610: More Values in the Darkness
24 Oct 2024Who will be the last person in the world using Quicksilver? We’ll give you one guess.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: We’re still grumpy about the most recent member’s special
- Follow-up:
- New iPad Mini
- Submerged and Vision Pro demos (via Kevin Markham)
- Some follow-up from the most recent member’s special
- Photo editing
- Exposing to the right
- DPReview
- More via Sam Doran
- Color spaces
- …are only applicable on JPEGs (via Léo Natan)
- Daniel Laan’s take
- What do we do with our computer’s color tweaks while editing (via Josh Harris)
- John’s thoughts on cropping
- Exposing to the right
- Parallelizing file compression/decompression
unxip(via Mihai Parparita)- More from
unxipauthor Saagar Jha - Apple Archive (see also
aa)
- “No hats, no walkmen” (via Dan Pierce)
- iPhone SE 4 rumors
- Aside: iPhone product mix from ATP #609 Overtime
- Case leak
- October Macs? 🧐
- Ask ATP:
- How do we protect sensitive information like driver’s licenses? (via Jochen Marschall)
- How do we assist parents with account management and legacy planning? (via Kaleb)
- How do we clean our keyboards‽ (via Randall Miller)
- Post-show: John’s Quicksilver update
- Members-only ATP Overtime: What even is a photo, anyway?
Sponsored by:
- Clic for Sonos: Elevate your Sonos experience.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Forbidden Follow-Up
- iPad Mini jelly-scrolling
- Vision Pro demo updates
- More Forbidden Follow-Up
- RAW exposure, color spaces
- Large-unzip follow-up
- Phones-in-school follow-up
- Sponsor: Clic for Sonos
- iPhone SE 4 rumors
- Rumored Macs imminent
- #askatp: Everyone wants personal info
- #askatp: Managing elderly tech
- #askatp: Any key turns on MBPs
- Ending theme
- John’s Quicksilver update
Forbidden Follow-Up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have a follow-up item that we have just been told that we aren’t allowed to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re starting we’re starting tonight with violence I say
⏹️ ▶️ John Characterization I would say it was suggested that we not spoil one of our member specials
⏹️ ▶️ John As an enticement for people to become members because then they will already know what happens But now they have to become members to find out
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and that was
⏹️ ▶️ John my suggestion Not an edict not a command, but a suggestion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s just say listeners that in the latest member special about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tier list for storage media, one of the hosts of the show was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down on a medium for being apparently unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Could you characterize that down? Exactly how down was this host? The host was me. How down?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like F tier? Is that what you’re talking about? What tier would you say?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve had people write in who have basically written in to say things like, I’ve read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thousand of them recently and they’ve all been fine. Anyway, so all this is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, we don’t want to spoil what this is, but rest assured, listeners, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are getting your feedback. And two of the three of us really appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Two-thirds of your hosts are very excited.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll say, that’s interesting, because what I was going to say is I also see all the feedback, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback is pretty much evenly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey split. No, no. Pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. Admittedly, all three of us have biases and priors here, but hand to God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eyes, it has been at best one-third in favor of the host
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who shall remain nameless, that is still very wrong, and two-thirds in favor of the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two-thirds of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t actually count them because I didn’t think I’d get any resistance to this because it was so clear from the feedback that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John getting that it’s pretty evenly split. Oh, please! Go read them again! Well, maybe we should count them up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s one of the problems with getting feedback on mastodon is that we all see the stuff that mentions ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John FM, but I only see the stuff that just that mentions me and you only see the stuff that just that mentions you. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re actually not looking at the same pool. So that does complicate things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. I will concede that and it would not surprise me if you’re flying monkeys were quick to report.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, actually, you’re flying monkeys would call Marco and I
⏹️ ▶️ John they would they would not shy away. Sometimes they do. I pasted one of them into slack for you to see because
⏹️ ▶️ John I because that’s why I didn’t understand the point of you saying, People wrote in in support of my position. I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, they wrote in support of my position, too. What’s your point? It’s like evenly split. No, see that really not it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t matter what people vote It only matters what the reality is and I contend that my reality is closer to the real one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow Your reality your reality is exactly that and just hear me out for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your reality is your reality and in Thing that you were saying was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that your and I think it was Merlin that hates this phrase But but I don’t I can’t think of a better one your lived experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not here to debate in your lived experience
⏹️ ▶️ John and my lived experience is shared by many others Who’ve written in there are dozens of you to echo
⏹️ ▶️ John there exactly they’ve written in and they say hey Yeah, the things that john was saying I also experienced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there were also many many many people who said you’re out of your darn mind
⏹️ ▶️ John I again, I think it was roughly evenly split but either way the main point is enough
⏹️ ▶️ John Surely you will concede that enough people wrote in and supported my position that you could determine that it’s not just a me thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yes, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not just a you thing. I don’t debate that your experience with this particular medium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was probably crummy. Now we may or may not get to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John later. How crummy was
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Like, like D tier?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How crummy? Don’t don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You’re killing me
⏹️ ▶️ John with this. You’re like, oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John hates and whatever. And it’s like, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners, rest assured you should listen to this member special.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should. I think it’s one of the best things we’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ John done. You’ve never heard people be more angry to receive an A grade on a paper.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you know, I was trying not to spoil it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We don’t even know what we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about. We could be talking about sandwiches here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re talking about the printing press, John. The printing press.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a printing press, in a manner of speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe slightly hyperbolic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So suffice to say, if this is amusing to you, listeners if this is amusing to you. ATP.com
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have strong feelings against storage media for computers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re listening to the right podcast. Boy, do we
⏹️ ▶️ John have Do we have the member special for you?
iPad Mini jelly-scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We could, not kidding, we could spend the next two and a half hours continuing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to relitigate this travesty that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John and I… We already did that show.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the whole show
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. It was two and a half hours long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We could do another one! And I know that John, you would be here for it, and I know that Marco would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be too. So anyway, but I’m gonna try to move us forward. Let’s talk about the iPad mini and quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jelly scrolling. And let me start by asking, do either of you have the iPad mini 6? The one that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before or the iPad mini A17 or whatever the heck the current one is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John A17 Pro, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I haven’t had an iPad mini in years, so I never experienced this. The only
⏹️ ▶️ John one who has a chance is Marco in his drawers. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had it. I have since traded it in for other credit to upgrade, but anyway, that’s the one that I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using for a little while as an e-reader. I know about the jelly scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effect that people said they had. I never went looking for it, but I never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticed it. Because I didn’t want to hate this thing I had bought, and I knew about this potential problem ahead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time. So I didn’t like, you know, squiggle it up and down in portrait mode, like to try to get the effect to show up. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just used it. And in my just usage of it, I did not notice the problem that people say. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t to say it wasn’t there. A lot of people did see it, but it was not noticeable enough for me to see it in my usage.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d saw it in an Apple store when this story first came out. I don’t think this was the first mini to have this issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see it if I look for it. I’m not entirely sure it would bother me, but I can definitely see
⏹️ ▶️ John it without slow-mo video, just like going to an Apple store, find one of these old ones and scroll it, and you’re like, okay, I see what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a message from inside one of your houses that somebody is a little grumpy that Marco and I were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey politicking during the member special. So if that is also appealing to you, please feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free to go to ATP. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John feel like that’s a separate issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Somewhat connected, but separate. Yes, I think that by virtue of STIR requiring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a unanimous decision, I think that implies that politicking is part of the game.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, everyone’s got to do what’s in their heart.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I would also argue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, first of all, that somebody in John’s house might be upset about, you know, tactics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being wielded against John, they might be a little bit biased. But also, I think Casey and I just discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our power for the first time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s, you’re only hurting yourselves. That’s what I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Everyone’s got to
⏹️ ▶️ John make their own choices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the record, well, I don’t want to go any further. I told, I see I’m letting myself get wrote back in. I said we were going to move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on. We can never, we can never watch
⏹️ ▶️ John a, you know, messages from my wife while you’re recording the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast. I didn’t say who it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It could have been. And by the way, there was no way to
⏹️ ▶️ John make my wife is as biased in favor of supporting me. I’m not even sure Casey’s conversations. My
⏹️ ▶️ John wife would support that theory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s actually, I can confirm that. I think of all the biases Tina may have in favor of John might be the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s true. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ John side. Although my friend did message me today and he wanted me to tell you that John’s friend
⏹️ ▶️ John from Bulgaria says it should be in B tier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John an alliteration. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it did seem like a lot of people pointed to quality of what you bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a large factor. And look, I’m just saying, I bought the good
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s kind of in support of my argument. When there’s lots of different variables And not
⏹️ ▶️ John all those combinations result in success. It’s like, well, how many of the combinations result in good things,
⏹️ ▶️ John and how many of the combinations result in bad things? And if too many of the combinations result in bad things, that produces people who have poor
⏹️ ▶️ John experiences, perhaps distributed throughout the mass of people who did it. And I just think there were too
⏹️ ▶️ John many combinations that resulted in bad things. And that’s what I’m digging it for, digging it all the way down, all the way down
⏹️ ▶️ John to the terrible tear that it ended up in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I’m letting myself. I’m doing it to myself. I can’t even, I have nobody to blame but the mirror. Anyway, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of the iPad mini 7, AKA the iPad mini A17 Pro, say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that jelly scrolling is fixed. However, was it David Pierce, I believe, at The Verge, said, quote, the jelly scrolling effect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the last model is still very much present. This is with, so what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jelly scrolling? It’s referring to screen tearing. I’m sorry, I’m reading from Mac rumors now. Refers to screen tearing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which can cause text or images on one side of the screen to appear to be tilted downwards because of a mismatch in refresh rates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It can cause one side of the display to look as if it is responding faster than the other side, resulting in a visual disturbance, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that turn of phrase, that is hard to ignore once noticed. It’s like a FedEx logo. The effect is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noticeable on the iPad Mini 6 when the device is used in portrait orientation, leading to complaints from customers over the past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three years. Shortly after the iPad Mini 6 was launched, an Apple spokesperson told Ars Technica that quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jelly scrolling was normal behavior for iPads with LCD displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Given that LCDs refresh as well, line by line, there’s a tiny delay between when the line’s at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top in the lines at the bottom are refreshed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so yeah, so the story is here that pretty much everybody who reviewed the new iPad mini parentheses
⏹️ ▶️ John A17 Pro said, hey, jelly scrolling is fixed, but the Verge says totally not fixed. I haven’t seen one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John in person, so I can’t say one way or the other, but it’s interesting to see any kind of split in this because again, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John noticeable, and I think it is, if you’re looking for it, it’s weird that most of the reviewers would say that it’s fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, we’ll see if we ever, if you ever end up in an Apple store, go find the new iPad mini
⏹️ ▶️ John and see if that jelly scrolling is still there. Although again, honestly, it’s like, even though I can see it if I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for it, for something like an iPad mini, I don’t think I would
⏹️ ▶️ John worry too much about it. Like, it’s not, you know, it’s a small screen. Maybe you’re not gonna be watching
⏹️ ▶️ John big high fidelity movies on it and be worried about that when you’re scrolling your timeline. I don’t know. Like, everyone has
⏹️ ▶️ John their own tolerance, but be aware that it did exist and that according to The Verge anyway, it may still exist.
Vision Pro demo updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last episode, I was wondering, hey, is this 15, 17, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute short film, Submerged, is that available to watch, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in part, during a Vision Pro demo? Kevin Markham writes in, I did a Vision Pro demo on October 14,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was apparently four days after Submerged was released. I was indeed able to watch Submerged during the demo. There was a much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shortened version, perhaps three minutes long, that showed the crew trying to save themselves from water rushing into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey submarine. Spoiler alert. There’s no indication that I was watching an excerpt from a larger, excuse me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey longer film. Rather, I thought it was just a random movie-like scene designed specifically to show off the capabilities of the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. We had a couple of people write in later to say something similar. I’ve also heard, or we’ve also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard a couple of reports that apparently the demonstrations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are far less on the rails than they were originally. If you recall, we were all talking about how,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I don’t remember, I don’t think Marco, you did a demo, but certainly John and I did, and they were very on the rails.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like you should do this, you should do that, You should do this. You should do that. Let me show you this. Let me show you that. And now, apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they still have a bit of a script, but they’re much more willing to let you experiment, as per a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people who’ve written
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And there’s more stuff. I mean, they’re adding this movie in. I’m sure there’s other, there’s just more content than they had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. Oh, yes. And speaking of, there is another sizzle reel, this time for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basketball for the NBA All-Star Weekend, which was, I presume, many months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is similar to the Super Bowl thing, which as a football fan, despite the fact that it’s a terrible sport in a zillion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways, uh, as a football fan, I loved the Superbowl, a sizzle reel, even though I didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any particular love for either of the teams. Uh, I am a former basketball fan. I just haven’t really paid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention in a long, long time. And this sizzle reel for the all-star weekend, really freaking good. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good. And this is, this is the, the, I don’t know, not dichotomy, but the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the issue with vision pro is that when it’s good, it’s so freaking good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it really, really is. But the problem is it’s five minutes at a time, 15 minutes at a time. If you happen to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch a movie, you know, and if you’re plugged into the wall, it’s also really good. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re doing the Mac virtual display thing, it is incredibly good, but I don’t know if it’s, you know, $3,500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. We don’t need to re-litigate that now. I’m just saying there is so much to love about this device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it bums me out that it’s not catching on. I get it. I totally get it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it does bum me out. In fact, there was a report, I’ll probably forget to put in the show notes, but there was a report I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier today, I think I saw it on Mac Rumors, and then it was echoed elsewhere, that allegedly Apple has built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough Vision Pros, something to the order of like 500,000 of them or something like that. I’m doing this off the dome, so forgive me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I get this wrong, but apparently they’ve built enough Vision Pros that they don’t think they’re gonna need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to build anymore after this year, and they’ll be able to ride that straight through most or all of next year
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the story was that they were gonna stop building them now for the remainder of the year, like they’ve got enough now to last
⏹️ ▶️ John them for the rest of 2024. I think that was the story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, I found it. I’m not going to read it right now, but I will put it in the show notes. I thought it was something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. And I didn’t think they were going to build any in 2025 either. But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if John is right or I am right, it doesn’t really matter. You get the gist. It’s that they’ve apparently built a lot more than they need,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is really too bad because it is such a cool and incredibly impressive device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Asterisk, dagger, double dagger, et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see the, I remember one of the stats from that story was that how many they were building per day. and they said they
⏹️ ▶️ John were currently building 1,000 per day. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey used to be building 2,000 per day,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they lowered it to 1,000 per day and they’re gonna stop. That just gives you an idea of the numbers here that if you’re building 1,000 a day,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you really are outrunning demand at this point. So yeah, maybe stop. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Casey, I’m down on the Vision Pro a lot on the show, but I do want it to succeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I think it’s a cool idea. I think it was executed with some choices that I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have made very differently. And I think, I hope Apple has seen what, you know, that the direction they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went with this was probably wrong in a few pretty big ways. But they built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of useful tech and I think it can be kind of, you know, pivoted into something cooler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we have two big challenges with what they have right now. Number one is like, how do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of pivot your hardware into something that is closer to what people want?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And number two, in the meantime, when you have, you know, this thing that you’re trying to sell now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people who have purchased it, how can you get enough content out there that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody who buys it can’t go through it all the very first night they have it? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John with video games too sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but usually, yeah, that’s the problem like when a new game system comes out and there’s like one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two games at launch, that’s a problem, but then like two weeks later, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch more. What they need in the Vision Pro is like, look, it’s great that we keep getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and more samples and trials and previews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and teasers. That’s great, but then what? Then we need, what backs it up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We need enough there that even if the whole rest of the industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all your press people are all saying, yeah, this thing’s, I don’t really have a use for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you, lone listener, say, I want to buy this, I think it’s cool no matter what anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else says, you should be able to buy it and take it home and have more than like a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days of stuff to do on it, of content, of apps, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should be able to have decent value, even if you buy it, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have decent value from it, more than just a few days worth. And some people do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, you know, just like with the apps that already exist, but I think that’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small group. And so it’s, again, it’s all about content. Just get content on there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you have to do, Apple, like there’s probably gonna be a decent amount of deal making happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make that happen. Whatever you have to do, get content onto the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John One other tidbit from that Mac Rumors article about the sales thing is that at the end, they talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John the upcoming low cost, not replacement or whatever, the low cost headset that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple supposedly has in the works. And supposedly Apple has told suppliers to prepare to build 4
⏹️ ▶️ John million of the low cost headsets. Oh, that’s over the entire lifespan of the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let’s, you know, if this thing is like half price or $1,500 or whatever, that seems ambitious,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, 4 million over the lifetime, is that lifetime four years? Is that a million a year? Is that 4 million over one year?
