531: Rock It in the Right Direction

38:07apparently my purchase of the studio display which i never had buyer's remorse over although i flirted with a little bit after the camera debacle which never really got that better But I also had a little bit of remorse, or I flirted with remorse, when weeks after I took delivery of mine, there was reports that, oh, there's going to be a super hot, high refresh mini LED ProMotion version coming out any minute now. And apparently, no, it's not. Because according to some people who watch the supply chain, we'll put a link to 9to5Mac in the show notes, apparently that's not happening. and we aren't going to be getting this new 27-inch display with mini LED and ProMotion after all, which selfishly, at least right now anyway, sounds good to me.

38:51I mean, you probably are eventually. Like, this is the thing, like, it's so hard to put a lot of faith in what the rumor mill says about any product that's more than, like, a couple of weeks out. You know, like, usually when stuff is imminent, you get rumors about it, and that's usually fairly accurate. But when somebody says, like, oh, Apple's working on this new kind of display for release in 2025, five well is that really like how how accurate is this forecast and then you know and and then you know the rumors start start treating it as fact and then when somebody gets different information that conflicts with that then they report that and then the rumors i'd say apple canceled this display it's like well did they or was your information already bad and you just got different information that might itself also be bad like so it it kind of it's it's this whole you know storytelling that we do uh with with these rumors that oftentimes is based on not a lot of reality or or it's people who have information that they interpret the wrong way or that is actually you know a different product they're telling a different story that than what they're than what they're reporting and so all this stuff you know it's it's wise to not put a ton of time and thought into these like far out product rumors um it was a ridiculous concept and we said so at the time that immediately after the studio display came out that there were rumors that they were gonna you know sometime soon make a much better one like we know how apple updates their displays the answer is they don't it's like they update their displays about as often as they update the mac pro like it's maybe less oh sick burn like it's that's a twofer we're lucky they still make displays and we know they don't offer them very much very frequently similar see also the mac pro on both counts right so uh the idea that they were going to follow up the studio display which came out what a year ago they were going to follow that up like fairly soon with something that is significantly different and better but replaces that same product category that doesn't make a lot of sense and it didn't make a lot of sense then it doesn't make a lot of sense now and if they do ever update this product i think and i think they eventually will as long as they keep making them at all um but if they do update this product it's probably still a few years away and at that point and nothing you hear from the rumor mill today is going to be very accurate about what the details of that might be i think the reason this particular rumor um you know had legs uh is well first of all when it originally came out the rumor was hey casey you just bought studio display well they're going to release a better one like in a month yeah it was like within a couple of months yeah it was ridiculously close and it was it was the type of thing where the only way it could possibly be true is if they wanted to launch both of them but couldn't and so they like delayed one of them or something which occasionally happens right but that was the rumor like how they're gonna they never update the displays and you're saying they just released a display and they're gonna release an even better one like within a month or two of like that seems impossible and it turns out not to be true right so that was kind of ridiculous right but the the reason this this rumor kept going is the one they released was less than we thought it might be right not that it was bad or anything it was you know it's a 5k display just like in the 5k mac and they put it in a display like good job and it was weird with the all a13 and the bad camera but like but in other words it was fine right but we know that in the world of technology that apple is competing in better display technology exists other manufacturers and even apple itself have better displays like the mini uh mini led ones that are in their laptops and the you know the fancy ones in their big ipad and you know lots of third-party manufacturers make displays that have uh dynamic backlights so we know that's out there we know it's not just like an advanced technology to expect it's existing products are like that sort of like okay apple came out with a studio display it's like this there's obviously room for there to make them to make a better version of this that has you know mini led backlight for better blacks or whatever or higher refresh rate because promotion is a thing right so it's one of those things where there will eventually be a better again like marco said if they keep making monitors which is not a given right but if they keep making monitors we know they're going to come out with that eventually so that's why this rumor despite it saying oh it's coming out next week in case he's going to be sad that was unbelievable and didn't happen but the rumor that there will eventually be a better one makes sense and it's just a question of when and when it's two or three years out you're like i can see that happening a couple years from now they'll probably come out with a new one but a couple years pass in apple land which as happens when you're waiting for the mac pro or monitor and we start approaching the date that everybody said this thing's supposed to come out and then you start with the rumors of like oh remember we said it was supposed to come out well it looks like it's not gonna and that feels like a you know the rumor was it's on and now it's off combine this with the persistent rumors ever since the 24 inch iMac came out that apple's going to make a bigger iMac which they also haven't done but anytime there's leaks from like the supply chain of a 27 inch display people like is this for a monitor is this for a 27 inch iMac lots of rumors about 27 inch iMac is like they made a bunch of prototypes they were thinking and making one it never got to the point where they said there's going to be one but they said that this is a thing apple has you know toyed with internally made prototypes of which makes sense like it makes sense that they would do that but you know it they haven't actually released anything and don't actually have any plans to release anything but that complicates all the rumors of better 27 inch displays because every single one of them you could be maybe that was just like the the big iMac that they were toying with and decided not to make so i you know this if they still keep making 27 inch 5k monitors if there is eventually a better studio another studio display it will be better in these ways and it will be good it's just a question of when that happens if they ship a mini led backlight pro motion 27 inch display five years from now that'll be a little bit late but you know not out of uh out of the realm of possibility for apple and the way they handle monitors should they have shipped one two months after casey got his no that seems silly should they ship one now i think it's perfectly reasonable to ship and i think it's reasonable to ship something like this and still keep the old studio display around because a then you can price this one even higher and apple loves that and b that like some people don't care about mini led or promotion and they should be able to get the cheaper one so i have my fingers crossed that something about this rumor comes to fruition at some point in the next year or two But for now, it's an example of one of those stories that stayed in the news because it makes sense technologically.

45:12It's not a fantasy. It's not ridiculous. It makes perfect sense. It's just that with Apple, what makes perfect sense doesn't always happen. Indeed. I mean, I would love to have a monitor like this. And my dream scenario is that I bump the studio display to be my accessory display, which is the most privileged thing in the world. but nevertheless and then i have this new fancy mini led promotion studio display 2 as my new primary display and that would be amazing uh but yeah i mean it sounds like it's not happening happening imminently and you know that's all right you could always get that samsung thing yeah yeah that's true i just said that you know the thing that uh you know it makes sense that this would happen but apple doesn't always do what makes sense well this next bullet item is a thing that never really made sense to me and it looks like it's not happening carry on so this is the rumor we talked about it many many shows ago about the quote-unquote solid state buttons in the new iphones this would be buttons that are like we keep using this analogy and i wonder how many people listening don't know what this is but there was a phone called the iphone 7 once uh and it had a thing called the home button and the iphone 7 switched the home button from a button that would move up and down like a regular button right to a button that did not move kind of like the track pads on modern MacBooks and MacBook Pros, but would just vibrate when you pressed it.

46:29And that sounds awful, but it turns out Apple did an amazing job and the home button on the iPhone 7 felt great. It didn't exactly feel like the actual physical home button, but in many ways, I thought it felt better. By the way, for whatever it's worth, not only did I use that home button today but i also just today arrived in the mail a brand new iphone well not brand new but a modern iphone that i just purchased that has that button it is the iphone se3 that for reasons that i that are too long to get into now um i bought a refurb really cheap uh iphone se3 from amazon um to serve basically we are killing Apple Watch family setup from our child's Apple Watch thing.

