608: Boot to Toot
10 Oct 2024The Google ruling, sports (?), PC-gaming laptops over time, and whether non-case iPhone cases can tempt case-less Casey Liss.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- NotebookLM podcast
- Camera Control button material
- iPhone case suggestions
- Spigen Ultra Hybrid T MagFit
- Arc Pulse
- Leather backs
- Sleep-tagging app suggestions
- Windows anti-malware app suggestions
- Adaptive Transparency report
- Wireless phone recovery
- End ↔ end encryption coming for iPhone ↔ Android RCS messages
- More tweaks to screen recording prompts
- Hotkey registration in Sequoia
- Liquid detection in Sequoia
- Epic gets a win against Google
- Apple nopes out of OpenAI investment
- Ask ATP:
- Will John buy the new $700 Playstation Pro?
- Have the Vehicle Motion Cues helped John’s motion sickness? (via Justin Waring)
- When will the first true “built from the ground up for AI” phone be? (via Neil McGregor)
- Is it time to move to Passkeys?
- Post-show: Adam’s gaming PC adventures
- Members-only ATP Overtime: AI moats & trade secrets
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- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online.
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Chapters
- macOS Se…quoia!
- NotebookLM follow-up
- More cases vs. Camera Control 🖼️
- Sponsor: Tailscale
- Sleep-tagging apps
- Windows malware removal
- Adaptive Transparency experiences
- Wireless iPhone 16 recovery
- E2E for RCS
- Sequoia security tweaks
- Google ruling
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code atp)
- Sports Corner
- Apple bails out of OpenAI investment
- #askatp: John buying PS5 Pro?
- #askatp: Vehicle Motion Cues
- #askatp: First phone “designed for AI”
- #askatp: Using passkeys?
- Ending theme
- Gaming laptops over time 🖼️
macOS Se…quoia!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, I’m recording from what the hell is this Sonoma Sequoia Sequoia. There we go Sequoia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, I’ve been doing that for a little while now. Yeah, is it is it? Okay? Like I just installed it today
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I upgraded on day one. So I’ve done all the episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since then I’ve heard absolutely nothing about it from anybody. So I guess it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John No news is good news Although you’re gonna hit you’re gonna hear more about it in the show today. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did I make a mistake? No, it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although actually I don’t know if we have a better time to bring this up and I was thinking about this literally like half an hour ago. And so I’ll just bring it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. I am really, really enjoying what is the official term for it? iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mirroring, I was gonna say iPhone remote control, but iPhone mirroring. I used it all the time. At first, I think in no small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part because it was new and fun and fancy. But it is really convenient to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to effectively I don’t think this is literal, but effectively VNC into your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and control it from your Mac. And it seems to do a pretty good job of like mirroring the clipboard and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. The one thing that drives me bananas about it is that all of the different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gestures that I’ve trained for the iOS simulator are not the same. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an example, to scroll in the iOS simulator, you have to click and drag, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this, you scroll and command shift H in the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simulator is hit, you know, hit the home button. And in this, it’s command one of all things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which like fine, it’s an easier gesture, but it is so wildly different than what we’re used do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so as an iOS developer, it’s kind of a pain in the butt, but in every other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, it is freaking great. And it’ll even pull through audio, if I’m not mistaken, we’ve only done that like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once or twice. But I genuinely, I’m not just saying this because you’re sitting right here, Marco, I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that the Overcast macOS app, as long as you’re running on an Apple Silicon Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hi, John, is actually pretty good. But if you don’t fancy that, or for some for some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason you can’t install it on like your work computer or whatever, but you can do the iPhone mirroring thing. You can pull
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the audio right through and use Overcast on your iPhone, even though it’s connecting, you know, it’s sending the audio through your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is really well done and I’ve been really impressed with it. And I don’t think we had talked about it yet on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I honestly, I haven’t even used it yet. So I wouldn’t have said anything about it. John doesn’t use iPhones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so he wouldn’t have said anything about it. We did
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about it. I’ll actually, maybe it was Rectifs. We were talking about using it to rearrange stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That was Rectifs, I believe. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, anyway, I have used it.
⏹️ ▶️ John did you know that iPhone mirroring works on Intel Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m actually a little bit surprised. I really honestly am.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, but that’s good. Like if you want to use Overcast on your Intel Mac, that’s how you do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true, actually. I didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, there’s a website too, I hear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is an Overcast website, allegedly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Is there? Maybe not last
NotebookLM follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were discussing a couple of Notebook LM podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of which was a regurgitation of one of your posts, John, one of which was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey semi-regurgitation of your pasta recipe, which I saw a handful of people ask for, which I got a chuckle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of. But apparently we may or may not have messed something up. Can you explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on here, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Regurgitation is actually a good word. I’ll get to that in a second. But many people pointed out that one of the things I was
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining about the generated a podcast that it didn’t mention a specific example from
⏹️ ▶️ John my article, it did mention it. Basically, I totally missed when it mentioned it because it was at the very
⏹️ ▶️ John beginning and I was too busy snarking about something else. But the other reason I missed it is that it mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John it but then used it as like, it was the mention of like emailing the artist to do something. It uses that
⏹️ ▶️ John as an example of the person who created it maintaining the copyright, right? So the artist creates
⏹️ ▶️ John it, they have the copyright for themselves. When I expected them to use it as I did as an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of transferring the copyright in exchange for payment. So I apologize to the Notebook
⏹️ ▶️ John LM podcast for missing their mention of that at the very top, because I was too busy snarking about something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think it has follow-up?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s one place we’ve definitely got them beat. There’s not going to be a follow-up podcast, unless you specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John spoon-feed it to them. But Casey’s word that he used, and I’m glad he used that, because I couldn’t think of a good word for it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was trying to think before the show started how I should describe this. The more I thought about and discussed the Notebook LM podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John with people, like just going back and forth on Macedon and stuff about it, the more it seems to me that
⏹️ ▶️ John the podcasts it generated, like the best way to describe them would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, at least for the first portion of it as sort of a,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say a paraphrasing of the content,
⏹️ ▶️ John regurgitation is similar, and then it’s like, okay, so here’s the article, and then the hosts
⏹️ ▶️ John of the podcast, the AI hosts of the podcast. basically do the equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of rewriting the article into podcast speak, like they just speak it out loud
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than reading it, but they’re not doing anything more than trying to,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically rewording sentence by sentence, point by point in slightly different orders, which is different
⏹️ ▶️ John than summarizing, right? Regurgitation, I think, I think that’s the word I couldn’t come up with in case you can’t with it. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a really good word because they are throwing back at you everything that was in the article in
⏹️ ▶️ John a slightly less pleasant form, but it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John And then in the second part where they sort of riff-reform on it, it’s more like they just took some of those words
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, looked at the Wikipedia pages that are related to them and went back and forth. And I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of why I think a lot of people when they hear these generated podcasts think they go on too long, is that they
⏹️ ▶️ John are, like they’re longer than the article. You would have just read the article and it would
⏹️ ▶️ John take less time, and it’s not because they have a lot of commentary, it’s because they take a long time to get around with everything. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about that last episode. If you want to hear those podcasts, if you skipped them last time and you want to hear them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can take a look. But I will say that doing live commentary on
⏹️ ▶️ John something you’ve never heard before is a lot harder than it sounds. There’s a reason, like Mystery Science Theater 3000, they
⏹️ ▶️ John pre-write and script all those jokes, believe it or not. They just don’t do it in real time. So. I don’t ruin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, I mean, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Notebook LM’s defense, like number one, I think there is, a lot of media out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just regurgitation of some source post or source material or source press release. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is a place for that, but also in Notebook LM’s defense, in each of those two examples,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only gave it one article. Like I think the actual use of the tool is meant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for larger data sets. Like, oh, I have these 15 documents or all these different sources that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to get some info out of or summarize or make, get some bullet points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of. When you feed it more information, it would not necessarily behave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly like that. I mean, it would still generate the same type of thing with some of the same benefits and pitfalls,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it would have more broad source material in most uses.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not just limited, like I don’t know the details of Notebook LLM, but I have to think
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is what Apple would describe as a quote, world knowledge LLM, because the parts where
⏹️ ▶️ John I was complaining that it sounded like it was reading for a Wikipedia page, it clearly has lots of world knowledge,
⏹️ ▶️ John like before you feed it anything, right? It could comment on AI and all those things. That wasn’t in the
⏹️ ▶️ John article. That’s why I’m like, oh, it’s reading from Wikipedia page. Again, about some just, it has a lot of general knowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what it’s bringing to the table. So yes, you only fed it the one article, but it’s got however
⏹️ ▶️ John many billions of words that it was trained on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m just glad I could contribute a recursive agent to the
⏹️ ▶️ John this. That’s good. And you know, like Margo said, sometimes that’s exactly what you want. And that we
⏹️ ▶️ John have tons of forms of media out there today where that’s what we pay people to do because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a service. Like it saves you the trouble of having to have, you know, read the thing yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Usually you want it to be either compressing it or adding some analysis or insight,
⏹️ ▶️ John but even just straight regurgitation does have a role. I’m not sure I’d want those particular
⏹️ ▶️ John AI hosts doing the regurgitation, but you know, to each their own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, to be fair, like I, there is, there are lots of things in my life where I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would want real humans doing a podcast about whatever I want to hear about, but I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say there’s nothing I would ever want this kind of thing to do. Like, this kind of thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t intend to make it a big part of my life, but I probably will actually use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something sometime, either in either this exact product or some future version of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John What was that thing that Marilyn talks about, like the shipping news thing? Some people from the UK know what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m talking about. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Maritime Report where this human would read it with a certain intonation and basically just he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John reading off like the weather report or like whatever, like it’s just, it could very easily
⏹️ ▶️ John be done by an AI trained voice because it’s very standardized, there’s no riffing or anything, but people
⏹️ ▶️ John find it comforting and they like to have it read to them and whatever that pleasing British person’s voice is.
More cases vs. Camera Control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we talk about the camera control buttons on Apple’s cases, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I kept referring to like the thing that Apple puts on them to transfer the capacitiveness of your touch
⏹️ ▶️ John as a quartz thing But it’s not it’s sapphire. Many people wanted to correct me on that. I am happy
⏹️ ▶️ John to be corrected I just want someone to make a case with a sapphire or like it doesn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be sapphire It can be that plastic thing with the metal things through it. I don’t know something That’s not a big hole and
⏹️ ▶️ John another week has gone by another week filled with Instagram ads for iPhone cases and another week without me finding
⏹️ ▶️ John anything exciting or good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I have a case from Spigen here that just arrived today that has
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re out there. Like I said, is it the one with the copper dots or is it a sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It appears to be just solid white, but you can tell, but it has a rim.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look real close, you can see there is a rim around its perimeter of some other material.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think it might be be doing the same trick Apple does with theirs of just like some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know solid material that with like a conductive rim around the outside but it does work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the Spigen clear case I’ll put a link they have a thousand cases so and you know you go on Amazon you try to find this exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one you won’t find it there’s it’s just in a sea of other cases often by them so it’s hard to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway I’ll put a link somebody else I think referred me to it. And as a clear case goes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. It’s not. It’s better than apples in certain ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The buttons feel better. It does unfortunately have a closed bottom, unlike apples.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that keeps getting in my way. And it’s a clear case. So like it looks okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t look amazing. But we actually have other case recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least experiences.
