533: The Beach Is the Beach

37:29I was, I didn't happen to toot about it, but I was also fighting differently hilarious error messages earlier today. It's so amazing what one can accomplish with SwiftUI. And I like to think that, you know, call sheets looking pretty good. It's not amazing, but it looks pretty good. and that's in part because I've had help from a bunch of different people. Hey, you should tweak this, do that. Most especially, I want to call out friends of the show, Ben McCarthy and Craig Hockenberry, both who have given me a lot of really great, really actionable feedback about this. But even still, even the stuff that I came up with, I can make look pretty good.

38:03I was never that way with UI kits. So there's so much great stuff about SwiftUI, but golly, the second you want to go off the beaten path, you get punished and that's where I am right now. Yeah, SwiftUI, my experience continues to be, wow, I really like this much of the time. This is definitely a great way forward. Doing things any other way now, like if I have to go back and modify some UI kit code in smaller things that I'm working on, it feels like I'm going to the dinosaur age. It feels so primitive and clunky compared to what I can do in SwiftUI. And the speed at which I'm able to try different ideas out in SwiftUI is so absurdly fast and satisfying and productive.

38:50It is by far my favorite way I've ever made UIs before. Not even close. It is by far my favorite. And I'm investing fully in it for the future. Yep. Couldn't agree more. Comma. However, yeah, it is full of sharp edges. And it's like many Apple products. Many Apple products are amazing and the best in their class and yet have some sharp edges. Not physically, of course, usually. Johnny Ive was sure to sand down all those sharp corners. The chamfered edges. That's right, yes. So that's fortunately not in the physical sense. But there are so many little sharp edges on SwiftUI, some of which are just outright bugs.

39:33like Apple products, many of which are design decisions that are just very opinionated like Apple products. And many of which are just, you know, shortcomings they haven't gotten to yet, you know, like Apple products. And, and so it fits in perfectly to be the, you know, the, the, the new way to build things for Apple, uh, because it, it, it really fits the attitude. And most of the time it's great. And again, I, and I wouldn't, I don't want to switch to anything else um but when you hit one of those walls oh boy it's fun and and so far you know and again ui kit had tons of those things too they were just different in many cases very different but what i have found for whatever it's worth over the years uh oftentimes i would slam into a ui kit wall and i would say no it has to be the way i want i have to be able to achieve the behavior or appearance that I'm going for here.

40:28And so I would build some kind of ridiculous hack that would make it happen. Over time, I have come to realize I have regretted almost every time I've done that. And the way I'm building it now is I'm trying as much as possible, which is hard with SwiftUI, but I'm trying as much as possible to avoid needing to do hacks like that. To try to keep things simpler and more fluid, more dynamic, more stock. And if SwiftUI is not letting me customize something to just say, oh, well, I guess I won't customize that thing as opposed to, well, now I have to rebuild UI table view or whatever. Instead of jumping immediately to let me force my way into this behavior that I want even if it's going to require 10 times the code saying instead, you know what, I'll just accept that and move on to a bigger problem.

41:17Part of that is maybe just me being old. But I think part of that also is hard learned wisdom. I've done this a lot. Currently, Overcast's current screen structure, which is all Objective-C and UIKit, it is really hard to change anything about it. It's super hard because it's really convoluted, really complex code because I was really picky about exactly every detail of how I want this to look, how I want this to work. I want to be able to put this up here and put this icon over here and put this bar up here. and it is so complex that I stopped touching it for a year and then lost the ability to ever touch it again.

41:57So I'm much more heavily now leaning into simplicity, flexibility and SwiftUI is great for that. It's not great in terms of like with UIKit, if something wasn't quite what you wanted, you had more options to hack it than you do with SwiftUI. Swift UI is it puts up taller walls it's a lot harder certain things you just can't hack it's like oh you want to customize the way this thing looks or behaves too bad you've got to drop down to UIKit at best if you even have that option but overall though I've learned over time minimize the amount of convoluted complicated UI customization and Swift UI is really good if you want to stay on the default path and if you want heck even for customization in in many ways many things that you can customize with swift ui were extremely difficult to customize in ui kit or impossible yep and so many things are actually way easier to customize but like i'm not saying you shouldn't customize you know looks and feels and stuff here and there what i'm saying is when it gets hard just bail out and just don't do it so when something gets complicated like oh well i could change this animation to be this other kind of animation that's nicer if i write this whole component from scratch and you know move this thing over here and have all these weird modifier exceptions and everything it's like okay well or you can take the regular animation with this one line of code that looks 80 as good and move on with your life what my customers want from me is not that one perfect animation what they want for me is all the features they keep asking for that i can't do because i'm buried under the weight of my hacky ui yep i couldn't agree more and and you know you said earlier am i just getting old I don't know.

43:43I think for me, age is barely distinguishable from pragmatism or pragmatic. You know, like as you get older, you just realize that a lot of the things that we think are worth it. You know, I made the, you know, play on words earlier. You know, the juice just ain't worth the squeeze anymore. That it's just not worth it getting the last 20%, as you had said a moment ago. You can get 80%. You know what? That's sufficient. And in this particular circumstance with the search thing and the floating action button, And the only reason I'm even considering dropping down to UIKit and trying to do some of that just absolute nonsense is because it is such a fundamental piece of the app and I'm breaking expectations.

44:20Well, I would argue SwiftUI is breaking expectations, but to a customer, that doesn't matter, right? The point is that my app is breaking their expectation. And it stinks that I'm hearing the same feedback over and over again. And nobody's being mean about it. They're not being turds or anything. It's just, hey, why doesn't it, when I hit the little circle magnifying glass thing, why doesn't it show the search box? Isn't that the whole point of the magnifying glass? Well, yeah. Well, then isn't it just basically a home button? Well, yeah. It's not what I want, but that's basically what it is. And so, yeah, it's frustrating.