47:19He's outgrown it, and also it's really buggy. Oh my god, it's so bad! Okay, sorry for the rant. So, quick diversion, us. The Apple Watch family setup, this is the feature they launched back with the first Apple Watch SE a couple of years ago, where you could set up an Apple Watch for a family member without having a paired iPhone for it. Normally, of course, Apple Watches require them to be paired to a particular iPhone. You can't pair them to iPads. You can't pair them to iPod Touches. It has to be an iPhone. So if you wanted to get a watch for your kid or a family member or whatever, they had to have a paired iPhone, and so that didn't work for a lot of people.

47:54So right at the time when my kid was getting a watch, it made sense for various reasons we described back then. He didn't and still doesn't have his own iPhone, and so we thought, great, this is perfect. And it has been so buggy for the last few years. we've had problem after problem with family setup most common problems are the the watch basically doesn't back itself up at all it thinks it does sometimes it never actually is whatever your kid does on the watch consider it very temporary data because it will be lost at some point usually next time you have to like move it to a different os version or whatever it will or move to a different watch if that one you know gets upgraded or breaks or dies or whatever so that's problem number one All the data on the watch is even more ephemeral and temporary than Apple watches usually are because it doesn't back up to a phone.

48:42Even the phone that you set it up doesn't really back it up. Number two, any app that has a phone counterpart where the watch app cannot be installed by itself, like directly from the little tiny watch app store, any app like that cannot run on a phone with family setup because there is no paired iPhone effectively. So there are no iPhone counterparts. So, like, for instance, we just, as a family, we've started running together. Tiff is a Nike Run Club person trying to make Adam a Nike Run Club person, just, like, you know, using their app. We were trying to get Run Club on his watch, and you can't really do it because it needs the phone paired app and all this.

49:17So there's all this stuff. I'm like, you know what? At this point, this has caused us so many problems. Oh, and family setup is super buggy with cellular, which is the whole point of it. I don't know why it's so buggy. Super buggy with cellular. A lot of times you just can't reach the person. And some of this is the fault of watchOS and the way it handles cellular. Some of it is, I think, due to family setup because of weirdness there. So anyway, I just needed a phone, any phone to pair to Adam's watch. And we're not, to be clear, the phone is staying in a drawer in my office. We're not giving him the phone.

49:48But it is just any phone that can be paired so it can be treated like a normal Apple Watch with all the regular code path. That way it can at least be the regular level of Apple Watch bugginess because at least Apple engineers use the watches this way instead of the extra buggy level of family setup where I don't think anybody who works at Apple uses that feature. And you can kind of tell when there's a feature like that with Apple. So anyway, stay on the commonly used path for Apple success and happiness, and that is pairing it with a phone. And normally, I normally have a drawer full of old phones, and the problem is all of my old phones, like my two old phones that would have been perfectly candidates for this are an iPhone 7 with the wonderful home button.

50:27and an iphone se first gen neither of which can run ios 16 and app and adam's apple watches on is on watch os 9 and it can't be paired to ios 15 phones so it's like okay now i got now i got to find something that can run ios 16 that i also don't need for anything else ever uh because it'll be signed into his account i'm not going to be putting like betas and crap on it so it's like so i yeah basically went and bought an iphone se pretty much for this purpose i can occasionally use it for like os testing here and there or testing on this old form factor but it works fine it was it was like 200 it was super cheap um for like you know refurb for amazon so very very i'm very happy with that and i and i it's kind of amazing like you know i pick up this phone like this thing has it's like either i think it's either an a14 i think it's an a15 in this like it has such incredibly modern computing guts in this thing but to use a phone today as somebody who's used face ID style phones since the iPhone X to use a new iPhone today that has the new guts but still has touch ID and the home button and the rectangular screen, it feels so weird and so unbelievably old.

51:44It is shocking how much I feel like I'm going in the past with this brand new, well, mostly new phone that is the current model that Apple sells that I'm pretty sure has an A15 in it. Anyway, that's my rant. Family setup, goodbye. So out of curiosity, you're not getting any cellular service for the phone then? So far, I don't think I need to. So I was worried that I would need to. So we just left the plan on the watch and we restored the new phone. And I haven't quite figured out location tracking yet. I might have to do some weirdness there. but so far he was he was like at the playground yesterday and was able to call us with his watch after it would have been paired to this phone the number it came from like a random phone number instead of his apple id uh it was like a facetime call but it came from some you know some rando phone number that the watch was assigned by by at &t a million years ago um so i don't know if we're going to be able to keep it that way or if you could set it up new that way if you didn't first set up with family setup i don't know but right now the phone has no cell plan the watch has its you know whatever ten dollar a month cell plan and he's able to call with this phone number so i don't we'll see let's see if this is a stable situation or if at some point you know at &t or apple are gonna you know end this for us but right now we don't need a cell service thing fascinating where were we solid state buttons yeah this is all state buttons on the se we have se3 or whatever they're still selling them because they still sell phones in that form factor um and like i said it's you know it's a thing that apple customers deal with all the time probably primarily on the trackpads on their macbooks and macbook pros because they're all like this they don't actually move up and down to hit some kind of sensor they you just press on them and your pressure initiates a vibration motor that makes you think you clicked it or something right so the rumor for the iphone 15 was that the volume up and down and the sleep wake button on the iPhone 15, or maybe it was just the pros, I forget.

53:47But anyway, the new iPhones that are coming in the fall, they would be like this. They wouldn't actually go in and out and press something. They would be pressure sensitive. And when you press them, there'd be a little vibration motor that would give a little, you know, wiggle inside there and make you think you have clicked the buttons. And when we talked about this originally, we were like, all right, I mean, sure, I guess, but that's like two more vibration motors and there's not a lot of space in there uh and it seems really tricky and complicated to do because you got to make sure the buttons work to like turn on a phone so there has to be some power going all the time so to sense the pressure in them right and what happens if the battery goes dead and uh since then there's been all sorts of stories saying oh apple solved this they have a new super duper low power uh tiny little chip in there that even when the phone battery itself is 100 dead still this other presumably tiny dedicated battery should the super low power system make sure the volume and power buttons still work so you can put it into dfu mode and stuff like that like that they had found solutions to all these problems still i was always wondering okay but like to what end is this just for waterproofing because it's easier to seal them when the buttons don't move um you know are the buttons a failure point maybe apple knows something that we don't about like it turns out that the the sleep wake button or the uh the volume buttons end up failing because people press them a lot like what's what's motivating this uh but anyway the most recent rumor is hey remember those uh quote-unquote solid state buttons on the iphone 15 yeah they're not doing that this year and the rumor is that they were testing them and they just basically had what quote-unquote unresolved technical issues uh and so i mean that happens sometimes you're pushing the envelope you want to do something that is not particularly common in the industry and you want to ship literally hundreds of millions of iphones with this thing the buttons better work and better be reliable So if they tested this and it turns out there are some issues they couldn't resolve, by all means, go back to regular buttons.