⏹️ ▶️ John Either way, these rumors seem to indicate that Apple thinks their next shot at this
⏹️ ▶️ John will do better than their first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just as a final note on this, I know we just talked about it, but I would like to echo again what we’ve said over and over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think on the show. If you have the ability, Like if there’s an Apple store near you, or if you have a friend that has a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro, it’s worth trying. It really, really is. Go to the Apple store and do the 30 minute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demo or whatever. It’s worth trying. And that costs you literally nothing. When I did it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey admittedly, I think they knew I was literally purchasing one at the time so they weren’t about to upsell me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my understanding is they’re not very aggressive at all about trying to close a deal or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that. They didn’t mention anything about buying one. They didn’t tell me anything about it. They didn’t tell me the price. They didn’t tell me I could
⏹️ ▶️ John buy one. they were just completely uninterested in selling me this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, so truly, it is worth 30 minutes or whatever of your time. If you live even remotely close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to an Apple store, or if you have a friend or acquaintance that has one, you really should try it because I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stress enough, I know I said it a minute ago, when this thing is on, like this immersive video and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the apps that are on it, it is just unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It’s so cool and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should really try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s an amazing demo. If you haven’t ever tried it before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will walk away from that saying, oh my God, that’s amazing. Just know that what you see in the demo is most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing. You’ll probably go to the demo and say, why is Marco especially, but also the other two, why are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they so down on the Vision Pro? And it’s because of what Marco said, because the amazing bits, generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, are the content, the amazing content. You can blow through that, like Marco said, in a day at most, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a bit less than that. Now, there are other good things. Like I keep talking about Mac virtual display, because if you’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the situation where that’s useful for you, you travel, you’re traveling or you have traveled,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you’re in a hotel or you’re on a train or a plane, it is unreal. But that’s not a problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally find myself needing to fix on a regular basis.
⏹️ ▶️ John And some people are just like to use a single window app while sitting on a mountain lake or whatever. Like there are
⏹️ ▶️ John people who like it and there are things that it does besides just, I mean, we always, we kind of talk about it not exclusively
⏹️ ▶️ John as a content consumption platform, but very heavily as that, because it’s one of the things that it does better than anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else. But it also runs the apps that are available for it. And yeah, you can run apps elsewhere too, but you can’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ John run them in the same way surrounded by a picturesque forest or whatever. And some people
⏹️ ▶️ John like that and find it a very new and interesting and useful way
⏹️ ▶️ John to work. So there is that, but boy, it’s a pretty expensive way to get one window floating in the air in front of you over a lake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and another, I think this has been talked about on Upgrade a lot. I know I keep trying to move on, and I keep stopping myself. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is apparently the Casey has no self-control episode. But I think, Upgrade has talked about this a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I have a standing every couple of weeks FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a handful of our mutual friends, all of whom have vision pros. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing that spatially where, you know, Mike, for example, is to my left and Jason is to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, and maybe James Thompson is straight across from me, at the end of that half an hour, hour, 45 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever it may be, I feel much more like I was hanging out with people than I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was on a FaceTime with people. When in reality, I was just on a FaceTime with people. And I was looking out there, what do they call the avatar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things? I’m drawing a blank now. The fake- Personas? Personas, yeah, yeah, yeah, the personas. I’m looking at personas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they’ve gotten good enough now that at the end of that, there’s something about that experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes me feel like we were hanging out in person. And I know that sounds bananas, and I would judge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me if I were you, but it really does feel different than just a FaceTime. So again, there are very cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible uses for this thing if you happen to have a bunch of friends with too much money and not enough sense. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t mean to be down on the Vision Pro entirely, but I can’t echo what Marco said enough. More content,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please and thank you.
More Forbidden Follow-Up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to the member special, I’m going to try to obliquely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring in some feedback from ReplyGuyXXL who wrote that for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the storage media we spoke about, if we were using an Apple branded device to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write to that storage medium, those devices typically were very, very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very bad and there are better ones that existed. So if perhaps, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you lived an all Apple life in in the, I don’t know, maybe mid 90s and probably had an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple device to write to this particular media, maybe your experience was suboptimal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, you don’t say. Maybe. I did not have an Apple Drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially if you’re using really crappy products for this. Like really. I was not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Am I the type of person that sounds to you like I would buy the crappiest piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of technology I can find with no research behind it? Which may, by the way, also be the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John that I ended up with the best reviewed version of this storage media piece of hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than just buying something random or getting the Apple one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, fair enough, fair enough, fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John did, seeing this view, it did make me wonder, do I still have that in my attic or did I finally get rid of it? I kept it for a really
⏹️ ▶️ John long time because it was so expensive because it was like the fancy one, you know, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John best reviewed, you know, especially at the beginning of, like this was before like the 52X or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever. Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to do. But yeah, I don’t even know if I still have that. And if I still had it, it’s probably because it was so expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John that I just wanted to keep it because it’s like I spent all my I don’t remember what it was. That was my allowance. I was older than that. But still, I
⏹️ ▶️ John spent a lot of money on it. So it has sentimental value. So I bet it’s still up there somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, Ian McCullough also wrote that. Well, Ian writes, I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash was a collector of recordings of jam band shows. And I am not here Marco to litigate what a jam band is, just to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be clear. But Ian writes, I spent more time and money on the silly, obsolete hobby than I’d like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to concede. And one of the storage mediums you spoke about was, all caps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey revolutionary to this particular hobby. But I’m here to confirm for you with over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1,000 data points, what particular brand of media you buy makes all the difference in the world. On the advice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Deadheads, which I think Marco and I can both agree is a jam band, this particular person used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kodak, or Ian used Kodak branded media. Codak Golds, baby! And there were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two grades. There was silver and gold. And because collecting Grateful Dead shows is obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is quoting Ian still, very serious business, I only used the high-grade slash gold ones. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well over a thousand of these pieces of media. And looking at my trading logs, I had stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collecting these shows in the winter of 1999. I recently went to divest myself of all my physical media.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And before I did, I re-extracted all of that to SSDs, 25
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years later after it had been put on this media, how many of those particular pieces of media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were unreadable? Exactly one out of over a thousand. And even that one was mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey readable. There was just one song I couldn’t pull off of it. And even within that song, it was essentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one second. So yeah, I’d say this is, I will concede it’s anic data,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but wow, is a significantly strong anic data. That depends, Mark, on me. That’s all.
⏹️ ▶️ John For every one of those, there’s someone like Paul Tower who says, quote, I lost a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ton of data in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco 90s before I knew how prone to failure they were.
⏹️ ▶️ John As a result, I have almost no pictures from college. Irreplaceable pictures. And he says, I can’t remember the last time one of these pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, my God, you the two of you must have been buying the worst pieces of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John media in this type. Like, I really mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could continue reading from other feedback that I’ve gathered, but, you know, like, look, like I said, there’s this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a situation where there are clearly a lot of variables, including, by the way, one of the variables that you might not think about, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, oh, so you, you know, you want to read this later, but you haven’t been actively using
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Where have you stored it? How has it been stored? What is the humidity like? Has it been in
⏹️ ▶️ John the sun? What is the temperature like? So many variables. And my contention is that there are
⏹️ ▶️ John so many different combination of variables that result in failure that it’s enough to keep this out of where you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would I would challenge you any storage medium, put it in the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment for the same amount of time and try to read it. and I bet you’ll have a similar failure rate.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, that’s part of these people giving their experiences and sort of feeling down on this is
⏹️ ▶️ John that, yes, of course, all storage media has some failure rate. But the combination of what these things
⏹️ ▶️ John were used for and how prone they might be to failure resulted in
⏹️ ▶️ John people losing data and remembering it and telling stories about it. It isn’t just an academic concern or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, all storage media fails, but it’s not a big deal because by then I had moved on. These people lost data to it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why they were kind of like when we talked about floppy disks, losing data on floppy disks, right? People
⏹️ ▶️ John remember it. It’s not like floppy disks were just incredibly unreliable. They were the main storage media in the computer for ages. But when
⏹️ ▶️ John you lose something, it sticks with you. And that happened with this storage media. To enough people that they
⏹️ ▶️ John remember it. And so, yeah, it gets the terrible grade, the terrible unfair grade that it got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was terrible and it wasn’t.
RAW exposure, color spaces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, let’s talk about photo editing. What is exposing to the right exactly? Marco, would you like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey refine any statements or do you want me to handle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so it turns out I used that term wrong. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you were close, you were close. It was just some of the particulars were slightly off. That’s why we’ll put a link in the show notes to two things,
⏹️ ▶️ John one, the Wikipedia page on it, and two, a DP review video if you want to see in detail what he was talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. Yeah, so basically what I was talking about was when shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos in a RAW format off your camera sensor you can there’s usually a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of shadow detail in the dark areas that if you shoot raw later in post-processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can usually bring up the exposure of the shadow areas to get a lot of that back and so but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can’t do is if part of the sensor was blown out with a hundred percent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white from like you know a bright light or the Sun or like a reflection like you know being in the frame or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near the frame you can’t recover any detail from a a totally white you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, blown out area. That’s just like, you know, the sensor having, you know, all the little buckets of photons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were all just full in that area. Like you can’t recover any more detail because it was just full. And so my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategy has always been, expose the picture during capture, if I’m shooting wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expose the picture to be able to capture the bright areas in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correct detail and exposure. Like the brightest, so if there’s like, you know, a sun or reflective water or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expose so that that’s correctly exposed, even if it makes the rest of the picture too dark, because then in post-processing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can bring up the dark areas, but I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John recover that highlight area.