44:54But, I mean, ultimately, almost all of Peek of View was UIKit. Very little was SwiftUI. And this was written when SwiftUI was new. Almost all of Masquerade is SwiftUI and very little is UIKit. and so far, literally all of CallSheet is SwiftUI. And one of the things that's been nice to hear, which is I think in no small part because of how freaking fast the movie database is, but so many people have commented, wow, this is so fast. I think that's also helped by the fact that IMDB is slower than dirt, but all of these factors are coming together, including that SwiftUI is pretty quick in my experience.

45:33All of these things are coming together to make my app look really, really fast, which is awesome. And certainly I've been able to write it much quicker than I would have UIKit. I started CallSheet in late January, and based on the accomplishments that I have, I would be in probably January of next year if I was writing this all in UIKit. You know what I mean? It would have taken me so much longer. And so in so many ways, I'm so happy with SwiftUI, but golly, it's so difficult when you want to do something that just isn't officially supported. We are brought to you this week by Trade Coffee. If you've been getting your coffee from the grocery store and drinking the same coffee every day, try something even better.

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47:58amal jensen writes i use the following shortcut to add and add the tag of hashtag 2fa in the notes field for the icloud keychain entries that have two factor codes that way i only see the sites that have 2fa uh this doesn't work on mac os of course because sad but nonetheless you can do and we'll put this in the show notes prefs colon root equals all uppercase passwords i don't know if that matters or not but it is all uppercase here uh ampersand search equals 2fa and so if you are diligent about putting that tag in the notes field for your iCloud keychain entries then here's a quick way to get to two-factor codes this is related to when i was talking about the google authenticator i still use it because when you launch the app all your two-factor things are just right there but if you go to passwords and settings and ios and iCloud keychain you see all your passwords and then you have a search field and you have to search and blah you know it's kind of annoying right if you do this if you go are diligent about going through all of your passwords that have two-factor which is not easy to find because you know it's a chicken egg problem you can't find them because you have nothing to search on i think but if you do this and then you create a shortcut that opens that url that we'll put in the show notes that prefs colon root equal blah blah blah then now that shortcut will take you to immediately to into the settings app into passwords into a search that just shows you the passwords that match to fa you still have to dig into one to get the two-factor code so google authenticator is still faster because they're just right there and you just tap on them and you're done this is one extra tap but it is pretty good especially if you have not if you're not already overwhelmed with the number of passwords and you kind of or you kind of know which ones are two-factor uh i was trying to implement this it was like hmm which one of these 700 passwords have two-factor and i just picked a couple off the top of my head that i knew but there's so many more that are in there that i'm i'm kind of buried but it's a good idea and it works and there probably is a way to do it on mac west i just don't know the there is like a url scheme i think for getting into system settings or whatever i just don't know what it is uh malad serchik writes having carplay available in rental cars is essential for me in just a few minutes i can connect my phone and have all my favorite apps and features ready to go this includes ways music app from apps from my playlist with my playlist excuse me and communication apps like whatsapp and zoom without carplay i'd need to spend time learning and setting up the in-car navigation entertainment system additionally privacy concerns arise when people forget to clear their profiles from the car.

50:12This was an excellent point. The only thing that kind of chaps my bottom about this is if I remember right, and I understand why, but if I remember right, every single car has a different home screen in CarPlay. And so if I were to plug into the Volvo as opposed to connecting to my Volkswagen, all of my apps have been rearranged and resorted and so on and so forth, which is really frustrating. I get why they do that because for some people that's a feature, not a bug. But for me, it's a bug, not a feature. Nevertheless. Is that why that happens? Yeah, it's per car. I'm almost sure. Oh, because I've just noticed that it just randomly shuffles up my stuff sometimes.

50:45And I never really figured out. I just assumed it was a bug the same way it randomly shuffles my Safari tabs every time I reboot my computer. Well, no, no, no. It should be consistent within one car. So if it's getting reshuffled, then yes, you did find a bug. But as you go between cars, each individual car should remember its own CarPlay home screen. Does that make sense? Yeah, I'll pay more attention next time. Yeah. So, but leaving that aside, I think Milad's point is absolutely accurate and I feel the exact same way. Now, granted, I am not in a position that I rent cars very often, but it is real nice.

51:19Also, it's super nice if I'm driving Erin's car, like just by myself, which doesn't happen often, but does happen. I don't need to like have my phone as a secondary Bluetooth device at her on her car I don't need to do anything I mean yes her car does support like profiles and things and I might be able to associate my phone with only my profile and my physical key and so on and so forth but it's so much easier just plug in my damn phone and then suddenly her infotainment system is my infotainment system and and so yeah I couldn't agree with this more Dave Nichols writes in all All the discussions around CarPlay and the manufacturers not providing it, I've heard lots of comments relating to the manufacturers wanting to make money from subscriptions.

51:57But I haven't heard anyone talking about the cost of CarPlay to the manufacturers. Is this because Apple provides it for free? That seems unlikely. Is there any indication of the cost in their push for services revenue? Has Apple increased that cost lately, perhaps on the back of all the new features that they've announced? uh one of us and i'm assuming it's john put in a very helpful link from 2019 uh to the verge where they they said apple says it doesn't charge automators automakers a fee to use carplay i would imagine there's got to be some kind of like certification process right that's exactly what i was going to say and that can't be easy but it's different than having like a per car fee yeah like maybe there isn't a fee per vehicle but i'm sure there i'm sure you have to like pay apple to certify you and stuff like that, right?

52:42Yeah, I would imagine so, but that's a one-time cost and that's nothing to car makers. So I guess the question of like, if Apple was Oracle, they would say we get a percentage of the total sale price of every car you sell because that's how Oracle does business. Yeah. Indeed. So yeah, I thought that was interesting. And as Marco was saying, I'm sure that the cost to implement it is not cheap. The cost to certify it is probably not cheap, but in the grand scheme of things, I don't know. But way cheaper than trying to do it all yourself. Also true. Also true. Ford also has announced, or I shouldn't say announced, has said, I think it was today that this happened, there was an interview with Joanna Stern, and Ford CEO Jim Farley said, quote, 70 % of our Ford customers in the U.S.

