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all firmware updates and then disconnect it from the internet, assuming you’re going to use an Apple TV as a primary way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consume streaming services. On the LG G4 quote-unquote magic remote, which by the way is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they call it, there is a single input switch button, but it does not switch input immediately. There may be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting to do this, but I haven’t investigated. Instead, it brings up a lower third menu that previews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the outputs on all the inputs, and you have to hit select on the one you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pressing the switch input will scroll your selection, or you can use the arrow keys. On the LG G5,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have a new magic remote that has removed that button entirely. I believe you can switch your remote to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the old magic remote, but I couldn’t quickly find confirmation that the old remotes work with the G5. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they, uh, the Sony, even the Sony button that I described, uh, there’s an input button, And when you first hit it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it brings up the menu. But if you just keep hitting that same button, it just rotates through the input. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the days are gone when you could hit the button and the one hit of the button would change the input, which honestly is probably a good
⏹️ ▶️ John thing because how many people accidentally hit the input button and then like their parents can figure out how the TV works because they switched inputs accidentally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bringing up the menu first, I think is the right move, but you should just be able to bounce on that same button to cycle through the
⏹️ ▶️ John inputs and then just stop on the one that you want, which is how the Sony one works. But anyway, it seems like there’s been backsliding
⏹️ ▶️ John since the C7, which was 2017, not 2027. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and part of why this frustrates me is that whenever, like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use like the ones I was originally complaining about, the Samsung TVs that have like their whole menu to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch inputs that you have to go through everything, it’s just so much slower than it used to be. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old TVs, old, you know, five-year-old TVs, you just put the, push this less input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button and it switches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John within a few
⏹️ ▶️ John Smart smart stuff was a big downgrade in speed, as you noted. But I do think that
⏹️ ▶️ John given that they used WebOS on your C7 and they’re still using WebOS with much faster processors, it should
⏹️ ▶️ John actually be more responsive than your C7. And I don’t know what the hell Samsung’s doing, but I agree their interfaces are both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I just like this is like it’s an area of technology where like they’re they’re adding so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much functionality, like even though we don’t always want it, but the basics are just getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more annoying and worse and slower. Like less reliable harder to use like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know I feel like this I feel like that’s like a tragedy of the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean at least that’s it makes me thankful for the Apple TV because it does let you never have to look at your smart TVs interface
⏹️ ▶️ John except for the input switching which I mean so obviously I would promote the use of receiver Which you don’t want but still
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI CEC. I still have it enabled because honestly I don’t even know if I can enable it on my
⏹️ ▶️ John current modern setup. I’m not an HDMI CEC unicorn It occasionally does something wonky,
⏹️ ▶️ John but most of the time it’s pretty miraculous. Like if I just grab my
⏹️ ▶️ John Switch 2 Pro controller and hit the little home button, hold down the home button,
⏹️ ▶️ John it wakes my Switch up, turns on my receiver, turns on my television,
⏹️ ▶️ John changes the input to be the dedicated, changes the input on my TV to be the dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John input that the Switch connects to because I don’t have it going through the receiver for input lag reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it amazed me the first time that worked. I’m like, HDMI CEC, you’re actually doing what you’re supposed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike AppleCare One. Occasionally, you know, again, things get wonky, but HDMI CAC
⏹️ ▶️ John can take you a long way to not having to hit the input button. Not all the way,
Running your own mailserver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, running your own mail server. I, in particular, was quite snarky about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this last episode. And the user potato.zip writes, on episode 651,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you mentioned that you should never run your own mail server. Apple offers running iCloud mail on a domain you own so you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a customer address. How does this work? Does it require maintenance? Would you recommend it? This is pretty different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I haven’t done this myself, but this is just pointing like MX records for your domain at Apple, right? It’s a little more than
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it goes through some Apple interface. So basically you, my understanding, cause I haven’t actually done this
⏹️ ▶️ John myself, is that you buy a domain, whatever, you know, your cool domain name.com, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then you tell Apple, Apple, I want you to have to receive email
⏹️ ▶️ John for this thing and have an email account for me. So I’ll, you know, hook up to it with my mail apps or whatever. But my
⏹️ ▶️ John understanding is that Apple runs the mail server for you. Apple receives the mail, you send your mail through Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing you bring to the party is the domain that you previously purchased and paid for. That’s my understanding of how it
⏹️ ▶️ John works. Again, haven’t used it. Does it require maintenance? I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason I haven’t used it is the answer to the question, would you recommend it? Absolutely not. I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John how Apple does mail. I’ve had an iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John account, a MobileMe account, a Mac.com account, an iCloud. I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple email for as long as they’ve offered Apple email. And they just offer
⏹️ ▶️ John no visibility or control into what they’re doing with your email. And very often I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten, supposedly gotten emails that Apple has disappeared, probably through some
⏹️ ▶️ John well-meaning spam filtering that I have no way to know. I don’t know that that happened. I don’t have a way to get them back.
⏹️ ▶️ John I basically don’t consider Apple to be a reliable place for me personally to receive email given the volume
⏹️ ▶️ John of email I received and how important it is to what I do. On the other hand, I have tons of family members who have an Apple email
⏹️ ▶️ John account and they think it’s fine. I also, by the way, think spam filtering is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I don’t recommend it because I don’t think they do a good job of writing reliable emails. No
⏹️ ▶️ John email service is perfect, but I want some visibility into it. I want it to be deterministic,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I want, like if I have to go in there and manually correct something, I wanna be able to do that. Having
⏹️ ▶️ John no recourse and total silence and no ability to debug is not how I roll. So that’s why I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend it, but that’s just me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What were you using for email, if you’re willing to share, prior to Gmail because you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Gmail account now and that’s been the case I think since we met, but what were you doing before then?
⏹️ ▶️ John Mindspring, uh, my ISP, uh, my ISP from, uh, in the dial up days. So I actually
⏹️ ▶️ John was netcom, netcom.com I think. Uh, but anyway, Mindspring, uh, it was my ISP and there were, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they were a national ISP and they gave you an email address and I used that as my main email address for years
⏹️ ▶️ John because, uh, I don’t know, I was younger and more foolish than I am now. I’m still foolish.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still using Gmail. I should be using my own domain, But anyway, it’s a complicated topic. But yeah, I was using
⏹️ ▶️ John Mindspring. I went straight from Mindspring to Gmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Sticking with the same theme, Peter Polio writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one solution for dealing with spam that I never ever hear discussed is using Hide My Email, the iCloud Plus feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, it requires a lot of upfront work, but I get maybe 20 spam emails a week now at most.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not trying to imply with what I’m about to say that Peter is wrong or anything like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really understand how the hide my email feature decreases spam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you’re the whole hide my email feature is that it gives a completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unintelligible, unintelligible email to the vendor that you’re working with. And they can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still email that address whenever they want and it’ll get forwarded to you. They just never get your real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proper email address. So does is Peter just shutting down these prior, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hide my email emails? Does you know, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John mean? That’s the whole point. Like, basically, if there’s a data breach and your email gets leaked, your email is not your email. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some random number at Apple, whatever. Like, it’s gobbledygook. Like, it’s obfuscation.