⏹️ ▶️ John the case situation is grim, but many, many people want to suggest cases. And I’ve gotten the main reason I want to read these
⏹️ ▶️ John out is to stop people from suggesting. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe someone else will find them useful. So here’s the first one. This has been suggested for years, not just this year, but every year we talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about cases. There is a contingent of people who really, really like this case. And maybe one of the people who’s listening,
⏹️ ▶️ John they might like this case too. But the fact that they keep recommending it to me, it boggles
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind because it is like the opposite of everything they want out of a case. They’re like, oh, you want an open bottom?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, how about this? I’ll put a link in the show notes. This is the Arc Pulse case. I’m not sure if different brands have similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. And I would say case is a generous term for this. This is,
⏹️ ▶️ John The way I would describe it is it’s like Princess Leia’s metal bikini from Return of the Jedi, but for your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. That’s exactly what this is. It is a very uncomfortable looking piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of metal that just sort of covers the corners of your phone. It goes like around
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera mesa and it covers the top and bottom corners of the phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John has an open bottom and that’s it. They’re like, this is great because really you just need the corners to be protected because that’s the main part
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna hit the ground if you drop it or whatever, which I’ll just pause right there and say, that’s mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John true, but it is very, very possible to drop your phone onto something like say, a set of cement
⏹️ ▶️ John stairs or something where you will hit the sides and maybe your screen doesn’t break, but you’re gonna scar up the sides. So
⏹️ ▶️ John right away, I’m not even accepting the premise that the corners are the only thing you need to protect. But why would I
⏹️ ▶️ John like this? I want a leather case for the grippiness of the leather. And I want it to cover
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, including all the buttons and including the camera button with a, you know, a pass-through thingy of some kind of there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is absolutely nothing like anything that I want out of a case, and yet
⏹️ ▶️ John people keep recommending it to me. So A, please stop. And B, if you want a case like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have never seen one because it is a very rare, very interesting form of case. We will put a link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can try it out because it basically gives you the feel of a naked phone with substantial protection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And actually building off of that, the opposite of that is the next section.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want a totally textured back, but no protection of any of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corners or sides, there’s this entire category called leather or just magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case backs. It’s basically a flat plate of some material, oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leather, that uses MagSafe to stick itself onto the back of the phone and just covers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only the back and not the sides.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so many people are suggesting this because hey, guess what? Open bottom, also open top, also
⏹️ ▶️ John open left, also open right, right? And honestly, this is actually closer because it does have
⏹️ ▶️ John leather on it. So I can see people saying, hey, you want a leather case and you want an open bottom. This, you don’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about the camera pass through because there’s nothing on the sides. I do find these attractive, but I will clarify
⏹️ ▶️ John that the leather I want on my phone is partly, and maybe for the
⏹️ ▶️ John most part, the majority wise, for the sides, because that’s where I grip my phone and the leather makes
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone grippy when I grip it from the sides. So not having anything on the sides is not a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. And then yes, obviously there’s the fact that I do drop my phone and I do actually want some additional
⏹️ ▶️ John protection. And yeah, the leather that goes around helps with that. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want a case that’s not really a case, but has a really nice look to it and it looks like it might be comfy
⏹️ ▶️ John on the back. Hey, there’s lots of magnetic back thingies that aren’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These caught my eye because back in the iPhone 4 days, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had, for my iPhone 4, I had basically a stick-on piece of leather that had a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny circle cut out for the camera on the iPhone 4. It was exactly what this creates, metal sides,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise no case feel, but a very nice textured leather back for grip. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think honestly for looks. And that I was so happy with. I freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loved that thing. Just a stick on piece of leather for the back. That was it. It granted the phones were a lot smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lighter back then. So grip and side protection were not quite as needed as they are today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was glorious. So I decided to try one of these. The one that most people recommend is by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nomad Goods. I actually ordered that one as well. I’m gonna compare it. But the one I’ve been using for the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week is by this brand Suti, S-U-T-I. and I also found one by Atom Studios,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A-T-O-M Studios. They have a whole bunch that use like vegan leather, so I’m gonna try one of those as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why I got one and I’m now ordering three is that I fricking love this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I don’t know if I’m going to stick with this form factor, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks and feels fantastic. It does, however,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John pointed out, offer really no protection against drops at all. Like if you drop your phone, do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not do this. If you don’t drop your phone and you just want some extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grip and some texture and some looks and maybe some surface grippiness, like when you lay down on a surface, you don’t want to feel like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sliding off all the time, this could be it. I think it’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Suity one is the one I have so far. I think it’s really, really good. The only reason I started branching out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Nomad and the Atom Studios ones is that the Suity one, the leather is only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the flat part of the back. as it rounds the corner around the edges, there’s like a big plastic gasket that goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the whole thing. So it’s not as grippy around the edges. Whereas the Nomad and the Atom Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, the leather appears to wrap around the edges. So I’m kind of curious to see how that feels, feel the different kinds of leather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In particular, the Atom Studios one is, I mentioned that’s a plant-based fake leather. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly is more attractive to me if it’s good. So I’m gonna see how these work, but honestly, this is an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option. because then you are using all of the actual buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your phone. So you don’t have to worry about buttons feeling bad or being covered or uncovered or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, I think it looks fantastic. I have the white phone, so I have like the bright silver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco band around it with a black leather plate on the back. I think it looks really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it looks good too. And that is a good point that one of the reasons I do like leather is for the surface.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when I put my phone down, screen up on a surface like the couch arm or something that it gives a little bit of extra
⏹️ ▶️ John slipping off. But yeah, unfortunately I need to have the sides. That’s the main reason I want leather is
⏹️ ▶️ John those side grips when I’m holding my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I use this for like two hours and I immediately ordered another one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ordered AppleCare.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess you’re also getting the same ads that I am on Instagram for Cactus Leather. That’s how they brand some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the plant-based leather. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, yeah. There’s all sorts. I’ve tried pineapple leather before. Like there’s a whole bunch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, honestly, Apple, I mean, well, Apple seems kind of stuck on the closed bottom with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ John of their clear case and the Beats case, but Apple really needs to go back to the leather well
⏹️ ▶️ John and just be like, find something that looks and feels like leather, but that is not leather. Every other company in
⏹️ ▶️ John the world is doing it. There’s so many variations. Plastis, plastic cactus, pineapple,
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever, try something, but yeah, find one of them, wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Yeah, and to be fair, like a lot of these, you know, the non-cow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based, you know, other leathers that are plant-based, there is oftentimes, I think, a non-trivial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of carbon footprint there. Yeah, plastic isn’t great for the environment either. Yeah, they’re plastic-based or they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise, you know, petroleum-based in some form. So, like, I think there’s a lot of… I think it’s a tricky problem for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to solve. And then they have to scale it. So, you know, there’s… It’s certainly not a trivial thing for them to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think they can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I’m still going caseless, although I will say I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come crawling back a little bit to my pop socket. Oh, no!
⏹️ ▶️ John goodness, you’ve become pop socket dependent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I have. It’s terrible. I don’t know what the issue is. Maybe it’s because the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back is so slippery, like you were both
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe you should try a case. A case might be your pop socket that’s not a pop socket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like any of the cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t want a case, but you’re going to stick this. I mean, I know popsockets compressed to be really small, but once you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that, just like try case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably about to have two that I don’t want. So, you know, am I going to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box? Hey, you know, my, my, uh, my Kindle charging port, I think is on its way out. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you want to send a leather case padded in Kindles, let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, like the way it looks with the Suity one that I have, like, it looks like a nice camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have aluminum and black leather, it just looks really nice. And again, it feels great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although that leather looks a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit rumply. I don’t like the rumply leather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, it’s like textured.
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like lizard skin or whatever, you know?
Sponsor: Tailscale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Tailscale. Tailscale
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to have to worry about whether or not my Synology and my iPhone are on the same network. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to do port forwarding in order to figure out how to tunnel through the internet into my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey land at home. I just want them to connect to each other securely and privately always,
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Sleep-tagging apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, we have hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tons of suggestions from you since you’ve done all your homework about sleep tagging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, about Windows anti-malware, about active transparency. So in the hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of homework that you’ve performed, can you tell us some results, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, it might have actually been that long. So I requested a couple of recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last episode. was for an app for me to tag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my sleep each night that I’ve been tracking with the Apple Watch to tag it with arbitrary tags,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like, you know, beach or alcohol, like, you know, like whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that might affect my sleep. And then I want, I want to be able to see over time, like, you know, if I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a heavy meal, like if that’s one of the tags, heavy meal, like, is that, does that make me sleep worse?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, it’s like 15% worse if, you know, every time I have, like that kind of stuff, that’s what I wanted. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I complained last week that the apps that I had tried to find that claim to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this were all, you know, these massive, complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comically privacy-invading and surprisingly expensive subscription-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that all tried to be everything to everyone to solve every possible sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or fitness or health need you might possibly have. I got lot of recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a lot of people. I tried them all. I have not found what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All I have found is mostly more very expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very privacy invading apps that try to do everything to everyone. Like that it is it is such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mess of like these massive sleep suites. Like we we’re not gonna just solve your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sleep. We’re gonna solve your your workout recovery and your health and your stress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all that and it’s like and they have all these massive arrays of features almost every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them requires you to make an account on their service to hold your health info mmm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and almost all of them force you to subscribe to their subscription as I described last time with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no way to you know close the box and skip it or anything so you can’t you know you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re like you know 40 bucks a year for almost all of of them. So I’m like, first of all, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store is, it’s getting, it’s always changing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The App Store is certainly always changing. This is not a category that shows off the best of the App Store by any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means. So anyway, I am still looking, I’m getting a little bit tired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of looking at, I might take a break. I have yet to find this app and I’m starting to think that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just should not be doing this. to write
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Just use notes. Just write down every day when you go to
⏹️ ▶️ John bed, the time you went to bed, and any notes, any tags, you just write them as words with
⏹️ ▶️ John between them. And then if you ever want to look at, like honestly, this really still reminds me of the Exist.io
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Like, I’m lighter when I eat sausage. Or, you know, like, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I take more steps when I’m at the beach. Like, I don’t know what you’re hoping to get from this, huh? So
⏹️ ▶️ John on this, the number of data points I have is five, and out of those it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John inconclusive, when I eat a big meal, sometimes I sleep well and sometimes I don’t. Like what, what are you, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John hoping to get actionable information out of this, but I feel like your data set is going to be too small for you
⏹️ ▶️ John to get actionable information unless there’s something really obvious. And if there’s something really obvious, you won’t need an app to tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I eat spicy food, I get heartburn. Like I’ll tell you that now. You eat spicy food, you get heartburn, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like so, just use notes, write it down. You’ve got your app right there, And then you can scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John back through those notes and look for patterns. And if you say, well, it’s really hard to find patterns in these notes, I wish an app could
⏹️ ▶️ John do it for me. The app’s not gonna do any better. It’s not gonna like, if it’s not a pattern that you can see, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John write a little program that reads your notes and tries to do some sort of statistical analysis, but you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John find out you have too few data points and it’s just noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, I mean, and you certainly touched upon, like I think a major problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost any kind of sleep tracking and quantification of that kind of stuff. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not particularly actionable a lot of times because usually everyone knows, yeah, you should probably get more sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should probably drink less coffee. You should probably not have alcohol. Like, you know, everyone knows these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had coffee before I went to bed and I had bad sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Yeah, like last night I was congested. I took Sudafed. That was a terrible idea. My sleep sucked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because my heart rate was way up for the whole night. I can see that already and I know, hmm, I probably shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take Sudafed even though my nose was stuffy and maybe it would have been worse, but who knows? I was like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of know what I should and shouldn’t do already, but I was hoping to find other insights. But you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, the actionability of those is limited and challenging. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app I want is a very, very simple thing that does only this in exactly the way I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So someday maybe I’ll make that app. I think that’s the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, the answer is I shouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’ve only been talking about the actions you would take with the app, which is when I go to bed, I note this, I note
⏹️ ▶️ John the X, I note how my sleep was, I tag it with things I did. But then what’s step three? Like say you
⏹️ ▶️ John had an app that did that, presumably you’re not entering this information just for the hell of it. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John the app or you or something to do something. That’s the, I feel like the hard part. What happens after you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a tag my sleep app and you tag your sleep for a year, then what happens?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and that’s the challenge is like, how actionable would it be? So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I learn like, oh, when I sleep better at the beach than not at the beach,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’m also not, like, that’s not, that’s also not the school year, first of all. So like, maybe I just sleep better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s not the school year, cause I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John waking up super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early. Like that’s, there’s different stresses or different logistics, like, so, or, and it’s like, I can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just live at the beach all the time during middle school and high school. So like, I’m not able to do anything about that. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s kind of my, I think long-term, I think what I, what I would realize if I actually endured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these other apps that does a thousand other things, plus maybe some version of this feature, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would probably find that. I’d probably find like I would tire of the manual entry and I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tire of, you know, but by the time I actually had a lot of data, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I would find limited insights, which is probably why I shouldn’t make this. Like, look, this is, I have so many app ideas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I eventually talk myself out of. Like, this is why I haven’t made a podcast editor. Like I shouldn’t make a podcast editor for lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. And I haven’t. I should probably not make a jam band music listening app either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I, so far I haven’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you shouldn’t because there’s gonna be some sort of anti Dave Matthews band something or other in there. Like what was it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was Alan Pike’s app or steam clocks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, it was a DJ app that it wouldn’t play. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nickelback Nickelback. Yeah. And this was from Canadians no less. Um, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I will take issue with your inevitable jam band app and your anti Dave Matthews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey band hatred, which is unnecessary, but I do think this is your next step because it’s a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simple, I think, or at least at a glance, it seems like a fairly simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Collecting the data is simple. You can make an app that does that, but then what does it do with that data? How does it even present
⏹️ ▶️ John you the analysis that you want it to perform, let alone how does it perform that analysis? It’s Exist.io.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re making Exist.io.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pretty much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I think the answer is, I probably shouldn’t make this app because I probably don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it. Yeah, that’s probably true. Well, that
⏹️ ▶️ John was productive. And the.io domain might be going away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we just do ATP Diamond Dogs? I think we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco might have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A little bit, except you talk me out of something.