⏹️ ▶️ John think you did the exact same slightly wrong description as you did in the last episode. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what you just did. That’s what I do, but I said, I think photographers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call this exposed to the right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns out, exposed to the right means almost the opposite of that. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John quite, but yeah. But like what you, yeah. So we should read this feedback from Sam Doran, who I think
⏹️ ▶️ John summed it up pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. The term exposing to the right comes from moving the histogram to the right, as in over-exposing
⏹️ ▶️ John for a second and say what the histogram is. Most fancy cameras have a thing where they’ll show you a histogram. Histogram is just a graph that
⏹️ ▶️ John shows like how many values at level one, how many values at level two, how many values at level three, and it makes like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John mountain-y, mountainous little graph. That’s your histogram, right? And what they’re showing in the histogram on cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John is different brightness levels, with the left side of the histogram being black and the right side being white and all the values
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in between in terms of brightness, if you’re looking at like a luminance histogram, right? And what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to say, moving the histogram to the right, it’s saying the shape of the little mountain range made by the histogram, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make the big peak, the big lumpy mountain, be more to the right of the image. The
⏹️ ▶️ John right is bright, the left is dark, right? So it’s always going to be some kind of like lumpy type of thing or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s one big lump or mound of where most of the the luminance data is in
⏹️ ▶️ John the image, exposed to the right is saying move that lump to the right. Don’t leave a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John space to the right on the histogram of like level 10, 11, 12, these are made up values. 13, 14, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, those just have very low values on them. The hump is in the middle. You don’t want the hump in the middle. You want to shift the hump of the right
⏹️ ▶️ John because, continue Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When shooting raw, exposing one third or two thirds brighter is the best way to maximize the data captured
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the sensor for later processing. You can recover quite a bit of seemingly lost highlight detail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a raw image. Only when shooting JPEG do you want to expose for the highlights as Marco described to avoid completely
⏹️ ▶️ John And Sam had some more information on this that I wasn’t able to pin down to the point where I can, wanted to like
⏹️ ▶️ John put it in the show word for word. But like the idea is that when you’re exposing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the right, the more brightness you can get, the more data there is available to you. Like you don’t wanna waste part
⏹️ ▶️ John of, the way I would describe it is your camera, whatever your settings are, captures
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain range of luminance value. So certain range of light, right? If you put the big lump in the middle when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John shooting raw, you’re kind of wasting the stuff to the right because you’re not capturing any data there. With RAW,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can shove that lump over, not off the edge, because off the edge of what Mark was talking about, oh, now you’ve blown out your highlights, now
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are pure white, but shove the lump over to the right to allow you to use the rest of the range to get more
⏹️ ▶️ John values in the darkness. And that’s the exposing to the right. The right is that lump in the histogram.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we want to discuss color spaces? All right, when shooting RAW, this is the same continuing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When shooting RAW, the color space is determined when exporting from the RAW processor. Adobe RGB is a good choice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when exporting edited raw images to other formats when while the in-camera color space only matters for JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey images, it should be set to Adobe RGB for when you do use JPEG straight from the camera. It’s a much bigger color space and the images
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look better as a result.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Although I feel like-
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I was asking Marco last time what color spaces he’s using, not realizing that it doesn’t matter when you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about raw because color space only comes into effect when you take that raw sensor data and you say, okay, now I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John stick this into something like a JPEG or an image or whatever. We choose the color space because the raw
⏹️ ▶️ John is really just the values from the sensor. And more or less it’s raw form after whatever it’s called, debayering
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever that thing is where they process the sensors into a bunch of RGB values.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although I feel like, and I can’t substantiate this right now, but I feel like a lot of people said that Adobe RGB was not the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John choice. Read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, there, okay. Maybe that’s where I got it from. Leo Natan writes with regard to camera color space settings,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey color space selection in cameras is applicable only for JPEGs. So far we agree. RAW files do not contain any color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space. They are just 12 or 14 bit or more readouts from the sensor. RAW processors take these bits and convert them to a color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space. When saving to JPEG, never use Adobe RGB, there we go, as it is a massive gamut, completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unsuitable for 8-bit JPEGs. You will see a lot of color banding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In my Nikon DSLR days, I got bit by Adobe RGB, making a lot of shots unusable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the most noticeable, or excuse me, it is most noticeable on smooth gradients, such as skies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also architecture. even P3 hits the upper bounds of eight bits. With today’s tech, there really is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no point shooting in limited JPEG. Modern Sonys can even shoot 10-bit HEAK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but RAW is always preferred for portability.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I, you know, like I said, my cameras are set to Adobe RGB
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m shooting in JPEG and RAW to two separate cards, but I mostly just deal with the JPEGs. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea behind this, what Leo was talking about is like number of bits per sample. How many
⏹️ ▶️ John how many bits do you take per sample in this thing? Obviously if you have 8 bits you can only have values from 0 to 55 if you have 12
⏹️ ▶️ John or 14 bits You can get many more values, right? So if you’re taking a picture of something like a sky gradient or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John Within you know one inch strip of the thing or whatever or within some strip of the sky you might have
⏹️ ▶️ John In the thing off the sensor you might have five different colors blue slightly darker blue slightly darker blue like five
⏹️ ▶️ John different blues, right? That’s in a 12-bit space because you’ve got a room You’ve got a room for however many
⏹️ ▶️ John values 12 bits is like as you know Thousands and thousands of different colors you can fit in there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you write it to a JPEG They have to take all those thousands of different colors and compress them down to fit in 8 bits And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s only 256, you know levels for the R the G and the B, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John and In an 8-bit thing those five different blues might map down to a single blue
⏹️ ▶️ John So what was previously a strip that had five different colors like a smooth gradient? gradient, that same strip now has
⏹️ ▶️ John one color because you compress it down to 8-bit. And that is the danger of possibly seeing banding where,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, instead of a smooth gradient where every single line is just a slightly different color blue than the previous one, now
⏹️ ▶️ John you see blue number one for half an inch, blue number two for half an inch, and that’s banding where you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John these distinct bands of color. I have to say, I’ve been shooting Adobe RGB for years and years on all my Sony cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have never ever ever seen this, right? But it is technically a danger for the reason that I just described.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I’m I’m not shooting enough big gradient skies. Maybe, I don’t know, like maybe they are in
⏹️ ▶️ John 8-bit JPEGs on all these cameras. We’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Daniel Lunn about sRGB versus
⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe RGB versus photo RGB that says, here are all the different situations where you might wanna use sRGB.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s where you might wanna use Adobe RGB. Here’s when you might wanna use pro photo RGB, right? So I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John provides a reasonably balanced view of like the different scenarios where you want each one.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I’m personally using Adobe RGB is because when I was first playing with this setting, I took the
⏹️ ▶️ John same exact picture in Adobe RGB and sRGB, it was just a picture of like something in my house that was
⏹️ ▶️ John red, and I brought the pictures back to my computer and I blind A-B tested them to see if I
⏹️ ▶️ John could tell which one of these is Adobe RGB and which one is sRGB, and holy cow, you could tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, again, taking a picture of a red thing in the house, maybe that’s not representative, but the Adobe RGB
⏹️ ▶️ John one was much more red and closer to what I saw with my own eyes when looking at it. So I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, that’s it, I’m done with Adobe RGB. It makes sense Adobe RGB covers more of the color space
⏹️ ▶️ John than sRGB does But I wondered like is that something you can even see and my answer was yes
⏹️ ▶️ John I could tell the difference in a blind test of which was which and I liked the Adobe RGB one better So
⏹️ ▶️ John be aware that when saving Adobe RGB to JPEG and you have smooth gradients Maybe banding is an issue,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I personally haven’t seen it. I’m sticking with Adobe RGB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right And then Leo continues for HDR always shoot raw Lightroom takes all the bits of information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you enable the HDR toggle toggle applies an appropriate tone curve automatically. Suddenly everything that seemed overexposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shows details. For exporting, always use 16-bit JPEG XL or 10-bit AVIF.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Josh Harris writes, thanks for the great discussion on editing photos. What should I do with display settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like true tone, night shift, and brightness while editing? I always try to turn color shifting off and increase brightness, but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure what the best setting is for the most true to life result or whether the system adjusts for this already. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I guess turn it all off if you can, but what a pain.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so here’s the thing with what these features do. First of all, night shift is the thing that makes it look like someone peed on your screen
⏹️ ▶️ John at night. I would suggest turning that off. It makes everything warmer on your screen at nighttime
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to like reduce the amount of blue light you’re being faced with and make you feel nice and cozy, right? Lots of people like that feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you’re editing photos, I would strongly suggest to disable night shift because that is intentionally changing
⏹️ ▶️ John the color balance of your screen in a way that you will notice. Like that’s the whole point. It’s supposed to look warmer to
⏹️ ▶️ John you. So don’t do that if you want to get an idea of what your colors look like. True Tone is Apple’s feature
⏹️ ▶️ John where the hardware has a sensor on it that senses the ambient light in the room and how warm
⏹️ ▶️ John that is. And then based on what that sensor sees, it adjusts the image to try
⏹️ ▶️ John to essentially match the white balance of the room. So if you’re in a room with very warm lighting,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not going to leave the monitor the same because the monitor will look really, the whites will look very blue
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to the ambient light that is much warmer in the room. Instead, they will warm the monitor up to match
⏹️ ▶️ John the color temperature of the ambient light. I personally leave True Tone on, which is not the quote unquote pro
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to do. Pros should be working in a completely dark room with their monitor perfectly calibrated by hardware to be exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John at a D65 white point. Like, I’m not doing that. I leave True Tone on. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I leave True Tone on is because I know I’m in a room with a bunch of lights that do not have the quote unquote the
⏹️ ▶️ John right color temperature. And I want my display to adjust itself so that it matches the color
⏹️ ▶️ John temperature in the room. So the adjustments I make, quote unquote, look right to me in this
⏹️ ▶️ John room, in this lighting. So when I see them in a different room, in different lighting, they’ll still look right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that’s foolish, but I don’t really care because that’s just what I do with my pictures and they look good to me and I print them
⏹️ ▶️ John in books and they look good in the books and when I see them in the books, I don’t think to myself, wow, that looks way different than it did on my monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead I think, wow, that looks exactly like it did on my monitor. So I say night shift off, true tone on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would say the same thing. The reality is that when you are editing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you want is a neutral view. However, your eyes and your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brain perform some degree of auto white balance all the time in the world. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you want is something that appears to be very neutral to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time. Night shift, the monitor peeing one, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more severe effect, and it is customizable, but people typically use it if they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a stronger effect. Night shift is too much of an adjustment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it makes it difficult for you to know what you’re missing by not seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because it’s filtering out too much of the blue end of the spectrum.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So your eyes can’t auto white balance to it nearly as well. So you will make mistakes. Like you will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do things in that mode that when you later see them like the next day in regular lighting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might think, oh, that’s not what I meant to do or that isn’t how I meant for that to look. True tone, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the much more subtle white balance shifting thing of the monitor, is a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weaker effect and much smaller effect. And therefore, it tends to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it within the range of what your eye automatically does throughout the day and in different lighting conditions. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure if it’s weaker, because if you bathe it in super duper warm light, I think it would adjust it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what it’s trying to do is make it look white to you. In this room, this sheet of paper, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John actually very yellow because the light is yellow. And if you have very, very yellow lights, that sheet of paper is objectively
⏹️ ▶️ John yellow, but to your eyes, that sheet of paper still looks white because you know it’s white and your brain adjusts for it
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And what True Tone is trying to do is say, hey, when you hold that piece of paper in the ambient light of the
⏹️ ▶️ John room up to your monitor, I want the white of that paper to match the white on the screen. And to do that, it makes your screen yellowish
⏹️ ▶️ John to match the yellowish paper. The paper is yellowish because your yellowish light in the room is bouncing off the paper and going
⏹️ ▶️ John to your eyes. Your monitor is yellowish because the OS is making it produce yellow by mixing the red
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and the green
⏹️ ▶️ John subpixels, right? And so that’s the goal of True Tone. And it’s subtle if your lighting is subtly
⏹️ ▶️ John warm or subtly cool. I bet it’s not subtle if your lighting is not subtly warm or cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. John, do you want to talk about cropping, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is something that came up and we’ve talked about it in past episodes of photo editing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t mention it last time because in the Ask ATP question, we were all very much focused on like, what do
⏹️ ▶️ John you do when you’re editing photos in terms of like exposure and all the fancy controls and Lightroom
⏹️ ▶️ John and photos or whatever. But it’s worth reiterating because a lot of people brought it up and we talked about it in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cropping is the very first thing I do with every single photo that I edit. And it’s not an exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John form of editing because you’re like, oh, I’m just changing the rectangle that defines the edges of the picture, who cares? I mean, maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ John gets a little more exciting with the advent of AI background extensions and stuff. But either way, cropping
⏹️ ▶️ John is the first thing that I do. And every photo that I edit, I crop. Like I can’t remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John last time I added a photo and said, you know what, I don’t need to change at all. Part of taking pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John and learning from the editing experience is knowing, ooh, if I had left a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ John margin around the edges, I could frame this the way I wanted. It’s better to have a little bit of extra background,
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you’ve got enough pixels of resolution. It’s better to have a little bit more extra background than it is to be missing that background, because
⏹️ ▶️ John AI background extensions aside, it still is kind of difficult to expand the image where you want
⏹️ ▶️ John it. but you can always crop in a little bit. And what are you doing when you’re cropping? You’re trying to compose the picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re trying to compose it when you take it too, but it’s often more important to get the shot, get the moment when the person
⏹️ ▶️ John is smiling, get the bird flapping its wings or whatever, and then worry about the cropping later versus I’m not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John take the picture until it’s perfectly composed in my viewfinder because then you’ll miss the shot a lot of the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I always try to leave a little bit extra and the very first thing I do is crop and I’m cropping to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a nice composition or try to make the composition I was trying to get in the camera, but the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John was tilted or, you know, and this, I guess this is involved in cropping too, like straighten the horizon line and stuff, if you want to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I didn’t quite get it framed the way I wanted it, but I have enough of the background that I can crop it. So that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do no editing except for cropping, you will get better at taking pictures. Your pictures will look,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote, look better. You’re like, I didn’t do anything to it. All I did was change the edge. They will look better. You don’t realize how much
⏹️ ▶️ John of a good picture is choosing the crop, choosing the composition until
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve done that to a few of your pictures and suddenly the exact same picture, you haven’t done anything to it, all you’ve done is define the crop,
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly it looks a lot better. Once you sort of get on that train, it’s hard not to notice it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, cropping, it’s an important part of editing and you should definitely do it and I would suggest making it one of the first things
Large-unzip follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to parallelization for file compression and decompression, Mihaly Paparita
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, the compression speed and parallelism discussion, the most recent ATP reminded me of CigarJaws
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on XIP, unzip utility. Though it only focuses on decompression, it shows how much faster than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey archive utility you can be. This is relevant because Xcode is zipped using this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess like secure XIP zip thing, and it takes four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking ever to unzip it by default. And so this is a open source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and third-party utility to make that faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’ve talked about this exact utility on the show in the past. But it should be noted that one of the things it does to speed
⏹️ ▶️ John itself up is not do the verification of everything. That’s not the only thing it does to speed itself up. So it’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ John looking. You can look at the source code and see it just uses Swift concurrency to try to do it in more parallel chunks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can totally peg all your CPU cores if you want to do this. But if you care about the checksumming,
⏹️ ▶️ John either don’t use this tool or do a full checksum on the finished binary somehow and
⏹️ ▶️ John make sure it is what you expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And then Cigar Jaw wrote in, or well, wrote on a thread that we were a part of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, if you just use Finder to make a ZIP zip, it uses some single threaded code by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey default. I don’t actually remember if you can make a zip in parallel, but I’m pretty sure even if you can, Lib
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Archive, whatever Finder uses, doesn’t do that. However, Apple has a proprietary format that essentially makes a big tar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your files and then splits it into chunks to compress those in parallel. If your use case is I have a chunkier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file, please make it small. And you’re okay with using a special Apple format and also probably giving up a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few percent in size, you should give it a try. There’s a developer there. If you’re a developer, there’s an API,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the Apple Archive API. There’s also an AA tool bundled with Mac OS that can create and manipulate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Archive files.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I didn’t even try this, but I wonder what kind of file extensions is it just.aa. But anyway, yeah, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on, if you’re just staying within an Apple platform and you wanna, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco If you really want to
⏹️ ▶️ John compress something quickly, you want to try doing parallel, try the A tool.