55:38Now, the thing I think is interesting about this is this is another one of those rumors, kind of like the display where it's like rumor thing that's coming. Actually, the thing we rumored is not coming. And the story is like Apple cancels this thing they never announced. Right. I'm sure Apple tries all sorts of things with their phones. But as iPhones, which are heavily leaked products, get closer and closer to their launch day or more precisely closer and closer to the point where the factories start churning these things out to be ready for launch day so they can ship hundreds of millions of them all over the world.

56:04We learn basically everything about them, short of their names, colors and prices and stuff like that. I bet it's going to be called iPhone 15. um in this case we're getting close off to the point now where people are like 3d printing the exact shape from the uh you know the quote-unquote cad files for the things you can see exactly what the phones are going to look like down to the curvature of the case you know is this is so that people who make iphone cases can manufacture them to fit exactly on the stuff like what the cameras are going to look like the gigantic you know camera mound and how much they're going to stick out and everything about that right one of the things that all the 3d models that people have done is they share a common trait that the volume buttons on the side of the phone instead of there being two little holes one for the volume up and one for the volume down there's one long skinny hole that would have been presumably for the solid state button that would act kind of like a seesaw rocker where if you press the top of the button that would mean volume up and you press the bottom it would be volume down and when i saw that i mean you can see it very clearly on the case there's there's just one long opening instead of two little ones right but I hate things like that.

57:06uh i don't want to go into a car rant but car manufacturers seem to love this idea and i want someone to shake them and say please don't do this the thing that car manufacturers do is uh they want to have a bunch of buttons but they don't want to have real button buttons so first they did capacitive touch where there'd be this big expanse of shiny black plastic and there'd be these light-up symbols right and if you just touch your finger to one of the light-up symbols it's not a screen mind you it's just a light-up symbol like that you know individual stenciled out little light up symbols you touch your finger to that light up symbol it's capacitive and it will sense that you touch it and it will activate it and then you put those controls in the steering wheel which is a terrible idea because when your bare hand swipes across one of them you turn on cruise control or something so you're like all right that's that was a bad idea you know it takes them five years to learn this oh no it's still happening look at the new golf they still do but some manufacturers figured out that's a bad idea let's do something better i know what we'll do let's have a big expanse of shiny plastic with light light up uh little areas that you also touch but instead of them being capacitive why don't we make them pressure sensitive and like but wait a second it's a giant sheet of plastic how are you going to make it pressure sensitive how will i know how it works i've got an idea we'll make it capacitive to figure out where your finger is and then we'll make it pressure sensitive to figure out that you're pressing and then some other genius says i've got an even better idea let's make it not pressure sensitive but let's make it a regular button so now they have a huge piece of plastic that when you press anywhere on it the entire piece of plastic goes in by like two millimeters they have capacitive sensors to figure out hey we know the whole big giant thing went in but what part of it was your finger touching when it went in so basically it's one big button but with like it knows where you press the one big button and it's like guys come on you can just use individual buttons i swear just just make six buttons instead of one giant button with a capacitive sensor so that it knows were anyway i'm pretty sure whether i'm pretty sure my defenders steering wheel buttons are this yeah no they love it and it works fine about 95 of the time but that other five percent is really frustrating yeah it's like and i guess they're saving costs because instead of having six buttons you have essentially one button and the capacitive stuff is cheap enough but it's like it's such a terrible idea especially in like you know something that's supposed to be fancy so when i anyway getting back to the phone when i look at this long skinny single volume button right where you just rock it from side to side i hate that because it's like okay i pressed it but i pressed too close to the middle so what i actually did was i actuated volume up and down at the same time or i actually did volume up and then volume down like when they're separate buttons and you find the one you want to press if you just press that button the other button doesn't get pressed at all but when it's a single piece and it's supposed to rock like a seesaw you have to make sure you press enough on the edge to rock it in the right direction or whatever it just seems like such a bad idea so given this rumor that you know they were going to be the kind that don't move but now they're not going to be they're going back to regular buttons i do wonder does that mean that the kate they're redesigning the case as well to have two openings one for volume up one for down are they sticking with the single long volume button only now it's just going to be a regular button that rocks back and forth didn't the iphone 3g and 3gs have a single big rocker button i think so yeah like they i think they did it where they they made the that they had like a divot in the middle and the new rumors are there'll be like a little line in the middle as well like you make like a divot it's still one piece but there's like a raised part another raised part which helps you a little bit to make sure you know you're pressing on the half that you're pressing on but it just seems to me like such a weird such a weird choice like what's broken about the two separate buttons that they need to fix by having one it seems like the same amount of surface area for water ingress is having two buttons but i don't know so anyway we'll see when this phone actually comes out does it have pressure sensitive buttons or not um or does it have a single long volume rocker or two separate volume buttons and cut of all the things to change again i'm still kind of curious about this like apple perhaps knows something that we don't and you know my only guess is water water and dust ingress and reliability of moving buttons but given their track record with home button it seems like they could probably do a good job of the solid state buttons uh but just maybe not for this year and the other rumor is that the the mute switch is going to be a button which still that's that's still on that rumor is still on and i think that'll be great because i'm already thinking about what i'm going to use that for because the mute switch i just always have it on silent so i don't need that switch to be there i would love that to just be a small button and i'm pretty sure my day one attempt to map that button not that i'm going to have this on my wife will but anyway uh what i would map it to is a rotation lock you remember the good old days when the ipads had a rotation lock i would probably map the button to rotation lock because i do rotation lock and unlock my thing usually i'm laying down i want it locked when i'm sitting up you know whatever uh but i'm i'm willing to uh imagine that i might find a better use for it i'm sure lots of people will hook it up to some kind of shortcut or do the same function that you currently have mapped to like triple tap on the back of your phone so adding another button to the phone basically by making the mute switch into the ring silence switch or whatever the hell it's called by making that into a button solid state or otherwise i think that's going to be a big upgrade and that one is a separate button and not just a weird rocker thing yeah that i think the most just the most obvious thing to do with that is have it launched the camera app of your choice like that would be amazing you know i think a lot of people would do that oh that's interesting launch a camera i mean and there's all you know launch the flashlight maybe you know whatever you use it could launch the default camera app i know there's 50 ways to do that you can swipe sideways you can press the little icon but but you can't do really any well i guess you can do the swipe sideways without looking but still you kind of got to make sure the screen is active or whatever i i think maybe if i find that rotation lock is not worthwhile maybe i would use camera because i just spent the day today i was uh touring in college with my daughter um and i was taking lots of pictures on my phone because i'm an embarrassing dad and she wouldn't let me bring a real camera um and so you got to take out your phone and you got to activate the camera a lot because i'm trying to do it stealthily activate the camera take a picture put it back right because i don't embarrass anybody uh and i have traditionally been a hold down in the little camera icon on the lock screen person but i tried to start being a sideways swipe person because that seemed like it might be easier but i don't i don't know if it's easier it seemed like it really wanted me to swipe a long distance sometimes there's notifications there and i'm afraid i'm going to accidentally swipe one of them away so uh either one of those actions though i think uh the the upcoming action button or whatever the hell they call it on the iphone 15 series will be better so i guess i'd try that as well yeah i can also you know i think by far the the most common use for it will be camera um and and i think again a lot of people will probably use it as a flashlight um if you currently use the triple tap accessibility shortcut for things like magnifier or things like that like i think that'll also be a very common use for people who use those features uh there's a there's a lot of features i can think of that people would love that and and if they do open it up to things that can be done with the phone that that would require the phone to be unlocked such as launching a third-party app or running a shortcut uh that would also that would add some complexity because like you know you'd have to you know let face id run first before it would finish the task but that would also i think dramatically open it up and that would do especially that would be great for third-party camera apps like because then they they could have themselves be the ones that launch when you hit that button instead of the built-in one and that you know if you use a third-party camera app that would be you know probably your holy grail and even if you don't and if apple just you know lets it be their own stuff that can run with the phone locked, even if it's just launching camera or flashlight or magnifier or, you know, changing the mute status.