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re supposed to do. On my thing, it was talking me out of something.
⏹️ ▶️ John successful. I didn’t do it. We’re so good for each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but you should. Except you shouldn’t.
Windows malware removal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I also, I asked for anti-malware Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software recommendations and got a few good ones. Pretty much everybody said, yeah, just use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Malwarebytes. And many people suggested I definitely should not use CrowdStrike.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apparently, it is really not made for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least one person said you should do it because it would be fun for the podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, that’s true. Yes, in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it would be terrible. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I installed Malwarebytes. I got the paid versions, but it would do like automatic scans. It found like seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or eight things, and I have not heard about it since, which is probably a good sign.
Adaptive Transparency experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Finally, in the Marco corner here, sorry, it’s been a long time. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned a couple episodes ago when John was talking about the AirPods noise pass-through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modes and noise cancellation modes, I had said that I had not found the adaptive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparency mode very useful. And we heard from a bunch of people who were ready to say, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing, I use it myself, it’s gotten better since it launched, try it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So since then, I have been trying it again. and I still don’t love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, it is better than it was. I’m not going to use it most of the time. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still gonna stick with transparency and noise cancellation that I toggle manually when I feel like it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the issue I found with it, so like one of the days I was walking around Manhattan a lot with it. And so, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, a decent amount of, you know, taking this big long walk in Manhattan. So a lot of street noise, a lot of road noise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m trying to listen to a podcast. So I tried it then, and what I found was I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, it was blocking out too much information to the point where I couldn’t hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vehicles that were like turning into my crosswalk area. And that’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found it to be unsafe. Now there are tweaks, you can actually adjust some of the noise levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. It became somewhat adjustable since its introduction as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is getting better all the time, but I found it was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good enough And it blocked out too much of the surrounding noise for my own purposes. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that being said, like your purposes might be different. It’s very situationally dependent, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether this is right for you or not. So I’d say if you have AirPods Pro and you’re curious about this kind of stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try adaptive mode, because it is different. Like it is better than it used to be. And it is different from the other two modes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Give it a shot. It was enlightening, even though I’m choosing at the end of the day, not to use it most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree that it’s definitely worth trying again. I had mostly sworn off of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after having a not great initial experience. And I do think it’s actually that and conversation awareness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neither of them are great, but both of them are better than I thought they were and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than I think they initially were. Um, the one thing that I really dislike about transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode is that I want it to filter droning noise out quicker. So as an example, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was yesterday I mowed the lawn and I had transparency mode on.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mean adaptive transparency, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did I just call
⏹️ ▶️ John it? You keep selling a transparency, which is a different mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes. I’m sorry. You’re right. Yes, I this whole time, I’m an adaptive transparency. Thank you. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had adaptive on when I started the lawnmower, and it took a solid like three, four, five seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it to decide, okay, I need to filter this out. Is that a big deal? Of course not. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I don’t feel like it’s really saving me that much trouble from just deliberately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting on noise canceling mode if I felt like I knew I was going gonna need it. So I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sticking with it for now and just messing, just kind of going about my day when I do have my AirPods in and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeing what I think of it. But I’m not sure I’m gonna stick with it. But I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely agree with Marco, especially if you haven’t tried it in a long time, it’s worth trying it again and seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it works better for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that delay is actually a feature or at least it was cited as a feature by many people who are recommending it. They like the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea that it lets you hear the loud sound briefly before it tamped it down as a way of letting you be more aware of what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going on around you. Yeah, that’s fair. I, you know, based on all the people recommending it, I also gave
⏹️ ▶️ John it a second try. One update on that, Marco was saying, hey, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John change the things that are available as you cycle through the various noise canceling
⏹️ ▶️ John nodes. Pretty sure that’s only a feature on the pros on the AirPods 4 with active noise canceling.
⏹️ ▶️ John The UI looks different in the settings screen and I cannot choose to not have one of those things in the rotation as far as I could tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but anyway, I left them all in the rotation and I have been trying out adaptive. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think I found some instances where I use it, but especially, I mean, this may be different on the pros because their
⏹️ ▶️ John characteristics are very different. But for the AirPods 4 where they don’t actually seal your ears and sound is
⏹️ ▶️ John always gonna get around them, I find that adaptive transparencies noise canceling
⏹️ ▶️ John when it chooses to cancel out a noise, like a droning noise or like, you know, white noise type of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just not as good as full noise canceling. When you put on full noise canceling, it cancels
⏹️ ▶️ John more noise. And so I’ve been using Adaptive kind of around the house without conversational
⏹️ ▶️ John awareness, but I think with the personal volume thing where it tries to crank up the volume when things get loud around
⏹️ ▶️ John you, I think that’s a good balance for me. But when I’m like, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John in bed at night watching something on my iPad, I switch to straight up noise canceling because my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife has like the window fan on or something. Noise canceling, at least with the AirPods 4,
⏹️ ▶️ John cancels noise way better than the best adaptive ever even attempts to do. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ John found a place for adaptive in my life and I do use it when I’m just like walking around the house but I still go into full noise
⏹️ ▶️ John canceling. So I kind of wish that adaptive was like full noise canceling when I felt like it was
⏹️ ▶️ John safe, but not, but I guess maybe I’m asking too much. Like I’m kind of asking for adaptive to be like
⏹️ ▶️ John a, for it to pick which mode it wants to do. Like I want adaptive to be a thing where it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John I see your other three modes and I cycle you between them based on what I think is safe. but that’s not how it works. So
⏹️ ▶️ John adaptive is in my rotation, but I still have to manually choose
⏹️ ▶️ John the mode that I want occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It remains a mode in your lineup. Yeah.
Wireless iPhone 16 recovery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, iPhone 16 can wirelessly recover from other phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using a phone-to-phone resuscitation. So this is reading from Ars Technica, if you’ve ever had an iPhone upgrade or excuse me, update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go bad, you may have used recovery mode to resuscitate your device. A device booted into recovery mode can’t do anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by itself, but it can be connected to a working Mac or PC with a cable. And that Mac or PC can download a fresh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copy of iOS and all of your phone’s related firmware to restore it to a factory default state. You’ll need a backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to recover your personal data, but it beats having to take a trip to the Apple store or send your phone in for repairs. The new iPhone 16, 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro models add a new option for phones that are in recovery mode. Rudimentary wireless communication,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so phones that need to be recovered can be placed near another iPhone or iPad and can be restored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without using a cable, a PC, or a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like to see Apple continuing this long march towards essentially making the phone more of an independent
⏹️ ▶️ John entity. Like so much, obviously we all have Macs and we assume everyone, if they don’t have a Mac, that
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a PC, but that’s just not true, right? and anything that you do with an iOS device, like if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John ever tried to help someone, and you say, oh, just connect it to your Mac or PC, and they’re like, what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would I need a Mac or PC? I just have my phone. And you realize, oh, not everyone in the world has a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac or PC or wants a Mac or PC, and any part of the phone process that requires
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac or PC is like broken. And so Apple doing this by saying, okay, well, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have a Mac or PC, but maybe you have an old phone. Obviously, if you’re in a situation where your thing is hosed
⏹️ ▶️ John and you need something else to help you recover from it. You do have to have something else. But allowing that something else to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a phone, I think is great. And it makes me wonder what the heck they’re waiting for on the watch, which is still completely
⏹️ ▶️ John dependent on the phone. I mean, obviously, there’s a synergy there where they want you to buy a phone and a watch, but they want you to buy a Mac too.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like the phone is overdue for a little bit, you know, take off some of the train wheels,
⏹️ ▶️ John let it be a little more independent. Hey, it’s got it got its own phone number, it can make phone calls, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John so tied to its parent phone and I think they should edge that along. But it’s nice to see the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John continuing to assert its independence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think that this is indicative of perhaps non-pro phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going without a cable at all? We’ve been talking about this for years like no ports, no ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this indicates that that’s where Apple’s going, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since the response from USB-C seems to be universal praise. But it makes me wonder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes me wonder.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe, like Apple doesn’t seem to be in a hurry and I don’t think users are in a hurry either. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like it’s kind of one of those things, kind of like USB-C, that when Apple finally decides to do it, it will be
⏹️ ▶️ John after the point when it’s, you know, they’ll let it be non-controversial, right? Right, if it did it
⏹️ ▶️ John today, it would be controversial, but there’s gonna come a point where a few people will care about it and they’ll just do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But as someone who continues to charge with the wire pretty much all the time, except when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John in the car and the MagSafe mount, I still could give it a few more years before
⏹️ ▶️ John they go full wireless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don’t see it happening. I think phones use too much power, and the inefficiency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and inconvenience in a lot of cases of wireless charging. The carbon neutrality, yeah. Yeah, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carbon neutrality over the last term of the product, it would go up like, what, 30% or something, if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was wireless only?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder how many people, what the percentages are. only Apple knows, but like how much wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John charging used to be 0% because the phone didn’t support it. Right now, what percent of phone charging in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, I don’t know, battery capacity or milliamp hours added to the phone is that? And then you do the math on
⏹️ ▶️ John the massive inefficiency of wireless charging versus wired and see how much waste heat we’re throwing out and how much
⏹️ ▶️ John energy that adds. Yeah, that could be another thing keeping Apple from doing this for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think also like, I mean, how many like regulars out there do you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using MagSafe for wireless charging instead of instead of cables? I see almost no one using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s a good pop culture thing to watch. Like in pop culture, you will very often see people complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John in modern TV shows and movies that their phone is out of charge and they’re desperate to find a charger and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John always plugging a wire into it. Right. We’ll know that that turnover has happened when in
⏹️ ▶️ John pop culture, we see the person who’s desperate for their phone to be charged. I don’t know, sticking it to a MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John puck. I’m not even sure how they would do it. But yeah, obviously this that’s a trailing indicator not a leading indicator, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah The wires are still pretty prevalent in popular media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also think about like the the practicality of that like a lot of people carry a phone charger with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for whatever reason that you know A lot of people need to do that Are they gonna carry around like a USB plug and like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant magsafe puck in their bag? Yeah, my safe pucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and like or what? What about like if you have to charge up from some like battery out of a vending machine like people do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a thing Like how is that gonna work? There’s there are so many contexts where I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Regular people just use wire to charge their phone the vast majority of the time it based on just my anecdotal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco observation trade broken wires Sure, whatever but and oftentimes, you know cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but like a drugstore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course But but like that’s what people do Let’s what like if I need a fast charge like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone’s low and I’m gonna be you know that you know in my House for a while and let me charge up in 15 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll use USB C I’ll use it almost every time. Like, I think a lot of people use the wire. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole idea of, we’re gonna make a phone that has no port on it whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t say they would never do that, but I can’t see that ever being the mainstream phone option. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe, you know, the rumor about the iPhone 17 slim that might come out next year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe something like that, if that wasn’t intended to be the mainstream model. This is not enough room for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like if that wasn’t intended be the mainstream model iPhone. Maybe that could be a way they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get that. But I think most people don’t want that. Most people want a cable. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to know how they could get to no cable in a way that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not controversial to people, rather than thinking of advances in wireless technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to do is fast forward to the point where, I mean, who knows if we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get this far, but if Silicon continues to advance and we don’t, and the wall that we know we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John inevitably going to hit is farther out than we think it is, you could get to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John the total amount of energy inside a phone, in the battery, for our all day battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life, is just lower. And then you don’t need advances, super advances in
⏹️ ▶️ John charging technology, use the same stupid inductive coils we have now, but because you’re filling a battery
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a quarter of the size, all these issues become much less, right? And if you have solid state batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John and they charge really fast, I think that’s how you would get to it. It would essentially require advances,
⏹️ ▶️ John continued advances in silicon, which are slowing rapidly as we all know, and also advances
⏹️ ▶️ John in battery technology. And then we get to the point where it’s like, okay, well, all those issues they used to talk about about charging your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and heat or whatever, that’s ridiculous, because now it charges in 35 seconds off of an inductive coil and nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, for what it’s worth, I very rarely use a cable deliberately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to charge my phone. You know, the bedside charger is a Qi charger,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Aaron’s bedside charger is a MagSafe Puck, the original version of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We do have a spare laptop charger that I just happen to have laying around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downstairs, actually by our turntable. And so that’s our, with a cable, of course, and that’s our,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh no, I really need a bunch of charge right now charger. And obviously, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m plugging in to do debugging or something like that. But for the most part, both of us, both Aaron and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself, and she is very normie in a way that I think we can all agree I’m not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we almost exclusively cheat charge. I mean, it’s just one data point or two, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for what it’s worth.