Phones-in-school follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dan Pierce wrote in with regard to the phones and schools overtime discussion from episode 607.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dan writes, my school had two main rules. This photo was in my yearbook and you see, I guess the staff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the high school and this is looks like in the gymnasium. They’re on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bleachers and in the back in huge letters. It reads as follows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No hats, no walk men. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all. We’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about this in the overtime. We’re saying how like, you know, trying to get kids to pay attention in class has
⏹️ ▶️ John always been a challenge. And I mentioned the Walkman as a technology that was around when I was a kid and how kids
⏹️ ▶️ John had them. And if you put them on in class, you would surely be sternly lectured that you shouldn’t be listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to your walk while you’re in class. I didn’t think about hats, but when I was a kid, that was also a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I guess I had mostly blocked out. Hats and gum chewing were things that
⏹️ ▶️ John adults were really obsessed with not happening in schools. But yeah, this is the bleacher. It looks like the bleachers in a gymnasium.
⏹️ ▶️ John The back wall behind the bleachers is you know that painted cinder block wall that
⏹️ ▶️ John all high schools had and literally painted, hand painted, like stenciled letters on the wall that are like two
⏹️ ▶️ John feet high, all caps, no hats, no walk on it, because the scourge of hats will destroy our children
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iPhone SE 4 rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so there’s been a lot of rumors recently about the iPhone SE4 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we wanted to talk about a few of them, but we also wanted to mention, or John wanted to mention something with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to our iPhone product mix that we discussed in the overtime from episode 609. So, John, what’s up? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John what we were asked to talk about in that overtime was like, what should be the iPhones that Apple sells?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, what variety should there be? Is the lineup as it is now correct? Should they make a small
⏹️ ▶️ John phone? that they make, you know, other kinds of weird phones. And we had this whole discussion and I thought it was interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John as an aside to the iPhone SE rumors that we’re about to get to that none of us even mentioned the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone SE in that whole discussion. Cause we were like the iPhone lineup, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones, iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max. Maybe there’ll be a
⏹️ ▶️ John slim, maybe there’ll be an ultra but not once did anyone mention the iPhone SE.
⏹️ ▶️ John So neglected is this previous year’s model with a new name or whatever, but the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John SE exists. And somewhat related to this,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone mini A17, parentheses A17 Pro, which is what Apple calls
⏹️ ▶️ John the new iPhone mini, is connected to the iPhone 17 rumors.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are actual rumors as opposed to like just wish casting about that we talked about in the overtime where
⏹️ ▶️ John Max Tech was talking about iPhone Air, iPhone Ultra or whatever, just like this would make a nice set of names. These I
⏹️ ▶️ John think are actual rumors. And the rumor being that the iPhone 17 lineup
⏹️ ▶️ John will drop the numbers and instead be iPhone parentheses
⏹️ ▶️ John A19, iPhone parentheses A19 Pro. And so the names would be iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone Pro, iPhone Max, iPhone, whatever they are, iPhone suffix, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But without the number, like the number wouldn’t go up and the way we would distinguish them is the same way we distinguish, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads. This happened ages ago. I think we even talked about it on the show when the quote unquote new iPad came out. Were we running ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John when that happened? I don’t even know. They dropped the numbers. They said, iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t gonna have numbers. This is just the new iPad. And we’re like, how are we gonna tell you had an iPad? And now this year there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another thing called iPad but it’s a different product. How are we gonna distinguish them? And the answer was parentheses, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, second generation, third generation, or the same thing they did with Macs. All these Mac minis, you’re telling me they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John called Mac mini? How do I tell which Mac mini I have? Do they have years in them, do they have ever? And the answer is that some
⏹️ ▶️ John phrase in parentheses after it that tells you what it is. Sometimes it’s year, sometimes it’s, in the past it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, dual, you know, MacBook Pro, parentheses, dual USB, like all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff. But the rumor is that this would be kind of like the iPhone SE, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The iPhone SE 4, all right, versus iPhone SE, parentheses, A16,
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. I’m not entirely sure that the parentheses stuff version of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John naming is any better than just calling it iPhone 17. In many ways, it’s worse, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting that the iPhones have stubbornly stuck with these numbers. I remember years ago, people were like, well, surely when they get to 10 or 11
⏹️ ▶️ John or 12, they’re gonna stop because iPhone 17 sounds so dumb or iPhone 16, whatever number everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying sounded so dumb, we’ve already been there and done that and sold that phone and we all survived, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact is the Macs, the iPads and lots of other Apple products don’t have numbers in the
⏹️ ▶️ John official product names, but the iPhone still does. So are we all looking at a future where
⏹️ ▶️ John every product, including the iPhone SE and all the iPads and all the iPhones has some weird thing in parentheses after it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are we just gonna keep making that number go up until we’re in iPhone 137? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, so certainly the sequential numbering model name system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has diminishing value over time. The numbers start to get weird. Does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody want the iPhone 37? It’s just kind of- We’re already there. We used to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John this discussion and people would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John does anyone want the iPhone 15? That’s ridiculous. And I do think that we are in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s gonna start to get weird if it hasn’t already. Like we’re certainly in that range. And so I think, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at Apple’s other product lines and it makes sense. Everyone’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which MacBook Pro do I have? I don’t know what year it came out. I know it has the M3,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, and the M3 Ultra. Like, so, like, did it come out last year? Did it come out the year before?
⏹️ ▶️ John What are the official Apple names of the, I haven’t even looked. What are actually the official name of the MacBook Pros these days?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s just MacBook Pro, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, late 2020 or whatever. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, I’m sure there’s exceptions here and there, like for some disambiguations, but like in the other product lines,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one, like, what is the current iPad Pro? What is it called? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I know it came out this year. Is it called the iPad Pro 2024? Is it called the iPad Pro with M4 chip?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knows? It doesn’t really matter that much. And I think with, with the iPhones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it mattered a lot more back when the iPhones were, first of all, being upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more often than people tend to do now. And when they were changing more frequently than they tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be changed now. You know, you look at the current iPhone industrial design and it looks very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar for the last, what, five years? It’s been a while now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, we’re in a, you know, the iPhone is in a maturing stage of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life. the iteration is slowing down in terms of like the physical design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes, like it’s kind of stabilizing. And so I think it makes sense to start treating it more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other products that have reached similar levels of maturity, like MacBook Pros and iPads. You look around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a reason why most of these devices don’t just get sequential numbers. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of confusing. The numbers do get a little big and weird after a while. And it stops mattering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much. Like, to some degree, I wonder if Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know to what degree they would want to do this, but I wonder if also they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you have, say, right now if you have like the iPhone 12,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you know how old that is? You know, if it was just like, you know, the iPhone parentheses 2019,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe that would feel older to you, or maybe it would feel, you know, maybe you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 12 to feel as old as it does when you know the iPhone 16 is out, who knows? But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s multiple reasons to look at getting rid of these numbers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco referring to it in other ways. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mostly because- They’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of these numbers, but they’re kind of replacing them with another number because the A series processors and the M series processors,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? Have numbers on them. And the A’s are already up to 17, 18, right? So iPhone Pro, parentheses, A18 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just move the 18 out of the, you know, it’s like, and it’s been,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a frustration of developers and other people who have to deal with these things, the numbers are not synced up between the OS version,
⏹️ ▶️ John the processor version, and the phone version. It would be nice if they got synced up, but I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at Apple’s compare page for the MacBook Pros, and it says, MacBook Pro 14-inch, parentheses, M3. They
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to be liking the processors in the parentheses, which is fine, like sometimes there are years, these aren’t, I don’t know if these are the official,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, actual Apple product names in the tech specs, but I’m just saying what’s in the compare page.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing they’re putting in parentheses is the processor, and all their processors have numbers in them. I mean, it is an improvement
⏹️ ▶️ John in tractability in that like, if you don’t care about that part, you’re just like, I got an iPad Pro, I got a
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro, or maybe I got a 14 inch or 15 inch MacBook Pro, like, but you don’t care what the processor
⏹️ ▶️ John is. And someone might ask you in the same way, you’re like, I got a new iPhone, or I got a new iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which one did you get? Well, do you care about the processor? Then you can list it, but if you don’t, you’re not distracted by it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I do see, I see a trend towards unifying under this scheme.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this scheme better than the existing scheme? Well, there is something to be said for consistency across Apple’s product
⏹️ ▶️ John lines. If they can ever even, ever so briefly attain that before they go off in another direction, that would be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s interesting to think about in the context of the iPhone suffix, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone will be left with no suffix, just like the iPad is, but all the other iPhones have something, SE, Pro, Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Max, which has two suffixes, isn’t great. Maybe if there’s an ultra, maybe if there’s a slim or an air or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s something to look forward for next year. And the iPhone 17, which I guess we can’t call the iPhone 17 if they
⏹️ ▶️ John go with the naming scheme, supposedly is actually going to change the form factor. And just like the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 10 slash X did change the form factor and briefly go into a letter-based naming
⏹️ ▶️ John system for the top-end phone before we return to numbers. So as always, with all things naming, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not entirely chaos in the Apple world, but there’s a little bit of spice thrown in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so what are the rumors for the iPhone SE4? First
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all, and this is from 9to5Mac, the SE4 is expected to be based on the iPhone 14 design,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but with a single rear camera, 48 megapixels, same sensor as the iPhone 15, a 6.1 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OLED display with an iPhone 14 size notch and USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not expected to have a camera control. It is not expected, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is unlikely to have an action button. And people are saying it might even have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that long rumored Apple 5G modem. You never know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could happen. This would mean no millimeter wave, which would make me very sad. And well, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m buying an SE, but that’s neither here nor there. It would have 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth on the single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip. And it is expected to launch in the spring, maybe possibly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ve talked about this 5G modem for ages. It’s kind of interesting that you were saying like, oh, they probably don’t want to roll out their very
⏹️ ▶️ John first cellular modem on a really important product line. So you put it on the SE. So if you really
⏹️ ▶️ John messed up, damage is minimal. And it also looks like the modem won’t even have millimeter waves. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even suitable for the Pro phones, assuming Apple wants to continue having millimeter wave. And by the way, the iFixit
⏹️ ▶️ John teardowns of the current 16 Pro and stuff show that Apple went to some
⏹️ ▶️ John length to find a new place on the phone to put the millimeter wave stuff because the camera control is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of where the millimeter wave antenna used to be. now it’s like threaded through to the top of the phone and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it seems like Apple is still on board with millimeter wave, at least in the U S. Uh, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s first 5g mode of not supporting a dollar is an interesting, I don’t actually know if in
⏹️ ▶️ John our current phones, obviously they have Qualcomm. So their modems, I don’t know if they have separate
⏹️ ▶️ John like a separate Broadcom chip or something for wifi and Bluetooth. And if so Apple combining
⏹️ ▶️ John 5g wifi and Bluetooth all into a single chip would be an upgrade. But if not, it’s just a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple trying to get away from Qualcomm to stop paying them money because they don’t like them and that
⏹️ ▶️ John every bit of profit that Qualcomm gets is a bit of profit that Apple doesn’t get. So they want to own and
⏹️ ▶️ John control the core technologies, blah, blah, blah. Ergo buy Intel’s cell modem business and
⏹️ ▶️ John get yourself your own 5G modem. It’s just taking a long time and fingers crossed that they don’t screw it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very true. But the new SE looks good though. Like, so this is everyone’s saying like, finally the SE will be modernized. It’s not doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the dynamic island, but it’s it’s all screen like it’s all it’s the current modern design It’s easy to repair
⏹️ ▶️ John a single camera on the back is actually kind of fun like one good camera For the cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John phone instead of having multiple ones It’s save space presumably makes more room for a bigger battery
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as it’s a good camera It makes it makes the phone look interesting and cute just having one little camera on it kind of like a throwback Although obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera is way bigger than it used to be. I think the iPhone se 4 which will probably be the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John se parentheses a 16 I don’t even know what they said the SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to be on this but it looks like a good year for the SE unless the thing you liked about the SE
⏹️ ▶️ John was it being smaller because guess what it’s gonna be the same size This is the iPhone 14 apparently.