⏹️ ▶️ John They will auto-generate you. It’s like those one-time use credit card numbers from back in the day. Remember those? They will auto-generate
⏹️ ▶️ John you an email address that you don’t need to know or remember, but that Apple keeps track of. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s data breach at pets.com or whatever, and they leak all your email addresses, you just kill that email
⏹️ ▶️ John address. You just say, like, OK, well, I’m I’m gonna delete that account and I’m gonna turn off that email address. So
⏹️ ▶️ John now that email address no longer even forwards to my regular one. So spammers who got it from the data dump, they can spam it all they want
⏹️ ▶️ John because it doesn’t deliver to me anymore. I don’t like, surprise, I don’t like this feature either because of the lack
⏹️ ▶️ John of visibility and because I don’t like not knowing the account name, like the email address associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with all these accounts. I know Apple takes care of it for you when you log in, you have to do it, but like what if I have to log in from a non-Apple device,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to go through iCloud website to find, like, I don’t like that disconnection. It was hard enough for
⏹️ ▶️ John me going from like bespoke passwords to auto-generated passwords decades ago. I’m not ready to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you don’t even know what the email address is that you signed into this thing with.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the other hand, my email address has been public for so long, I get the maximum amount of possible spam, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not really a concern for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Ay yi yi. All right, and then again, continuing with the same theme, Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Diller writes, I’ve been running my own mail server for about 20 years. I would never dream of yelling at someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who didn’t want to do it. Hmm. But I do think the downsides and quote unquote horror show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aspects get blown out of proportion sometimes. The worst thing about it nowadays is that you’re suspicious by default if you’re on any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of cloud server or consumer ISP IP address. Deliverability can be a challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if you do all the right things with DKIM and SPF. My outbound has been relayed through AWS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a few years now so I can ride on their reputation. I got blocked by Microsoft with no recourse before I made that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change. All in all, it’s not a huge amount of work day to day, but I’ve sunk a lot of hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in over those 20 years. I only do it because I get some enjoyment out of it. Perfectly reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to not want the hassle.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this was the mildest of the people telling us that actually running your own L server
⏹️ ▶️ John is easy. Lots of people say, I do it and it’s fine. Stop scaring people away from it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that bad. There’s always just want to give you the other side of it. People who have been doing this for a while say that it is
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely a thing that you can do and they’re fine with it. I do have to say that in the volume of email we’ve gotten and
⏹️ ▶️ John the volume of things I’ve read online still heavily lean in favor of do not run your own mail server.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I just want to let you know the other side does exist. It can be done if you
Post-quantum cryptography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Lisa Ougre writes, in last episode’s Overtime, you discussed post-quantum cryptography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and noted that quantum computers capable of breaking today’s cryptography don’t currently exist. This is true, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that doesn’t mean transitioning to PQC isn’t urgent. It’s widely believed that there are actors currently recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encrypted traffic with the intention of decrypting it once such quantum computers exist. I tried to go for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acronym and realized I couldn’t. Using algorithms that have already been written despite not yet having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware on which to run them. And so, John, what do we call this?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s called Harvest Now Decrypt Later, and I meant to mention it last week, and I didn’t, and I was punished for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Store Now Decrypt Later. We’ll link to the Wikipedia page. This is a well-known concept. The idea is
⏹️ ▶️ John we got to save all this garbage data because it’s garbage to us now, but in the
⏹️ ▶️ John future, we might be able to trivially decrypt it all, so let’s save it. Now, this is kind of an interesting wager here
⏹️ ▶️ John because it kind of assumes that quantum computers will be around
⏹️ ▶️ John in a time that will make it valuable to decrypt it. So let’s say just for sake of argument, if, if
⏹️ ▶️ John a quantum computer capable of breaking today’s encryption, uh, didn’t exist until 500
⏹️ ▶️ John years from now, that stored data, if it still exists, will most be of interest to historians.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if quantum computers come out two years from now, it’s of interest to a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the, the many people are in today, all the, all the assumptions that like, you know, world governments are storing
⏹️ ▶️ John data. Other bad actors are storing data. The tricky bit is which data do we store and how much of it
⏹️ ▶️ John and for how long? Because you can’t like, I don’t even want to say this. You can’t record all the internet’s traffic
⏹️ ▶️ John and save it forever, right NSA? Hmm. Anyway, we hope someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing that. But yeah, they’re definitely saving this data because you know, it could end up
⏹️ ▶️ John being a goldmine if those quantum computers come online in a reasonable timeframe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Saul Sutherland writes, PQ3 was actually first brought to iOS 17.4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to improve encryption of iMessage chats. I think we talked about this way back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John then. We did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. February 21 of 2024, iMessage with PQ3, the new state-of-the-art in quantum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secure messaging at scale. And this is from Apple’s security blog. And that also mentions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same Harvest Now Decrypt Later thing. Brian Jarvis writes, what will compel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network infrastructure manufacturers to adopt PQC. The government, NIST, the NSA, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey various other scary agencies have established an expectation that cloud service providers, browser and OS vendors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network hardware manufacturers, basically everyone up and down the tech stack that uses public key cryptography must get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their collective butts in gear and adopt PQC gradually over the next decade. This will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impact the awarding of government contracts. So there’s a pretty hefty financial incentive to migrate, even if the security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argument doesn’t compel you. This also presupposes that we have a functional American government.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But that’s neither here
⏹️ ▶️ John nor there. I mean, I’m assuming world governments are doing the same thing. It’s kind of the same reason that network hardware everywhere supports IPv6.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, we’ve been successful at making sure that the hardware stack supports it. And we did get some feedback I didn’t put in here of like
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile networks in particular, since they have more control over the network and since most people don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, your phone, when using cellular data, is probably using IPv6
⏹️ ▶️ John to communicate instead of IPv4. It’s just more of the existing infrastructure sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John terrestrial internet access still has a lot of IPv4 stuff in it. So anyway, what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about is like, let’s make sure this hardware can work with PQC, because of
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that we talked about in overtime, that the packet sizes change and some hardware manufacturers made assumptions
⏹️ ▶️ John that will no longer be true, that would cause their hardware to fail. And so this is motivating them to say, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John make sure your hardware can do this. And so in that respect, IPv6,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, see last episodes over time comparing this to the IPv6 transition, IPv6 has essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John completely rolled out to pretty much everywhere in terms of does the hardware and software stack support it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t mean that everyone’s computer is now communicating over IPv6 on the internet. It doesn’t mean that web servers
⏹️ ▶️ John still only exist on IPv4, including, by the way, as many people pointed out, many of our own web servers, ATP.fm,
⏹️ ▶️ John my personal website, might not even be listening on an IPv6 address, mostly because it’s a complexity
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m not a networking guru and it’s a complexity that I don’t want to take on unless I have to. But
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes if you’re hosting your website elsewhere, it’s pretty easy to add support for it. So maybe I’ll get around to it eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need an ahhh record on your DNS. You do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think that’s very clever. If like multiplying it out by the number of bits, but yeah, it is an ahhh record.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Saywer writes, Chrome has been shipping PQC and TLS for a long time. It’s true that some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TLS specific hardware broke, but these are not that common
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the consumer internet. This is mostly done in software for big sites. Here’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post about PQC from Cloudflare in 2024 called The State of the Post-Quantum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Internet. And in there, they write, today, nearly 2% of all TLS 1.3 connections established
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Cloudflare are secured with post-quantum cryptography. We expect to see double digit adoption by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of 2024. Now back to Saber. They now say one third of Cloudflare traffic is using PQC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’ll put a link to a different blog post in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there is some upside of a huge amount of traffic through Cloudflare when they decide to adopt PQC, they
⏹️ ▶️ John can have a large effect on the percentage of of traffic that is using it.
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John vs. Tahoe icons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about you going to war, John Syracuse. What’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is something that every developer is doing for the 26 OS’s because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John changed, you know, the new design everywhere, but also they changed their recommended icon
⏹️ ▶️ John style across all the OS’s, including adding like supporting a clear
⏹️ ▶️ John variant in addition to the dark and light ones, and tinted ones, and yada yada. I’ve been battling this with my
⏹️ ▶️ John apps. When they do something like change the icon style, you start realizing,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, I don’t have three apps. Like I have three apps in the app store. I actually have five because I have two little dinky things that are not in