E2E for RCS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, end-to-end encryption is coming for iPhone to Android RCS messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you recall, in iOS 18, Apple embraced or adopted RCS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a better version of SMS that supports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delivery receipts and things like that. But it is not end-to-end encrypted. Well, apparently, reading from MacRumors, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GSM Association, or GSMA, the organization responsible for developing the Rich Communication Services,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or RCS, standard, announced on Tuesday that is working to implement the end-to-end encryption for messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent between Android and iPhone devices, though no specific timeline for the implementation has been provided. Currently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not all RCS providers offer end-to-end encryption. Google Messages, which enabled end-to-end encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, by default for RCS conversations last year, is one of the exceptions. Apple’s proprietary iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system also features end-to-end encryption, but this protection does not extend to RCS messages. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure how they’re going to do this, because I think the way Google did it, like you essentially need key exchange servers, like essentially the The servers
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple runs for iMessage that handle negotiations between the parties and sort of allow
⏹️ ▶️ John the intent encryption to happen, they can’t obviously see or infiltrate it, that’s the whole point,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you still need kind of a middle party to mediate the exchange. And so Google has that, so if you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John Android RCS from another Android phone, it goes through Google servers just like iMessage goes through Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John servers, but that doesn’t help when you’re using RCS between an iPhone and an Android phone, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get the encryption there. is coming up with a standard for this, but then who’s going to run the servers? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John does Apple stand up its own sort of RCS key exchange servers? Does
⏹️ ▶️ John Google open up its servers to everybody? Do the carriers run the servers? Not quite sure how this is going to work,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s good to see that they’re working on it a little bit. It would be better if the RCS standard came out of the gate with a solution to this problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it absolutely did not. I want to ask Casey though, because I think you’re the main one who has complained about
⏹️ ▶️ John having conversations with Android people and dropping messages and everything. Have you actually used
⏹️ ▶️ John RCS to your knowledge? And is it better than it was when you were just using SMS?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have some. So here’s the funny situation. The one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey group chat, because I do exchange messages with individuals that are on Android, but not terribly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often. But there’s one group chat that I talk on maybe once a week. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron’s brother and his wife, so my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron’s brother, my brother-in-law, is on Android, has always been on Android, will likely always be on Android. But my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sister-in-law is enlightened in this regard and has had an iPhone since she’s been part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family. And so I noticed that I was not sending RCS messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that group chat. And yet I did have an occasion to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey send a text to my brother-in-law, and that was RCS. So I think I’ve gotten screwed by my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn sister-in-law, who hasn’t updated her damn phone to iOS 18. Can I think that’s the issue? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t yelled at her yet to get on the update train, but I need to do so at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also some confusion about when the iOS Messages app shows RCS, like
⏹️ ▶️ John as placeholder text in the text field, to tell you that it’s RCS. But in some cases, it’s not really RCS.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might just show that now, even when it’s just doing MMS stuff. I don’t know. There’s some confusion about that. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John good luck in getting everyone upgraded and let us know if it improves your life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I will say, though, that in the brief exchange that my brother-in-law and I had directly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was definitely better. You know, I got a delivery receipt as an example, which was nice. And- I mean, the big thing is the images
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t terribly over-compressed thumbnails.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Yeah, I feel, I don’t remember which conversation it was in, but I do feel like I did receive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one image that was not, you know, potato quality. And that was a extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey welcome improvement. So I was very happy to see that.
Sequoia security tweaks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Apple is still tweaking their screen recording app permissions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’re further decreasing the pop-up frequency in Sequoia 15.1, reading from MacRumors. In the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release notes for the sixth beta of macOS Sequoia 15.1 update, Apple says that users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t going to see as many screen recording permission pop-ups for apps they regularly use. Quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey applications using our deprecated content capture technologies now have enhanced user awareness policies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will see fewer dialogues if they regularly use apps in which they have already acknowledged and accepted the risks.
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I mean, again, I don’t know how this affects the thing we talked about in the past where you can just use the plist
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to override it. Although the one of the feedback that we got was that 15.1 was the one that used
⏹️ ▶️ John a bundle identifiers in the plist instead of using pass to the application. So I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing is still there. But like I’ve now that we know that that exists and until
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple invalidates that this entire thing just seems like a waste of time. Like don’t bother trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do things to make it less annoying because the only reason that anyone would ever
⏹️ ▶️ John be accepted of any annoyance here is in exchange for increased security for the purpose they wanted to do. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have an app that’s recording without your knowledge that you forget about it or didn’t know about it. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John want the OS say, Hey, you might not know this or you might not remember this, but app X is recording
⏹️ ▶️ John your screen. That is the supposed security benefit right and there are many possible scenarios in which that could be
⏹️ ▶️ John beneficial but stuff like this where it’s like oh if you use it frequently you’ll see fewer dialogues
⏹️ ▶️ John or if someone just sets the p-list key you’ll like according to i wish i
⏹️ ▶️ John should have pulled the quote from snell but he was saying his understanding is that every time you use the app essentially it kicks the
⏹️ ▶️ John can down the road a little bit farther for you seeing the dialogue and if that’s true you could just keep using
⏹️ ▶️ John the app every day and never see the dialogue but like like what what are we even doing here if this is
⏹️ ▶️ John one google search away from a domestic abuser making it so you never see this dialogue. We’re not getting any benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re just annoying people who don’t benefit from this feature at all. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John glad to see Apple’s still working on it. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, can you tell us about hotkey registration in Sequoia, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a weird one. It came up because I actually use
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Sequoia now requires global hotkeys to use at least one modifier
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not shift or option, possibly only for sandbox apps, so I haven’t been able to confirm that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Global modifier is like, if you know, hit Command Shift 3 to take a screenshot, right, it doesn’t matter what app you’re in. That
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard shortcut, in theory, works anywhere in macOS. That’s a global keyboard shortcut. And in Sequoia,
⏹️ ▶️ John you better use a modifier that’s not shift or option or you can’t do it. And the reason this comes up for me is, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a, I had, although I think I still have it because I think the app’s not sandboxed, a global
⏹️ ▶️ John key modifier and keyboard maestro, which is option C, which centers the front mouse window,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is surprisingly useful if you’re taking screenshots and stuff like that. And it’s a cool thing that keyboard mystery can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I used option C because I couldn’t think of any app that I used, where
⏹️ ▶️ John option C was a keyboard shortcut that I use frequently. But in Sequoia, if I guess if keyboard mystery was
⏹️ ▶️ John a sandbox app, that wouldn’t work. And there’s a comment in Apple’s developer forums from an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple frameworks engineer, saying the following. This was an intentional change in Mac OS Sequoia
⏹️ ▶️ John to limit the ability of key logging malware to observe keys and other applications. The issue of
⏹️ ▶️ John concern was that shift an option can be used to generate alternate characters and passwords such as the zero with
⏹️ ▶️ John a line through it, which is shift option. Oh, so this is like, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John apps can’t, I guess, again, maybe only sandbox app can’t monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John for keystrokes globally use shift and option because
⏹️ ▶️ John those are modifiers that you might use when typing a password. I a lot of people in the forums also
⏹️ ▶️ John had trouble parsing like yeah, but is this like, how does it stop key logging? Are they just
⏹️ ▶️ John registering with this like an API call to register for a hotkey? They’re just registering for option C, they’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John see any other keystrokes unless someone hits option C, how could you get someone’s password that way? It’s very confusing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but clearly it was intentional. And so yeah, I hope you didn’t have any global hotkeys that use either only
⏹️ ▶️ John shift or only option. Hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a little wonky to me, but whatever. Maybe they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John reverse it in 15.2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Anonymous writes in and says, I just learned that on Select Max running Sequoia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is USPC liquid detection. I assume it works similar to how the iPhone does when wet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that it refuses to charge and pops up a dialogue warning you that the iPhone may be wet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the always inadvisable and baffling option to override and charge anyway. I’ve encountered this warning before after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using my iPhone while in a pool. I thought it was dry enough and foolishly plugged it into charge. I ended up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just charging wirelessly for a day or two, a significant benefit of having MagSafe. Related to this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was at a UVA game this past weekend and the ground was a little dewy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, had a little bit of moisture on it because it was a noon game because, whatever, I hate noon games, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here we we are. Anyways, I had a USB-C cable that I had let flop on into the grass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I was using to charge my phone. And when I put it back in my phone, it took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few seconds. But all of a sudden, and I can’t recall if Bluetooth audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playback had stopped at this point, or maybe it had continued. But all of a sudden, I heard this like, kind of distressing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alarm coming from somewhere that was vaguely in the direction of both the speaker and also my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I eventually realized, oh, it’s my phone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard my phone make this noise before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sure enough, I picked it up and it was like, for the love of God, your USB-C port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be wet. It was very upset. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately unplugged the cable and it was very happy again. But I had seen something like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe last year, but certainly on lightning phones, and it was far less aggressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it definitely, like I said, it made an audible alarm, which was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the flash flood warning. It’s similar, not quite so traumatic, but similar if memory serves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But but interestingly, it did. So even though I’m pretty damn sure the phone was silenced, because my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is almost never silenced, excuse me, almost never on loud. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it made that noise, regardless, which I get, you know, if this is a potentially dangerous thing for the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get that it would, you know, override silent mode. But it was very striking and very surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did it give you the option to charge anyway, like this feedback says?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think so, but I wasn’t looking that closely to be honest
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, anyway, look for this coming soon to a Mac near you, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think it’s a good idea. Like if they have these liquid detectors and they can detect that there’s liquid in the port, saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, I know you just plugged it in, but I’m choosing not to charge because I’ve detected liquid. And again, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not with an option to override, but it may be in really humid places. They get that every time they plug in, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good for Mac OS to get those features well because anybody who’s got a USB-C port, there could be water in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I mean lightning too, but definitely with USB-C.