Rumored Macs imminent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of things that are forthcoming, do we want to briefly talk about the theoretical Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey October event and maybe some new Macs coming?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, I think the alleged October or early November release of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple products, who knows what form that release will take or even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will happen, although it sure does seem like it’s probably about to happen. But you know, in some form, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press releases or some kind of, you know, announcements, Who knows? But there are a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of very, very loud and persistent rumors that we are about to see. Most likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new Mac mini, new MacBook Pros, and possibly an iMac, and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C peripherals for like keyboard and mouse updates. We’ll see about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, that’s interesting. The iMac rumor. Yeah, it is in the crop of Macs that are due to be
⏹️ ▶️ John updated with M4 chips. And there’s kind of a separate rumor of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a version two of Apple’s current crop of magic peripherals,
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboards, the mouse. And the rumor is vague enough to say, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John a new version of the keyboard and mouse, is that just like take the existing keyboard and mouse and get rid of lightning and put USB-C? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be welcome. Everyone wants it, right? Or is it like, have they actually revised these
⏹️ ▶️ John products where the keyboard and the mouse are different? I find that hard to believe, but you know, the rumors are so vague and so new that
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows. But the final rumor is new iMacs M4,
⏹️ ▶️ John they still with lightning peripherals, but there will also be a USB-C variants of the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John and keyboard. They just don’t come with the iMac, which would just be the most awful thing ever. Unless maybe if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John new or something like that. I don’t know. But anyway, yeah. It
⏹️ ▶️ John would be nice if they updated this peripherals not to be USB-C, but I don’t think anyone with iMac is
⏹️ ▶️ John dying to do it. Because like, honestly, look, If you’ve plugged in your I guess you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t plug in their keyboards and I max they probably use a blue So I’m just saying like if it comes with lightning already That’s you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John harpoon your little turtle with the lightning connector that comes with your iMac and you’re all set But I guess most people probably use
⏹️ ▶️ John their keyboards and Bluetooth mode So, I don’t know but anyway, they should definitely upgrade to USB-c and it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John nice if they did that in this event But it’s interesting that here we are by the time you’re listening to this These could have already been announced
⏹️ ▶️ John and we still don’t know if they’re gonna get rid of lightning on the peripherals or if they’re just gonna to keep them the same and swap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so very ready to excise what small amount of lightning exists in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life out of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though, honestly, it is not at all burdensome to have a keyboard and mouse that charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via lightning. Well, I should say trackpad. It is burdensome to harpoon the turtle, as you said. But for the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the keyboard, it is not burdensome to have lightning. I just have a lightning cable draped off the back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my beloved Calgigit TS4. And occasionally I plug them in when they need to be charged.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that being said, it’s one of those things that’s just like, ugh, gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lightning just gives me the ick now. I just want to be done with it. And so I would very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much like if it would be possible to get these peripherals, even if they’re not really refreshed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you were saying, just these exact peripherals, but with USB-C, please and thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other things that are rumored, obviously we’ve talked about the smaller Mac Mini in past episodes. That’s the rumor. It’ll be redesigned
⏹️ ▶️ John for the first time I mean, I think 14 years or something, that the case will be much smaller than it was. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t need a new Mac mini in my life. I have one. I have an M1 Mac mini that I had gotten refurbished,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I remember correctly, and that’s what runs Plex and channels and not too much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else, to be completely honest with you. I have zero need to replace that Mac mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if there’s like a little puck looking thing, oh man, that’s gonna be tempting. It’s really gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John tempting. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s supposed to have a lot of ports on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually do have an intended Mac Mini in mind. I’m trying…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, okay. You’re going to put it outside on the deck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, basically, my last experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a modern Synology was not good. It’s basically dead already. Like, I only bought it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, two years ago, and it is not going well. Well, you should have kept it inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it was in a utility closet that is that is it was in a conditioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco utility area so it wasn’t like fully inside but it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside but anyway I want something for archival storage that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can back up to backblaze straightforwardly it with the regular backblaze not like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paper gig one and so I and I have external SSDs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are huge and great I have all these giant hard disks that are ready to go sitting around. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I wanna do really is just get the Mac mini and Velcro one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these little Samsung SSDs to it and maybe down the road have a hard drive enclosure that it connects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. But for the most part, I just want a Mac mini to be my archive server in my house and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of this broken technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, hopefully the pricing won’t be too ridiculous. But yeah, I think a lot of people will be tempted by the
⏹️ ▶️ John shrink on these because they’re gonna be good machines. And I think the rumor is M4 and possibly M4 Pro, That’s the other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about this announcement. We know what the M4 is. It’s already in a bunch of Macs. M4 Pro and M4 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t really been super solid rumors about what exactly they contain. We think we know like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, the Pro will be better than the M4, the Max will be better still. Like there’s been lots of Pro and Max’s on all the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John M series. But in the M3s, Apple changed it up a little bit and the Pro is different than it was
⏹️ ▶️ John in the M1 Pro and the M2 Pro, right? And so we really don’t know what they’re gonna do with the M4 Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John the M4 Max at this point. Except to say that yeah, the MacBook Pros, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John there’ll be M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max-based MacBook Pros as well. And so we’ll find out how much GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many cores, what are the clock speeds like, what is the cooling like? You know, these are all N3E
⏹️ ▶️ John processors, presumably. And so this should be exciting. We’ve waited a while, like the M4 debuted
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iPad of all things, and then came to a bunch of the Macs. Now it’s gonna be coming to even more Macs, but we’re finally getting to
⏹️ ▶️ John like the, I’m not gonna say the good chips, because the M4 is a good chip, but like the more powerful chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John the beefier chips. Nothing big and fancy like anything ultra-sized
⏹️ ▶️ John or Mac Pro. All those rumors are pushed way out into next year. The Mac Studio, in fact, the latest rumor is that the Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John which might’ve been scheduled for spring next year, is now looking more like it might be pushed more towards June,
⏹️ ▶️ John and at that point, they might as well just save it for WWDC. And the Mac Pro, same thing. If you’re lucky, you get to announce
⏹️ ▶️ John the WWDC and ships much later in the year. So no, don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John expectations that you’re going to see anything beyond an M4 Max chip, but you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ John these things tend not to leak, for all we know, they’ve decided to stop naming them Pro and Max. Maybe there’s only one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them and that has a different suffix,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco who knows? But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John our money’s on M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max. And the rumors are that
⏹️ ▶️ John these machines will be the same. The iMac will look the same, the MacBook Pros will look the same, the Mac mini is the only one that’s gonna look different.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, just a bunch of laptops with the same ports and the same design and the same everything, more or less, except
⏹️ ▶️ John swap out the M3 for a better M4, insert suffix here. That all sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John great, and that’s another reason why a press release may be reasonable. Have they
⏹️ ▶️ John ever done a press release for a new form factor for a Mac? I don’t know. It seems like something
⏹️ ▶️ John that would have to be potentially rare, but not inconceivable. So honestly, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if there’s going to be an event. The rumors are, as we record this, that next week, whatever’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna happen will happen. So tune in next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean if they were going to do a press release for an entirely new industrial design product It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be the Mac mini because it’s such a half-assed product for the most part like they really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or yeah, or the iPhone SE exactly like that. I think both of those would be very likely to be press release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only You know, I’m sure they would have briefings for people for you know, a handful of press people But like, you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not gonna justify an event and that’s why I kind of think there is no event here I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is all press release products because none of these are like the big kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of splash that Apple likes to make with events. Like they tend not to have events these days that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have some kind of like really exciting novel thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think a new Mac mini does it no matter how good it is, cause it’s just the Mac mini. I don’t think the iPhone SE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it, cause again, it’s just the iPhone SE. These are not high profile, high excitement level products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are specialized things for certain markets doing certain things that Apple does not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco draw a lot of attention to. So I and a new and you know a new chip in the iMac that otherwise probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks the same. I can’t see that changing. You know that that’s going to be you know also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah nice update but who cares? You care if you’re in the market to buy an iMac but no one else will care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally for the potential upgrade to USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboards and mice I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is wrong, I really do. I cannot see them changing anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else about them. I bet the dumb Magic Mouse that I love so much, but the dumb Magic Mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet it still charges on the bottom, you still flip it over like a turtle. I bet the, you know, everything else about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboards and the trackpad, I bet they’re all exactly the same. It just switches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to USB-C and makes no other changes. I hope I’m wrong, but I bet that’s what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, that’s the smart money because that’s just, it just makes sense. I mean, they did it to an entire pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about like peripherals. They did it to the AirPods Max, right? The whole product was the only thing that it got.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve done that, they did it with the AirPods cases. Hey, first we had the case of lightning. Now it’s the same case, but it’s got a
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C on it. Apple’s not super into revising its monitors or
⏹️ ▶️ John its keyboard and mouse peripherals on any kind of reasonable schedule. So watch for that. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ John have to think, again, this is type of, with these rumors with obscure products, not as much stuff leaks because people just aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John as interested in leaking it. So if Apple did have all new peripherals, it’s conceivable that we would know
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing about it a week out, but it’s, you know, I would expect to hear something about
⏹️ ▶️ John revised products. Yeah, if they, like this is the best case scenario. They just revised and have USB-C and
⏹️ ▶️ John they come with the iMac. It’s like, yeah, that’s what we wanted. If you’re waiting around for Apple to make
⏹️ ▶️ John like a new ergonomic keyboard that makes Marco happy or a new mouse that’s much higher that makes me happy, like don’t hold your breath.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not a chance. Nope. Their design philosophy on those peripherals has been the same for a really
⏹️ ▶️ John long time. And similarly for the MacBook Pros, again, no rumors about case design changes or whatever. There
⏹️ ▶️ John are rumors about the next, essentially the next generation of Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John of the MacBook Pro laptops potentially getting slimmer, which we just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John just went through this whole big thing of like the Johnny I philosophy of everything uniform, not enough ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John too thin, blah, blah, blah, to the much more sort of like rectilinear, blocky,
⏹️ ▶️ John utilitarian, SD card slot sporting, HDMI port sporting
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pros. They were like, hallelujah, like the magic is back. They finally made more good laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John How many years has it been? We’ve just been riding this high, but eventually they will have to redesign them. And the rumor is they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna redesign them to be thinner, which is fine, but now comes the real test of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, hey, that correction they made on the MacBook Pro line, where they gave us the ports back
⏹️ ▶️ John and put in more battery life and did a little bit of function over form by saying, let’s just make
⏹️ ▶️ John it rectangular because that leaves more room for battery. The test comes when it’s time to make the new revision. Do they go back to their
⏹️ ▶️ John old ways? Did they say, we can make it really skinny if we got rid of that HDMI port or we got rid of the SD card
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, right? I keep thinking back to the MacBook Air, like the 2011 generation of MacBook Air that are really,
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Air used to have an SD card slot, folks. MacBook Air, it wasn’t like a pro
⏹️ ▶️ John only feature. Somehow on the thinnest, lightest laptop they made, they found room for SD card slot. Whereas now it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, 16 inch MacBook Pro, I’m not sure we can fit an SD card slot in there. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John know, again, that’s not this year. That’s rumors are maybe next year or the year after. So watch for that. That will be a good
⏹️ ▶️ John test. But yeah, in the meantime, like I agree, this could be a press release thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the Mac mini being a big deal. You know, it would make for a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac event that they would
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco want to actually have an
⏹️ ▶️ John they announced perhaps the world’s fastest personal computer or something impressive like that, but alas,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, let me tell you right now, if for some reason we got an invite to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and because you refused to leave your house for any reason whatsoever, you didn’t go, and then they release the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are fired from the show, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would go. I mean, it would be a WWDC announcement. I’m going to WWDC if I get an invite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if they do it in a week? You never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do it in a separate, again, the rumors are that both the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John are potentially announceable around June of next year. I mean, the Mac Pro probably wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be ready, but that doesn’t stop them. They’ll announce it and ship it three months later. Who cares, right? But yeah, no, I’m there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m at WWDC. That’s my event. Don’t forget about me, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, don’t forget about any of us, but still. I don’t know. I’m just really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amused at the thought of breathing life into the Mac Mini. You know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just think that would be really fun. And everything else, like I don’t feel like I’m in the market for a new MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want a Mac studio that’s not filling a need I have. However, I will say just, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it was earlier today, maybe it was yesterday, somehow I got thinking about y’all’s monitors and how the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey XDR is like, is it 10? It’s not 10 years old, it’s like five years old now, though, isn’t it? How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thing? So 2019,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, to put things in perspective, Micaela is in first grade right now, and she is six and a half years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old. Like, that thing came out when she was one, and now she’s in first grade? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the XDR is old, and the studio display ain’t much better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Price hasn’t changed, but you know, with inflation, it actually is cheaper now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that is true, but it’s still a very, very old monitor, and I don’t know, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to see, I would like to see the monitors refreshed. And I think Mike had mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey promotion on an external monitor. I think that would be really neat. Is it a need I have? No, but would I love it? Heck yeah, I would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of, I’d be a little hesitant about them updating it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the monitor they made in the meantime, the studio display, has a lot of weird little problems with its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s fine, it’s fine. It had a little bit of a rough entry, but it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that is the test. That’s what everyone’s afraid of, is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they gonna put like an A19 in the monitor and it’s gonna be flaky like the studio was until they get all the firmware
⏹️ ▶️ John updates? Like, should a little mini version of iOS be running on an iPhone chip inside your monitor? Or should
⏹️ ▶️ John it be more like the XDR, which was in the days when Apple was willing to use whatever weird chips they have inside
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing to do like, to, the, the, you know, image processing and run the USB hub and whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, uh, Apple just decided like, why are we paying for these chips from all these different manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this stuff and dealing with this weird firmware? Why don’t we just put an A-series chip in there and put our own OS on
⏹️ ▶️ John it? And the answer was, because you’re not very good at that. Yeah, the Mac Studio was a little bit flaky,
⏹️ ▶️ John but my wife’s got a Mac Studios right behind me And whatever flakiness there was in the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John She has had no complaints on it and it has never done anything weird. I still that said I still
⏹️ ▶️ John fear the possible flakiness of an A-series powered
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR replacement because this XDR has just worked like a dumb peripheral
⏹️ ▶️ John which is exactly what you wanted to do Like I don’t even want to know there’s anything computer inside it especially since this thing does
⏹️ ▶️ John not have a power button, which Apple is still obsessed with, right? So if there was something wrong with it, power cycling would be a pain, but
⏹️ ▶️ John thankfully I’ve pretty much never had to do that. So I think my, you know, I’m happy with MaxDR
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it is. Talk about, if you’re waiting for a mouse and keyboard, like I said, or monitors to be revised,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t hold your breath. There’s been rumors of new monitors for Macs for years and years, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like maybe those projects are started internally and then scrubbed and started again and then scrubbed and then started again
⏹️ ▶️ John and then scrubbed and they just go around and around one of them actually escapes the company and lets you buy it. And that hasn’t happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, for the record, I did have to power cycle my studio display, not irregularly when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I first got it. And I think it’s been at least a year since I’ve had to do that, possibly more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot remember the last time I’ve needed to do it. And you know, I have this array of the studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display in the center and the bequeathed LG 5k from Marco on one side and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that I had bought secondhand on the other. And I maintain that while the LG UltraFine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey studio display is noticeably better. And it does have weirdness and the camera is just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trash. It is straight trash. The camera is real bad. But other than that, it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty darn nice screen. And I would love to get, you know, studio display two to put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the center and, you know, downgrade the current studio display to either my left or right side and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just move everything down a a notch, which actually brings me to a mostly unrelated point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have the most recent Apple TV in the living room. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one generation back in the bedroom, and then I use the two generation back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones. This is several years old now as the like tailgate Apple TV or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we’re traveling somewhere for a long time, we’ll bring that Apple TV. I feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eldest Apple TV is getting real long in the tooth at this point. And I would I would love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have another instance where I filter everything down a notch. So I would also love to, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think there’s any rumors about this, but I’d love to see a new Apple TV as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are rumors about it, but like the Apple TV is kind of reaching the point,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of reaching a fork in the road. Cause I, as far as I’m aware, there aren’t really many
⏹️ ▶️ John television viewing based standards and technology that Apple TV does not yet support that it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John useful for it to support. People might say 8K and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John The PS5 Pro supposedly supports 8K, but so does the PS5, technically. Anyway, if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a use case for 8K, potentially next generation consoles might be the use case, but they’ve said that before.