53:29are Apple customers. Why would I go to an Apple customer and say, good luck? And this was obviously with regard to GM saying exactly that. Farley continued, in terms of content, we kind of lost that battle 10 years ago. So like, get real with it, because you're not going to make a ton of money on content inside the vehicle. It's going to be safety, security, partial autonomy, and productivity in our eyes. So that relationship for content is between you, and he was talking to Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, between you, the Wall Street Journal, and the customer. I don't want to get in the middle of that.

53:58But Tesla and other companies, Rivian, believe differently. They want to have complete control over the interior experience. Now, this is me talking. I get that. But again, I just don't think that even a software company masquerading as a car company like Tesla, like Rivian. And admittedly, I have not spent an absurd amount of time with either of those infotainment systems. But I don't know. As a devout CarPlay person, I would be hard-pressed to imagine a way in which I would prefer Tesla or Rivian's setup. But I don't know. Marco, Don't tell me I'm wrong. I tried the Tesla in-car stuff for years, and it's fine.

54:39It's totally fine. It is not, however, great. It is better than anything else I had before that, but it's not great. The reality is people want CarPlay. They want Android Auto. They love their phones. That's it. So often we've learned this lesson over and over again. Don't bet against the smartphone. People love their phones. And it's not because we're sheep or being fooled or addicted. It's because they're really good. And CarPlay, while it is not perfect, while I don't love everything about CarPlay, it is way better than everything I've tried from anybody else. It's way better than the stuff in the car.

55:19Here's the thing. Even if CarPlay wasn't very good, because look, it's not amazing. It is still your phone. You're updating the hardware of that every few years. The software is updated every year. It has all of your stuff on it. So the address book has all your places that you go. The voice control has up-to-date location information. If you want to use different navigation apps for whatever reason, you can do that. They're all built in. Compare that to a car UI. A car UI is at best okay when it's first developed. In most cars, it is never updated. Or in the case of Tesla, it's updated sometimes that makes it worse.

55:58so you know but most cars never updated at all the hardware it's running on is never updated for the life of the car and so you know after you know five six years you know you're running an old computer in there and you know if you try to if you have more modern expectations of what things should do well too bad it does what it does it does what it did when you bought it and that's it or maybe you know in the case of tesla where you are getting regular software updates you're still running on the same hardware so it's going to have limitations after a while your phone is constantly getting better and so again and going back to the car you're in your car you you want to like you know suppose you want to you know get some real-time traffic information well your car might have an internet connection that has that it might not it might have an internet connection for a little while and then maybe a few years into owning it maybe it doesn't have it anymore for whatever reason you know maybe maybe your tesla free trial expired for their data service and you don't want to pay x dollars a month for your car to have cellular or maybe the cellular provider or the cellular technology your car uses, like maybe your car uses a 3G cellular modem and then the 3G towers get shut down as we go to 4G and 5G, then that's broken.

57:03Yep, that would be my Volkswagen. My Volkswagen went through exactly that. All of these problems are avoided when it's your phone projecting a video stream to a screen in your car that can be as dumb as possible. CarPlay, again, while it is not amazing, it is always going to be better than what the car makers make. The car makers, they don't want that to be the case because, number one, they want control. And then I think, you know, number two, they see revenue potential when they can do it themselves. They don't want for their car to be just showing someone else's screen and having Apple make all the money from the app store and get all the cool data and have the car maker have no money and no data stream that they can monetize in other creepy ways.

57:44Note, though, that the reason why the car maker wants, you know, wants to do this themselves and not have CarPlay. those are reasons that benefit them more than their customers and sometimes only them and not even their customers at all. it's very clear what customers want is carplay manufacturers you know the ones that don't offer that it's going to hurt them because most people offer that most manufacturers offer it so now people have been accustomed to it many people in the car market have you know carplay has been out long enough and has been common for long enough that many people have owned or used a car with carplay by now and as people you know like if gm goes through with their plan to pull it from future evs there's going to be a lot of people who are shopping for those future evs and who see oh it doesn't have carplay what the heck and they're going to bail out of that of that purchase and buy something else and so i i think the cat's out of the bag here i don't even like cats but the cat's out of the bag here we are we've been spoiled by carplay now and we want it tesla is going to, you know, they're going to do what they're going to do.

58:51Who knows what they're doing over there? Rivian, I think, will add it. It doesn't seem like it's a top priority for them, but I bet they will add it. And GM, I bet they're going to change their mind on this once they see the impact it'll have on their sales. We shall see. And then, finally, for follow-up, Michael Hanneman wrote in, speaking of classic macOS and holding the mouse down on a menu to freeze all other activity, John might remember the game Fool's Errand. Do you remember this, John? I certainly do. In it, there was one puzzle that you could only solve by exploiting this behavior, because otherwise the target moved too fast for you to click it.