Google ruling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have some breaking news from I think day before yesterday as we record.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google apparently has to open Android up for third-party stores and a bunch of other things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is thanks to our quote-unquote friends over at Epic. Reading from The Verge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on October 7th, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling on Epic versus Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play App Store to competition for three whole years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, unless developers opt out individually. These were Epic’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey biggest asks, and they might change the Android app marketplace forever if they aren’t immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paused or blocked on appeal. And that’s not all that Epic has won. starting on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey November 1, 2024, which is in what, like three weeks, and ending on November
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1, 2027, Google must also, number one, stop requiring Google Play billing for apps distributed on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Google Play Store. The jury found that Google had illegally tied its payment system to its app store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Number two, let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Play Store. That sounds pretty cool. Number three, let Android developers is linked to ways to download
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their apps outside of the Play Store. Also very cool. And finally, number four, let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android developers set their own prices for apps irrespective of Play billing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, Google cannot share app revenue, quote, with any person or entity that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distributes Android apps, quote, or plans to launch an app store or app platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They cannot offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the Play Store exclusively at first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They cannot offer developers money or perks not to launch their apps on rival stores. They cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offer device makers or carriers money or perks to pre-install the Play Store. And they cannot offer device makers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or carriers money or perks not to pre-install rival stores. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Epic versus Google, Epic successfully argued that Google had created such a substantial array of deals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with developers, carriers, and device makers that it was nigh impossible for rival stores to spring up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By blocking these sorts of deals and proactively helping rival app stores, it’s possible that some real competition to Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monopoly could now arrive. Google will still have some control over safety and security as it opens up the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Play Store to rival stores. The injunction says that Google can, quote, take reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey measures, quote, that are strictly necessary and narrowly tailored and are comparable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to how it currently polices, polices, polices, I don’t know, the Google Play Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Google will be able to charge a fee for that policing too. Epic has repeatedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argued that Google should not be able to deter third-party app stores through policing, so it’s likely Epic and Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will keep butting heads over this. Would anyone that we know deter third-party app stores through policing?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is such a incredibly harsh judgment in a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where Google was already way more open than Apple, and yet the jury decided,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may claim that you’re open, but you’ve constructed all these deals and all these incentives that you really aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John open. So A, you’re a monopoly, and B, the stuff you’re doing in Paris competition. I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ John bodes well for Apple. We’ll see, different cases. Sometimes Google has gotten worse judgments
⏹️ ▶️ John because they like were claiming that they were open, but they weren’t, whereas Apple never claims that they are. They’re just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s totally closed, but like, oh, you know, it’s so hard for third-party app stores to get going. You know how it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it really hard for third-party app stores to get going? Completely never allowing them at all in any possible way like Apple had been doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But look at this. They have to distribute the third party. It’s as if the Epic
⏹️ ▶️ John Store had to be in the app store and it automatically got access to every app in the App Store unless
⏹️ ▶️ John the developer opted out. Like this is so… Can you imagine this judgment going against Apple? Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John with the caveat appeals, blah, blah, blah, who knows if this will end up, but wow, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John like the doomsday scenario for judgments on App Store. It’s all of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worst nightmares come true and all of Epic’s dreams come true, with the exception of the security
⏹️ ▶️ John policing thing, which obviously they’ll argue about, because like if you give a company like Google
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of lever, any kind of oversight or input into this process, Google will decide
⏹️ ▶️ John how they can use it to try to get back the control that they’re getting taken away by this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John man, and again, this is in the US, so this is not DMA, this is not the EU,
⏹️ ▶️ John this was the case, we’ve talked about it before, Google was found to have a monopoly, how are they gonna fix it? They’re gonna fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it by saying, yeah, Google, all that stuff you were doing, you’re not doing that anymore. For three years, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John why three years, like when three years is over, did this go back to the old way? This is a slightly confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John remedy, but boy, this is, I was about to say this is epic, but I’m not gonna do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is extremely harsh. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely harsh. Google cannot be happy. And I guess Apple’s over there thinking, well, boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad that will never happen to us because we’re so different than Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, in all fairness, the Google case had a lot of details that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not apply to Apple in the same way. Like, it isn’t, what was ruled illegal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or bad behavior that requires action was not just them having an app store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and requiring their in-app purchase system. It isn’t a directly applicable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruling to what Apple is doing. It’s in the ballpark, but there’s a lot of differences in the Google case, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual things they were doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly because Google didn’t totally disallow all this stuff. They had a system
⏹️ ▶️ John that ostensibly allowed it, but then they did anti-competitive things to stop it from happening, which you would think,
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that what Apple’s doing even worse? But in the past legal cases, Apple has come out
⏹️ ▶️ John ahead, but they’re like, Apple never even pretended they were allowing this. They weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John illegally restraining what should have been competition. There never was any competition. It was never allowed at all. And
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, the EU thinks that’s bad. But so far, that has actually helped them in US cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. Anyway, so you can’t really read into direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conclusions that would affect Apple. However, it does strike in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ballpark. And what this shows, if this actually is not legally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intervened with, if this actually comes to pass, this is a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disastrous result in a lot of ways. And so much of it is like, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it is better for consumers if certain things are open and competition is preserved and everything. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual practical implementation of this remedy is going to be a mess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for consumers and for developers especially. So this kind of shows like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the risk that these big platform companies take by trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and failing to self-regulate is that someone else will step in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regulate you in some other way that you have a lot less control over and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way might be disastrous. So it is within the company’s best long-term strategic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interests to avoid this kind of regulation by not becoming an abusive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monopoly, by not doing things that are that are anti-competitive and that might violate antitrust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco law in certain ways, or that might tip off regulators that something needs to be done. Like ideally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you as as as these big platform companies avoid this kind of thing happening to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you in the first place, because when you play fast and loose and and when you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too greedy and too short-sighted and you invite this kind of scrutiny and regulation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and court cases, you run the risk of there being a massively destructive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and non-ideal resolution like this remedy. And who knows how destructive
⏹️ ▶️ John it will actually be, by the way. Yeah, we’ll see. Because obviously it is destructive in that it destroys the thing that these people wanted to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because what they had before was what they wanted to have because they got to choose. And that’s what they wanted. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as we’ve said many times over, I think it would actually behoove these companies to
⏹️ ▶️ John have to compete, right? To eventually have this competition force on them, what we would hope
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it would force them to make better products and services because now there’s competition.
⏹️ ▶️ John So all the things that we would complain about about these services, they would say, well, there’s no competition so they can get away with being
⏹️ ▶️ John that crappy because in the end, they’re still big. And someone in the chat room said, Chris said,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that you can’t make a closed platform because the law explicitly says you can’t is insane. Just to reiterate,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make a closed platform. There’s absolutely no problem with that. The only time there becomes a problem is if you
⏹️ ▶️ John are found to have monopoly power and found to have abused that monopoly power. And if you’re just making a closed platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably don’t have monopoly power because you’re a dinky little startup and it will take years and years and years, if you’re lucky, for
⏹️ ▶️ John you to gain monopoly power. And we could argue about, is it a duopoly because Apple and Google are rarer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no arguing that there is like a diversity of competition in the mobile phone
⏹️ ▶️ John app marketplace. There’s two things, two main things, especially in the US. And the rest of the world, there’s more,
⏹️ ▶️ John like in China and everything. But that amount of power is found to be by
⏹️ ▶️ John the EU, obviously, and also by US courts, to require a different set of rules
⏹️ ▶️ John to apply to you. So it’s not like you can’t make things integrated or whatever. It’s like when you get to a certain size, when
⏹️ ▶️ John the decisions that you make, I think Jason Snell talked about this on Upgrade recently, when you get so
⏹️ ▶️ John big that the things that you decide to do affect the world economy
⏹️ ▶️ John and the competition across an entire industry, that’s when different sets of rules apply to you. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John easy for that to sneak up on you. And it’s easy for you to stay in the mindshed of just never give an inch, keep
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. And you wake up one day, and you’re the biggest company in the world. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John and Google control mobile phones almost entirely. Yeah, and you get these judgments to go
⏹️ ▶️ John against you. And I think the other thing that’s interesting about this case is it was a case in the US, and there
⏹️ ▶️ John was a jury. And the jury basically bought a lot of the arguments that are in the
⏹️ ▶️ John complaint that the DOJ has filed against Apple, that doing these things, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re found to have monopoly power and you do these things like tying your payment
⏹️ ▶️ John system to the App Store, the jury found that that’s a thing that they shouldn’t be allowed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Apple does that. And paying people to
⏹️ ▶️ John not go into rival stores or whatever, Apple doesn’t do that because they just forbid the rival stores. shows that
⏹️ ▶️ John there are US juries that are ready to say that these kinds of practices are not just, oh, that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it is and I accept it, but that apparently the lawyers were able to argue in a way that convinced the jury that,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, Google probably shouldn’t be allowed to do this. Not that no company should ever be
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to do this. Not that this is illegal, but that Google specifically, because of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John they became convinced that Google has illegal monopoly power and so on and so forth, Google shouldn’t be allowed to do these
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And a lot of those things are some of the same stuff that Apple does. Again, surrounding circumstances are also different. Cases
⏹️ ▶️ John are different. Juries are going to be different. The venue might be different. We’ll see how it goes. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a neutral judgment for Apple. I think this is at least a slight negative,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it happened in their country, and it happened to the company that is the closest to being like Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though, again, there are big differences. And it happened with a US jury that found some of the same
⏹️ ▶️ John things that Apple does were illegal, if you have monopoly power.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I wish I had had the presence of mind to reread the Strategory articles that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were about this and the Apple suit, because I remember Ben saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he expected Apple to do better than Google, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what the justification
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because they never had an opening for competition. So it was like the illusion of competition, making deals,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you can do X, you can do Y, you can do Z, but then coercing them through other means is
⏹️ ▶️ John found to be worse than just saying, look, there are no relationships with third-party stores. We don’t allow third-party stores. We never have.
⏹️ ▶️ John We never will. It’s basically like when you buy the iPhone in the before DMA days. When you buy the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not buying it with any expectation that there are third-party stores. Or you bought an Android phone, it’s like, oh, Android is open. I can
⏹️ ▶️ John get apps from anywhere. But then Google was essentially disallowing that. I think that was the gist of at least
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the arguments.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We need a podcast to summarize it for us. Hey, welcome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I find this very fascinating. And I also find it fascinating as someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who writes code somewhat for a living, some of the requests
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the judge is making, the amount of rejiggering and rewriting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just code that is going to be required to make this work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just can’t fathom it. Like this is so much work. I mean, Apple was working on DMA stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might be less than what Apple did for the DMA though, don’t you think? I don’t know. Because Apple wrote so much code
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure that they could do what they wanted to do in the way they wanted, where they could have just said, fine, third-party app source. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know what I mean? Like it’s less work to allow more things. And Apple worked
⏹️ ▶️ John so hard and made so many frameworks, sometimes necessary, like trying to allow the browser engines while maintaining security.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I think that was necessary, but sometimes not necessary. Like, yeah. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, that’s part of the danger of having a judgment to go against so you don’t get to decide that suddenly you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff, not on your schedule, not when you want to do it, not how you want to do it, but because a court
⏹️ ▶️ John ordered you to do it. And that’s not, no one wants to develop software that way, but that’s the danger of losing court cases. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John had actually self-regulated and been a little bit, you know, less controlling,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could have set your own schedule to do stuff like this, but didn’t anyway, we’ll see. You know, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what the schedule is, like if this will get appealed for the next five years, and we’ll be talking about this, you know, in 2030
⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple’s carbon neutral, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I hear you. I don’t know, it’s wild. Um, I don’t, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how it makes me feel that I’m kind of pleased that Tim Sweeney’s made all these changes happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, you know, I bet if we were to listen back or have a podcast, summarize our podcast for us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we were to listen back to the episodes in, I think it was like late 2020,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, about when Tim deliberately and Epic deliberately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started taking third party payments in their apps. You know, they had clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey planned to get evicted from the app stores, both Google and Apple, and it had like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a whole site ready and waiting to go that they launched immediately after they got punted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember thinking of it fondly at the time, and I thought that they were being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of pretty big turds, but now, looking back on it, maybe it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, they’re turds too. They’re just turds in different ways. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because, you know, why does Epic want to run their own app store? because they want 10% or 15% of everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchases. Like, of course they want that.
⏹️ ▶️ John To be fair, they’re taking a lower percentage. And you know why? Because when there’s competition, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John incentive to undercut the competitor. And especially when it’s like, you know, 0% margin software,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can undercut them if you’re willing to take less profit. And for Epic, it’s way more profit than not
⏹️ ▶️ John getting any profit from mobile platforms. So they’re willing to undercut Apple. But you know, Epic’s tactics
⏹️ ▶️ John are not always in great. And sometimes they ask for unreasonable things, But
⏹️ ▶️ John the result is it’s causing these systems that have held up the
⏹️ ▶️ John two giant mobile platforms to come under scrutiny and to be judged and
⏹️ ▶️ John decided that they are actually impairing competition and here’s how we should try to restore competition.
⏹️ ▶️ John extent that benefits Epic, ideally it would benefit anybody who wants to make a third-party store
⏹️ ▶️ John is now more free to do so than they were before. but we’ll see.