⏹️ ▶️ John the app store, but they have icons. So I’m messing with five icons at once. I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to give a little bit of background on that and explain why it is difficult. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put a link in the show notes to Apple’s WWDC video and their documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John on their website about what app icons are supposed to look like. And the WDC video
⏹️ ▶️ John is called create icons of icon composer. Icon composer is a new version of an icon creation app. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it existed, or at least there were icon apps, creation apps that existed before this from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here is the latest iteration. And here’s the thing about icon composer. So it is an app
⏹️ ▶️ John that lets you make icons in the style that Apple wants you to make icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it doesn’t, it’s not just like a bitmap editor. It has you make the icons
⏹️ ▶️ John out of vector shapes and attributes on them. It’s very limited. What you end up getting
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it is, it’s like, I don’t know, like a property list. It’s like kind of like an SVG or whatever. It’s just like, you get a text file from
⏹️ ▶️ John this. And the text file says, draw a circle here, draw an oval there. It should have this highlight from this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it should be this, the effects are on in this. This should have a gradient. This is the starting color, this is the ending color. I don’t know, I haven’t looked
⏹️ ▶️ John into the details of what languages or whatever. It’s not SVG directly, it is very limited. It’s like, you can have shapes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can apply styles to them. If you open the Icon Composer app, you will see like a layers palette essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then for each layer, you can pick from a handful of properties. And it just writes those properties in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John You put a value for this property, what’s the X position? What’s the Y position? What’s the scale? Is this on, off, whatever? It just writes all
⏹️ ▶️ John those numbers, all those booleans, all those things into a structured text file. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John describes your icon. That describes all your icons. you make one of those things, the icon composer,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can tweak it to say, here’s what I want the dark one to look like, here’s what I want the light one to look like, here’s what I want the clear one to look like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s all from the same base text file. This is very different than in the past where they
⏹️ ▶️ John would ask for differently sized bitmaps for their icons of, you know, it started off, there was like 128
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel icons in Mac OS X, that’s huge. Now we have like 1024, cause it’s like 512 at 2X. Maybe we wouldn’t have 512 at 3X, I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, the days of bitmap, according to Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John over instead here’s how we want icons to look and if you’ve seen the icons in any of the 26 OS’s you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they look like it’s kind of like a fuzzy liquidy glass kind of thing where it’s like colored
⏹️ ▶️ John layers on top of each other and you can put regular graphics in there too you don’t have to do everything as a bunch of vector things you
⏹️ ▶️ John can import bitmaps into the icon composer and put them in there but they want you to make everything out of vectors and
⏹️ ▶️ John outlines if you look at apple’s own terrible icons, especially on the Mac in Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re all made like this. So this this is what this is what icons are going to
⏹️ ▶️ John look like when you you know, I’m mostly spending my time on Tahoe, but the same is true on the phone and the iPad. All
⏹️ ▶️ John the apps, you know, and love from Apple, the mail app, Safari system settings, those are all made with this
⏹️ ▶️ John app in this style, or if not with this app with with the app that puts output that’s like this. And again, they
⏹️ ▶️ John are described as a text file. and then on the fly
⏹️ ▶️ John generates the bitmaps that are displayed on the screen. This presents
⏹️ ▶️ John a bit of a problem, maybe for all apps, but certainly for me on the Mac, because
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as I despise this new icon style, and as much as I love my current icons, I do want
⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac apps to fit in on Tahoe. So I want them to have,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote, Tahoe native icons. I could just draw different icons on Tahoe with bitmaps I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to use Icon Composer like they say, you know, whatever. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the Tahoe icons are hideous. I don’t want them to be on macOS versions before Tahoe,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in fact, they wouldn’t fit in in that context because in Tahoe, all the icons look like that. In Sequoia
⏹️ ▶️ John and earlier, none of the icons look like that. So I want to keep my old icons before Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John and the new icon after Tahoe. And it kind of boggles my mind that one of the main
⏹️ ▶️ John points of Apple’s documentation or their videos wasn’t. Here’s how you can do this thing that we know people are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to want to do. I don’t know if they just assume that people are leaving behind every old OS as soon as they do a Tahoe icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re going to release a new version of the wrap that only runs on Tahoe or something. But it’s like, guys, people support
⏹️ ▶️ John more than the latest version of OS is sometimes with their apps. Nobody wants their Tahoe icon
⏹️ ▶️ John showing up on earlier OS is because everybody knows they’re hideous. And even if they weren’t hideous, even if they look awesome, and we love
⏹️ ▶️ John them, they just don’t fit in on the old Like they fit in when all the icons around them look
⏹️ ▶️ John like this. So, anyway, Apple didn’t explain how to do that, but people quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out if you just give the icon composer file the same file name minus
⏹️ ▶️ John the file name extension as your existing app icon, it does what you want. When you’re on Tahoe,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get the icon composer thing, and on pre-Tahoe, it doesn’t know anything about the icon composer thing, and you get the old icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then, of course, they broke that in beta 5, I believe, and all of a sudden, all my apps started showing the Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John icon everywhere. everywhere. I’d burn basically an entire week going back and forth and mastodon with a bunch of people
⏹️ ▶️ John smarter than me, figuring out how to restore that functionality. Turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ John after much gnashing of teeth and custom build phases and other things like that, eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John who was it? I think it was a Václav Slavík figured out how to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it first a very complicated way and then a simpler way. All of it hinged on an undocumented flag
⏹️ ▶️ John that I guess they they found by running strings on Apple’s binary of like the AC tool asset
⏹️ ▶️ John catalog compiler that compiles your asset catalog in your app. Apparently there’s an option
⏹️ ▶️ John in there that will tell it don’t like leave the icons alone for pre-Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John OS’s but let Tahoe, anyway. This was very frustrating. I filed a bunch of feedbacks on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I filed a feedback that said, hey, there should be a way to do this. Like there should be like a documented
⏹️ ▶️ John actual, like Apple should say, if you want to do this very common thing, here’s how we recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. Instead of all of us just trying to figure it out on our own, right? So that was one of my feedbacks. The second
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback was, it used to work in betas one, two, three, and four, it stopped working beta five, so it’s a regression.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I did a second feedback, depending on which might be more appealing, if anyone ever looks at these, which they probably won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the final feedback I put in was another aspect of the
⏹️ ▶️ John icon system in Tahoe is that, we’ve mentioned this before, but if you have a non-Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John icon on Tahoe, and that icon is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a Big Sur style squircle, as in a rounded rectangle where nothing breaks the frame
⏹️ ▶️ John of the rounded rectangle squircle thing, your icon will be put into squircle jail. It will be
⏹️ ▶️ John shrunken, shoved onto a gray squircle background, and your app will look terrible. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John punitive. And one of the earliest feedback I filed is get rid of squircle jail. It’s punitive.
⏹️ ▶️ John If developers don’t update their icons, their punishment is that their icon doesn’t fit in with the other icons. Don’t punish them further
⏹️ ▶️ John by shrinking their icon by 80% and putting it on a gray background. It looks terrible and it’s super mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they should just get rid of Squircle Jail. All these feedback numbers will be in the show notes. Not that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that will make any difference. So anyway, if Squircle Jail actually
⏹️ ▶️ John ships, which it probably will because no one’s ever gonna look at my feedback. If it hasn’t just been a tool
⏹️ ▶️ John during the betas to scare developers into making Tahoe icons, which by the way, would have been a good strategy, but get rid of it for release.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, if it ships, I would expect to see more articles like this one that was on nine to five Mac this week,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the title of which is, Mac OS Tahoe, put your icons, your apps in icon jail, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how to fix it. And that where they basically say is like, here’s a website and go to macOSicons.com
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and find a squircle compatible icon for
⏹️ ▶️ John your app that’s in squircle jail, and then using the finder, get info on the app and copy and paste the icon
⏹️ ▶️ John onto it. That works fine until your app auto updates and then rewrites back the old icon and you’re back in squircle jail. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John regardless of whether people like the new interface or not, I don’t think anybody is going to like
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing their app icons, especially ones that are in the dock that they see all the time, being
⏹️ ▶️ John shrunken and put in a gray rectangle. Like people, like try explaining that to somebody. For
⏹️ ▶️ John some reason, my icon of this app I use every day now is like small and in a gray thing. Can
⏹️ ▶️ John you fix that? just like the amount of explanation that we required or like explaining you can fix it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but when the app updates, it will unfix itself. Squircle Jail is punitive to users, it’s punitive to developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it has served its purpose because they silently did Squircle Jail and scared everybody into making Tahoe icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now they need to revert it. But anyway, I just wanted to link to all this stuff to let you benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John from the pain that I and others have been experiencing and to thank the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who figured out how to do this. Interestingly, by the way, one of the ways that we
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out how to do this for the custom build phase, seemed to work great. I updated all five of my apps with this
⏹️ ▶️ John custom build phase. So they were all compliant, set out new test flights, still, well, actually didn’t set out new test
⏹️ ▶️ John flights, planned to set out new test flights and found out that when I uploaded it to App Store Connect, it said, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re missing some icon resources, rejected. Like I couldn’t even upload to App Store Connect. They worked fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I tested them going back and forth to the other Macs logged into my Apple ID all the time. They worked fine here.