59:29This was intentional. Do you want to explain this? I've read about it, but I've never experienced it. So do you remember this? It's just what it said. So if you use the Mac, even if you aren't technical, you did have to notice after a certain point, you know, everything else stops when I hold down the, especially if you have like a game or something and you enter the menus, right? um and so this the fool's errand is the type of game the i figured what the other one was there was a the sequel to whatever million people were right to tell me but there's a bunch of games that were like this they were kind of like puzzle games and they they did a lot of sort of fourth wall breaking and that they understood they were being played on a computer so like the menus of the game were part of the game solving type thing they were very clever oh uh three and three was i think from the same people amazingly good puzzle game um and so yeah this one was like you'd get that itch you're like this is impossible i can't do it i can't click it too fast you know especially because people aren't really good with the mouse back then you probably could maybe get to it i couldn't do it but anyway you're like well you know in my experience using this computer if i want everything to stop on the screen i just pull down a menu i wonder if that will work and the answer was yes it would and that was the way that they intended you to solve the problem put a link in the show notes and you can read about it you can probably actually find this on one of those like you know mac software garden things and run it in fact if you just go to like infinite mac dot infinimac dot org i believe there's like the launcher for system seven that app system six that app they probably have this game installed in their games folder somewhere if you dig for it that is pretty cool then um michael continues almost as amazing as the ps1 game where you couldn't beat the boss unless you switch the controller cable to the other ports that you could no longer read your mind slash memory card all right this really ticked me off because i had a playstation one and i freaking loved metal gear solid i have no recollection of this or so i don't know if this is a confused recollection i also did not play this game on the ps1 but i remember reading about the feature and the feature i remember reading about it i believe it was a metal gear solid and you it's when you're battling a character called psycho mantis and he would freak you out by telling you the player things that he guessed about you and what he was doing what the game was doing was reading the memory card to see what other games you have played and so psycho man is like oh it looks like you like castlevania you're like how did they know he know that i don't that Castlevania is a good example but anyway um and then you know kids eventually figured out oh the only way he could know these things about me is because he's reading the memory card I don't remember the fact that you had to switch the controller cable to another port so he couldn't read your memory card or whatever but again I didn't experience these firsthand but this is another example of fourth wall breaking in a game uh the other one that I did play through all of that was fun was uh Eternal Darkness on N64 GameCube oh I'm getting old if I can't remember this has got to be gamecube right do you either one of you ever heard of eternal darkness i've heard of it i've heard of perfect dark that's a very different thing oh no maybe that's what i'm thinking of that's the gold night yeah eternal darkness um it was a sort of uh i don't know like puzzle type kind of like resident evilly kind of thing um but it also did some fourth wall breaking because you the character in the game uh would take like psychic damage from these creatures kind of you know lovecraftian horror type things and they would make you start to make your game characters start to lose their mind a little bit and they would do fourth wall breaking by making it look like your save file had become corrupted or like stuff stuff that would make you flip out as a game player uh you know the game would trick you into thinking it's malfunctioning or there's a bug or something was erased or whatever and it was it was very effective i mean at least the first time or if you especially if you hadn't read a game magazine because it was plausible to think that really was happening and you would be you have the incredible anguish of losing all your progress because your save file was corrupted it i don't remember that's an exact one but if you go look up uh eternal darkness if you want to be spoiled on the whole game and see all the things that it did to you during the game it was a lot of fun sounds like a blast that sounds traumatic you also get your character gets squished by a giant lobster claw at one point that's my most vivid memory of eternal darkness we are brought to you this week by squarespace the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online stand out with a beautiful website engage with your audience 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1:05:26uh we have received most of us our first rapid security response from apple um i don't know if anyone has declared what specifically they were trying to fix maybe they did and i missed it but too rapid no time exactly um screw it we'll do it live um so yeah so apple has decided there's some sort of bug that was bad enough to justify using this rapid security response framework that they've been working on for a while this has been used in betas for off and on for a while perhaps just for the purposes of testing i don't know if they were actually fixing anything or not but this is the first time that like real honest goodness ios users got it i did it today and it was stunningly fast john how could that be so quick yeah so first in the show notes we'll have a tidbits article by adam angst uh where he goes into lots of detail about this if you have applied this which casey has and i have as well on one of my macs no actually on both of my macs i think um you'll notice that the version number of your operating system instead of just having three numbers with dots between them now has a letter at the end so uh the the releases were for for ios it's 16.4.1 a uh and for mac os it's 13.3.1 a uh and you know that's as the name says this is this is supposed to be a feature of ios 16 and mac os ventura and ipad os 16 as well to give updates faster uh for you know crucial situations or for you know urgent situations um and the update did run really fast for me uh on the mac it and same thing on the phone like it ran so fast it made me wonder if it had actually applied it yeah and you know so adam talks about in the article like the goal of rapid response and his estimation i don't know if this is straight from apple but either way um it's they're trying to make the uh the installation time shorter because no one likes their phone or their mac to be sitting there for 20 minutes doing an update it's just too time consuming they they want the download size to be smaller i don't know if you've noticed with all our gigabit fiber connections we maybe don't notice how big downloads are all the time but a lot of these updates even if it's just like a you know a point update you know 13.3 to 13.3.1 that update can be surprisingly big and if you don't have a fast connection or if you're stuck on cellular or something on your phone uh it can take a long time to download or can burn through a lot of your data so that's not great um and then you know people are a little bit hesitant to install updates because they're afraid it's going to break something and you might be thinking well how does this help with that an update's an update i would be just as hesitant right well i'll get to that in a second so to deal with the download size and installation time uh they're using a technology that that uh was introduced i think in ventura called cryptexes this has been in our show notes for many months probably since ventura came out um it stands for cryptographically sealed extension i know we've talked about this before but like uh ventura and i think a couple of operating systems before that you do something called a sealed system volume you know it used to be that the operating system was on the same disk that you as your user data and it was just a disk and you know use unix permissions to protect the files then eventually the operating system was put into like a read-only partition so it was mounted read-only and the operating system was there and then your user data would be elsewhere uh in its current state what max boot from and i'm i don't actually i don't even know if this is what deals in ios not even address it but on the mac what max boot from is a something called a sealed system volume which is a a read-only snapshot so it's not even like you're not booting from like a read-only mounted disk it is a read-only snapshot of a disk you're booting from a snapshot uh and that it's cryptographically sealed and that every single byte of data on there has a cascading series of checksums that lead to like a master checksum and if any in theory if any one bit of data anywhere on the entire seal system volume changes the checksum will be invalid and the mac won't boot from it so it's kind of a way to ensure that the operating system is known good and it's the same for everybody there's no variance you can't get in there and muck around with it if you go if you do go in there and like mess with stuff they will invalidate the signature and you won't be able to boot from it anymore and that's why in this day and age for the most part with some caveats the old uh the sort of cure of weird problems of like let's just reinstall the os shouldn't do anything because the thing that you're booting from is supposedly cryptographically proven to be exactly intact and exactly what is expected there is other stuff elsewhere that's not part of the sealed system volume however uh in particular i think when they first shipped this they they had a bunch of other parts where they'd put things like safari and and shared caches and stuff like that um and that's because updating anything in the sealed system volume is a major pain in the butt even if you're only updating a little bit of it i think the problem is that what it has to do first of all it has to reboot and it has to boot from something else so it can get the the uh the the volume that has the sealed system volume snapshot on it and mount it read write and then modify it and then recalculate and reapply all the checksums and seal it back up and then make a new snapshot and then reboot again then reboot from the new snapshot and that is time consuming like no matter how a small change you make just the overhead of doing that takes a surprising amount of time even if you change like one file so that's not great so to try to help with that they have a system called cryptexes which are kind of like little tiny sealed volumes they're basically like little images that are cryptographically sealed again every single byte on them is has checksums and every directory all you up to the top level one so you're sure that it contains what you think it contains and in those cryptexes they make them smaller you know so one of them has like safari uh inside it or whatever so you can update safari more quickly what the system does during boot is it boots from the read-only snapshot of the sealed system volume and then it takes those cryptexes and sort of loads them and overlays them in kind of nfs overlay parlance i don't know if that helps anybody but like it overlays them it graphs them onto the sealed system volume so it's a series of smaller cryptographically sealed things that are grafted onto it, making one complete system.