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Sports Corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to enter sports corner, please, which I know means I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco going to carry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this whole thing by myself, but that’s all right. There was an interesting article that a buddy of mine pointed me to earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The title is Lionel Messi to MLS has been ruined by Apple’s paywall. And I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read you a bit. I tried to cut this down as much as possible, but I think we need to set a little bit of a stage here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In 2022, a 10 Their $2.5 billion deal was signed that kept most of MLS exclusive to Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fox and Univision would occasionally be able to air a game, but most of the league would now be behind a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paywall. Apple’s deal would eventually help incentivize one of the world’s most popular soccer players ever to finish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his career in America. As part of Lionel Messi’s agreement with Inter Miami, Messi gets a cut of the revenue from new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscribers to MLS season pass Apple streaming service for MLS games. As Messi’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inter Miami goes on a historic run, clinching the supporters shield and award
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given to the team with the best regular season record, one has to question whether the league’s deal with Apple has blunted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the impact of one of the all time greats playing in America. Messi and inter Miami’s dominance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this season wasn’t a major storyline that sports observers were paying attention to or covering highlights
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have appeared frequently on sports center, major online highlight Factories like Bleacher Report and Overtime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also haven’t made much mention of Messi since he made his debut in 2023. It’s hard for viewers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to watch arguably the greatest soccer player in history during his run in the United States if the majority of his games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are behind a paywall. There are no marketing partnerships of depth with the big dogs of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sports media, and there’s not much promotion done on linear television or even free online options like YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a recipe for irrelevance. We don’t need to talk too much about this, but I thought it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was fascinating that here it is You know, soccer, slash football, we don’t need to hear feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this, please. Soccer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arguably the most popular, maybe not even arguably, the most popular sport in the world. I think F1 and soccer, it depends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on who you ask, but they’re both up there. Anyways, one of the most popular sports in the world, and here is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, arguably the best current active player of the most popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sport in the world, and nobody’s paying attention. only follow certain sports and I don’t follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them super closely, but typically I’m aware enough that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if something major is going on, you know, like my friend who had sent this to me, someone will mention it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a group chat that we’re in, or you will call my attention to it or whatever. I don’t typically watch SportsCenter or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, but these sorts of things bubble up. I haven’t heard diddly squat about MLS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nor Lionel Messi outside of Apple initially, you know, mentioning him every four seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the deal was still new. I don’t know if you guys remember that. Um, but it is fascinating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that Apple. Understandably to my eyes made a gamble that, that, Hey, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring the world’s greatest player. Let’s bring them into American soccer. Let’s put a, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, these golden handcuffs on him and let’s make a great deal so that he will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only be performing for us in so many, in so many words. And yet, because it’s behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s paywall, it seems like nobody at all is paying attention. And that just is totally wild to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it shows that even when you throw a bunch of money at a problem, that doesn’t necessarily fix the problem, especially if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t understand it very
⏹️ ▶️ John well. Is it because of the paywall, though, or is it just because Americans don’t like soccer?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a very fair question.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the easier solution. And the other thing is, I don’t know much about soccer or this person, but from the article you read,
⏹️ ▶️ John incentivized him to finish his career in America. I am assuming he was the greatest soccer player,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now he’s getting kind of old. And so you can have an equivalent of other sports,
⏹️ ▶️ John a great sports player that maybe has passed their prime, and
⏹️ ▶️ John by far, they would be the biggest player in the MLS. But who are they playing with? Are they playing with all of their
⏹️ ▶️ John rivals from the peak of their career? No, they’re back playing the real soccer in the rest of the world, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So even to a big soccer fan, it’s like, eh, well, they got this great guy at the end of his career.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s great he got put out to pasture, and he can go beat up on the Americans who aren’t as good at soccer. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough to support a league. The rest of the soccer world has all the stars of soccer playing each other, which is much more
⏹️ ▶️ John exciting. And I mean, the paywall probably doesn’t help here. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the most fascinating things about this deal is that they were able to finagle it so that he gets a percentage of his subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John revenue. That’s star power, to have a deal with Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, for real. Percentage of
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription revenue. That just shows that he is the only player that matters in the league.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I don’t think there are many other players in MOS that are getting a percentage of Apple subscription revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but he probably only gets 70%. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John playing. He’s probably getting a tiny percent, but any percent. It’s like when movie stars get big enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to start getting a percentage of gross, right? It’s even bigger than that. So I think the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Americans just aren’t into soccer. But yeah, and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple couldn’t get the NFL. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John down to. They tried, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t get it. Well, I don’t know, though. Is it that they couldn’t get it, or that they just didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John enough. Yeah. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they literally couldn’t, because I think one of the things I heard was that they were insisting
⏹️ ▶️ John on certain provisions that the NFL would not agree to, as in like, we need to have these
⏹️ ▶️ John rights or be able to shoot the games in this way or whatever. And NFL wasn’t willing to give that up. And Apple wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to do the deal without it. So it’s not just a matter of money. It was a matter of conditions, maybe. But either way, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get it. And I think a lot of Americans, I don’t know what the percentages are, but I bet a lot of Americans,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe even more than 50%, pay to see the NFL, even though technically there’s over-the-air
⏹️ ▶️ John broadcasts that they could be getting, right? And so I don’t even think the paywall issue is a big deal. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you put the NFL entirely behind a paywall and took it off over the air, people would complain,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the viewership numbers would go down, but it would still probably be more popular than baseball.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes and no, because honestly, the NFL is easier than ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get, well, there’s asterisks and daggers double daggers there. But for, broadly speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the NFL is easier than ever to get access to because it used to be that the only way to have access to what’s called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sunday ticket, which is basically you get to see all of the football games again, asterisk, dagger, double dagger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can see all the football games really easily. And it used to be you had to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DirecTV subscription, which was a satellite cable for, not a cable provider, but a satellite provider here in the States.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was easier overseas, but here in the States you had to have a DirecTV dish, you had to have a DirecTV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscription, etc. etc. Now you can do it on YouTube TV, but it’s something like $500 a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is astronomical, the price of an NFL Sunday ticket. It is hilariously expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And because of that, I think that a lot of people will go to fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stark lengths in order to avoid paying that money. And let’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say I’ve looked into this and there are not a lot of great options that that I’ve found, but it is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive. And I don’t know how it would turn out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the NFL came off of terrestrial TV, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m just saying it came off of over the air waves. Like it would still be on basic cable for your home team
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, I don’t know the terms.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But anyway, the NFL’s not gonna take it
⏹️ ▶️ John as for the people who need to see every game or whatever, it’s very expensive. But I’m saying if the NFL was not available for
⏹️ ▶️ John free, then otherwise you had to pay for cable television, for example, to see games, right? We’re not in that
⏹️ ▶️ John situation now. But basically, I’m wondering how many people watch the NFL on over-the-air broadcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it would be that many, to be honest with you. Also, before I forget, real-time follow-up, it’s not Lionel, it’s Lionel Messi,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my American is showing. And I apologize. I’m sure we’ve got 1,000 emails and tweets. I’m sorry about that. But no, to come back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the NFL, I don’t know. I think some of what’s going on with the MLS, as you said, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Americans don’t care about soccer. But I do feel like if this content was easier to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consume, you would see more of it. So as an example, I don’t pay much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention to the NBA, even though I would actually like to pay more attention to it, but I just never think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t pay much attention to the NBA, but I’ll see interesting plays bubble up through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of several different group chats. I’ll see it occasionally through, you know, Mastodon, or if for some reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do open Twitter, usually to look at a single tweet and then dismiss it, then oftentimes I’ll see like a basketball,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, play or sequence floating by. There’s so much, and like NBA Twitter, from what I gather, is phenomenal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s so much that bubbles up and I think a large part of that and this is what this post this story is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to say is that so much of that is because it’s easy to capture it’s easy to share it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John easy to get to. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because Americans like basketball. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey why. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really popular. I think it was Canadian invented it maybe but it’s basically practically an American sport. For the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love of God John it was invented in Springfield, Mass.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All right I can’t forget it was a Canadian peach basket.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway the point is Americans like basketball that’s why people that’s why you’re seeing clips from it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think it’s, I don’t think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing a lot of clips of basketball games and you know, other parts of the world where it’s not popular, but it’s really popular
⏹️ ▶️ John in this country. Have you heard of Michael Jordan?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Larry Byrd. Oh my God. You’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey older. You’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John older. It’s been popular
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. Obviously NFL has come from, come from out of nowhere to become the most popular sport, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re, you’re, you’re of course you’re going to see highlights. You’re going to see even see heights from baseball, the American pastime,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though NFL is more popular, right? I think that’s a better explanation and not the venue
⏹️ ▶️ John for the thing, but you know. Maybe they need like they had drive to survive to try to get Americans interested in F1, they need like
⏹️ ▶️ John boot to toot or something for getting Americans
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco into soccer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god. Good luck with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. I’m pleased that we had an actual conversation about this. I feel quite satisfied Thank you for indulging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, gentlemen. Oh my goodness.
Apple bails out of OpenAI investment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s move back to tech stuff, or strictly tech stuff. Apple has said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or is being said, that Apple is no longer in talks to join OpenAI’s investment round.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had already heard that they were not going to take a board seat, if I’m not mistaken. But now they’re apparently not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even investing. So reading from The Wall Street Journal, Apple is no longer in talks to participate in OpenAI funding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey round, expected to raise as much as $6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rare investment by the iPhone maker and another major Silicon Valley company, according to a knowledgeable person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The two other tech giants, Microsoft and Nvidia, have also been in talks to participate in the round. Microsoft is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected to invest around one billion, adding to the 13 billion it already has put into the company,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to people familiar with Matter. The funding talks aren’t completed, and it is possible the participants’
⏹️ ▶️ Casey investment amounts could change. OpenAI is also in the process of overhauling its corporate structure from a non-profit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into a for-profit company. That change, which was encouraged by many of the investors in the round,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t say, will be a complicated process for the startup. If it doesn’t complete the change within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two years, investors in the current round will have the right to request their money back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hasn’t even shipped their OpenAI integration and already they’re just like, eh,
⏹️ ▶️ John hmm. We’ve talked about this before, how OpenAI’s culture and Apple’s culture are not a
⏹️ ▶️ John good match. But that’s sometimes just the way it is with a young company and an older company. Young, upstart,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Maybe they kick out their CEO and he comes back and kicks out everyone. Like a lot of drama
⏹️ ▶️ John going on there. Recently their CTO left and a bunch of other people like it’s OpenAI, a lot of drama.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple doesn’t like drama, but they did the deal. They did the deal with OpenAI. They talked about them in the keynote when
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, your thing on your phone can’t figure it out. You’ll have the option of sending it to OpenAI. And they did this deal, which
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly no money’s changing hands, we don’t know the details. And they were gonna be an investor and they were gonna have a board seat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no board seat. And actually, you know what? We’re maybe we’re gonna sit this one out investment wise.
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we just don’t think there’s a big upside there. And I don’t, and Apple was really touting like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, we did the deal with OpenAI, but we’re almost, we’ve almost got a deal with Google for Gemini, and we haven’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about that since, you know, we see when they were like, yeah, totally, it’s not just OpenAI, we’re, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, this Gemini deal is probably gonna happen real soon now. And not that they said that, but they were hinting in that direction,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so far, no Gemini deal. OpenAI is ostensibly going to ship as a feature of our phones
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point in the future, and Apple is rapidly, not distancing
⏹️ ▶️ John itself, but getting less cozy than they were before with OpenAI. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they just figured we could have better use of our money, we’ve got the deal that we want, we don’t need to invest,
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe they’re really just hedging their bets. And I don’t think they’re gonna be investing in Google
⏹️ ▶️ John anytime soon, but maybe that’s part of it. Maybe OpenAI is getting so big and has so much funding,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ve raised more money than any quote unquote startup ever, if you can call this company a startup at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, maybe they’re just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need our help and maybe we’re, we’ll talk about this in overtime, but maybe they think maybe we’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally funding our future biggest rival and we don’t wanna do that. Or maybe they just are
⏹️ ▶️ John rethinking getting even tighter with this company that seems to be in constant turmoil.
#askatp: John buying PS5 Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some ask ATP and let’s start with James Sutcliffe asking, will John be buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new $700 Sony PlayStation pro? Uh, and can you John give me the two second overview on what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes the PlayStation pro pro and also $700 please? Yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing that Sony has been doing where, uh, it’s not a mid cycle update, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, uh, at some point in the life of their console generation, they will release a better
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the same console that plays all the same games that plays them better in some way. Uh, so
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the PS4 and the PS4 Pro. This is in addition to the Slim model which is just the plain PS4 and it
⏹️ ▶️ John was the PS4 Slim. Anyway, there’s the PS5 which I have, then they made the PS5 Slim which is a slimmer version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the PS5. And now they’ve announced the PS5 Pro and what makes it better? It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John a beefier GPU, a little bit better CPU, sometimes they have more RAM. I don’t know the
⏹️ ▶️ John technical details that much for the PlayStation 5 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it It is, I do know the effect on the games and the effect is sometimes they
⏹️ ▶️ John run at higher frame rates, sometimes they run at higher resolution or higher apparent resolution with upscaling,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they run all the same games just a little bit better. I always buy the pros models because I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to run the same games a little bit better and very often they will be not remasters but like game existing
⏹️ ▶️ John games that they’ve already shipped will be updated to look better on the pro version of the console
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s happening with a bunch of games that I like. I think they’re doing an update to The Last of Us
⏹️ ▶️ John Part II, and The Last of Us Part II TV series is coming out soon, so I
⏹️ ▶️ John might replay through The Last of Us Part II before the TV series, just like I replayed through the original
⏹️ ▶️ John Last of Us for the third time before the TV series came out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John just like I got to replay through the sort of remastered PS5 version of The Last of Us, now
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll get to replay through the PS5 Pro enhanced version of The Last of Us Part
⏹️ ▶️ John II. And so to answer the question, I guess I already pre-ordered my Sony PlayStation 5 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m looking forward to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m sorry, it’s replacing a regular PlayStation 5?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, what’s gonna happen is the PlayStation 5 will rotate up to my son’s room, replacing the PS4 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, this is the rotation in the house. So we just said, when I get a new console, my old one goes up to him and that’ll be good
⏹️ ▶️ John because the PS4 Pro, even though I have an SSD attached to it, it’s just so much slower. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John playing the same game, like we’re playing Destiny with each other, right? But I have to wait for his load times And this will really be
⏹️ ▶️ John a big upgrade to his load times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s really for you though. You said you have to wait for his load times. You really are speeding up your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John load times. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’ll like having a better game console
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey though half the time he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John playing games on his iPad anyway. But
⏹️ ▶️ John PS5 will take up way more room on his desk and his room, but he’ll survive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, with all of the redundant PlayStations, you could have bought at least one Xbox. That’s something you could have done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would I want that? Or like a gaming PC, and then you can stop buying Mac Pros. Also true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would much rather have the PlayStation than the gaming PC.