⏹️ ▶️ John They worked, but App Store Connect they were missing icon resources so it was like back to the drawing board even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get something that works you only know if It really works if you do a real archive build
⏹️ ▶️ John sign it with developer ID Look at it on a Tahoe machine look at on a Sequoia machine
⏹️ ▶️ John Then also upload to App Store connect and make sure it redownloads and everything works fine and blah blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, I had to do like nine times for all of my apps and now all of my apps I think are compliant with the simpler system
⏹️ ▶️ John Just wanted to let the world know that a this is happening and be The icons look a little bit weird, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John in Tahoe. This is why. Apple has kind of dropped the ball on this. And I want to say, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the icon composer format and idea is actually kind of a good one. Maintaining 700
⏹️ ▶️ John different icon resolutions and bitmaps is not efficient and it’s kind of annoying. I know iOS, or
⏹️ ▶️ John I think iOS changed recently to be able to let you say, let me just make one really big high-res icon and it’ll make all the other ones. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John true? Yes. Yeah, they didn’t do it on the Mac. Because who cares about the Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ John But even that, like, you know, having a sort of a definition file for
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, if you plan to have, I wanna be able to make a clear one, a light one, a dark one, like if you wanna be able to programmatically do that
⏹️ ▶️ John with a specific icon style, that to be clear, I do not like. But I do respect that this
⏹️ ▶️ John format is a clever solution to that problem. So I’m not against icon composer or the Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, I’m against having an obvious built-in way to only have the
⏹️ ▶️ John OZO icons on Tahoe and forward. And obviously this was, the problem will solve itself in a few years Nobody cares about those old icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think what Apple is trying to avoid is a repeat of the big sir thing where they said, Hey, in big,
⏹️ ▶️ John sir, and from now on, everyone should use squircle icons and everyone was like, Nah,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t feel like it. And they didn’t. Some people did. Most people didn’t. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think that’s why squircle jail exists, which is like, no, seriously. This time we demand that you make your icons
⏹️ ▶️ John look like our icons. And if you do not, you will be punished.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We, you know, this is the direction Apple is going with their new OS’s. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when Apple tries to maintain compatibility with old OS’s, they don’t face the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues that we do with their apps, because most Apple apps are built into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the operating system. So they don’t need like the same code that’s running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS 18 to be running at like, as the same bundle in the app store as what’s gonna run on iOS 26.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And same thing with, you know, the Mac OS equivalents and all the other, like they don’t need to worry about that. Like the team that writes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Mail, They have their before 26 builds, and they have their 26 builds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And those are basically different apps, or at least probably a different branch or
⏹️ ▶️ John but the closest they get is Safari on the Mac because they do ship a version of the new Safari on the old
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, but I imagine that’s just an entirely separate build.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably. And so in areas that Apple does not face the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenges or face them in the same way as developers, they generally really don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how hard it is for us. Like they really honestly, and it’s not like it, not like in a cynical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or snobby way. They just kind of institutionally, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has never been amazing at dogfooding the developer experience. Like they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really know, like they don’t really fully, people in Apple don’t usually fully appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what developers need to do in certain ways or around certain problems because they just don’t face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those problems themselves and they don’t care. Or they are not important enough to them for them to care more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, once Apple goes in a new direction, whether that’s a software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update or a redesign or whatever else, that’s a one-way transition for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this has been Apple forever, even back to Steve Jobs. As soon as they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are on the new thing, they don’t care about the old thing at all. And so for us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be like, well, we kinda do need to still care about the old OS for a while. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve moved on, that’s it. So this is, this is the kind of area that tends to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco underserved and Apple’s like tools and solutions and everything. Cause they, they just don’t care the way, the way we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. So this is an area where like, yeah, like, you know, when, when I build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my app, like the iOS app, when I build it with the new icon and it runs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS 18, it shows like a flattened rendering of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glass icon as the new app icon on iOS 18. Like, and that’s maybe I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can hack around that the same way you’re trying to here, but like, I’m just, I’m not going to, because it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it. Like there’s only so much fighting I can do. And the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for my app, I know this is very different for the Mac for my app. I’m going to probably be above 90% on iOS 26 by December.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s, it’s only a problem for a few months for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John all iOS apps were already squircles. Like I know they changed the radius of the curve as we talked about, but, and
⏹️ ▶️ John also your particular, the overcast icon does lend itself well to this style. Like you didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John like a photo realistic like I mean my my switch class icon, which I love by the way is like by Brad Ellis
⏹️ ▶️ John is like a semi photo realistic like 3D clear piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of glass on an angle like it is not in a squircle is not like it just it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it does not fit with the Tahoe thing at all. There’s no like making a Tahoe version of that. And I love
⏹️ ▶️ John that icon. So I don’t want it to go away, but your icon was already a squircle is a flat
⏹️ ▶️ John rendering that is not, it doesn’t have like 3d shapes that are rotated or shaded and stuff like that. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John make a Tahoe version of your icon that doesn’t look that different than the regular version. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John if I showed the Tahoe icon of any of my apps on pre Tahoe, it would stand out like a sore thumb because none of
⏹️ ▶️ John my apps look anything like that pre Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. But, but again, like this is an area where like I’m on the easy side cause I’m on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple, you know, they do everything with iOS first and first priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with the most effort and Mac OS gets table scraps. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s what’s happening here
⏹️ ▶️ John on that front. James Thompson’s apps or I think it was James Thompson and somebody else. Oh, it’s underscore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think some let’s put it this way. Some iOS developers went a little overboard with the custom
⏹️ ▶️ John icons. Casey went a little bit didn’t go overboard. He has some custom icons, but like I think James Thompson has
⏹️ ▶️ John like 50 icons or something. And I think maybe V underscore was saying that Widget Smith has like 150 or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were saying that the build phase in Xcode when just doing like dev builds of trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to build all the icon bitmaps from those icon composer description files that
⏹️ ▶️ John I just did was taking a lot of time. So they were trying to figure out ways to basically like make like conditional build steps to say
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re doing a dev build, don’t build all the icons. Cause it was taking like, I think James Thompson said it
⏹️ ▶️ John was taking like five minutes to just to do that phase of his build. So that’s another
⏹️ ▶️ John example, like Apple doesn’t have that many custom icons. They’re actually thinking, who’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have more than one or two custom icons? Well, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Yeah, that’s, again, it’s another area where like, no Apple app has more than a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of custom icons, if any, you know. I think it’s probably just like Apple Sports, right? Isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the only one that has any? So like-
⏹️ ▶️ John And who knows what’s, Apple gets to use whatever weird system they wanna use for it. They don’t even have to use the ones that we do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so like, you know, when you face a problem in your app that Apple doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face much themselves. It doesn’t tend, again, it doesn’t tend to get great tooling support, doesn’t get a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of attention from Apple. So I think the pragmatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution here is you kind of have to decide how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re willing to fight on this. How much is it worth? And in my case, as I said, like with my,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, showing my glass icon on iOS 18, I don’t care. It’s not worth the fight. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many other things to deal with that that’s, that’s not something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a hill. I’m going to die on. That’s not something I’m going to spend any time looking at because the glass icon, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like people who are going to hold onto iOS 18, cause they hate liquid glass, they’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to have a problem with it, but that’s not going to be that many people over time. And it’s, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much better spending the time continuing to move the app forward and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking too much about the past, and that’s exactly how Apple thinks. They move their stuff forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t spend too much time thinking about or working on or enabling the past. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you try to swim against the current, like you can, it’s hard, you will spend a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of time doing it and it might not be the best use of your time and effort.
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#askatp: Tahoe designed for touch?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Daniel Liu writes, do you think the decreased information interface density in Liquid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Glass in macOS might make the interface potentially more touch friendly? Setting aside the myriad of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems with legibility, consistency, and the Liquid Glass’s brittleness, to use Snell’s term,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you think of the new macOS as being a step toward touch max? I have not used any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this on macOS, so I have nothing to contribute. John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, first, I just want to defend Daniel’s honor and say that even though you read a myriad of he wrote correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ John the myriad of problems without an oven there, that’s the way
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you use that word.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Casey just inserted the of because that’s the way a lot of people say it. And anyway, setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ John the myriad problems, I believe that is correct. And that is what Daniel wrote. Anyway, I see where they’re going with this. We
⏹️ ▶️ John all kind of had similar thoughts when they made the menu bar taller. Turns out that was just for the notch.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here’s the thing, the notch making the menu bar taller, the setting that’s in accessibility that
⏹️ ▶️ John does nothing in Tahoe, but anyway, there’s a setting in accessibility I believe that says do you want me to show the regular menu bar in
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS or do you want me to show the large menu bar? Again I think it does nothing in Tahoe, but that doesn’t mean it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always going to do nothing or did do nothing in Sequoia. The lower information
⏹️ ▶️ John density and the larger controls in Wicked Glass in Mac OS and on iOS and an iPadOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though pretty clearly none of that was designed
⏹️ ▶️ John with the intention of making it easier to make touch Macs, in the end it does
⏹️ ▶️ John put them one micro step farther down that road. Now here’s the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John in a world of thoughtful interface design that acknowledges
⏹️ ▶️ John that there is a science to it and that things can be known and tested, an actual Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John interface designed for touch would do a lot more than liquid glass is doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do think that every step they take to sort of puff
⏹️ ▶️ John up the interface on the Mac specifically sets them up for a future
⏹️ ▶️ John where they could enable touch without making too many changes. And honestly, like
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside the retina transition, Apple has tried to hold the line on the Mac in terms of like DPI
⏹️ ▶️ John and how big things are on the screen. Not for touch reasons, not for like the size of the tip of your finger,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you know, Macs don’t have touch. But they’ve tried to make things kind of sort of stay the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size. But if you, there’s lots of people posting historical images like here’s how this
⏹️ ▶️ John graphic looked in Mac OS for the past 20 years or something online these days because of the liquid glass stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you look at some of those, even when they account for retina and like don’t do the 1X, 2X thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John older versions of macOS, especially when you go back to classic, things were smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John because screens were smaller. Like physically, like they had fewer inches. Like people had 13 inch CRTs, not 32
⏹️ ▶️ John inch LCDs, right? People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were smaller, the world was smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So things have been getting bigger. And I think, I mean, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a good thing just because when you have so much screen real estate, there’s not as much reason to make everything
⏹️ ▶️ John as small as you possibly can. You don’t need a lot of nine and 10 point text everywhere in the UI because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re on a nine inch monochrome screen. You know what I mean? So
⏹️ ▶️ John even though I think, you know, liquid glass has probably set us backwards from touch in many other
⏹️ ▶️ John areas, things getting a little bit bigger, assuming it stays that way until, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if touch, max ever come and assuming the liquid glass stuff stays and someone doesn’t come in and undo all that, It does
⏹️ ▶️ John bring us a tiny little bit closer, but only accidentally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t read too much into the, like liquid glasses design being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ported pretty closely to the Mac, like from the iPad. I think that’s just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t really care as much about the Mac as the iOS devices, and they just brought the design straight over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, you know, you can say, well, why would they make the Mac have these bigger elements?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, one reason is to make touchscreen Macs. Another reason is it allows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to use basically the same design between iPad and Mac OS, which makes their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own development of their own apps easier. That’s probably the reason they did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at like how much consideration has been put into this design for things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch target sizing, legibility, pretty significant like usability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factors. it’s very clear that like, there is no like big grand master plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. They made something that they thought looked cool and usability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a pretty far secondary concern in that list. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the fact that they made things bigger, they’re not thinking, Ooh, then now they’re touchable. And in fact, in many cases, as I said, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many cases, like the touch targets are actually way too small, even on the touch devices on their own native designs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, so I don’t think they’re thinking that hard about it. I think it’s, They wanted to make one unified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design language across all their devices and that makes their jobs easier And it gives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them you know the the brand unity that they’ve been wanting all these years That’s why the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac design got bigger. I don’t think it’s at all about touchscreen considerations in some future strategy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s all about the pretty shallow reasons that we can see right now
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat related to this One of the ideas floating around out there because people always want to like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a conspiracy theory people people want to, um, they want to see intention where
⏹️ ▶️ John it may not actually exist. That’s why you get questions like, well, putting these chips in makes cellular more possible. They’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this because they’re planning for future touch max or whatever. Again, I don’t think they are planning for it, but in the end.