1:04:34Those are all very, very nice features for almost everyone who uses them. So I think that's the plan for the mute switch to become an action button, basically, sounds awesome. And we'll see what Apple does with it, like, you know, what they actually allow us to do, how it actually works. But that sounds awesome because I think most people are not flipping that switch frequently. Most people, I think, typically have it in one state or the other. So I think it's totally fine to make that a bit more of like a software-based thing. Also, hitting that switch the way almost everyone uses their iPhone, which is in a case, is terrible.

1:05:17Trying to flip that switch one-handed when it's in a case with most cases is difficult to impossible. Yeah, it's an innie belly button. It just collects lint. Yeah, it collects tons of lint. And it's hard to operate. So I recognize if you are a caseless unicorn and you want to be able to hold and feel it in your pocket or flip it in your pocket, that's great. But you also probably recognize that you are the minority of phone users by not using a case. And so when you are using a case, depending on how the case is shaped around that it's very difficult to operate that switch or to detect what state it's in without just taking it out of your pocket and looking at it so making it a button that would be you just push it in and then the phone does something in response maybe it gives a little vibrate to indicate whether if you leave it on mute mode maybe it gives a little vibrate to indicate muted status so you could still do it in the pocket 100 % by feel that's how I would expect them to do it and that I think would be totally fine And similar to, you know, when the iPhone 7 came out and it didn't have a real physical pushing in home button, we all thought that was going to be bad.

1:06:21We all thought it was going to be somehow worse than having the physical home button. And by the way, remember, the physical home buttons in the iPhones that preceded the iPhone 7 often died during the time you used the phone. Like, they often wore out and led to this whole world of people who use, like, the, what's the on-screen little blobby thing? But you know the little blobby thing where you put a home button thing on your screen? Yeah, it's an accessibility feature. I don't remember the name of it, but it basically was it's an onscreen incarnation of the home button for people whose home buttons broke.

1:06:49Right. And then and what turned out happening was like huge places like I believe this was big in China. Huge places, huge amounts of people would assistive touch. Thank you to veg in the chat room. Huge populations of people would turn that on right from the start. They would just always use the phone that way because they didn't want to wear out the home button. It was like people who put plastic over their furniture so to be protected. right but they would never take the plastic off of the furniture so i wanted to look good forever but now it's going to look like it has plastic on it forever so you'd preserve your home button which you would never use i guess for resale value or whatever right that's that's how my grandparents former living room always was there was always there was a whole room of the house filled with furniture and we could never go into it except on christmas day and on christmas day we would go into the room but the plastic would still be on the couches we would just sit on it well you don't want to mess it up you want it to always look good just ignoring the fact that it looks bad because it has plastic on it right and it's totally unusable as furniture anyway um so when the iphone 7 came out with that home button you know virtually you know done with the tapping engine again we all thought it was going to be worse but it turned out it was i wouldn't say way better but it was it was fine it was it was exactly as good as the old home button in terms of how it felt and everything but then it worked pretty much 100 of the time like it was way more reliable i liked it better because it required less travel so it felt yeah felt less onerous like the old people remember the old home buttons moved a lot they didn't just move like a half a millimeter in and out like they moved up and down a lot yeah that's true that the thing about the old home buttons is like that we were all aware of home button failures so it made perfect sense to us why apple would want to make that solid state setting aside waterproofing which which also kind of came around then i think the seven was the first one where they really advertised the waterproofing stuff um but that made sense but the the volume power buttons like i'm willing to believe that there's reliability and waterproofing benefits but i don't i don't see them myself in like my my my overview of the iphone market and my usage of the iphone like it doesn't seem like there's a crisis of volume up and down and and uh sleep wake buttons dying on iphones and apple needs to address this so i mean maybe it's not that pressing maybe they bailed on it because they couldn't figure it out but they'll you know return to it in the future the action button on the other hand i think is a great example of apple discovering that buttons are useful i mean people look at it and say oh it's just like on the apple watch ultra but i feel like it's the same ethos that put the hdmi and sd card back on the pro max like that hey uh having a clean appearance is one thing but features pay dividends every single day so you want to strike a balance between it you know not having a million buttons and things sticking out of it but also having enough functionality can the iphone support one more button i believe it can i mean they're not adding a button they're just changing something that used to be a switch turning that into a button but still it's a big win especially if they let us uh you know assign things to it for like what's single tap double tap triple tap tap and hold like i don't think they're going to go hog wild with it but if you think oh well then once i pick one thing for that button it's game over apple does have the ability to be fancier and we just mentioned the triple tap on the back of your phone that's a triple tap action which is fairly rare for apple to go single tap, double tap, triple tap.

1:09:57So if they're willing to do that, I really hope they'll be willing to let people assign things to single tap on that action button, double tap on the action button and, you know, hold down the action button. Like there's lots of potential flexibility there, depending on how far Apple wants to go. I mean, I can tell you why it's triple tap on the back of the phone. At least I'm pretty sure I know why. A long time ago, as I was brainstorming features for Overcast for how could I use this while walking before the Apple Watch came out? how could i control overcast so i actually prototyped tapping the back of the phone while it's in your pocket as some kind of gesture to detect and you know maybe make it like track skip or whatever it was extremely difficult to get that to work reliably and not have false positives because you know just as you're walking the phone is being shocked by every step you take and so to try to try to detect the difference between regular motion while walking or running or jogging or whatever and a tap or a double tap your error rate is is significant whereas triple tap if you do that within a fast enough time that gives much more data a much more identifiable pattern of vibration with the accelerometers and everything to the point where they can probably detect that pretty reliably with with almost no wrong false positives um so that's probably why that's a triple tap they should have done it like uh they should have required mario 64 timings for the triple tap for the triple jump yeah right tap tap tap oh sorry you didn't do the timing right you you did a double jump and then just jumped did a single jump after try again i believe you're thinking of mario john i'm not actually yes you are anyway yeah i don't know i i like the idea of a of some sort of action button or you know smart button uh i do use my um my silent switch as a fidget toy, which I know I should not do, but as of yet, I have not broken one.

1:11:51I'd never flick it otherwise. So like my phone, certainly since I got my first watch in like 2014, and I think even mostly before that, my phone was always on silent, just always. And again, once I had an Apple watch on my wrist, pretty much always, there seemed to be no purpose to ever have it not on silent. And I'm not one of those absolute monsters that has a chime on their watch. You know, that's why I wear a watch, I can be silently notified if something needs my attention. And so anyways, I don't really have a need for a switch. I don't do the rotation lock often. I tend to leave my phone on rotation locked to portrait pretty much always.