#askatp: Vehicle Motion Cues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Justin wearing rights as I was 18s vehicle motion cues mitigated John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motion sickness at all. So to recap, and then I would like to throw my two cents real quick. Uh, vehicle motion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cues is there’s a bunch of dots like circles that are on your phone screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you’re riding in a car and let’s say you’re holding your phone and the car starts to accelerate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Those dots will, will move toward the bottom of the phone a little bit. And I think that the way this is supposed to work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is for your visual, for your vision to match what your inner ear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is feeling. Because otherwise, if you’re staring at your phone and nothing’s moving, there’s a disconnect between what your inner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ear is saying is happening and what your eyes are seeing. And so it’s supposed to allegedly help.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t recall if it’s on by default or not in iOS 18, but I certainly had it on for a little while,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess on my iPhone 16, I believe. And I found it so incredibly distracting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as someone who is not used to motion sickness, you know, I don’t typically get motion sickness. I found it so distracting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it didn’t take me very long to turn it off entirely. Erin also suffers from motion sickness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when reading in the car, and I don’t think we’ve been in the car very long with her as a passenger, so I haven’t had a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ask her about this. But with that preamble aside, John, have you tried it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I get motion sick when I look at my phone, so I would never look at my phone in the car.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, but this is the whole thing. What if you don’t get motion sick now? I know, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John chicken and egg problem. It’s like, oh, but now you’ll be able to because the dots will save you. It’s like, why would I ever look at my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John in the car? It’s like asking you to drink this cup of Ipecac. It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, no thanks. So here’s the thing though. I was aware of this feature and I
⏹️ ▶️ John made sure when I updated to iOS 18, even before I got my new phone, I made sure it was on
⏹️ ▶️ John automatic because automatic is supposed to, you can turn it off or on or on automatic. Automatic is supposed to detect
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re in a car by your GPS location. It detects when you’re driving and it will turn the dots
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Freaking thing never turned the dots on. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a passenger in a car, we’re driving down the highway at 45 miles an hour. Like, it’s not turning on,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to know what it’s waiting for. So what I did do was I added the dots thing to control center, the new customizable
⏹️ ▶️ John control center and I do actually want to try it at some point, but honestly, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m never going to look at my phone when I’m in the car. Like I get, everyone gets motion sick to varying
⏹️ ▶️ John degrees and I get motion sick extremely easily. The dots are not going to save me. Like there’s no, there’s no fricking chance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I understand the theory, you stated it well, but that’s not enough. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John those little dots are not going to be the thing that makes me not get motion sick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t know that. You’ve never tried it.
⏹️ ▶️ John to try it and I’m going to get, you know, sick to my stomach and I’m going to be mad at the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey stupid dots. Well, with that attitude, yeah, you will. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John try it for science, but look, it’s like those glasses with the liquid in them. You’ve seen those?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s like a bunch of glasses you wear, but they have like water in them. And so as you, as your head tilts, like on a boat, the water
⏹️ ▶️ John will stay level and it’s in your field
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey division. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John of this. I’ve heard of all the the motion sickness thing you can possibly imagine. Like I, I,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure this will help. This will help people. If you’re within the threshold that this can help you, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great. I’m so far past the threshold. Stuff’s going to help me. I’ll try it for science if I
⏹️ ▶️ John remember to the next time a passenger, but I have dim hopes because I think nothing can help me,
#askatp: First phone “designed for AI”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neil MacGregor writes, given the time scales that we think we know about iPhone hardware lead times, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlikely that this generation of iPhone was really, quote, built from the ground up for AI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When do you think the first true built from the ground up for AI iPhone will be launched? What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifications will be the telltale signs? For example, a step change in neural engine performance, uncharacteristic jump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in RAM, bigger battery for demanding workflows, custom compute beyond the neural engine, et cetera. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difference in this generation appears to be the RAM size, which I assume could be added
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a chip design relatively late in the development, and it was likely to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point anyway. I get what Neil’s saying here, and I don’t disagree, but I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would look for other than a wildly beefier neural engine. I’m not sure what else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be a good sign to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John We need Suruji. What’s his first name? Johnny Suruji? Yeah. We need him. Every time he gives an interview,
⏹️ ▶️ John he says this exact same thing, and he’s like, I just I can’t get it through your thick skull, so I’m gonna keep saying it, and I agree with him.
⏹️ ▶️ John What he would say if he was given this question is, we’ve been putting neural engines in our phone chips
⏹️ ▶️ John for years, built from the ground up for AI. That’s a marketing term, but practically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, Apple has been putting machine learning hardware in its chips way before anyone else was. They
⏹️ ▶️ John were emphasizing it, they were building features around it, they were making APIs for it, they were making frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ John around it. They continue to do so. So if you look at the phone and say, what would it look like
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was built for AI? Would it have like a beefy neural engine? Well, they already have that. Like they didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t look like it’s any different because they just make the neural engine better year after year or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Increasing the RAM size, Neil’s right. That’s something that’s pretty easy to do. And it’s pretty clear that they did that
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple intelligence. But honestly, I think, you know, even though surely this phone
⏹️ ▶️ John was not, when this hardware was being planned, Apple intelligence maybe wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. So in
⏹️ ▶️ John that respect, the whole built from the ground up for AI is a little bit marketing spin, a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John truth in that we did make sure they all had eight gigs of RAM. Like, so I give it a pass on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, you know, it’s not a completely bogus marketing thing, but it’s also not true that when they were planning this
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, they were like, this needs to run Apple intelligence because they didn’t even have Apple intelligence based on the rumors that we’ve heard of when
⏹️ ▶️ John this was conceived in the, you know, three year lead times or whatever on new phones. But honestly, a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John built from the ground up for AI wouldn’t look that different than like the 16 Pro and the 16 Pro Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I don’t think we should expect any massive change to the SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple Intelligence, especially since Apple Intelligence, as we record this, is still
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially an unproven feature. Do people love it and they want 100 times more of
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Or does it just like, eh, it’s all right, I hope they make it better. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri’s a good example. A voice assistant is great and we take it for granted and we think it’s an important
⏹️ ▶️ John feature and it should be there, but they didn’t remake the entire phone around it because A, Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t good enough for that, and B, there are so many other things that we do with our phone that are not Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John that there was no reason to bend the entire phone around Siri. They did make the microphones better, they did make Siri better, they
⏹️ ▶️ John did add the neural engine to make it beefier and beefier, but in the end, were we previously
⏹️ ▶️ John using phones that were built from the ground up from Siri? I think this is putting the cart before the horse, as the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John industry is, with the assumption that AI will be the most important feature on our phone and we want the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware design be focused on that feature, let’s see how the feature does before we completely
⏹️ ▶️ John change the hardware design of the phone around it and again give it a three year lead time.
#askatp: Using passkeys?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sharon Gordon writes, I’m wondering if any of you have made the switch and really started using passkeys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are the pros and cons, not just security-wise, but convenience-wise? Is it difficult to transfer them to a new device? Right now I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a situation where my 2FA codes are in Authy, which doesn’t allow export, and I’m considering redoing them all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and putting them in Apple’s new password apps, the Passwords app, even though I’m a paid 1Password user.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s all getting a little confusing. Are there any articles you can recommend that really go over this, especially from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple ecosystem point of view? I have largely been ignoring passkeys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a handful of places I use them, but generally speaking, I don’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s mostly because of a similar ignorance. And also, I don’t feel like I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good understanding of how sharing a passkey would work if such a thing is even possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there are some things that Aaron and I, like let’s take Amazon as an example. Aaron and I, you know, both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the same Amazon login. And I don’t know, I genuinely don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not, you know, a figure of speech. I truly don’t know how that would work if I were to switch my Amazon login,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, to a passkey. So I am here for you two to tutor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only Sharon, but me as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, my answer is pretty boring. Whenever a website asks me if I’d like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add a passkey, I say yes, and I add it. But most websites don’t ask me that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I only have a handful of them so far. I’m not taking proactive actions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to move myself over to it, not out of any kind of fear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or political statement about them, more just I have more important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things to do most of the time. And that’s just like, that’s one of those kind of like, technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hygiene tasks that I think most working adults don’t have time to actually really ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. So I intend to maybe someday get there, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just haven’t yet. But whenever websites ask me, I say yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So to help answer Sharon’s question a little bit, we should link to Ricky Mondello’s post about
⏹️ ▶️ John migrating password managers, migrating to the Apple password system, and
⏹️ ▶️ John passkeys. And it’s got some good advice about not trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Big Bang type of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m going to go in there
⏹️ ▶️ John and change everything and transfer all my stuff. That you can kind of do it sort of the demand paged version of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, sort of slow, gradual one. So that’s actually a good, a good, some, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t follow the advice in the article, it’s a good mindset to get into that you, it’s not like you’re, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not missing some boat that’s leaving and you need to get on it and it will change your life or whatever, right? This is,
⏹️ ▶️ John PASCIs are a developing technology. I’m kind of in the same boat with Marco in that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m, when they offer it, I take it. But as Ricky will tell you, lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John websites that implement PASCIs choose totally different policies
⏹️ ▶️ John for those passkeys than other websites. Because websites can choose to do whatever they want. They can give you a passkey
⏹️ ▶️ John and then remove your password. They can let you use a password and a passkey. GitHub uses passkeys as a
⏹️ ▶️ John second factor in a two-factor login. So you enter your username and your password. And then as a second
⏹️ ▶️ John factor, one of the things that you can use is your passkey, which is totally not the supposed intention
⏹️ ▶️ John of passkeys, but technologically there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. So the bottom line is that
⏹️ ▶️ John every website that uses passkeys has some
⏹️ ▶️ John different notion of where they fit in in their website. And maybe that will change over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like in the beginning we wanted to roll out passkeys just to try them out, and if lots of people adopt them, maybe we’ll do this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John just because a website supports passkeys or anything supports passkeys doesn’t mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John my perspective is I don’t know, based on that, how it’s going to work. Okay, so you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John passkeys. When someone says like, oh, we support usernames and passwords, I more or less know how that’s going to work
⏹️ ▶️ John these days. Although there was a kind of a, uh, older people remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat annoying drawn out transition between, uh, sites and other things
⏹️ ▶️ John asking you for a username that was not an email address, you both remember those days, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Those were not good days.