⏹️ ▶️ John Controls being a little bit bigger does help in that direction, but it’s not the intention at all. Um, a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of people have been trying to play that game with the liquid
⏹️ ▶️ John glass, uh, design decision to put margins around and everything. So all of Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom and top bars, they used to go edge to edge on the screen, which meant from the edges of the screen, you would
⏹️ ▶️ John move in from the literal edge of the screen by some margin, and then you could have content. Now you’ve got to
⏹️ ▶️ John have empty margin where there’s nothing, beginning of capsule, new margin inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the capsule, and only then can you begin your toolbar button, right? So that’s what you were saying, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John that actually the touch targets in some cases get smaller, even as the amount of room taken up
⏹️ ▶️ John by the interface element gets larger. And people look at that and say, yeah, but assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is all knowing and all powerful, which is not true. Um, there must be some reason they’re making this terrible design
⏹️ ▶️ John decision of putting markets around everything and floating, floating controls over content, harming legibility
⏹️ ▶️ John for no use of blah, blah, blah, see past episodes. There must be a reason they’re doing this. And the reason I’ve heard passed
⏹️ ▶️ John around a lot is well, when the folding phone comes out and the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John wraps around and it has a waterfall edge or whatever. not having, for example, bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John bars in iOS apps actually extend to the edges of the screen will help
⏹️ ▶️ John because that part of the edge of the screen might be wrapping around like a waterfall design or
⏹️ ▶️ John bending over a hinge or whatever, depending on how the app is oriented. And so the liquid
⏹️ ▶️ John glass design is forward looking for devices that have not yet been released, in particular, the folding devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s why they did it. Again, like the touch things, Depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on what the folding device looks like, this design might help. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s why they chose to do this design. I actually don’t know why they chose to do this design other than someone thought it looked good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a terrible idea and I don’t think it looks good, but here we are. But that is, I just want to put that out there, is
⏹️ ▶️ John if the folding phone comes out and Apple says, you were wondering why we screwed with your interfaces so much? Well, it was all because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John folding phone. Like, they’re never gonna say that, but it might be the case that when the folding phone comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ John the floating elements everywhere with margins around them reduces the touch target size might make slightly more
⏹️ ▶️ John sense, but I would say again, probably only accidentally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like there, there really was not a lot of consideration in a lot of parts of this design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t, again, I don’t think like John, like I don’t think there is like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grand plan here. I think that’s, that’s, that’s us projecting what we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume or hope might be the case. There is no grand plan. They made a design that looks cool and And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to slap it together, you know, at kind of the last minute in a pretty slapdash fashion. That’s what we have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s going to look cool and we’re going to live with it and it’ll be fine. But there is no grand plan here.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like when you’re a kid and you think like that adults like know how everything works and are doing things for the reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you become an adult and you go, oh. Yeah, that’s
#askatp: Product sense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on, Ian Anderson writes, it has been discussed in recent episodes that Tim Cook does not have, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good product sense, quote. As someone early in a tech career with ambitions to be a leader one day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in what could be considered a product organization, what sorts of things should I start doing? What books should I be reading,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, to cultivate good product sense now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this depends a lot on what we mean by product. There’s an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discipline and profession called product management. I’m not an expert in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field. Um, I w I, uh, read a good book on it by Marty Kagan called inspired a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while ago. Um, I’ll link that in the show notes. Um, so that, that’s a great book. If you are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a product. Manager director, you know, whatever, to practice the actual like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco science and profession of product management. Um, that’s when I say Tim cook is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a good product person or doesn’t have good product sense. I’m not really quite talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that version of what that means. I’m more talking about like in like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visionary, like kind of like the Steve Jobs sense of like having a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like good instincts for the direction that they should go with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product design with, you know, what products to make different choices while making them different things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to prioritize and the the profession of product management does have a lot of overlap with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. There is a lot of product management, you know, the discipline that can help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that. But it’s kind of like having good artistic talent or good musical talent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s a lot of science behind it and a lot of practice that you can get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Into it to, you know, to make yourself better at it, to educate yourself on the fundamentals and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sciences and, you know, music theory, you know, various like forms of art instruction and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco art theory, like there, there are, there’s, there’s educational paths you can and should take,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s also kind of like fundamental aptitudes or talents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can really help you be the next level. For a company like Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming off of Steve Jobs’s life, he was so good at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were so well known for their products that just had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that they just had such a knack for making great products pretty reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with great attributes and great, great combinations of things, great spirit behind them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that was Steve and a lot of the people under Steve and you know he was also a great editor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a great director and you know a great collaborator you know and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he had more than just like the the science and discipline of product sensibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was also just like a natural talent at identifying like what makes great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products and what what should we do what direction should we go what how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should I how should we tweak these little things to make this product a little bit cooler a little bit more kind of must-have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more delightful he was great at that Tim Cook is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of that whatever you want to say about Tim Cook’s you know pragmatism or operational expertise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s really good at making money he is none of that he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t seem to get that he doesn’t seem to value that he knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s not that, but because he’s so not that, he’s not able to, I think, pick good people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to serve those roles either. And good people who could serve those roles, I don’t think, thrive in his organization.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so when I say he doesn’t have product sense, what I’m talking about is that. Kind of like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spirit, the natural or developed sense of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what makes cool, gotta have products that that fit with what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people really want and and can can, you know, break into new areas and set new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set new trends and everything. He has none of those sensibilities. Whatever product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco successes Apple has had in the Tim Cook era had nothing to do with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him and probably happened despite him, not anything because of him.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the this question is about like how do I prepare myself
⏹️ ▶️ John for a leadership role one day in a tech career in a product organization.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it really kind of depends on at what level
⏹️ ▶️ John do you aspire to operate, right? So if you aspire to be CEO, as
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, the CEO level is different kettle of fish than
⏹️ ▶️ John being in charge of one product or being in charge of a set of products. Because when you are at the CEO level, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about things like, what should this company be doing? Are we in the right
⏹️ ▶️ John business? Should we pivot to video? Should we start making self-driving cars?
⏹️ ▶️ John Where’s our next area of growth going to come from? And in many respects, like those are the things that Tim Cook has been
⏹️ ▶️ John very good at, is like the sort of setting aside the fact that it’s Apple, which, you know, it’s difficult to do and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get back to in a second. If you are the CEO of any really big company, One of your jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John is to sort of steer the ship to figure out what’s next for Apple. How does Apple continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to succeed? And yes, continue to grow and continue to make money. And Tim Cook has been pretty darn good at figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to make Apple continue to grow and make money. Unfortunately, Apple as a
⏹️ ▶️ John company is basically defined because of the second Steve Jobs era as being a company
⏹️ ▶️ John that is successful because of its great products, not because Steve Jobs was a genius at figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out where the next growth thing was going to come from. He wasn’t like the whole things that Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John has done with like services, revenue, and all the things that he’s done with the financials. And like, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John not Steve jobs of strength. He didn’t do that. He didn’t care about that. He had other people handling it. He would not have done as good
⏹️ ▶️ John a job as it as Tim Cook has. But when we think of Apple, a lot of us
⏹️ ▶️ John still have that image in our mind of the company that like Apple was successful because
⏹️ ▶️ John they made great products, which is not true of lots of really big companies. the bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John the company gets, the more it’s like, why is ExxonMobil successful? It’s not because of really great gasoline, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s all sorts of other reasons that make these giant corporations able to be big and grow
⏹️ ▶️ John and like strategic, boring corporate stuff that we don’t know, or maybe some stuff having to do with science of where they find
⏹️ ▶️ John the oil or like geopolitics of having to get like, but there’s stuff like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s reasons they’re big, but it’s not like the reasons we loved Apple so much is like this one company found
⏹️ ▶️ John a way by just doing really good things that people like to become tremendously successful. And
⏹️ ▶️ John again, Tim Cook knows that’s not his strength. And so he doesn’t have the choice to do that. Like, he was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, you should learn it and get better at it. No, it would be better if he realizes what his strengths are but as Marco said,
⏹️ ▶️ John now you gotta have somebody do that. And not being able to do it is one thing, but if you also
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t correctly pick people to do that for you, or at the very least, tell
⏹️ ▶️ John when you made a bad choice and change it up. And Tim Cook has definitely been slow to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that and reticent to do that, deferring a lot to other people and it hasn’t worked out that well.