1:12:32And I will occasionally turn that off, you know, if I need to like show a photo in landscape or something like that. But I like the idea of having that as the action button activator. I love the idea of having the camera as what gets activated in this mythical action button. And certainly for the iPad, I would love to bring back the switch. It used to be that the thing that's a silent switch on your phone, there was something similar on the iPad, and that would be your orientation lock. And it was amazing, and I miss it all the time, and I would love to have that back. But anyways, I love this idea.

1:13:08I hope that maybe these reports are wrong, although I doubt they are, and maybe it will land in the iPhone 15. But we'll see what happens. Everyone agrees the action button is coming. It's just a question of whether the buttons will be solid state or not. Yeah, and I think it's tricky with the solid state because when you look at how they did, if you look at a teardown of any of the Touch ID phones from iPhone 7 forward, you can see how they achieved that pressure button was that the Taptic engine, which is kind of like a big subwoofer in your phone. Like it's basically a relatively large, low frequency driver that goes back and forth like a speaker driver sort of.

1:13:46But it's just it's such low frequency that you just feel the vibration instead of like hearing audible sound. So what's interesting is that the way they did this is that the Taptic Engine just I think just happened to be in the design of the phone at the bottom. And so they realized, oh, well, we can just use that since the home button is already right there. let's just move the tapping engine a little bit over and you know boom boom there's our there's our click um and because you have to feel it when when you're close to it to really maximize the you know the way it feels right the problem is taptic engines are big and in order to do this in in for the iphone volume buttons you would have to move it up there and then maybe even have a second or third one and so that takes up a lot of internal volume and and in the iphone they can't really spare internal volume very often.

1:14:35If there's space in the iPhone, they want to use it for battery if they can. So it seems like a bit of an odd choice unless they found a way to either use one Taptic Engine to do all of this or to have much smaller ones that still have enough of a feel. Plus, the home button wearing out thing, as we were talking about a minute ago, you think about how many times is a home button pressed? Even in light use of a phone, maybe it's pressed 50 times a day and you know if you're a heavy phone user more than that whereas how many times do you press the volume buttons in your phone you know even if you are just the volume all the time you're probably not pressing them 50 times a day so sleep sleep wake might be pressed a lot because people press it before they put it back in their pocket you know yeah maybe i mean it depends on like you know some people even don't even realize it's there but but even then yeah i mean so maybe 20 to 50 times a day for that like not as much as a home button because the home button you you you press it every time you switch to apps so it was and everything we unlock the phone so it was it was very it's pressed a lot so i don't know that it's necessarily um needed for like you know resilience purposes on those buttons i think what it would be for would be for water resistance because keep in mind too like apple apple has dual reasons for wanting to make the phones durable one is that they want people to be happy with their phones and if their phones are too fragile You'll see also the reason why they make the backs out of glass.

1:15:58God knows why. If the phones are too fast, people don't like them. But number two, if Apple has to repair a lot of the phones that are under warranty or Apple care, they eat the cost and they lose money. Anything they can do to reduce service needs, to reduce warranty failures, they have a pretty strong incentive to do that. So ideally, that's why they remove the headphone jack. That's why they try to make everything as salty as possible. that's why there's always these rumors about oh they're going to remove all the ports and everything like that because apple has strong incentives to make their phones not fail at least while they're under warranty or apple care coverage so you know again glass aside that still makes you mad but but like me like if apple does eventually not use glass on the back of their phone it's probably going to be for that reason mainly and then secondarily maybe about weight I would love these phones to get lighter.

1:16:55You'll be happy to know the rumor is titanium instead of stainless steel on the Pro, so that'll be lighter. I know, that'll be great. I hope that's real. But anyway, as for if they actually do this Taptic Engine volume rocker and sleep button thing, I bet it will feel totally fine. I bet we won't really notice a big difference. They did show with the iPhone 7 and forward home button, they can do that. They can achieve that, and the illusion works. again the trackpads and the laptops we've had that illusion for since about 2015 on every model like that's that illusion works fine so the illusion works they can do it i trust them to do it i just question whether they will do it because of the interior space constraints that they probably have while doing it yeah the reason we know that they were going to use two additional taptic engines was because the rumor was from a supply chain about like who was awarded the contract like there was like this is a big win and the stock price of the the company that makes the taptic engines is going to go up because now instead of selling them one taptic engine per phone they're going to be selling them three right and the rumor was that the taptic engines for the volume button and the sleep wake button were very small like they weren't the size of the big one because they didn't need to shake the whole phone like when it rings or whatever they just needed to provide feedback for the buttons and they would be right next to the buttons still taking up space but right next to the buttons and that was part of what was boggling my mind is like like you said they're gonna they're gonna take space out of that i can't imagine it taking less space than physical buttons so they're going to take space and power for these little taptic engines two additional taptic engines just to pull off this feature that nobody really wants that presumably make the phones a little bit more durable um i do wonder if the technical issue they couldn't resolve has nothing to do with the low power thing and what do you do when the battery dies and is instead uh related to like the experience i think a lot of people had with the original apple watch that the the tiny taptic engine and the series zero very often sort of gave up the ghost and just could not shake your watch anymore i think it still happens occasionally with later generations that the very small taptic engines sometimes just can't even and they they stop they stop they stop doing their little wiggle um and i you don't hear about that so much with the big taptic engine that's underneath the track pads or inside your phones at the bottom right so maybe something about making a very tiny taptic engine and making that reliable is what the technical issue was because we've definitely seen that specific technical issue with the very small tactic engine that's in the apple watch but we won't know until they announce the product but this was definitely something that seemed like um it was very heavily rumored to the point where they were you know talking about which supplier was awarded the contract and excited about there will be more tactic engines and then this latest rumor from the same from the same source from ming chi kuo saying uh yeah it doesn't look like that's happening for this year which which is a thing that happens you know you try a feature out you put it in prototypes if you can't get it up to the reliability levels that you want your fallback is just do regular buttons right it's a fallback that you can have readily available because it's not like they don't know how to make regular buttons so um but we'll see how this ends up but if if it doesn't come this year if there really are benefits like you were saying marco like the reliability or you know water intrusion or whatever they'll try again right they'll try with the 16 they'll try with the 17 like eventually they'll get there we are brought to you this week by squarespace the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online.

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1:21:56Let's do some Ask ATP and Xerxes wants to know, do any of you run third-party anti-malware on your Mac? Is that time of year again? yeah everyone asks at least once or twice a year yeah and the reason i keep putting it back in there is because i just always want to see has our answer changed we probably answer this maybe once a year once every year and a half or whatever and like it's not safe to assume that things will stay the same forever in the technology world so here we are 2023 uh are any of us running anti malware on our macs in the past we had said we were not so let's see now casey says no nope i uh I also like to me, you know, first of all, I think anything that is a significant threat of malware to the Mac, Apple will most likely use their X protect system and block it.