⏹️ ▶️ John But other than that, it’s like there’s that quick thing about media switching without as long a blackout thing, stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. There’s not a lot of stuff that you say, I need some more hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV to do video watching. Then there’s gaming, which of course, you need unlimited power forever and ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does Apple want to turn Apple TV into more of a gaming thing or make their own controller? Are they going to ship it? Are they going to upgrade? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the kind of the decision point because their Apple is kind of close to saying for the purposes
⏹️ ▶️ John of watching video content, there’s no reason for the Apple TV to get
⏹️ ▶️ John any more powerful for the
⏹️ ▶️ John of playing games, there’s infinity reason for the Apple TV to get more powerful. Which way do we go with this product?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m with Casey, whenever a new Apple TV comes out, I buy it just blindly for the same reason he does. Cause I just
⏹️ ▶️ John rotate them through my thing And historically, there has been a benefit, especially when they went 4K and they
⏹️ ▶️ John got a little bit faster or whatever. And I do occasionally play games on Apple TV, although let me just take an aside to complain.
⏹️ ▶️ John My son was home from school for break and wanted to play Journey. I’m like, great, that’s out for Apple TV. Guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John out for Apple TV anymore. It was briefly out for Apple TV, I think. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a false memory of it or whatever, but it definitely is not out for Apple TV now. You can play it on the iPad, you can play it on
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS. You can play it on lots of different platforms that you cannot play it on Apple TV. I think it used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be an Apple Arcade and maybe it was like a time limited thing, but it’s super annoying when that happens. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if the next Apple TV comes out. Like there’s no point if you just watch streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John TV to say like, we need an even faster SOC here so you can play and pause television.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I would love for them to make that more reliable and better because it’s still flakier than my like TiVo from 2002 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John year I was using it, which is sad considering it has like a bazillion times the power of that TiVo,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Obviously it’s looking at 4K content and SD, but still even accounting for that. Like, so I’m not saying the Apple TV is
⏹️ ▶️ John as good as it can get. It should get much better, but I’m not sure if hardware, increasing the level of hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John has any point for anything other than gaming. And so maybe that’s why they’re dragging their feet on this. There are
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors about a new Apple TV coming out. It supposedly does have a better SoC and more RAM and Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John capability and all that, you know, all of this stuff. But I don’t remember where the dates associated with that are, and I’m sure Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not in a hurry. But it is interesting to think about this lull in the Apple TV where
⏹️ ▶️ John until we get 8K everywhere, even if we do get 8K everywhere, like by that point,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple TV caliber SoC should be able to handle 8K fine. And it’s like, you know, is
⏹️ ▶️ John this basically, is this a gaming box or is it not? And if it’s a gaming box, why does it only come with a controller? And that is the decision
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is probably going to have to make because there will be many years of time where the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John is completely adequate for all video functions. And then the question is why would anyone ever buy another one of these things?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, no argument. It’s crummy, but I get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could also improve their remote because even though they made it better than it was, it’s still accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, stop. It’s perfectly good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. It’s fine. It’s better than fine, you grumps.
⏹️ ▶️ John I use it all the time. And every time I use it, I just think about how much better it could be. It’s not killing me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what do you need to change? We don’t have the time for this, but here we go. What do you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John change? So the D-pad, essentially, up, down, left, right, right? and the swipey thing in
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle. I know you can disable the swipey thing in the middle, but enabling allows you to swipe through things
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, but disabling it allows you to use the ring more easily, but I feel like the ring is just not
⏹️ ▶️ John as secure to me as an actual D-pad. I still have to think about the North, South, East, West of it because it is one continuous
⏹️ ▶️ John ring, and I still have to kind of think about not touching the touchpad, but I wanna keep the touchpad enabled because I do swipe sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s unsatisfactory. And the whole size of it, it’s bigger than it was in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John thickness, right? but it’s still not really filling the negative space of my hand in the way
⏹️ ▶️ John that I want it to. I still feel like it’s still a little bit small. There’s advantages to being small. It looks elegant,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good for people with small hands, but for my hands, it still feels a little bit small and a little bit fidgety,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s nothing like, you know, everyone talks about the TiVo remote, but just any other kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like more normal size remote with bigger, beefier, more distinct buttons that I can
⏹️ ▶️ John use with less mental effort. It’s not like I’m killing myself using the remote. I use the Apple TV remote all the time. It’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the main remote I use for our television. Still feel like it could be better.
⏹️ ▶️ John runs against everything that Apple wants to do, because they want it to be small and elegant or whatever. And they’re like, here’s our concession to
⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomics. This is the new one. And we all celebrate it, because it was so much better than the old one. But they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John farther to go if they want to improve this thing. And I wish they would.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand what you’re saying. But for me, while I would love it if it wasn’t the same shape as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an original Nintendo controller, just a squared-off rectangle, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s carved on the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, fair. But that being said, I don’t think I want it to be very much bigger. I can understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ditching the rectangle shape, but I don’t think I need it to be much bigger, nor do I want it to be much bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like that it’s a small little thing that my kids can use just as easily as I can. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, in that sense, for me, the size of it is fine, but I concur that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the shape could be a little more ergonomic, definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even the Tivo peanut grill got smaller over the years. It didn’t stay the same size. It It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John of striking that balance, but I feel like the thickness maybe is more important than the length and width, just sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, because it’s not, it’s like, how do you grip it? It’s kind of like the Apple mouse. Some people love it because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so low profile because of the way they use the mouse, but other people don’t use the mouse that way, and they find the very
⏹️ ▶️ John low profile mouse to be like against everything they want out of a mouse. So I feel like maybe the remote
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same way. But either way, the circular D-pad with the touch thing in the middle, I feel like is such
⏹️ ▶️ John a weird compromise between the different functions, I always find it. It’s I find it difficult to very
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly go left, left, right, down, down to the thing that I want. And even just having to make the mental
⏹️ ▶️ John choice of like, should I try to get there with the swipey pad versus should I try to get there with like the digital
⏹️ ▶️ John D pad, even just making that choice is a little bit of more cognitive load. And again, I know you can disable
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But like I, in some parts of the UI are so much better with the ability to swipe,
⏹️ ▶️ John but other parts aren’t. And I would just feel like obviously there’s so much simpler in the table world, but there’s no swipey
⏹️ ▶️ John pad. And it’s just up up, down, left, right, and you would just mindlessly go up, up, up, up, up, up, up, down, left,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, up, because there was no other option. There were the choice and the buttons were big and beefy and easy to find, even when they were
⏹️ ▶️ John still in a ring, I felt like they were easier to find because you weren’t worried about accidentally swiping when you went across the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John and it responded faster to you. I don’t know, like it’s not a video game. It’s just a bunch of menus. It’s not a big
⏹️ ▶️ John deal. It’s a much bigger deal that the stupid streaming apps forget where I was in the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and start playing me the episode I saw last night. That is a much bigger deal. That’s a software bug and not a hardware issue, But we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about the harbor right now.
#askatp: Everyone wants personal info
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can mark Marshall writes, it feels like recently more and more places I deal with one to copy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or want a copy of or to scan my driver’s license, like the doctor’s office for my child wants me to upload a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photo of both sides to their app, or the school wants an email with photo of it, I’ve become much more careful about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giving identity data out to places I do not have control over. Obviously, social security number is a different level. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s just talk about driver’s licenses. How do you all handle this? I mean, do we have a choice in most cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just cough it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, actually, so that’s the way I handle this is if it’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t think really necessarily needs it I try to just not give it and see what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey instance, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, well, you know friends like we change dentists when we moved and So, you know and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new dentist wants basically every single thing about us drivers licenses social
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security numbers all that stuff and I’m like Why? Like what, do they need that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like submit to the dental insurance that I don’t have? Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they can just get away without it and, you know, are they just asking for it so that they can try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to chase me down if I don’t pay a bill? Like, because I can just pay when I have the cleaning. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, I basically, a lot of these things, it’s, a lot of times people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask for stuff because it’s routine or it’s quote standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or we might need it or whatever and when it comes to your personal information you can take the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra two seconds to be like mmm what if I just don’t give it do you really need it it’s like you know when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the grocery store asks you for your phone number they’re doing it because they want to do crap with your data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can choose at that moment whether to give it to them or not don’t assume that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know a place that seems more official than a grocery store for some reason like your dentist or whatever like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why do they deserve your data? There might be a reason why they why they absolutely need it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they also might not fully need it, and so you reserve the right to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can I just not do this like do you like can I not give you my driver’s license? Can I not give you this information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re asking for like what happens if I don’t can be perceived without it like you can ask those kind of questions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I strongly encourage you to do that more often, because the more I have done that, the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often the answer is okay fine all the time it’s just fine like like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know another example this is not quite the same thing but my current health insurance plan never mailed me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a card so I don’t have a health insurance card I haven’t had one for like two years so when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go to a new doctor or whatever they always ask you know upload a scan of your card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t have it I have the number like I have my policy number and so I’ve done things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like take a screenshot of the one password screen showing my policy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number, like literally in a screenshot of one password on my phone and said, will this work?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or here’s the number. Is that all you need? And so far in every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, even when they’re like, no, we need the card. And I’ll just say, well, I don’t have one. Here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number, try it. And every single time I’ve been able to get the care I need, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always just been fine. So again, push back a little. If a place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t need your driver’s license is asking you for your driver’s license, try saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. Try saying, you know, can we proceed without it? Do you really need it? I would rather not share it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can make up some BS like, you know, my job requires me to, you know, to keep a certain degree of confidentiality. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever you need to say, like, don’t be a jerk about it, but try to push back and actually ask,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, do you really need it? Or are you just asking? Because a lot of times they don’t really need it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to use the grocery store example too, because in my local grocery stores that I go to for many years
⏹️ ▶️ John they were like do you have a phone number with us do you blah blah blah can you you know do you have a phone number can you give us a phone number or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and i would just say no no no no they they’ve changed recently to not asking
⏹️ ▶️ John that question which i think is wise but instead having a system uh they have you know whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John their their rewards program thing that of course has an ios app and all this other bs that everybody makes you do
⏹️ ▶️ John to gamify their shopping right but the bottom line is you do get money off your food
⏹️ ▶️ John if you play this game And so the motivation is hey, do you want a few bucks off your groceries?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the way they do is they don’t ask you for your phone number anymore But on the little stupid little paddy thing that they have
⏹️ ▶️ John there you type in your phone number to essentially Get your discount to say oh
⏹️ ▶️ John now we know who you are now We will register your groceries in the app and give you the discount that you’re entitled to for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John rewards blah blah blah, right? Whole Foods has the The Amazon. Well, I don’t think it’s Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the Whole Foods has the thing where you get the diamond shaped QR codey thing in their app and you scan it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing God knows what’s on that QR code that they’re scanning. It’s probably all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco your information anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I forget if I said this but recently I changed my action button
⏹️ ▶️ John to launch the Whole Foods app Because you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can never find your
⏹️ ▶️ John code because I realized The main time that I am trying to do something under time pressure on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and I find it frustrating is unlocking it and watching The whole foods app so I can scan it So that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John my action button does now because I’m using the camera control for the camera action button launches the whole foods app Which is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even want I don’t shop at Whole Foods that often
⏹️ ▶️ John you freaking Whole Foods? I mean, it’s within walking distance So if you need something last-minute you just walk to the Whole Foods, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t actually do my grocery shopping there I do it at Star Market Which is a local chain that is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John owned by whoever the hell owns all the chains in this area now Who got that Shaw’s bought them recently where recently
⏹️ ▶️ John means like 10 years ago. But anyway Yeah, Star Market has the app. They don’t ask you your phone number but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want your discount, they have nothing for you to scan as far as I’m aware. You’ve got to type your, so I’m typing my telephone number
⏹️ ▶️ John into the keypad rather than giving it to them, which I guess is better than reading out into the air, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s ridiculous. For the driver’s license thing, I think one of the reasons you see a lot more of this happening is
⏹️ ▶️ John twofold. One, there are more online account thingies
⏹️ ▶️ John these days that give you some way to prove you are who you are, to give some kind of backstop for
⏹️ ▶️ John account recovery. and they essentially just need you some proof of identity and they
⏹️ ▶️ John have you scan your driver’s license or your passport or some other thing. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John only do that if you think the value of being able to recover your
⏹️ ▶️ John account through proving who you are is worth the loss of privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John of giving these people your thing. How much do you trust the company? Do you really care about this account? Like usually
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an optional type thing, but that’s part of the same family of activities of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just need you to prove who you are, but you’re not there. A lot of times, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John there in person, if they just need your driver’s license for you to prove your identity, you don’t have to scan
⏹️ ▶️ John it or give it to them, you can just show it to them. And maybe, you know, you can see if they’re typing down your driver’s
⏹️ ▶️ John license number, or do they just want to say, yes, a human being has now seen, and like a, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a bouncer at a bar, looked at your ID and decided, I think this is a real ID, you
⏹️ ▶️ John are Joe Schmo, you have a state issued identification, thumbs up, and then they never
⏹️ ▶️ John scan it and hopefully they never write anything down about it, you’re just showing it to them and then putting it back into your wallet. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John is another kind of middle ground. But yeah, like Marco said, you can just say no and see what the consequences are. Most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ John they just need the information. I think, I don’t know this for a fact, but I think a lot of the reasons healthcare
⏹️ ▶️ John providers in particular want you to scan both sides of your card is because they’re so sick of trying to navigate
⏹️ ▶️ John the world of getting people to give them the correct information from either side of the card. And they’re just like, if we just get scanned, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out where it is. Oh, it’s this number, but not this suffix, but don’t worry about your group number, but we need this ID
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, just scan the cards. Like, I feel like it’s just a like, you know, avoiding a customer
⏹️ ▶️ John service issue. And so in that case, if you wanted to skirt around that, it’s like, do you just need my member number?