⏹️ ▶️ John getting back to Ian’s question here, if you want to be CEO, it’s kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s not a lot, you end up reading business books. Like, cause if you try to say like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I want to be a good CEO? How do I know what products my company should make? Just like in
⏹️ ▶️ John UI design, there is a science to doing this. Like, business school exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John People do case studies at the company level. how do I know
⏹️ ▶️ John what products I should be making for which customers? How do I know when I should decide that we should
⏹️ ▶️ John move away from this kind of customers to these other kinds of customers, you know, or should I be making products or
⏹️ ▶️ John should I be selling services? Like there’s tons of people doing, you know, PhD
⏹️ ▶️ John theses and business case studies and like on all these things. But all that, all of that science aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, you’ll see is not specific to anything. Like business school is not
⏹️ ▶️ John about the tech business or the farming business or the oil business. There is such a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John as generic business knowledge. And when you’re steering a company at that level, that’s what you have to learn. So if you aspire
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a CEO, you should probably have some knowledge of business and companies
⏹️ ▶️ John and economies and big picture things. If that doesn’t interest you and you’re like, I’m thinking more about how do I
⏹️ ▶️ John make a really good version of iMovie? Like how do I make, I wanna be in charge of our most important products and I wanna make that
⏹️ ▶️ John product the best it can be, That’s way smaller. And now you’re thinking about like product design. How do I figure out,
⏹️ ▶️ John this starts to get into UI design, but how do we figure out, should we be making a product for beginners or pros? What are the
⏹️ ▶️ John trade-offs there? If we do make it for pros, how do we figure out what pros need? Again, there is a science
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect to that, of figuring out how do we identify customer needs? What is the state
⏹️ ▶️ John of the art of figuring out what customers exist, what they want, what they’re not getting from competing products?
⏹️ ▶️ John How do we make a product that will excel? There’s tons of science about that. There’s also art to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs, I think, understood or cared about none of the science of it. He was 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John in his gut, on his gut feeling, and we’re lucky that his gut was right as much as it was, but it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John always right. The G4 Cube wasn’t the right move. Lots of things that he did didn’t work out, but his batting
⏹️ ▶️ John average was great, and I think he had none of that, other than the school of hard knocks, because he’d been
⏹️ ▶️ John in so many companies, made so many products and so many mistakes. He was all from the gut. You can’t rely
⏹️ ▶️ John on that. Don’t assume that you will have the early success that Steve Jobs had that gave him the millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars to be able to make multiple mistakes and to get one of his mistakes acquired by his earlier mistake. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to have Steve Jobs’ career. So don’t follow his lesson of, I’m just going to be a really good gut person,
⏹️ ▶️ John and my instincts and taste will lead my company to great success. Look at all the CEOs who think they’re Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to do that and fail. So I would say, decide what level you want to work at. Learn
⏹️ ▶️ John the science and sort of, I’m probably using science wrong a lot of these things. Cause again, people would say, well, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, business is not really the same, but anyway, look at the things where they, where they, it is a scientific method.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have an idea and you test it. You try things out in the market. You’re like, what is the state of the art in trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to determine what we know, what we don’t know and how to find out new information. And you know, all the, all like
⏹️ ▶️ John the innovators dilemma and all these various advances and are thinking about how markets work. Learn about
⏹️ ▶️ John that science of it, because don’t assume that your gut instincts are going to be right as much as Steve Jobs, but don’t forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about the gut. because if you just learn about like how to sell widgets or when to pivot your company from
⏹️ ▶️ John a B2B to a B2C to a SAS or whatever, you’re gonna be missing
⏹️ ▶️ John the essential heart of what, you have to actually, like Mark always says, you have to, if you’re gonna run Apple, you should really care about
⏹️ ▶️ John computers or phones or like whatever it is that you think Apple’s, you should really super be into
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Tim Cook probably is kind of into that. He did work for Compaq, but he wasn’t into
⏹️ ▶️ John computers like Steve Jobs was. I mean, Steve Jobs was like, no one was into computers when they were making the Apple One. He was just like
⏹️ ▶️ John he was a nerd. He was super into this. Not a lot of people were, but he was. He comes by his computer
⏹️ ▶️ John nerddom honesty. Tim Cook. I’m not entirely sure. And I think that is an important aspect,
⏹️ ▶️ John like to have that passion and to be to have that sort of that
⏹️ ▶️ John gut and that love for the product helps you identify. You know, helps you know
⏹️ ▶️ John that people are going to love the iMac, even though lots of people are going to tell you it’s dumb and ugly, and I can’t believe you’re making this computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs knew that it was going to work now because he focused tested it or did the science part of it because I don’t think he even
⏹️ ▶️ John knew how to do that or cared about it at all, but just because he trusted his gut and got lucky. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t follow that path. You should probably actually understand the the logic and rationale
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the product decisions you are making. Otherwise you end up with liquid glass. But then also
⏹️ ▶️ John have a passion for it and have some kind of, you know, have some kind of opinion about it and
⏹️ ▶️ John taste that hopefully will guide you. Right. And Marco gave a book recommendation, which is more than I have, because I never
⏹️ ▶️ John aspired to be in this part of any of the businesses that I worked for. So I don’t know any like
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you should be reading, but that’s, that’s my advice for like how to view this,
⏹️ ▶️ John find what level you’re going to work at, figure out what sort of science stuff applies there, learn it, but then
⏹️ ▶️ John also have a passion about it and bring your, bring yourself and your art to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, nothing is better than experience in this area too. And you don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a CEO of a tech company or a founder of a startup necessarily to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relevant product experience, get an app out there in front of customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can fail all on your own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but even something small, I mean look, even something as simple as a lawn mowing business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your town, like ask people, figure out what people need and try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a solution that fits it and get it out there. How much should I charge? What services should I offer? Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much every business offering that you might have from local services like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a store, to an app on the App Store or a web app. If you are putting something out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for customers, you’re gonna face all these same dynamics. You’re gonna have, okay, what do you make?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What problem are you trying to solve? Who is it for? Why would they choose your product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over other products or services? What are their needs and how much are you going to fit those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs? How big is the market? What can you charge for it? How will they find your product?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How can you market it? What’s your go-to-market strategy? whatever term you wanna use, like, how are people gonna find it? And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you have something out there, if you get any users whatsoever, that’s great, first of all, and then second of all, then you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start figuring, okay, well, where do I take it next? What, how can I keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serving the customers I have? How can I serve them better? How can I get them maybe to give me more money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to use my product more, or, you know, use it for more things? Like, there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of this sensibility that is, it’s great to read up and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, figure out a lot of the terminology and practices and science and theories behind it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience actually doing it with real products in front of real customers is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more useful and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John will serve you better. Well, that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John the science comes from. They have ideas and they test them in the market. And they don’t just guess, they think, well, this is a great idea, it will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John work. No, they try it and then they report it. And if it doesn’t work, they put that in the paper and they say, we thought doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this would increase sales a huge amount, and it totally didn’t. And they write
⏹️ ▶️ John it up. Like that’s the nature of the science of it. Like people have all sorts of ideas. Like, I think if we do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John customers will love it. Like they go with their gut. So like companies try things, their successes and failures
⏹️ ▶️ John inform these case studies to say, we studied a bunch of different people who had different
⏹️ ▶️ John strategies for tackling this particular problem. Here’s what actually worked and actually didn’t. Rather than just going
⏹️ ▶️ John by, well, these people did it this way and the company got big, therefore that must be great. No, let’s look at
⏹️ ▶️ John if they get, did they get big because of that or despite that? And yeah, you do get the turns out stuff of what’s his
⏹️ ▶️ John name? Blink dude of like lots of different kinds of ketchup or tomato sauce or whatever the examples are.
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta watch out for like a little bit of like seven habits of highly effective people, sort of junk
⏹️ ▶️ John science, pop culture stuff or whatever. But there is actually, like you can tackle
⏹️ ▶️ John this as a thing that is knowable. But your own personal version of that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, maybe you’re not going to study this. Maybe you’re not part of the Harvard Business Review, but in your own personal business,
⏹️ ▶️ John you do your own little experiments and you’ll find out what works and what doesn’t pretty quickly. It’ll be painful
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not as much easier to read about other people making the mistake, but you will make a bunch of your own mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John and learn from them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that is how you will develop the sense, is put something out there, iterate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it, fail in order to figure out what fails and what succeeds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you will start developing these practices. And again, experience is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than any book, but there are also a couple of books you can read. Ideally
⏹️ ▶️ John you do both. I mean, and reading about it will let you know, like for example, if you have an idea, I think I’m gonna do X, Y, and Z
⏹️ ▶️ John with my product. You can learn like how to approach that. How do I try this out in a way that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John destroy the business if I’m wrong, right? You’ll learn that in the book. You won’t learn in the book whether you should add this button to your
⏹️ ▶️ John app, right? You’ll learn that from experience. But what you will learn is, how do I tell whether this idea
⏹️ ▶️ John is good or not? How can I test whether it’s working or not? How can I control for that when all
⏹️ ▶️ John so many other things are changing at the same time? How can I make sure that I don’t turn something that I don’t intend
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a make or break decision for my business into, oh, it turned out that was a make or break decision for the business, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Learn that from the book instead of the hard way, right? But the actual ideas of what you do,
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t see that in a book because it’s so specific to you, your business, your app, whatever problem you’re solving, which hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be unique enough that there aren’t books written about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think just very quickly, it’s worth adding that if product design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically is something you’re interested in, then you can learn a lot about what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good and what’s not. Obviously you have your own innate sense of what’s good and what isn’t, but you can learn a lot about why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people think things are good or bad by listening, I guess, to shows like this, but I’ve got, I got to imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are other podcasts or perhaps, you know, YouTubers where they dissect the, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like what, what makes a product good or bad. And, you know, as much as we poke fun at John for being hypercritical,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think one of the valuable things that I learned from listening to the hypercritical podcast was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what does make a design good or bad? And if there’s something to be criticized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or complained about or what have you, is that, why is that? And when, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John has always, since I’ve paid attention to John, it’s been like 15 years now, um, has always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been very good as an example of distilling why that is. And you can get that from any number of places.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you could argue that pretty much everything in your life is a product of some sort. And so just thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what you do and do not like about things and why, and even better, hearing people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who do this sort of thing or who are passionate about this sort of thing discuss why something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is good, bad, or otherwise, I think is also really, really helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, just to go back to the example I kept using with the art and science of UI design.