1:22:44And that, you know, so that will be fine. So far, life on a Mac has has repeatedly shown that malware is not a massive concern for most of us who run things at all responsibly. And so we are, I think, it's a pretty low risk for us. secondly the reality of anti-malware software like third-party anti-malware software the reality of what that does to your computer is itself in my in my opinion kind of like what malware does and so like i don't i don't want those negative effects and i don't want my computer to be slowed down and messed up and giving some weird company like you know what these companies like Norton and whatever like they're weird companies too why am I giving them access to everything on my computer do I really trust them should I really trust them do I trust them not to have their own security holes like if I'm opening the door to them to give them because you know these things need like you know root access or whatever how do I know they aren't going to introduce their own security hole that somebody can exploit like it's just it it's adding it's adding risks to my computer it's taking away risks I don't think are very big uh and you know in the sense of not just the total malware risk to a Mac, but the delta between what could Apple protect against directly versus what these can protect against, I think that's a very, very small gain in practice.

1:24:08And then the downside of having them is they make my computer worse. They make it perform worse. They introduce privacy questions. They, you know, I have to pay for them in some way. Like, it's like, well, that isn't, that's kind of like what malware does. So I'd rather, I just would rather not do that. And as long as the, as long as the risk of Mac malware continues to be as low as it is, and as long as Apple can do a good enough job with their built-in stuff to protect against anything that actually gets big, I'm fine with that. Yep, agreed. I'm not as pessimistic as Marco is about anti-malware software.

1:24:43I think the big difference is the reputable anti-malware software vendors, their intentions are good. They're trying to protect your computer. It always amazes me that Apple... They're trying to sell you a protection scam, let's be honest. But they're not trying to encrypt all your stuff and then send you a ransom. Historically, and I think still currently, Apple has had in macOS 10 slash current version of macOS, various places for anti-malware software to hook into the system. For example, I think there has been and probably might still be the hook that says, hey, every time anything tries to access a file anywhere, here's a part where you third-party developer can insert your anti-malware thing to make sure that the file access is not malicious or whatever you know like that there are really deep low-level hooks at like the kernel level for anti-malware software to intercept things like network requests or file access or whatever to perform the function of anti-malware and over the years apple i think has made those hooks safer so that if there is a bug in anti-malware it doesn't itself become a security exploit like the network stack stuff is now using moved into user space i believe and anyway um all that said i don't run anti-malware software i i never have and i continue not to uh not because i think anti-malware software is like bad for my computer or whatever but for example what thing that sprang to mind immediately is this bug i talked about at the top of the episode where my window dragon got all messed up if i had any of those things installed that would be my first thing that i would look for right what is in my operating system that's third party at the lowest level messing with literally everything that happens every file access every network or whatever that's going to be my first culprit to say all right uninstall that and see if the problem went away not because again they're doing anything bad or wrong but just to perform the function of anti-malware you have to be so deep in the system and you have to watch every single thing of a particular type that happens you can't just watch some network request or some file io like you would miss the malware right you have to be there and and catch it all right and apple itself already has an anti-malware system built into mac os at the lowest level that it's it's limited and there's not a lot of surface area to it but apple uses it and periodically updates it with new malware or whatever so it's not like i'm running entirely unprotected but the main reason i don't run any malware stuff is that you know it's there is a cost to running it i was forced to run anti-malware stuff when i had my various jobby jobs so i know what it's like there is a cost to running that stuff some of it can be worse than others right and the benefit is just not there in my opinion it's not as if i'm like well it's okay for you not to run it because you're a savvy user and you won't do anything dumb no like i'm no not much more savvy than the average user like malware exploits human weakness and exploits your complete unawareness i load web pages i don't have some magical knowledge that knows hey i'm sure this web page doesn't exploit some zero day thing in my web.

1:27:39But no, I don't know that any more than anybody else does. So I've been using Macs without antivirus without anti malware since 1984. And I've never had a problem with it. So until that changes, there's no way I'm going to voluntarily run some software that I know has downsides in exchange for an upside that I just do not see. So the answer to, you know, has this changed? Are we still running? We're still not running it. Now, I know companies have to run it probably for liability reasons and if your company forces you to run it I'm sorry I've been there it happens right but for regular people I still think the correct answer is don't install third-party and emailware software unless you find that you need it and I don't think you will find that you need it Jesse Wilson writes in your discussion of life streams John noted that rewind.ai doesn't encrypt local application data does matter I don't know if that's still true by the way but at the time this was written yeah at the time this was written that was true uh does mac os allow apps to keep encryption keys and data private from one another do you have any mac do you use excuse me any mac apps that encrypt their local data john yes mac os does allow apps to keep data private that's what keychain is for applications can store stuff in keychain that other applications can't see uh obviously on the mac there's always the top level root privilege where you can see everything and you as a user can unlock your keychain and look at all the contents but there There are mechanisms that application developers can do to try to keep their stuff separate from other people's stuff.

1:29:06Sandboxing helps with that. Not every Mac app is sandboxed, but the ones in the Mac App Store are. And a sandbox Mac app really has very limited access to reach into what other apps are doing. Non-sandbox apps can reach pretty far and wide. So you have to trust the developer that's making them. But the operating system does provide mechanisms to try to keep data private. and keychain is the the ultimate one of those but you can't just say oh because this mechanism exists i'm sure every mac app is safe no because developers have to use these apis they have to opt into sandboxing and so do other apps and in the end because it's a mac you do have the ability to say well i'm just going to become root and bypass all of these uh you know protections and just get it what i want there is there is a higher level of that like system integrity protection and you know having a read-only system volume right so it is more secure than it was so just keep that in mind uh but yes applications like rewind can do better than leaving all their data unencrypted on disk and i i'm assuming that since this was this is a sktp question was sent to us probably many months ago that actually has changed with this specific application um it's tricky on the mac because like you could say well i'm using an encrypted disk like my you know my laptop comes and i'm using encryption on the entire disk isn't everything encrypted and safe yeah but you have to unlock it to use the computer and when you're logged into it and your screen is unlocked and everything's unlocked and your keychain is unlocked yeah it's all encrypted what we call encrypted at rest as in on the disk it's encrypted but right now live on the computer it's ready and able to be read by anyone who sits in front of your keyboard and your mouse because your computer is unlocked your keychain is unlocked and you know so the security is complicated but uh but yeah the standard is uh actually make it encrypted on the disk because that way if you shut down your computer and someone yanks out the ssd chip and tries to like read stuff from or whoever there are many levels of protection that's preventing them from getting at it but the final one would be oh and by the way if you actually do manage to read it it's all going to be encrypted anyway indeed and finally true writes if you hadn't already gotten the mac studio for your wife john would you now opt for the m2 mac mini instead i wouldn't because i'm trying my goal with uh buying her computer is to you know like like buying my computer or my hondo card or whatever just get one and then make sure it is good for many many years so uh the m2 mini i think doesn't come uh with the max chip the m2 max uh i believe that's correct it goes up to the pro only right you can't outfit it with 64 gigs of ram that is a big future proofing thing because you know things just get more ram humbly over time uh and there's no sd card which seems silly but her previous 5k iMac had an sd card slot and so does her mac studio and i actually use it by sticking sd cards turn my cameras into it.

1:31:50Even though it's under the desk, I can still get at the SD card slot. So I personally wouldn't, but for a lot of people who don't care about any of those things and aren't trying to buy some sort of future-proof computer, you can save a lot of money by buying an M2 Mac Mini with some decent specs rather than the studio. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Backblaze. And thanks to our members. You can support us directly at atv.fm slash join. Don't forget our cool new merch sale, atv.fm slash store. And we will talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin.