1:11:29And it's faster to update the cryptexes because they're smaller. They have less stuff in them and resealing them and making sure all the checks on the right takes less time than doing it on the big one. So rapid security response things, they're cryptexes and they're small ish. Uh, and since they're cryptexes, what that means is if you were to look at like where all this stuff is, you'd see the sealed system volume. You'd see, you see like essentially, I don't know if it's like a disk image or whatever. You'd see the thing that holds Safari. You'd see the thing that holds like shared caches and stuff like that.

1:11:57And you'd see one for the rapid security response, the one we just had. And what that means is that it's really easy to remove these things. And you can actually remove this. I don't quite know why they do this. You can remove a rapid security response thing. So on your Mac, if you go to general about and then click on the magic little I in a circle, which everybody knows on the system settings on the mac you have to click on because everything is behind there you will see that the last rapid security response that's in there and there's a button that says remove and restart and that will basically just delete the cryptex because it's not it doesn't unlike an update to your operating system where it actually modifies your operating system like it overwrites the old versions of the files the cryptexes are separate and they get grafted on top of your operating system so if you just delete the cryptex when it's booting and doing that process where it grafts them on it won't find that one and so it won't graft it on and so that's how that update will be removed i guess they do this just in case they screw up real bad because the whole idea of rapid response is like oh there's there's a security problem we need to get this thing update out as fast as possible go go go right and they go go go real fast and they put it out in 24 hours oh they screwed up somehow there's a bug or whatever so they don't hose everyone's systems these things are removable i'm not sure how that would manifest if you've really hosed your thing maybe you can't even boot to the point where you can remove it maybe you're able to remove it from recovery i'm not entirely sure but this is how it works on ios as well if you go on ios and go to settings general about and into the version you can remove the rapid security response that you just installed uh in terms of the sizes you can look in the uh the tidbits article they vary depending on the os but like one of them was as small as like 53 megabytes for an imac that were installed in a minute and a half that is unheard of in the modern era of doing mac updates where every single update is like 800 megabytes and takes 20 minutes to install so hopefully everybody went through this and applied the update you do have to reboot for this one in theory they could distribute a cryptex that didn't require a reboot i suppose if it's not like urgent that you you know reboot immediately and i don't know maybe they could graft it onto the running system volume or something not entirely sure but the reboot like on my phone the reboot was so fast again i thought it might not have installed the mac reboot i could tell it was installing something but it didn't sit there for an hour with like a little white progress bar and a black screen so i give the system a cautious thumbs up still kind of confused about the removal thing but it's a it's it's a feature that is made possible by the technology that they use kind of like all the apfs uh features that enable really easy you know user-facing features like snapshots that's because of the underlying technology and so cryptex is this weird thing where they have these cryptographically sealed little turds that graft onto the other thing allows stuff like easy removal of OS updates.

1:14:44And I think that's a good thing. All right. Well, I feel better for having known that. Do you want to do some Ask ATP? Let's do it. Ben would like to know, before the iPhone 14 Plus came out, this is the large size but not Pro version of the iPhone 14, there was a lot of optimism about consumers wanting larger screens without upgrading to a more expensive Pro model. So far, that hasn't panned out. Do you think that a 15-inch MacBook Air will be different or the same story? I think that a 15-inch MacBook Air, assuming it's not prohibitively expensive, you know, assuming the expense is compenser with the larger screen, I think it'll sell really, really, really well.

1:15:21Because I think a lot of people don't necessarily fancy themselves professionals by the Apple definition. You know, they don't need an SD card slot. Maybe they need an HDMI port. I don't know. But I think a lot of people would want just the same MacBook Air, but bigger. So I would assume it would sell, but I mean, obviously all of us said that about the 14 plus, so who knows? Marco, what do you think about that? So coincidentally, 100 % coincidentally, I told you that I had to get more test devices for my test device fleet. And I said I had purchased a really cheap iPhone SE, mostly for Adam's watch pairing.

1:15:57I had also purchased an iPad mini. And the third and final device that was part of that purchase was an iPhone 14 plus. Of course. Of course. So no one bought them, but I did. I found a good, just like the other ones, I found a good deal on Amazon for a refurb. And yeah, I am now the proud owner of a 14 Plus. I got to say, it's surprisingly not bad. Like, first of all, it is surprisingly lightweight for its size. It weighs roughly as much as my non-plus 14 Pro, like, you know, regular size. it gives me it gives me hope for the future you know pro phones that are going to switch materials maybe they maybe they'll be lighter that would be nice uh anyway so yeah it feels good in the hand but it's it's a totally fine device but you know it's i i haven't really used it as my phone because it's been my test device and it will continue to be my test device over the summer so anyway moving on to the actual question about the 15 inch macbook air whether that will you know be kind of you know land with you know kind of as a dud uh or actually be popular and successful and frankly i i think it's going to be a really big hit so when you look at the mac lineup there is this massive price gap between the macbook air which almost everyone buys and anything with a bigger screen than 13 inches and meanwhile if you look at the world of pc laptops look at what people are actually using, especially for work.