⏹️ ▶️ John one is like caring enough about it to have opinions about I like this and I don’t like that or whatever and then trying to figure out why.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also understanding that there’s like there’s reasoning and rationale that other people have
⏹️ ▶️ John already considered that went into it. So just to give one example, the menu bar that’s at the top of
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac screen versus the menu bar that’s inside Windows on Windows, Microsoft Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Knowing which one you feel like you’d like better, that’s a good, that’s a start, right? But understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John the the different trade-offs that those two designs make, like that there was thought behind them,
⏹️ ▶️ John that there was testing on them, and they said, okay, well, the menu bar at the top of screen it’s farther away, which is a minus,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the target height is essentially infinite because you can slam the cursor on the top, which is a plus. But now let’s test
⏹️ ▶️ John that idea. Do people slam their cursors against the top of the screen or do they very carefully target the file menu and they never
⏹️ ▶️ John let their pointer touch the top of the screen? We don’t know without testing it. Let’s test that, right? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar inside the windows, if you like that better, okay, it’s closer to you. and
⏹️ ▶️ John where your cursor is likely to be, and you don’t take up the spot on top of the screen all the time, so you have more screen real estate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Understanding that there are like knowable, objective, measurable trade-offs
⏹️ ▶️ John between those two designs that were considered and weighed, and then decide,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, well, those weights, those weights are the opinion part, but the science part is like, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t just guess. Like, it feels better to me when there’s a menu bar on top of the screen, or I just like it when the menu bar is inside the window.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like having that opinion is a start, but you can’t just stay there and be like, oh, I just like it because I like it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re a dummy, right? There is logic and reasoning behind the designs. Not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John one is necessarily better than the other, but you have to understand the mechanisms and not just be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s all magic, and it’s just like, oh, it’s a feeling in my gut, and I’m right because I’m the CEO. And God,
⏹️ ▶️ John so many CEOs are like that, don’t be like that. So many product designers are like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The world is knowable and understandable. It doesn’t mean that you’re gonna come to a definitive opinion about
⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of menu bar is better, but it does mean you can understand the aspects of it that go into
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and that you can test them. Again, the idea of it being an infinite target. You can say, well, it’s an infinite target, I win the
⏹️ ▶️ John argument, right? It’s like, well, did you test that? Do people treat it as an infinite, do they get that benefit? Do they get
⏹️ ▶️ John that targeting benefit because they don’t have to carefully decelerate the mouse cursor when it comes up to the file menu, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John can just jam it up against the top of the screen? That’s something you should test instead of just assuming, right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the science of this stuff. thinking of it that way, thinking that there are noble things
⏹️ ▶️ John that go into it, that then you layer on top of your opinions and your how much do you
⏹️ ▶️ John value this versus yeah, how much do you value screen space versus targetability versus locality versus whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of those things you can test too, but in the end it always comes down to like value waiting of like once
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve think you’ve identified the aspects that you care about and understand the rationale behind
⏹️ ▶️ John them, then you’re free to assign weights that you think will make a good product and you’ll find out whether you’re right or wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John when you put your translucent teal gumdrop-shaped computer in front of the public. And then you’ll really find
⏹️ ▶️ John out, do people like this or do they not? Turns out they did.
#askatp: Merging duplicate photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally tonight, Keith Heaton writes, when using the duplicate photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey function in Apple Photos on Mac OS, I’m presented with four photos it wants to merge. One is two megabytes, the other three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are one megabyte. One is favorited, the other three are not. One is added to an album, the other three are not. One has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the camera EXIF data and accurate creation date, the other three do not. How the heck do I audit these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey properly and pick and choose which attributes become the new singular master photo? My library currently reports over 10,000 duplicates.
⏹️ ▶️ John duplicate processing in Apple Photos I think I talked about when it first rolled out. It tries to
⏹️ ▶️ John save you some of this pain by giving you a button that says just merge these and it tries to
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially choose the quote unquote best one but then combine all the metadata
⏹️ ▶️ John from all the other ones. So by best it usually means the highest resolution or
⏹️ ▶️ John the largest or both but then it will try to do a union of the metadata from all the other ones
⏹️ ▶️ John but then if there are conflicts I’m not sure how it resolves them You can manually
⏹️ ▶️ John choose to resolve this yourself by deleting the ones that you think are not duplicates the interface for this is not great In photos
⏹️ ▶️ John it tries to be simple and the second you don’t want to just trust it It gets way more complicated to
⏹️ ▶️ John the point where as I’ve complained about in the past When it sometimes identifies photos that
⏹️ ▶️ John are not actually duplicates like you took a burst photo and you can see these are two different photos Like they’re half smiling in this one
⏹️ ▶️ John and one eyes closed in this one and these are not the same photo, but they’re close enough that Apple Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks they’re duplicates. There’s no way to convince them that they’re not duplicates. You can’t say, these are not duplicates,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re wrong, Apple Photos. No, instead you have to forever see that in the duplicate list and just remember to never merge
⏹️ ▶️ John those because they’re two separate pictures. Or you just get frustrated and delete one of them that you like less. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately for Keith, the root problem here is that if you have 10,000 duplicates
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of them are like this, Like that a human
⏹️ ▶️ John description of them all is like, it’s difficult for a human to even figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ John combine these, like what should be done? What is the right thing to do? How long does it take a human to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out what the right thing to do is and then do it? If that’s your situation, no computer program
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna help you because in the end, you’ve got a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John human decisions to make, complicated human decisions. Now the program could be nicer about giving
⏹️ ▶️ John you all the information that I assume Keith had to look up manually that we just read off these bullet points, like the sizes,
⏹️ ▶️ John which one’s favorite, which one is in an album, which one has accurate exit data. Like you’ve got to
⏹️ ▶️ John investigate that, the program doesn’t give you too much info, but in the end, you just got
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of duplicate photos. Like assuming it’s not really, really wrong, you’ve got a library with a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John duplicate photos and there’s no sort of simple way to resolve that. Now, if you just want to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you know, let go and let Apple, if they gave
⏹️ ▶️ John you a big button that said, closing my eyes, I’m assuming what you’re gonna do is right, resolve all my duplicates,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re done, it’ll be like, hey, no more duplicates. And then you just go, la la la, not
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, and not think about the ones that you might have deleted that you liked, right? Those are basically
⏹️ ▶️ John your choices. You either manually do a tremendous amount of work, kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna do a report you saw again, but like you F’d around and you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco found out you have 10,000 duplicate photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, where did they come from? How did they get there? This is the situation you’re in. You can either
⏹️ ▶️ John resolve them all very quickly with little oversight and just not worry about what it did, or you can resolve them manually with
⏹️ ▶️ John a tremendous amount of oversight. And yes, Apple Photos should do more to help you,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s no amount of program can help you that will absolve you of having
⏹️ ▶️ John to make these decisions if you care about these decisions, which it seems like you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Factor, 1Password, and Sentry. and thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on overtime, we’re gonna be talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether AI voice control is a threat to Apple’s platforms. So tune in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco atp.fm slash join if you’re a member, it’s gonna be fun, if that’s overtime this week. And of course, there’s many other perks of membership,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of other exclusive content, check it out. Thank you so much, everybody. Thanks for listening. you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to. ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Tech Podcasts,
Marco’s AC “update”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, do you have any updates on your AC? I’ve been dying to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the updates are, um, I spent a lot of money getting them to finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just install the stupid thermostats. They did not fix the problem. Surprise, surprise. They gave diagnostic codes. Surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you talk, did you talk about that on the show already? I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I did. You definitely talked about it privately. I don’t know if you spoke about it on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John want to give some background on the thermostats. I think you complained that they they told you that, I think your problem is these fancy thermostats
⏹️ ▶️ John you got, and you didn’t like that. But then what happened since then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had, at various times, three or four different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AC repair companies out here over the course of this spring and summer, trying to get them to just fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my stupid air conditioners already. And every single time somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out here, they would make a big sneak, oh, they’d point to my Ecobee thermostats. Oh, it’s the thermostats. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these smart thermostats. They die all the time. It’s always them. And I’m like, okay, I assure you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I would go through and I’d show them my phone, look, there is no energy saving setting on right now. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, cause, and you can see, you can understand why, like they probably get a lot of service calls from people who install a Nest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something and it goes into energy saving mode. And the people say, my air conditioning is broken and they call them out. So like, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they would be sensitive to that, but literally everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gave me so much crap about these thermostats. No, it must be those. And then like, they would call the manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech support like as they’re looking at stuff and the manufacturer tech support would be like it’s the thermostats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my god they worked for five years I guarantee you it’s not the thermostats but okay and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said you know what F it I’m so tired of these people you know being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this just put in the Mitsubishi thermostats like I don’t care like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine give me a Wi-Fi thermostat from some other brand I’ll bridge it to home whatever if I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine if that’ll make you guys shut up and just work on my air conditioning ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. So they did. So I got a repair person to finally put in the Mitsubishi thermostats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve been in for a couple of weeks. We still don’t have air conditioning. I’m sitting here in my office. It is, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the yielding sensor on the wall, I can tell you it’s 82 degrees in here. My forehead is wet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think I’ve got that beat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably. But yeah, it is very hot in here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we still don’t have air conditioning. Now it has been a pretty mild last couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks, like temperature wise here. It’s been, you know, we haven’t really needed it most days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s been fine, but it is August. There are still hot times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and August isn’t over yet. And September is also pretty hot. So also this is our heat in the winter for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this house. They’re heat pumps.