1:32:25Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S That's Casey List, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G, Marco Armit S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental, they didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long I have a bit of an odd problem. Oh, no. I don't quite know how to fix it. Let me guess. Let me guess. The fix is throwing lots of money at it. In this case, I don't think so because dog treats are pretty cheap.

1:33:34Not the ones that I get advertised on Instagram. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm sure you can find the super fussy ones. Does your dog eat grass? Does your dog ever lick its own paw? does your dog ever look at you your dog is probably dying from parasites buy these 40 treats that last a week oh my god that's all i get on instagram is is uh sick dog ads so you mentioned earlier casey that you're you know you have all your phones on mute because why would you ever need to hear sound effects i have started doing this myself i i actually have had my phone on loud mode much over the last few years just because i live in the middle of nowhere in the winter and there's no one around and so who cares and so i'll just like leave it on because you know sometimes maybe it's out of my pocket or something um somehow something has changed in the last couple of weeks where my wonderful dog hops who is a tiny little 12 year old diabetic shit poop uh has started really freaking out with phone notification noises and this is new he's he's not usually like a nervous dog this is a new thing uh i don't i can't figure out what was the inciting incident here like you know i thought like okay maybe maybe like a phone notification noise preceded some like traumatic event or nervous event for him but i can't figure out what that would be my my only theory is like maybe maybe every time the phone dings i subconsciously look alert towards it and maybe that makes him nervous that he thinks, oh no, something that requires alertness is happening.

1:35:11Maybe it's something bad. That's the only thing I think of. I don't think I'm that bad about it honestly. But anyway, it's gotten to the point where the thing is we have a lot of devices in our house. We have all of my stuff, we have all of Tiff's stuff, all of Adam's stuff. Trying to make sure that no devices unnecessarily play Apple's default dings and doodoodoods And like that, that's actually very difficult in this house. There's, there's a lot of, you know, things that can cause that. You can be, you can be a mute switch family. I mean, I, I realized that I don't actually know all the sounds that a phone might make because my phone is set to silent all the time.

1:35:47And so is every other device in the house. And the few times I've turned it off, I'm like, oh my God, it makes a sound every time a message comes in and every time you send one and I immediately turn it off. So I know how hops feels because anytime I hear that sound, I also want to break something. yeah and like and to be clear it's not making him like aggressive it's making him nervous making me nervous too i'm upset about the idea of your house no it's like a giant video arcade please just just go around the house and put all the switches into mute and you don't just have to be in your pocket because when it vibrates and it's on a hard surface you can still hear it yeah but also but like okay so think so also my mac makes these sounds and sometimes i have it playing through speakers or at least open backed headphones so he can definitely still hear it what is your alert sound set to i just i just look what are the defaults are so so i what i hear a lot of i don't know the default look it up what is it is it funk is it glass um i think so glass is the one that's ting right is that that one yeah that that one is definitely one that gets it so as far as i can tell it's at least that he hates that and i think he also hates the that's like the standard ios you know notification sound so there's two problems number one we have a ton of devices in the house and you know three of them are max and so it's you know there's that's going to be difficult to like never play these sounds um the second problem is we've watched tv shows from apple tv plus yeah product placement yeah so we've been watching ted lasso and shrinking recently both of which take place like in the modern day i do like the fact that at least on ted lasso i don't watch shrinking but at least on ted lasso they use the dynamic type features of the os to make the text readable on screen rather than faking the stuff like it shows no way it's all faked it's all faked no they fake it with real i think with actual video footage it is it is composited in the sense that it like it's faked that way exactly but it's actually using ios it looks like yeah it's the real apps and the real os and the real dynamic type type feature which i think looks so much better than when they you know try to take an interface and blow up the text for the purposes of reading on the screen but it's not actually a supported thing of the future and yes the screens are composited on so they read on camera but i'm just saying the the actual software is real apple software only with you know you just assume everyone on ted lasso has bad vision because the the fonts are all cranked up but yeah i so you know in all in ted lasso and in shrinking there and i think i think the morning show also had this that that hasn't come back yet but um when we watch that i think they have a lot of like you know showing iphones having text chats and so you end up hearing a lot of ting and do you hear and the whoo whatever the you know the i'm asking i feel like that is a bad character moment because granted some characters would be terrible people who have the sounds on but some characters would have the sound and they just i feel like apple's branding overrides everything look everybody has to be has to have the mute switch you know set to uh to the noisy mode right and that's not true some character i feel like it should be a character moment we see what kind of character is a terrible person who lets their sounds go on their phone agreed but setting that aside it doesn't solve my problem so like it's getting like it's very hard to watch these shows now without you know something will happen on the show and then like hops is he's basically he likes you know he he leaves his normal his normal tv state for years has been you know tipped over power save mode you know as we're as we're watching tv at night and he's now like you know climbing on me nervous like that and this is so unlikely so i'm trying like how like what do i do so i thought you know at first i'm like oh maybe maybe i should like start playing the sounds and giving him a treat yeah every time the sound plays give him a treat yeah yeah like resensitize it to it to be a positive thing uh but then like then i'm worried i'm like am i gonna break my dog okay am i is he gonna then want to treat every time my computer actually makes the ding sound like i i don't know or am i gonna like confuse his association and then make him hate treats i don't i don't know i don't know what to do yeah i mean the thing you should you should actually do from a dog training perspective that i don't actually know how to do but i think this is what dog trainers would tell you is what you want to reward is not hey when you hear the sound you get the treat what you want to reward is the behavior you want and the behavior you want is sound goes off and dog remains calm and so you have to find the the the smallest reproduction of that phenomenon where he can actually remain calm because right now he can't remain calm the sound goes off and he isn't calm so you have to find something like some noise that is like that noise but not that like basically you have to say a noise happened and you remained calm and that's what you reward the calmness after the noise then you'd work your way up to the actual noise that he is now coming i don't know how to do that because like what do you use as the you want the dog to be successful essentially so you need a scenario where i can make a noise that is close to the ding noise but it is not the ding noise such that i know hops will successfully be chill about it and when he's chill you reward him for the chillness and what that trains him to do is then eventually you work your way up to when i hear the noise his reaction is oh when i hear that noise if i'm chill i'll get a treat and then he's chill and then you give him the treat uh so that's the theory behind what you're quote unquote supposed to do and in theory it would work i just have no freaking idea how you would do that i'm i'm not sure his stack is that big like i i don't think he can actually this is how a dog training works it is for the people who know how to do it somehow they're able to train their dogs to like do their taxes for them using this technique through through a series of very tiny steps like i started out just by by you know like i would knock on the floor with one finger and if the dog didn't bark i would give it a treat and now a marching band can go up to the front door and the dog's just their reaction is we're just going to be so relaxed and calm because we know if we just lay here and snore we'll get a treat yeah i don't i don't know if that if those are ever shih tzus though i don't think i mean that i you know you say that and you're like well sure it works for your dog your dog is magic but it's not going to work for my dog or my breed or whatever but the dog training people i've seen them train all sorts of dogs that you think should not be able to do taxes and they're just filing returns so i don't know i don't know what magic they know how to do that we don't know how to do but purely with positive reinforcement and a series of minute mind numbingly boring steps over the course of months they train these dogs to do amazing things i watch too much of this on youtube yeah yeah i don't know i i just like because i don't i don't want to like it's been a while since we've had to train him for anything because he's such a chill dog in every other possible way he always has been so he's actually he's been a very easy dog like to to keep you know on the on the good path um and so i mean he's 12 and so we've had we haven't really had to train much of anything since he was a puppy so people get older you have the same problems i know and and the problem and and he's he's never really been nervous about stuff so like that's another thing where it's like i don't really know how to handle this yet but if but one thing for sure like you know it's really hard to watch any apple tv plus shows yeah i mean the other thing i get i get advertised on people talk about in the chat room i get advertised on instagram is the like basically pot for dogs right the little doggy drugs like oh my dog used to be so nervous but now i give him these little druggy treats and he's chill on a car ride oh the cbd i'm not doing that that's that sounds like a terrible idea i don't i mean hey you should try it i mean if you try it and your dog likes it and it solves the problem like you know i don't know you'd have probably talked to your vet about like are any of these actually effective which one of them will not kill my dog like i would say talk to your vet yeah well the other thing too is like he has diabetes i don't want to like mess with stuff too much like i don't even like it's already like i don't even give him a lot of treats normally anyway just because of that so i like i already if i'm gonna like set you know train him with with treats i gotta figure out like okay what's like the you know the lowest calorie density treat i can give him that will actually work and you know fortunately you know dogs aren't that picky you know i can give him like a one millimeter square of bacon no i mean like his current treat yeah i know his current treats are these like you know they're basically like chicken dust balls like like there's not much they're basically like that's not an appealing brand name i know it's like dried chicken like formed into like a little disc their logo is a tumbleweed yeah that's what they look they don't look appealing at all but he's fine he has low standards you know he's yeah the treats we give our dog i break up into like a thousand pieces because dogs just love the smell the treat so much the fact that they're getting a piece of treat that's the size of like a period at the end of a sentence they're still just as happy and and then that one treat lasts for like you know seven days as you break off tiny pieces of it yeah i mean i guess he's not he doesn't even like chew or enjoy he just inhales whatever treat you give him yeah exactly he's his diabetic food keeps him so he's so hungry all the time poor guy all right i'll have to give that a try i have to like you know look at like what dog trainers say and i don't know i i mean i don't i don't understand how the dog training thing would work i'm just saying that that if you look online you will find people saying try to do this but like they always have scenarios that are just simpler like that you You know, my dog barks whenever someone knocks at the door.