1:17:29But, you know, just look around. What do people buy for PC laptops? Yes, 13-inch laptops are very common, but so are 15-inch, roughly, class laptops. Like, those are also very common. There's a lot of people who, when push comes to shove, if they want a Mac and they want, you know, a big screen, some of them do jump all the way up to the very pretty premium price of the 16-inch MacBook Pro. But many of them don't. Many of them either settle for a 13-inch MacBook Air and just say, well, I would like this to be bigger, but this is what I can afford or justify, and therefore that's it. Or they go and buy a cheap 15-inch PC because it's a lot cheaper.

1:18:11The 13-inch MacBook Air, now that we have the Apple Silicon era, it is in many ways like one of the best computers Apple has ever sold. it might be the best all-arounder for most people that they've ever sold when you factor in price and value like but even if you don't like the the size and weight of it and battery life are just so good like it's such a great computer if they can broaden the appeal of that form factor without increasing the specs of everything so high that they need to charge like twenty five hundred dollars for it that's gonna get a lot of people in the door now also look at when businesses buy computers.

1:18:48This, I think, you know, people are looking at this as like, why would consumers buy this with the M2 chip when the M3 is around the corner? It is not about that at all. You know who's going to buy these? Businesses, tons and tons of them. They're going to buy these by the carton, like whatever unit Apple sells them in. Businesses are going to buy these like crazy because businesses want to give all their employees a laptop. Apple's been making pretty good strides in that area in a lot of industries. And they usually have to just buy the MacBook Airs. But, you know, it turns out people do like bigger screens sometimes.

1:19:24And businesses usually, especially businesses, really have a hard time justifying MacBook Pro prices for a lot of employees. You know, certainly, obviously, if your work involves heavy computer usage in ways that the pros actually are meaningfully better, that's a different story. Most corporate laptops bought for most employees don't need that kind of power. Most of them just need to be able to browse the internet in a relatively safe and nice way with decent battery life and relatively low cost and as big a screen as you're willing to put on it. That's what most people want. All that set aside, by comparison, if you look at the iPhone 14 Plus market, the 14 Plus, I know from having just bought one and having waited a long time for a decent deal to actually pop up the 14 plus is expensive it is barely cheaper than the pro phones the theory i've heard from enthusiasts about the 14 plus is that it's not so much about this year as in future years they've never brought a plus or max sized phone down to like the last year's phone price slot they always just discontinue them and replace them with the new with the new one this is presumably going to be the first one in all likelihood that they will drop by you know one or two hundred dollars over the next year and you know make that the cheaper phone so the full story of the 14 plus has yet to be told but also if you compare it to what it's like the cheaper version of it's not that big of a price difference whereas if you look at the 15 inch macbook air if we we don't know where this is going to land price-wise, but I would guess somewhere around like$1 ,600, you know, something in that ballpark probably.

1:21:06And that's going to be substantially cheaper than a 16-inch MacBook Pro. And also for most people's needs will be just as good unless you really need those like big heavy duty stuff. So I think they're going to sell a ton of these things and good for them because the MacBook Air is awesome. And to make a bigger one, to enjoy that same even if you know people are like oh you should put the m2 pro in it no they're not going to they don't need to they can just make the exact same computer as the 13-inch macbook air but bigger exactly the same in every other way and it will sell like crazy because it's a great computer already no one cares if it has the m2 or the m3 in it they'll sell a ton of them no matter what and it'll be awesome torstein writes is hdr and dolby vision worth the trouble hdr can have overly bright scenes white subtitles ruin dark scenes and blinds you in a dark room abl triggers several times during one movie colors can look oversaturated oversaturated and the format war war between hdr 10 hdr 10 plus and dv fragments can content not to mention the different dv profiles which is a hot mess i prefer sdr 10 but 10 bit as it's more pleasant to watch in a dark room and looks more accurate color wise what are your thoughts i don't care john what do you think but you will care eventually if you don't already um so here's the thing with the the dolby vision hdr and all that stuff if you believe in the march of progress that video is traveling down uh the idea that the picture looks more and more realistic over time it's inevitable that the next step in realism of your television set is related to brightness because if you think of your television as like a frame like an actual hole in your wall and then through that hole is whatever you're seeing on television it doesn't look like that now if if you know if it was if you looked out your window and you saw a boat on the ocean or a sunset or or, you know, a space battle is harder to imagine because that's kind of very fictional.

1:23:11But anything real world, you know, a family sitting on a blanket on the beach. If it was not a television set, but it was just a hole in your wall and through that magical hole, like a portal in the game portal, you could see a family on the beach and you were in a dark room, you would be totally blinded because it's the bright sun of the beach and you're in a dark room. That's not a fun experience, but that is, quote unquote, realistic. so we are traveling down that road to realism and the things that contribute to that are obviously you know 3d parallax blah blah which we're not doing uh we're very difficult to do resolution which we've been doing a little bit and we're kind of getting to the point now at normal viewing distances on a 4k tv the pixels are probably too small for you to see uh and uh dynamic range what's the darkest what's the brightest color reproduction right uh if it was actually just a hole in the magical portal that showed you a beach you don't have to worry about those things the beach is the beach it's got the colors that it's got like it's you know it's got the brightness that it's got but there are lots of real world scenarios where looking at the thing that is being depicted whether it be a a sunset or a beach or uh you know even just an interior of of a store with fluorescent lighting from the perspective of sitting in a dark room would be too much for you to handle so part of the job of the creator of media with this new technologies like hdr is to figure out how to present what they what they're presenting they could choose to have a really dark scene and the next scene be on a beach with maximum hdr brightness they could do that for effect to make the audience squint and go ah because maybe that's what needs to happen at that point in the show you're cutting to someone who's in the desert getting baked and you want the audience to squint but if you don't want the audience to squint don't take them from a long dark scene into full hdr brightness because they're going to squint and that's what i think creators of media are learning now is how do i how do i use hdr to further the story i'm trying to tell how bright do i want things to be which things do i want to be right what kind of effect do they have moderated by of course well i know what it looks like here in my 30 000 mastering monitor in this you know video suite but what is it going to look like in real people's houses on their crappy tvs that aren't calibrated right so it's a difficult problem but lots of people who experience hdr and find it off-putting some of that could be the people who made that didn't give enough thought to how this was going to feel to watch some of it could be people are making media to try to make you feel like oh that's way too bright or oh that's way too dark and you just don't like it and that what you're saying there is i don't like the artistic choice you made you could not like the artistic choice someone made in turn you think the story is dumb the acting is bad or also this you know the color grading is weird or they did the hdr in a way that i didn't like that's the thing i am a believer in giving creators these tools because when used well it makes for a more impactful more realistic looking picture and i think that is valuable that's why we all ood and odd over hd tv when it came out that's why we like 4k and yes that's why we like hdr because it gets closer to being realistic but in all media you don't have to make it look like it would look if it was a magical portal you can choose to make it look how you want it to look to further your story and things being awe-inspiring and realistic looking or more like reality is sometimes what you want to happen and so that's why i think these tools are essential that's why i think it's we only need we're going to get more of this and as we get more of it now as the tools become more powerful creators will have to be careful up to i don't think we'll ever get to this point because i think they'll probably pull back but up to the point where if you go outside on a sunny day and you look up at the sun you'll burn your eyeballs out hopefully we won't ever have a television that can put out the light output of the literal sun because then if a creator made a bad choice and put the full sun in the middle of the picture you'd look at it and it would burn your eyeballs out and little kids would go blind because they don't know to look away right so let's not do that okay but somewhere between where we are now and that i think we have to continue traveling that road because there are still situations For example, when you have an HDR capable television in a very bright, sunny room and the sun is shining directly on the screen and you can't see the picture because it's washed out because the real sun is more powerful than your television set.