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also you paid a lot of money for air conditioning and your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house is supposed to work. Yes, and it’s only five years old. And also, you know, we have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s… okay, so there’s also all this drama now that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the refrigerant that our system uses is R410A. There’s, you know, every heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pump system has a refrigerant in it, and over time they find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, like, refrigerants tend to be pretty bad for the environment if they’re vented into the atmosphere, and over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time we develop new ones that are less terrible for the environment. And And then what happens eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is usually states or the federal government will start restricting the old refrigerants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from being used. And so you, if you have a system that uses the old refrigerant, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes after a while can’t get it anymore or can’t get parts or can’t get it serviced anymore. It can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it recharged if there’s any slow leaks over time, you know, so that has now happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in New York for the refrigerant I use for tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ John In your five year old system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. old system, you can no longer buy new ones, I think, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of around now or this year, and they’re going to phase out their refrigerant over the next X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, and it’s going to be harder and harder to get and harder and harder to get parts and replacements.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s true of refrigerators
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know it’s right
⏹️ ▶️ John in the name, but just FYI, it’s definitely true of refrigerators.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So the repair guy, he’s like, you know, if you want, you can get some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra, there’s two big outside condensers, he’s like, you can get, or compressors, whatever, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two replacement ones and just like store them somewhere right now. Like they’re about to go out of stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. Put them with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. They’re huge. And I’m like, okay, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell me a price. We’ll talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re telling you to buy the entire unit, the whole big thing with the fan. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John extra ones to replace. What the hell of a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to store in the salt air? Maybe you’ve got a hermetically sealed box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And well, Well, he recommended that I keep them on Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do not keep them by the seashore, because when you need them, you open it up and it’ll just be a chunk of rust.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I’m like, okay, what are we talking here, numbers-wise? And what we are talking about, if I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep a spare set of condensers, $27,000. Oh, that’s not surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you do if these things ever go
⏹️ ▶️ John and you need to replace them is you buy the newer, more efficient ones that are available on the market now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And well, so the problem is when you when you change the refrigerant on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco units, chances are you probably also have to change the inside air handlers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re really unlucky, you might even have to run new refrigerant pipelines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the outside thing to the inside things. And so I asked him, I’m like, OK, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that scenario, what does that look like? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even want to tell you the number, he said it was substantially higher. So I’m like, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ John did he get an explanation of why you would need new like lines and inside
⏹️ ▶️ John units for refrigerant change?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, well, you know, every cyst, every like, you know, pair of compressor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and air handler, they have their own specs. Like, okay, well, you need, you know, this diameter of pipe and you need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s like there’s all, they’re all designed for each other. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John designed to match each other. I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe that it’s, I’m just, it surprises me that the refrigerant changes would be so such a radical
⏹️ ▶️ John change that you can’t use the existing lines and inside units because like the diameter is wrong or they can’t handle the
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure or something. But you know, presumably they know, but then again, they also said it was your thermostats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. Yeah. So now I’m like, I’m out literally thousands of dollars in thermostats and thermostat labor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now I’m being asked to spend another 27 grand. Maybe I still don’t have working air conditioning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not happy about the situation at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you enjoy at least a moment of smugness when they put in the new thermostats and it didn’t help? Yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will enjoy that smugness once the system works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now I’ve just spent thousands of dollars for uglier thermostats that don’t work in HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well no, because once it works they’re gonna say, see it was a thermostats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have loved if it was a thermostats, because that’s a lot simpler and cheaper than everything else we now have to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at. But I’m just, you know, the next step is they’re gonna like, you know, flush out the whole system and put an all-new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refrigerant of my apparently about to be illegal refrigerant. Like, and I honestly, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will fix it. It’s probably, like, based on all the research
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’ve done. What they
⏹️ ▶️ John should do, I mean, I’m assuming they will do this, but if they don’t, talk to them about it beforehand, is they should be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John measure the amount of refrigerant that was in the system when they quote unquote drain it, because as you’ve noted, they shouldn’t be just venting
⏹️ ▶️ John it to the atmosphere.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when they do it on your car, they refresh your air conditioner, your refrigerator, whatever. When they collect
⏹️ ▶️ John it, they know there should be X number of liters in the system or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we got X minus 50% out. So we know there’s probably a leak somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They should be able to tell when they extract the old refrigerant, hey, has this been leaking?
⏹️ ▶️ John Has this been leaking out of somewhere? And hopefully they would find where it was leaking before they refilled it with fresh
⏹️ ▶️ John refrigerant because they’re just gonna keep leaking out or whatever. But I feel like if they don’t do that, at least mentioned it before, and hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna measure it when you take it out and you know that, like maybe they don’t know the intended volume of the system because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John written somewhere and they don’t know how long the lines are or something, but this would be a good thing to know if there is a refrigerant leak because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what you need to fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, yeah. And so that’s like, like, that’s the next step. It’s just like, okay, like, please look at the refrigerant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is based on the symptoms and my chat GPT research. And like, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sure seems like the refrigerant, like it’s like, so now, now that we have thermostats, now we can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the error codes. And what’s great about error codes is that you can look them up on the internet. And so I’ve of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course been seeing, okay, well, the, the, the upstairs reports one code, the downstairs reports a different code. Okay. So I searched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of those and the only, and upstairs and downstairs seem to be demonstrating very similar symptoms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they have two different error codes. And they’re two totally separate systems. And when you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the chat GPT summary of what these error codes might mean or what might be causing them. Can
⏹️ ▶️ John you just look up the error codes in the manual for your device,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco please? No, you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the code is like, suction sensor one or whatever. It’s not a useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, but the explanation’s like, why might that be happening?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the explanation, the only overlap between those two Venn diagrams of the explanation of those two codes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is refrigerant issues. And so it’s like, yeah, that’s probably right. I probably had, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the the earlier repair person over the spring worked on it. I think they screwed it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They put in the wrong amount or whatever and it’s been bad since all of the symptoms point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that. So let’s fix that and maybe by December,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I’ll have working air conditioning. It’s been.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been a really awful week for lots of other reasons. That has not been one of them. But certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once it continues to get hotter, I’m going to get more grumpy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, hasn’t been a good past few months for me appliance wise too, but on a much smaller scale
⏹️ ▶️ John I lost an air conditioner at the beginning of the summer and replaced it at significantly less money than you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about because I have window units, lost my oven, had to replace it, lost my toaster, had to replace it. I didn’t actually replace
⏹️ ▶️ John the oven, I fixed the oven. We’ll talk about it in rec tips. Anyway, yeah, sometimes these things just go. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think I’ve got another five years on my water heater and my heating system
⏹️ ▶️ John in my house should have already broken, so we’re just out here with our fingers crossed. And Casey’s house is filled with water, so
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Can I interest you in $27,000 worth of condensers that you won’t be able to refill in a few
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, they’re very compact, don’t take up a lot of room, are very lightweight, easy to deal with, easy to store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, I’ve been going back and forth the question, if we do this, like, you know, they’re like, they’re 300 pounds each, and they’re huge.
⏹️ ▶️ John would you get them across the ferry?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, how would I, where would I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store them? Like, they don’t, they’re not going to fit in my garage on the other side. Like, where, I’d have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get a storage unit just for them and then like hire some trucker to like go pick them up. You’d
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be like temperature control and stuff, because like, you can’t have like delicate equipment like that in like just random
⏹️ ▶️ John temperatures and humidities. I mean, it’ll rust even if it’s not by the seashore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. I we we had a family discussion about what we should do that about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we all decided we’re not gonna buy the spares but But it’s a very frustrating situation.