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause I’ll just give you that, it’s this. And I don’t even have, like Marco, I don’t even have a card, but if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you need. And very often like credit card numbers, they can look at the member number for whatever your insurance is and know whether
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve omitted the right number of characters from the beginning or whether you’ve tacked on a group number or whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they can figure it out. So that’s pretty much what I do as well. Although I have to say that for my
⏹️ ▶️ John driver’s license and stuff like that, I just assume everyone can get that information anyway. My social security number
⏹️ ▶️ John is a lot higher security than that. I have to say, I don’t think anyone has asked for my social security number
⏹️ ▶️ John in a situation where I don’t think they should need it, but driver’s license, I’m a little bit more cavalier with because
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, but yeah, push back and see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this totally sets aside the question of whether these things actually are keeping you secure or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. Whether you can keep these things reasonably secret, what happens when they do get out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sets all that aside.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether someone could just buy a database of all this information anyway right now for a hundred bucks or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. Most of that does not matter. I would also say two things. While you were talking I tried to decode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Whole Foods QR code and it decodes into a base64 and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what appears to be a custom binary blob that begins with amz. So amazon and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some binary data that I don’t immediately understand. So there’s there’s a lot actually in there. I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s some kind of expiring signature thing, because it’s one of those things that you know they cycle it every few seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you try to take a screenshot, it yells at you actually says for my security screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around a lot of like, oh really, that’s that’s for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John security. Take a picture with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, but anyway, yeah. So who knows what’s in there, but also in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grocery stores with loyalty things, so I actually do use the Whole Foods one because between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and using Amazon’s Prime Visa card, I actually get a decent amount off of Whole Foods
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So I actually-
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I think we’ve complained about this before, but like, Jesus, when I pay with an Amazon card, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make me scan the code. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco already know who I am. I know, what is that? Like, let’s connect the dots.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s an Amazon card in an Amazon store, and I still have to bind my
⏹️ ▶️ John action button to scan this stupid QR. you already know who I am, just give me the discount. Honestly, the Whole Foods, you get
⏹️ ▶️ John a discount on like 3% of their products, it’s very frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, but at other stores, like we have a non-Whole Foods, just chain grocery store here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, every grocery store has loyalty things, but the cashier asks, do you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever card? And I don’t, and every time I say, sorry, I don’t. And if you’re just nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, I don’t have one, 90% of the time, the cashier will be like, oh, I’ll put one in for you, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they put in their cards, they get their rewards or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have nicer cashiers than we do. The cashiers here are trained to say, oh, do you want one? Here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re a lot more, I think, a lot less aggressive with the sales pitch. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just want to keep moving. And so, yeah, I’ll put one in for you. Sure. I’m like, great, thank you. Every time, thank you so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they get their points. I get the discount. And I didn’t have to have all the tracking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the pro move there is, oh, I left it in the car or I forgot it at home, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit of a white lie. But then they want you to type in your telephone number. Oh, we can look it up by your phone number. Oh, fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, sorry, I don’t have one. Because most of them, they’re not going to want to stop the flow of customers to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to explain to you why you should have one. No, they’re just like, fine, I’ll just put one in for you. Beep, and then it’s done. they move on.
#askatp: Managing elderly tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Caleb asks, my parents are both in their late 60s and occasionally have issues with password management, getting devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up. I’ve considered proposing pulling them into my Apple family plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and setting up legacy contacts. Do you have any advice or suggestions or do you manage any account or technology for your parents?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This has been a little bit of an issue for me. I don’t have any good answers, but my parents are getting older and I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am starting to approach the time where I really need to get this stuff squared away before one or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of them loses their cognition. I can’t think of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word I’m looking for. Maybe I’m losing it. But anyways, the point is that I need to have this conversation with them and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t yet and I know that this is coming. Marco, I know you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had grandparents that passed a couple of years back. I don’t know if you have any thoughts about this for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your parents. And then John, your parents are still kicking. Let’s end with John, please. So Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s start with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Mazzella Yeah. So yeah, back when my grandparents were still around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, the tools were all different. I’m fortunate enough not to have to deal with this yet with the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation down, like the our parents generation. But certainly it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming up. I’m thankful all these new tools are here now. I’m thankful that we have things like legacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contacts, that all of the family plans in the Apple and other similar environments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have gotten a lot better, a lot more full-featured. We have things like remote control diagnostics, like remote screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharing. That kind of stuff is getting better all the time and getting, without going too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insecure or too controlling. Because what you have to balance, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is so tricky with so much of aging and caring for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and living with or being with elderly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatives is there’s a tricky balance that you have to walk between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco letting them be independent and have their own lives versus you being available to help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And that’s just different with everybody and that can change over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Like as somebody gets older, they might be either okay with you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking more control or they actually might want you to take more control, but that’s gonna depend. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you do with your particular situation, you gotta just be constantly reevaluating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and adapting to what your actual needs are. So it might require something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have, like you can remote into their stuff whenever they need help. It might be something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Or they might not want you to have that level of access yet. It might be more like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe you keep a copy of their password and they can call you if they forget them. You know, it could be as simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as that. But again, it all depends and it’s always an evolving situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So kind of just, you know, keep an open mind to what you might have to do, be willing to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, be willing to make it easy on them. And, you know, don’t assume that any one solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you come up with will last forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go on. So my parents, they,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking about one of the things that’s saving me from having to deal with a lot of this is the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that neither one of them really maintains any sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of digital collection of stuff. Like they’re just, they
⏹️ ▶️ John just never, like they have their own photo libraries and their sync to iCloud photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re just sparse, disorganized, and just not important to them
⏹️ ▶️ John really, right? Like for example, when my parents make their like calendar for the year, we all make like calendars
⏹️ ▶️ John on like Shutterfly or whatever, like we put on our fridges and have pictures of family photos or whatever, most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the photos in that calendar are photos that I take that I send them to put in the calendar, or they get sent
⏹️ ▶️ John from my other siblings to them. Like, they’re not taking pictures, they’re not collecting pictures. They have pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of, they go on vacations and they take pictures, but very few, and who knows if they ever look at them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the real question is, for like legacy contacts and dealing with their digital stuff or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John what happens if they die and no one has access to their stuff? The answer is they have no stuff. They just like, what do
⏹️ ▶️ John they have? They have accounts on systems that I don’t care about. Like no one’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John care about after they die what their login was to their local newspaper website because who cares, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’ve got all their usernames and passwords. And by the way, on that front, I tried to herd my parents
⏹️ ▶️ John towards the sort of happy path, Apple default things or whatever, but in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ John my dad is somewhat willing to do them. My mother insists on having a document with all her passwords in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s nothing you can do about that. And fine, like if that system works for her, then that’s what works
⏹️ ▶️ John for her. And, but like, honestly, I was like, well, what if you lose access to that document?
⏹️ ▶️ John If she’s dead, like I don’t need those passwords. Like nobody needs those passwords. I’m not worried
⏹️ ▶️ John about losing all this. So it’s really just more of like, I feel like my job is more or less just like facilitating
⏹️ ▶️ John their ability to do what they wanna do with their computers. And what they wanna do with their computers is
⏹️ ▶️ John not the same as what I wanna do. and in my particular case, also does not leave any sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of digital assets that I have to worry about. Now that said, I did make them all set up legacy contacts and set
⏹️ ▶️ John me up, like I did all the Apple things, because why not, why not do that? They don’t even, because
⏹️ ▶️ John when we visit with each other, inevitably, well, it used to be they were better about doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but now they’re like, I don’t want to bring my laptop on the plane, it’s so heavy, they just want to bring their iPad and their phone, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And their laptops are not heavy. But anyway, they used to bring all their tech products, And part
⏹️ ▶️ John of us meeting was like, here John, here’s all the tech products. And they would, my mom would make a list and notes and say, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all the problems I’m having with my computers. And we just go through them one at a time. I can’t get this to work. Why does this thing do this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to do this, I want to do that or whatever. And we always just go through all those and I fix all their computer problems and I let them go back
⏹️ ▶️ John and do what they want to do. But trying to sort of impose like, oh, everyone needs to use one password
⏹️ ▶️ John or we all need to be in the same Apple family or like, if they’re up for that, if your relatives are up for
⏹️ ▶️ John that, fine, but mine aren’t. And honestly, I wouldn’t want them included of my Apple family because that’s just a complication
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t need to deal with personally. We should really just keep those things separate. But yeah, I help them with what they
⏹️ ▶️ John need help with and I make sure that they’re able to live their life and do their computer stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think, you know, my parents are kind of like this with their belongings. They’re already trying to like give away their
⏹️ ▶️ John old, you know, photo albums of us as kids, like physical photo albums of us as kids because they don’t even want to deal with those anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? So they’re pretty good about dispersing their stuff. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be shocked if they had more than like 10,000 photos in their libraries and how many of those are actually good is even
⏹️ ▶️ John probably even smaller. Now, I think those are valuable photos just maybe on vacations with themselves. Like we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have those pictures. Sometimes they send them to us like, oh, we’re on vacation, here we are in Florida, look at us on this beach or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And presumably they have some of those, but they’re just not big picture takers and they don’t collect them and they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really do anything with them. So if I lose access to all of that, which I won’t because I’m their legacy contact, but if I did, it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be that big of a deal. So yeah, I think Marco was getting at the heart of it, which is like, you got to figure out like
⏹️ ▶️ John what these people actually need from you, not what you think they should be doing with computers. and
⏹️ ▶️ John that really clarifies your role in all of this.
#askatp: Any key turns on MBPs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Randall Miller writes, I shut down my new MacBook Pro occasionally, but it restarts when I touch any key on the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why on earth would Apple do this and leave no way to turn this quote unquote feature off?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mostly agree with this. I find it frustrating as well. I particularly find this frustrating when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to clean my keyboard, which usually involves, you know, mashing down on the buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from time to time. And I find that very frustrating. Now there is a tool, which one of you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume, John has put in the show notes, called Keyboard Clean Tool that fixes the keyboard cleaning problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t have any solutions for the touch anything to turn the computer on problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the tricky bit. And there’s many apps that do this. They basically disable the keyboard until you
⏹️ ▶️ John do some really complicated thing that you’re unlikely to do by accident. I don’t know if the one we’re putting in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John is the quote unquote good one. It is just the one that I found that seemed vaguely reputable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s a million of these apps. But you do need one sometimes if you want to clean the
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard without fear of accidentally doing something bad to your computer. It’s not like you’re worried about waking it up or the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John turning on. You’re worried that like, you’re gonna accidentally hit a keyboard command that’s gonna like delete something or
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, you basically just wanna say, I want all key presses to just go nowhere for a while cause I’m gonna clean my keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s separate from the turning off thing, but that’s relevant because you’re like, oh, I’ll solve this problem. I don’t need a special app. I’ll just shut
⏹️ ▶️ John down my Mac. And that used to work until many, many years ago. I forget when. They said, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Touching anything on the surface of this laptop will make it boot. From a template, quote unquote, off
⏹️ ▶️ John state, you shut down, not sleep, you shut down your portable Macintosh computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then what makes it turn on? It used to be there was a power button, but then they kind of got rid of that, then it was a touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID button. They said, you know what? It should wake up if you touch anything. And now, shutting your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John down to clean the keyboard very carefully no longer works because of this. I find it frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John too. I believe there probably is some firmware. I was gonna say open firmware, whatever the hell the firmware
⏹️ ▶️ John that the ARM-based Macs use to turn this off, but it’s not sort of a user visible
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that you could find in a GUI somewhere as far as I know. So I kind of understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why Apple did this because searching for the power button on Macs has been a bit of a silly game
⏹️ ▶️ John for many years. And it seems silly to tech nerds who are like, I remember when the
⏹️ ▶️ John power button was on the keyboard and I loved it or whatever. But if you don’t know where it is, like people just want to open up their laptop and if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s turned off, they just want to mash it with their meaty paws and have it turn on. So this is the right
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to do 99% of the time, except that 1% of the time when you wanna clean the keyboard when it’s incredibly frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know the solution. Maybe there should be a GUI to toggle this off in system settings somewhere that nobody can find, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. In the meantime, maybe check out one of the keyboard cleaning apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsor this week, Click for Sonos, and thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the member perks is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week, Overtime, we’ll be looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some of the discussions recently about what is a photo? You know, comparing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the different phone and camera vendors’ definitions, like what is a photo? How does it relate to things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI edits? It’s kind of an interesting, meaty topic, so that’s gonna be our Overtime topic this week. What is a photo?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much, everybody. You can join to hear it at atv.fm slash join, and we will talk
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. John didn’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to. Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John check podcast so long
John’s Quicksilver update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see John’s Quicksilver update. Like, is this Quicksilver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the launcher from a thousand years ago, Quicksilver? It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sure is. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god, what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been in the notes for a while. I started using Quicksilver ages ago as my
⏹️ ▶️ John launcher thing. I use it in a very limited way. I’ve talked about it on the show. I mostly just use it to launch apps and do a few other things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had it for years and years and, you know, I know there’s a million other launchers. I own a million other launchers
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, but I just like Quicksilver does what I want and I’m good with it. I like how it looks. I like how it works. I like everything about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’m so used to it. I don’t need to do anything fancier than it does. Everything’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Quicksilver, being a very old app whose original developer