1:27:27We've got a ways to go. But I feel I feel the pain of the person who wrote in about this. But I think you kind of can't stand in the way of the march of progress. But that march is filled with people making bad mistakes. As always. Nick from Toronto. I'm sorry. Toronto writes. Do you guys have any thoughts or opinions on these motorized standing desks? I'm moving. It can't bring my current desk with me, so I'm exploring options. Heck, I'd even like to hear what you guys think about your regular desks. I had a somewhat infamous glass desk. It's actually in pieces behind me because I recently upgraded to a standing desk.

1:28:03I had thought over spring break that we were going to be going past the closest IKEA to us. One of the few problems with living in Richmond. Yes, you heard me, you two. one of the few problems of living in Richmond is that the nearest IKEA to me is 90 minutes away on a good day, which sucks. But I thought we were going to be driving by it. And so I'd ask for opinions on Mastodon a while back about, hey, you know, is I forget which model it was, but is the such and such IKEA model of standing desk any good? And I really didn't want to hear anyone talk about other options because that's not what I was asking.

1:28:35However, everyone said that the fully standing desks are excellent. And that didn't really matter to me because I was pretty much decided I was getting an Ikea one. But then somebody said, oh, and by the way, Fully at the time, I don't think this is true anymore, was having a steep discount because as it turns out, Herman Miller has bought Fully. And so now Fully is just a line of Herman Miller stuff. Weren't they a sponsor a long time ago? Fully might've been actually. Yeah. Shoot. I'm glad you called that out. I think they were. I think you're right. But it was forever ago, if memory serves.

1:29:10But anyways. Yeah, it was not recent. Yeah, so all of this had nothing to do with the fact that they previously sponsored. But thank you, Marco, for pointing that out. But anyway, so everyone and their mothers said buy a Foley. And then somebody said, oh, and by the way, it's cheap right now. And that's all I needed to hear, baby. So I ordered myself a 60-inch by 27-inch. I don't care what that is in metric. But a relatively large stone-colored sit-stand desk. and I freaking love it. I don't think that you necessarily need to buy this exact desk, although I have put a link to it in the show notes.

1:29:44But if you can find a sit-stand desk that doesn't wobble a whole ton, I am in full support. Since I got this maybe a month ago, I have been sitting and standing on and off all day long and I love it. I cannot stress enough how much I enjoy having a sit-stand desk. An alternative to this, by the way, ah shoot what is it very desk um did you see these a lot when you were at work john do you know what i'm talking about all sit-stand desks tend to look the same to me so i don't no no no this is something else this is uh very.com v-a-r-i.com and they do these things very desk desktop converters and what it is is it's an impossibly heavy thing that you stick your monitors and your in and your keyboard on and then you that thing sits on your desktop and lifts up And if you can't get a sit-stand desk, it's actually a pretty good second-choice option.

1:30:35And I had that when I was working most recently at a real job. But yeah, I really like my Fully. But before I move on and give you guys a chance to talk, I love this desk. And I got the one that you can program, which I think Marco years and years ago had said, you got to get one that you can set your particular heights that you like. Couldn't agree more. That matters a lot. It makes a big difference. but with that, with the desk, I bought Fully's JAX, J-A-X, dual monitor arm. Holy crap, this is the best monitor arm I've ever gotten because my studio display is a VGA mount. My 5K Ultraman, I took off the stand, so it's now effectively, did I say VGA mount?

1:31:17I'm sorry, a VESA mount or VESA or whatever, however you pronounce it. Anyways, so both of these things are on the Fully JAX dual monitor arm. this is the best monitor arm I have ever used. I've never had any of the fancy schmancy like XDR ones, so I can't speak to those. But just for regular old Visa Visa mount stuff, this arm is so freaking good. I love my sit-stand desk and I love the freaking monitor arm even more. It is so good. So definitely check that out. And it's not a bespoke thing that would only work with a Fully desk. Like, you might want to check this out even if you have a different style desk because it is that damn good.