⏹️ ▶️ John websites still do it, but in general, we’ve sort of settled on. If you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a login to a website, that’s not going to be like a a third party login, like login with Google, login with Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John login with Apple, whatever thing, that it’s going to say username and
⏹️ ▶️ John a password and the username’s gonna be an email address. But back in the battle days, you had to come up with a username
⏹️ ▶️ John and put numbers at the end of it and do other awful things, right? That’s where we are, I feel like, with passkeys. It’s like, oh, so you support
⏹️ ▶️ John caskeys? I don’t know what you’re gonna want from me. If I enable this passkey,
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going to remove my password and my password won’t work anymore? Because sometimes I don’t wanna do that, because
⏹️ ▶️ John not because I don’t trust passkeys, I don’t trust the website to implement passkeys well enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there are some things, Casey mentioned the sharing of passkeys, which I think is trivial with Apple’s passwords. It’s just like you
⏹️ ▶️ John put it in a shared group or whatever. And by the way, I’m loving the shared groups. I made a bunch for my family and they’re really making your
⏹️ ▶️ John life better. So thumbs up on that. As someone who wasn’t a 1Password user, which has that feature, has had it for ages,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s great for me to have it now in the Apple key chain thing. But passkeys, there are still
⏹️ ▶️ John some technical limitations. The sort of export import flow for passkeys is supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John coming soon, but it’s not available yet. They wanna do it in a secure way, so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is the limitation versus plain old passwords where it’s easy, for example, not easy, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is very possible, for example, to migrate from 1Password to Apple’s password
⏹️ ▶️ John system because 1Password has an export and Apple’s password have an import. Obviously making that export
⏹️ ▶️ John is incredibly insecure, right? Because there’s your passwords in plain text in a file that you’re gonna import or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s not great and Pasky is gonna try to do that better, but there’s no good cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do that with passkeys yet. And every website that uses passkeys can pick
⏹️ ▶️ John a different policy and you really never know what it’s going to be. Can you just log in with the
⏹️ ▶️ John passkey by itself? Can you keep the password in the passkey? If so, how do you choose to use the passkey? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John you only prompted to use your passkey when you use Browser X and not Browser Y? Does it work
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone or your Mac? My stance is anytime there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a passkey, I would like to use it instead of a password, but I’m not even always given that option. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think we are in a transition period and it’s fine for you to dip your toe in. Find
⏹️ ▶️ John a website that uses passkeys, that you think it will make your login experience better, and try
⏹️ ▶️ John it for a while. I’ve been on sites that took away my password and I’ve disabled the passkey so I could get my password
⏹️ ▶️ John back because I didn’t trust yet that this website was implementing passkeys well enough that I wasn’t gonna get locked out of my
⏹️ ▶️ John account, right? You have to kind of make those choices on your own. So fingers crossed for me on
⏹️ ▶️ John Passkey’s. I’m optimistic about technology, but it is still young.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Tailscale and Delete.me. And thanks to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week’s Overtime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on AI, moats, and trade secrets. So tune in if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a member, you already get it. If you want to hear this and you aren’t a member, atv.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. Thank you so much and we’ll talk to you next week.
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, Marco and Casey wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let him Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
Gaming laptops over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my kids gaming PC, it’s a laptop, it’s a Razer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop. We all, all three of us in our household have Razer gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops of varying ages and specs and those those are together our gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PCs. Tiff’s is dying and won’t even boot anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s actually her second one. Mine is perfect and works great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I hardly ever use it. And my kids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been having some problems, a lot of problems. You know, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a Windows laptop. So most of the time when it is closed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some reason, it is very hot. The fans still run. It’s like, it’s, it’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, standard kind of like, you know, messed up Windows laptop problems. Like this thing doesn’t sleep well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like me with a pseudo-pedron. So like this thing does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sleep well. It seems to be doing a lot of work for nothing most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time. The thermals are awful. So I thought… and he started to complain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot about really bad performance in pretty much any action.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, at first I thought like maybe it’s some kind of weird malware that he installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while downloading some random thing off of a Discord. But then he actually showed me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, there were some common tasks, like, I think it was opening up the browser, and it took so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long to open. I’m like, okay, something is more wrong with this than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, any game would fail miserably. It’s not like, all right, maybe it’s thermals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a laptop. It’s been running its fans on high for like two years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So chances are there’s probably a lot of dust and crap in there. Maybe it’s clogging up one of the heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sinks or some of the fans. So –
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I pause for a second here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just point this out, which I know I’ve mentioned this before, but just to show that it’s not just my family and that it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. When we were all kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John when there was a problem with the computer, we fixed it because our parents were old and didn’t understand computers and we were young and we did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not every young person understood computers, but we did. Now that we are older, I mean, my parents said this to me
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time when I was a child, when you get old like me, your kids will have to explain technology to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John But instead what happens is that our children’s computers don’t work and they bring them to us to fix because we
⏹️ ▶️ John understand computers. Now, obviously we have a tech podcast for programmers, like we’re not the average person, but I still
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like we may end up being, or at least my generation, Gen X may end up being the only generation that
⏹️ ▶️ John had to fix all the computer problems when we were kids because our parents were tooled to understand it and still have to fix all the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John problems when we’re older because young kids don’t know or care anything about computers because they just take it for granted
⏹️ ▶️ John and PCs are for old people anyway. And so here you are, Marco, debugging and fixing computer problems
⏹️ ▶️ John for your kid. Where was the future we were promised where we would be old fuddy-duddies and our kids would have
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix our computers? My kids don’t fix my computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think eventually my kid will know enough about computers that he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t need me anymore. That time has not yet come though, I mean, he’s only 12. There’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John time. My son
⏹️ ▶️ John is a junior computer science major with excellent grades and I still fix his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer. Anyway, so I decided, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop is long out of warranty. And I tried, I even looked, I installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some process monitoring tool and I even tried, I used the built-in task monitor or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And nothing seemed to be using a lot of CPU or GPU power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was no reason why it had to be running its fans on full blast, I’m like, all right, well, whatever. Let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me open it up and see if I can blow out some dust.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, I know where the story’s going, so I just wanted to ask you a leading question here. Before you got to this stage,
⏹️ ▶️ John is there anything else you noticed about the computer that gave you any pause?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. Okay. Not at all. Proceed. All right, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I flip it over, I get out my trusty iFixit screwdriver kit, find the right screwdriver to take the bottom screws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. And so I do like the four corners of the screws. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like three across the top, three across the bottom. So I take off the, and when I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the corner on one of the two bottom corners, when I open it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole panel kind of pops
⏹️ ▶️ John up. Not a good sign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, hmm, that’s unusual. Why are the contents under pressure?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you shake up the laptop before you opened it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, hmm, that’s… Anyway, so I continued to open the rest of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, pulled it off, and I noticed the battery has ballooned somewhat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And I’m like, all right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another aside here, by the way, you posted this on…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Was it Masanara Threads? Masanara. I forget where you posted this. I
⏹️ ▶️ John keep forgetting threads exist. All right. So there is… Speaking of threads, there is a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John there are people writing stories about this, and it amazes me that they’re writing stories about this now and not last month or the month before or the month before
⏹️ ▶️ John that, because it’s always been true, about threads, things on threads,
⏹️ ▶️ John like having the algorithm on threads essentially promoting, they’re calling it like engagement bait,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s kind of like the version of click bait. It would basically be, well, someone will post something
⏹️ ▶️ John innocently, like pretend innocently post something that they know will be incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John controversial and everyone will reply about. And so Margo unwittingly did this, but not on threads,
⏹️ ▶️ John posting a picture of his battery and saying, do you think this looks
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And it was exactly like the engagement bait on
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody would ask that, no sane person would say something like this unless it was totally
⏹️ ▶️ John like, because they know a thousand people are gonna reply and say, hey dummy, don’t you know about X, Y, and Z? I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t think of a good example from threads, but just, you don’t need me to put an example. Open up threads right now, go to the algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline and then it automatically switches to you even if you switch to following because they’re evil. And just look at what the top post
⏹️ ▶️ John is and it’s gonna be some person innocently saying, I always thought that X, Y, and Z, but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure about whatever. And there’s gonna be a thousand reply guys replying to this engagement bait and that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John Threads has become. Well, Marco is, I think it was, were you, you have to tell me, were you legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ John asking that question or were you doing it just to get insane reactions?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was legitimately, because like, okay, I know that swollen batteries are a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing good, but I didn’t like it was only a little bit puffy, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know like no, that is not true.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the puffiest battery I’ve ever seen in my entire life look like a ravioli.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It looked like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was about to explode. I thought you should have immediately put it on your driveway and called the fire department.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I thought I’m like okay. Well, it has puffed up enough to like you know to push the case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m Like, I’ve never seen a Razer battery. I don’t know what their starting state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. This is how they normally,
⏹️ ▶️ John they normally look like pillows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case open. But only like, it wasn’t like, Only a little. Well, yeah, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, what you normally see is like, laptops where like the keyboard is starting to bend upwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the track pad has popped out. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I was asking, like, did you notice that, like, was the case bulging? And the reason I asked that is because I saw the battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But no, the case was fine. It was just like a little bit of pop on the case when I opened it up. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it didn’t… That’s why I was like, I know this is not… I’m pretty sure this isn’t normal, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how far gone is this?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a perfect example of engagement bait. Unintentional, apparently. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, anyway. So everyone reports back to me, oh yeah, that’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apparently they’re called spicy pillows. Like no one taught me this slang. Right, yeah. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and of course, every single reply is making that joke. I’m like, wow, you guys really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really original there. I assume some YouTuber popularizes
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a, I don’t wanna say it’s a meme. It is a term of art, let’s say in the field. And yes, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are pouch style batteries, but there are no Ravioli style battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, and I heard from a bunch of people who said, basically their Razer laptop also had this happen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including the replacement battery they got also had the same problem within a short time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. So anyway, so I’m like, crap. I don’t, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a possibility of a gaming PC happening in his Christmas future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, I gotta make this last till Christmas. I’m like, how? But now that I’ve seen this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, I can’t just let this go. Like, I can’t just leave it there. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to take action now that I’ve uncovered this. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John the world was telling you. The world was telling you your house will burn down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so what I was wondering is, can I get this to work, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until Christmas at least? And miraculously, so first I blew out all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dust out of all the fans and everything. And it seemed to work. But then I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I wonder. When you say it seemed to work, I was gonna say, like, you have these gaming laptops, but honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gaming desktops that are just bad desktops, because like, who’s using a gaming laptop not plugged in? Your performance will
⏹️ ▶️ John tank. So were you using this? you had removed the battery and disposed of it properly,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the thing would still boot if you just plugged into power? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I wondered, because I would assume that a modern Apple laptop will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not boot with the battery unplugged. Because I would assume it’s like buffering the power through that in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I thought there’s no way this is gonna work without a battery. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, let me just try it. I took out the battery. It took a long time to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery out, maybe because it had swelled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re trying not to explode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like I think maybe like I was looking up all these different YouTube videos on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to disassemble these things and of course, like every minor revision of a razor gaming laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is differently laid out inside enough that no YouTube video matches whatever one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you happen to be needed to take apart at a given moment. So like it, I’d never found one that matched the one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was looking at, but it was clear to me that like okay, I’ve unscrewed like the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five screws that hold this in and it’s not coming out. I eventually had to like bend the case slightly to like get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery to pop out. So oh that’s good. I think I think it had just swelled beyond its original size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I eventually pop it out and I’m thinking like all right, let me see if I can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn it on without the battery and sure enough it works totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny. It just boots up like it’s like okay fine. I guess I don’t have a battery anymore. I guess I’m a desktop. Okay, like windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so gloriously dumb. It’s just like okay, I cool. I’m a desktop boots right like no like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t even give me a message. Nothing is complaining. It just booted and everything works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. So now it’s just a desktop a crappy desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John said, but a desktop in the list the performance issues are gone. It works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better part of that is also probably the anti-malware scan that I did that’s removed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight unwanted programs or whatever, but it seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a much better state now. I think the Christmas gaming PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably still going to have to happen, but I think we will get there now more safely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you tape the power cord in or something or put a little note that says do not unplug?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean I told him, hey, this is not going to work on a battery anymore, but like he never used a battery anyway because it sucked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John batteries. I was going to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s using a gaming laptop on a battery anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really I mean and first of all like I can’t say enough mediocrity about Razer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a as a company that makes gaming laptops like it’s one of those products that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great as long as you don’t use it too much and there’s a lot of products out there like that especially in tech so my Razer gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC is great because I hardly ever use it I absolutely it’s it’s now a few years old it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worked great for the few times I have actually played games that’s who a gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop is for. A gaming laptop is not for gamers. It’s just not. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like an actual gamer who’s going to use it regularly should have a desktop because these laptops are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just… And it’s an impossible problem. Like the… If you’re gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of remotely gaming possible GPU, you’re gonna have such power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demands and such heat production from that thing. It’s just not going to have a long life in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop form factor. And it’s going to be a crap laptop. And knowing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t even get a really high spec one. I got a mid-range GPU in his. I figured I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know he’s going to still use it as a laptop, back and forth to the beaks. I didn’t want to have too short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a life. So when I sped it out to buy it, I specifically chose the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second lowest GPU option. And still, even then, massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat, massive problems. The battery life was never usable, like ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think the answer is for PC gaming, desktops are the way to
⏹️ ▶️ John So, but why are you getting another laptop then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not. I’m saying a gaming desktop is going to probably happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I thought you said you were gonna get another gaming laptop from, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, now if I was getting myself a gaming PC, I would most likely get another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop if I needed to. But my current one works great, even though it’s years old because I never use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, gaming laptops, great if you never use them.