⏹️ ▶️ John moved on to do other things, has had a bumpy road in recent… the past
⏹️ ▶️ John five years or so, maybe. I think someone else picked up the project, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot of people developing and maintaining it. And when it works, that’s fine but when it starts getting flaky
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like well it’s open source maybe I could try to fix it myself I can never get the
⏹️ ▶️ John freaking thing to build because of some obscure Xcode error that I can’t figure out and it’s objective C so I’m like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to do that you file a bug but then you feel bad because it’s just one guy trying to maintain the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in his spare time and you’re like maybe I should just try another launcher so I just go through all the other launchers
⏹️ ▶️ John that I already own buy the latest Alfred power pack make sure I have the latest version of all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John try raycast all these new fancy things and it was like you know I can get by with some of these but
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of miss Quicksilver and then the Quicksilver dev will like come back from vacation and make a change
⏹️ ▶️ John and Quicksilver will start working again and just I just feel like I’m kind of stuck here because
⏹️ ▶️ John I I’m just so used to Quicksilver and I just wanted to continue to work the way it has always worked
⏹️ ▶️ John but the things I’m getting hung up and so some of the problems I’ve been having with it is sometimes they were just playing
⏹️ ▶️ John crash and that’s one of the worst things it can do because it’s faceless I run it in faceless mode There’s no dock icon. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar icon. It’s just faceless It’s just part of my Mac and there’s nothing worse than hitting command space and having nothing happen
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I have a spotlight bound to command option space so having a launcher and hitting command space and
⏹️ ▶️ John starting to type and Nothing happening. Well a that typing is now going into whatever the hell you were in
⏹️ ▶️ John like a messages window That’s like whatever the beginning of what you’re gonna type and B just makes your computer feel like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John broken, right? It’s just like just it’s like it’s like getting on an escalator that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John move, right? my computer is not doing what it’s supposed to do. And then it’s like hung in the background
⏹️ ▶️ John or it’s like it’s crashing, you need to relaunch it. And how would I relaunch it? Command space Q, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John no, that doesn’t work. It’s a chicken egg. Like I don’t know how many times I’ve done that to try to relaunch
⏹️ ▶️ John Quicksilver. It’s just madness, right? Sometimes it hangs. And then there’s the other thing that it was doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually filed a bug on was like, it would launch. But if you look at the Quicksilver catalog, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is like the list of things you want it to index that are searchable, I have a very limited catalog with a bunch of custom
⏹️ ▶️ John items in it. And I’d like type command space and start typing something and it wouldn’t auto-complete
⏹️ ▶️ John to the thing that I know is there. And I’d go look in the catalog and it would be like, yeah, look in this folder
⏹️ ▶️ John and scan all the files. And it would say zero items scan. I’m like, what do you mean zero items? So I hit the little refresh circle
⏹️ ▶️ John button and it would scan it and say, oh, a hundred items. Oh, why didn’t you scan them when you booted up? It’s like, oh, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you have it set to manually scan, to automatically scan, to scan every hour? You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried all these different things So the bottom line was, it was just not scanning my catalog. You’d log in,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d boot your computer, log in, and Quick Server would be running, but half the catalog
⏹️ ▶️ John would not be scanned. For no errors logged anywhere, I was just like, oh, I can’t use it like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh, either it’s crashed and it’s not running at all, or when it’s running, I hit Command Space and start typing stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t find the things that I said. So I’m like, this is too much. I can’t, it’s not doing the job
⏹️ ▶️ John that it needed to do. So I spent a while using Alpharet, and I sort of hammered Alfred into
⏹️ ▶️ John shape to try to make it more like Quicksilver. It’s not exactly like it in ways
⏹️ ▶️ John that are, in pointless ways, just like aesthetics. Like I like the big, I use like the Quicksilver
⏹️ ▶️ John bezel, bezel classic, I think, whatever it is. It was the original appearance of Quicksilver and
⏹️ ▶️ John they changed it years and years ago and I complained and I said, hey, why don’t you just leave the old appearance
⏹️ ▶️ John in too? You have seven different appearances but you deleted the original appearance? Just leave them all in so we can pick our appearance. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John brought back the one and they called it classic or whatever. That’s the one that I used. It’s got really big icons. When you type command
⏹️ ▶️ John space and start typing something, it cycles through the matching icon. Like as you type, as it refines
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it just basically, it just shows you the top hit. And configurably, you can make it after
⏹️ ▶️ John a delay show you the second and third and fourth hits, or you can make it only when you hit the down arrow show you the second and third
⏹️ ▶️ John hits. But the bottom line is when I’m typing, I just want to see one very large icon right in front of me that
⏹️ ▶️ John is cycling as I type things. And if I want to, I have it set. So if I want to see the third and fourth, second,
⏹️ ▶️ John third and fourth options, I use the down arrow. Alfred doesn’t work like that. Alfred has a configurable amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff that it’s going to show you, but it doesn’t, it can’t just show you the one item and the icon is smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you do make it show you only like the one item and you don’t have the option to show the other ones, like it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John the same, right? But you know, hey, it works. And so I was using Alfred for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time, but like I said, the Quicksilver developer came back and he fixed some bug in something and the Quicksilver
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t crashing anymore. And by the way, Quicksilver was only crashing on my computer, but not on my wife’s computer, but she has a different
⏹️ ▶️ John catalog set than I do. But for a while it was freezing on her computer and she was complaining about Quicksilver,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m like, oh, I’m gonna have to take her off Quicksilver, maybe I’ll put her onto Spotlight. And just, it’s made me think about how
⏹️ ▶️ John such a small part of my computing life can throw everything else into chaos. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like if the right button on your mouse only works sometimes. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a big deal, but it’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t realize how
⏹️ ▶️ John often, you don’t realize how often you’re doing that. a quick workaround just click it again or something right and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John know the workaround of quicksilver like launch it with spotlight or whatever but it’s just been a mess anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John right now i’m running quicksilver again and it’s no longer crashing no longer freezing it scanning my catalog so fingers crossed but
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m not going to write myself a quicksilver replacement and like i said i can’t even get quicksilver to build due to things that are
⏹️ ▶️ John above my pay grade and x code causing it just not to build or maybe it will build but it won’t let me attach a debugger because i wanted to like
⏹️ ▶️ John catch where the crash was or whatever and like ldb gives me some error and I won’t attach to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, that’s all. I just wanted to complain about Quicksilver, which has been such a fixture in my computing life
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sure everyone’s going to send me all their alternatives. Like I said, I probably already own all of them
⏹️ ▶️ John and some of them are really good and some of them are really cool and some of them, you know, tons of them do things that Quicksilver couldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John dream of, but I’m just so used to Quicksilver, I just wish it would like continue to work the way it
⏹️ ▶️ John used to work and I would be happy with it. I don’t need any new features. I don’t need anything. It’s needed to stay the same as it is
⏹️ ▶️ John forever, but unfortunately that’s not the way computers work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, you are going to get all those responses from everybody saying, why don’t you switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Launcher X? There’s so many of them now. They’re very good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did switch away from Quicksilver, but I understand why you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to because these launchers become such a part of how you interact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the computer. The comparison to the right mouse button is not that bad because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is like a basic input mechanism. It is, you know, like changing to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different launcher, I think it’s kind of like changing your keyboard. It’s like, you know, you can get one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works pretty similarly. There’s going to be a lot of differences in some of the details, but it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is a fundamental way that you interact with your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like changing your shell, which is another thing that I’ve been resisting doing since 1993, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I still use an ancient shell.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve complained about this a couple of times online. If you do anything with Unix stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like, oh, and sure, just copy and paste this and it will do what you want. And it’s always for Bash. Or these
⏹️ ▶️ John days you’ll see it’s for Bash or Phish. There’s just so much open source software that just assumes, well, of course everybody uses Bash
⏹️ ▶️ John or Phish or ZSH. Those are the only shells, right? Like, no, that’s not my shell.
⏹️ ▶️ John And all shells are not the same. And I can’t copy and paste that because it won’t work in my shell. So yeah, changing, launchers like
⏹️ ▶️ John changing shells and that, oh, I could change shells real easily, but now I gotta take everything that I
⏹️ ▶️ John built up since 1993 in my shell, which is TCSH, which is ancient and nobody should use it, do not use this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John would have to take all that stuff and reproduce it in my new shell. And it’s exactly the same with Quicksilver, although it’s a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John number of things. So you wanna use Alfred. Can I essentially port all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that I was doing in Quicksilver and have them be the same keyboard shortcut? So it just looks different but works
⏹️ ▶️ John the same. And the answer is yes, I could do that and did do that after some pain, but in the
⏹️ ▶️ John end, it didn’t quite look the same. And it’s like, well, what do you care? It looks slightly different, it’s fine. Like, who cares? I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I just kinda like the way Quicksilver works. So yeah, Alfred is my fallback. I have Alfred set up to do
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much everything Quicksilver, not everything, everything that I care about that Quicksilver does. There’s some other stuff, like I think Quicksilver
⏹️ ▶️ John does large text a little bit differently, and some other slight differences in searching and tabbing
⏹️ ▶️ John and typing. Like, there’s still differences, but I can get by with Alfred. That is my choice, my personal
⏹️ ▶️ John choice for replacement, but the time spent sort of porting your
⏹️ ▶️ John world from one thing to another very much reminded me of what it will be like someday when
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m forced to port my world from TCSH to another shell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because like, it’s similar to a shell, if you mostly just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use one of these launchers on its, you know, for its like surface level feature of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launching apps quickly, like that’s that is what it does on the surface. You can do the same thing with spotlight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little a little bit less quickly, but for the most part, it’s like you can use this on the surface and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch those apps quickly. And if that’s all you do. I have to say, Spotlight is
⏹️ ▶️ John really good these days. It is much better than it used to be. Every time I’m on a default Mac and I use Spotlight,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, Spotlight is honestly one of my contenders for a Quicksilver replacement is just use Spotlight.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as configurable as any of those cool launchers and everything, which is bad, but it’s still pretty quick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it is an option. The problem is, if all you do is that surface level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, then you can switch freely between these options and you won’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much difference. But again, like a shell, good analogy, the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you get into any more advanced features than that, then it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of muscle memory lock-in. It becomes very disruptive. This is why,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so my shell of choice, or my launcher of choice is LaunchBar. And I actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, I am a very shallow, basic user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all these launchers features. I don’t do the second level, all right, do this, then do this, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this. I don’t do any of that. I mostly just use it as a launcher and occasionally as an emoji search. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s basically like a
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you open files or folders with it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Almost never. A couple big hits, like Dropbox, I’ll open that. But for the most part, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing very basic things with these launchers. However, in LaunchBar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LaunchBar has by far my favorite multiple clipboard manager interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not because it’s like the best in the world. You know, I don’t know, I haven’t used every clipboard manager.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s because it fits me really well and I have incredible muscle memory for it. And any Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does not have clipboard management done the way I think it should be done, like in LaunchBar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels broken to me. Like I get that feeling from that. And so even though I’m only using a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shallow amount of the features in this launcher, that many other launchers could do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just fine, I am a hundred percent tied to LaunchBar the same way you are to Quicksilver, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the clipboard management is just in my hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I could learn a different system if I really had to, but the amount of friction required when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have the way LaunchBar does it, Any change in that introduces so much friction. It’s almost like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing keyboard layouts. It’s like, yeah, I can type on some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other non-US English keyboard layout, but I’m going to make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of mistakes and I’m gonna be slower for a little bit and it’s gonna be frustrating if I don’t need to be doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s how this is. It’s like changing keyboard layouts. Yeah, you can get by,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but why get by with a change and get used to it if you don’t have to?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of dreading, well not dreading, like we’ve been saying for years, Apple needs to add multiple clipboard support
⏹️ ▶️ John Disabled by default, but available because it is such, like once, you know, every nerd in the world has gone
⏹️ ▶️ John to multiple clipboards for like a decade now, right? But it, and it is a nerd feature, but it’s at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point, I feel like it kind of like the second mouse button. It’s like, it’s so important. Every OS
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to have second mouse button support built in and also multiple clipboard support built in. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can disable it by default so not to confuse people, but it’s gotta be there. But the danger for people like us is, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we all got our favorite third-party clipboard managers that we’ve been using for a decade. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John the question is, do I keep using my third-party one or do I switch to the system one? Switching to the system
⏹️ ▶️ John one is like, oh, it’s one fewer thing I have to worry about installing or whatever, but it surely will work differently than whatever third-party one we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using and we’ve got all our muscle memory problem. And it’s not like Apple’s gonna make it infinitely configurable. So Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John please add multiple clipboard support to every single OS you make. But please
⏹️ ▶️ John also do not disable the ability for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco us to use our
⏹️ ▶️ John third party ones. You probably need some accessibility permission that requires 17 dialogues and
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to read them
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for them every week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the record, nobody asked, but I have been using Alfred forever. I’ve tried most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the other ones and aesthetically I don’t have any problem with them off the top of my head,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they think differently than I do. And so because of that, it’s just a non-starter for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s the one that everyone is obsessed with lately? Raycast or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Raycast is one of the fancy new launchers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I tried it briefly. Again, it just does not think the way I think. It doesn’t mean it’s bad. I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s bad at all. I’m not saying that LaunchBar is bad or Quicksilver is bad. It’s just that none of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey click with the way I like to get things done. And so, because of that, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Alfred forever. I’ve had the power packs, you know, all the time. That’s always been what I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used and I have no particular reason to leave anytime soon
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah it really is to think about the shell thing because it’s like just to give one example one of the things I use quicksail for
⏹️ ▶️ John is mounting volumes Because the finder sucks so bad that mounting them through the finder is like pulling teeth
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I can hit command space and type two letters and it returned it’s so much faster When
⏹️ ▶️ John you change shells one of the things you have to quote-unquote port is oh I probably built up many aliases
⏹️ ▶️ John that I use in my shell And the aliases themselves are fine. It’s just something you type and a different
⏹️ ▶️ John thing happens. But if you have complicated aliases, porting those aliases to a new shell,
⏹️ ▶️ John at minimum requires you learning the syntax to declare an alias in the shell if it’s different than yours. But you might also have to quote
⏹️ ▶️ John things differently to capture arguments or the second argument here or whatever, or which
⏹️ ▶️ John things need to be escaped with double backslash versus single backslash. Stuff like that makes me think about what I
⏹️ ▶️ John had to do with Alfred. To do the simple thing, which Alfred is 100% capable of, but how long did
⏹️ ▶️ John it take me to figure out how to make Alfred mount a volume, a password
⏹️ ▶️ John protected volume, in response to a keyboard sequence, and it took me an embarrassingly long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, like that, I mean, again, I’m saved by the fact that I don’t do much with Quicksilver so
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t have to port too many things, but if I had to port all my aliases, and honestly, I don’t even like other
⏹️ ▶️ John shells that much either, but anyway, do not use TC, don’t let your children use TCSH. Let them
⏹️ ▶️ John use Bash or Phish or ZSH or something more modern, but it seems like at this point, I’m just going to die using TCSH.