1:44:28And you can see the series of steps that you would do to like, how can my dog be successful? What is like knocking but is minimally invasive? What if it's not a stranger? What if it's me? What if I tap one finger on the floor? And you can see them building up to it. But they do it like in a time lapse or like fast forward and now the dog knows how to do it. And you didn't get to see me spending hours a day. Not hours a day, but like it's only like five minutes a day every single day for, you know, six months. Exactly. And then the dog. But that's how dog training actually works and sticks. um and you know i don't know if doing with old dogs is more difficult or not but i would say talk to your vet about like calming treats like there are there are many i know because i get them advertised all the time there are many calming treats for like uh dogs that get nervous in car rides or you know freak out when you're not there or so on and so forth i i personally have not had any success for them with my dog but mostly i was i was we tried them a couple times when uh my dog was a puppy and she was you know a puppy but like that's she grew out of that right but for your dog with a new thing especially with senior dogs maybe your vet knows like oh you can actually try this and it will not be in conflict with the diabetes and has been shown to work on older dogs but do ask your vet yeah thanks I wonder kind of building what John was saying I wonder if maybe the approach would could be you have hops do something he's good at like stay or sit or something like that and just almost act as though he's a 12 year old Chitpoo, his default behavior is staying.

1:45:53What is he good at? What is his major skill set? He mostly does UIKit, but he's learning SwiftUI. He used to be our doorbell, but I think he's been recently caring a lot less about that, so I think he might be retiring from that job. Well, so the point I'm driving at, whatever it may be, so let's suppose that you're in the context of doing sit training, which obviously is kind of silly because he already knows how to do that, but in the midst of that, okay, hop, sit, here's your treat. Hop, sit, here's your treat. In the middle of that then have you know one of the glass tones or tritone whatever fire off and if hopefully he's distracted enough to not lose his mind and then maybe you say okay good job here's your treat you know what i mean and like that's an interesting idea it's it's it's almost like a background thing and he only gets the treat if he doesn't lose his friggin mind but if he loses his friggin mind then you say no no you know go and sit and whatever and then try it again in a few minutes and see what happens i don't know that that's what i would do not getting the treat because he lost his mind has no effect on dogs like that like if you don't get the behavior you want and they don't get the reward that has no effect the only thing that has effect is the is rewarding the correct behavior which is so frustrating that's why you have to find someplace where your dog can be successful what is a a thing that is like the thing i'm trying to train but i know my dog will be successful because if your dog fails that's your failure as a trainer they're learning nothing from that they only learn from success you they have to succeed whatever it is you're trying to get them to do whatever increment they have to succeed and you can only reward the success because you're training them this is the behavior i want you to perform everything else they do not make enough of a connection for to understand like you're not getting the treat because you didn't do the behavior like that like there's a million things i could have done i had no i have no logical connection to not getting a treat all i know is i didn't get one so it's all about reinforcing what you want the opposite punishing what you don't want or withholding from what you don't want is not as successful but and i would imagine it's difficult to to let the succeed in something where they're getting anxious about something like it yes that's that's that's what i'm saying like the knocking at the door like or the strangers or whatever it's like a version training for like people who are like afraid of spiders you you know you show them show them a picture of a spider from across the room on day one and like you work your way up over the months to like you know touching a spider right you have to find those increments but they have to unlike people where you can explain and there's logic and everything dogs have to succeed so whatever it is you're trying to get them to do you have to find the thing where they succeed and so you can reward it and then you keep cranking it up and you know if you crank it up too fast and they fail you go back a level let's go back to where you're successful right and that's how you that's how you ratchet up that ladder or you can just mute all your computers and silence all your phones that's really and and not watch any apple tv shows well yeah and then and then uh do you ever go into a deep enough sleep where uh the the sounds of the tv show does not wake him up I mean, I have to observe more.

1:48:40I mean, oftentimes his regular tipped over power state on the couch watching TV at night, oftentimes that's when he'll start the adorable sleep barking. Yeah. The little twitchy dreams. Oh, God. The best is when he wags his tail and he's slapping against the couch. The little paw twitchy dreams. Yeah, they're great. And the little whoop, whoop. Barking without opening his mouth. It's so cute. Yeah, that's usually during that time. So I think he's in deep sleep a lot of that time, but I think it still gets through. I mean, the good thing is, like, these noises are not difficult for us to reproduce.

1:49:12Like, any Mac I have, I can just, you know, write a shell script in two seconds and just, you know, play it every five seconds if I have to. Like, you know, it doesn't, it's not difficult to generate the noise if that needs to be part of the training, which it probably does. That's like the end of the training. Maybe super low volume. I'm trying to think of what would approximate. Yeah, like something like that, you know. Or have it just play it at random times every few seconds for a few minutes and just try to sit with them. Give them treats. I don't know. I don't know what it is. I've got to figure it out.