1:31:57And I think they have a single monitor version as well, if I'm not mistaken. But yeah, full support of a sit-stand desk. And again, prior sponsor, Fully is my pick from my experience of, let me check my notes, one standing desk. But I do really like it nonetheless. Now, Marco, I think you probably have the most experience with this, even more so than me. Mine is just recency bias. so thoughts corrections where did i go wrong um i think you pretty much got it so yeah so number one i love standing desk the electrically raising and lowering kind is great if you can do it i have used them on and off uh for a long time now over a decade the good thing about it is that i i've used i think three in in that time two i know just two i guess but i see i've seen more you know here and there and heard other people's stories and universally seems to be they're all pretty good like if you just find a standing desk that you like the you know look and dimensions and price and features of you're probably good like it's not something that you have to really you know get too picky about the the first one i had when i was back when i was a tumbler that was we had visited the fog creek offices and oh i bet that was nice it was really nice and they had they had just gotten these amazing desks and and i asked joel spolsky like hey can you send me the the name of these and it was back then it was the kind of thing like you know he did he was he's awesome i love jill and uh you know we we had to like go through some kind of like commercial furniture dealer to get them like it wasn't something you could just like order and have it shipped normally like from a website it's like you know you have to like find the dealer and all this stuff because it was like commercial only use that was probably 2008 or something like that was a long time ago things are very different now now everybody can get them you can get them delivered ikea sells them like there's a you know as you said like there's there's so many options that one that i got that we got back then we ended up we did get them even and then when i when i left tumblr i asked if i could take my desk with me and sure and david said sure so i i remember i drove my uh i drove my honda accord into manhattan one weekend and unloaded this desk from my office building from downtown manhattan or midtown manhattan rather that must have been fun yeah fitting into a honda accord required some some degree of disassembly but it worked anyway and i still have that desk uh that's you know i i have that uh you know in one place and then in the other place i have i got one um for the beach for uh from this company uplift they're a pretty popular standing desk maker i am super happy with it as well it's super heavy duty i they have a bunch of different options i have the the uplift v2 like regular standing desk I don't have the one with the big crossbar I don't think yeah I don't have the one with the big crossbar I had to look it's super sturdy it doesn't wiggle much it's rock solid and they have a lot of different wood options for the top which was important to me I wanted to get nice decent wood and have it match the room so yeah Uplift I can recommend but really as Case mentioned earlier the one feature you want in a standing desk is position memory Chances are, if you use a standard desk, you're not going to be standing all the time or sitting all the time.

1:35:16And you're probably going to have like one set height that you like to sit at and a different set height that you like to stand at. And if you don't have memory on the control panel, you have to just, you know, raise and lower each time and kind of guess where you want it to be. And that's infuriating because it's always like a little bit off and you're not quite, is this what, oh, maybe raise it up a little bit. And then, oh, is this right? put a piece of tape on the wall save some money they don't yeah and this is one thing like if you if you get like any decent standard desk usually it comes with memory now except for the very cheapest models even the ones that have an option not to have memory the option to add the memory is usually like a hundred bucks or less add it trust me take that option you you want that option it radically changes how how nice it is to use in practice.

1:36:05But yeah, otherwise, it's a great thing to use. I used to have some back issues that, you know, I had to stand for a while. That's why at Tumblr, I initially like faked it with like some Ikea bookshelves held up by Coke cans on my desk. It was a whole thing. But it's a nice thing for, you know, the way you work to be as comfortable as possible. And whatever your body needs, you know, listen to it. And if you need to stand for a while, stand for a while. and if you get something that's electrically raising and lowering and has memories it makes it very easy to switch back and forth depending on what you need at that moment or what's more comfortable for you or what's more healthy or whatever so strongly recommended uh yeah i'm a big fan you know john i'm a little surprised that you didn't advocate dangling a tennis ball off the ceiling like garage style to figure out what the standing height would be tape on the wall is less intrusive you don't need the you don't need the tennis balls because you can't put it against the wall you gotta have it hit the windshield so it's gotta be in the middle but yeah not just two pieces of tape on the wall will do it all right so what is your desk situation did you ever have at any of your jobs a standing desk i presume not i had the option for one but i was never really into it um a lot of other people i work with did have them uh and eventually they were basically standard issue to everybody i think i've actually might have had one at a certain point but i never moved it so is it really a standing desk if i never actually raise it um although even just as a regular desk it's nice to be able to pick the height that you want the sitting desk to be at even if you don't use it as a standing desk as most desks you can pick from like one or two possible heights and that's it and you can adjust with your chair height but then if you have short legs then your feet are dangling then you need a foot rest and it's just this whole thing where being able to adjust the height of the desk is nice but no i never really used one in a standing position at work uh at home i have a plain old boring non-standing desk it's very very old uh but one of my wife we made her a little office down in the basement for her to do more working from home uh during the beginning of the pandemic i believe what she got i was trying to look this up while you guys were talking pretty sure it is the uplift desk i mean a lot of standing just look similar but i'm pretty sure it's uplift it's a very popular brand i looked at the pictures i'm like yeah that's her desk i'm pretty darn sure um so she uses that down there not sure if she sit stands with it or not but again i think she appreciates the fact that she's a shorter person that she can adjust the sitting position to be what she likes and it is standable and i think we did get it with memory i don't remember uh one thing i will say about sit stand desks is they're heavier than you think they are yes yep so very heavy good ones are anyway you know they come this one came disassembled and i had to bring it down to the basement to assemble it and i'm bringing the boxes down i'm like what is in these things the leg parts of them are very heavy and this gets to what i think is one of the most important features of a sit stand desk unrelated to the standing because of the way they're designed especially like the uplift desk or whatever there's just two extremely heavy legs and with little feet on them but there's nothing else like the the there's no sort of intrusion into the area where your legs would be there's no back thing there's no legs poking in there's no bar going across it is just complete open space because the the metal is so heavyweight that they don't need anything so you can get a huge standing desk very deep very wide it's just going to have the two legs with no bars and that always annoyed me when I was shopping for computer desks and the really old days when sit-stand desks weren't really a thing.

1:39:24You'd find a lot of them that did stuff to where your legs are. They have supports or braces or struts or stuff like that. These things usually do have some sort of overpriced cable management thing that they'll sell you to go under the desk. Those are okay. You could do your own cable management for a lot less money, but sometimes it's convenient to have them, but they're a little bit janky. But anyway, I do appreciate how incredibly solidly constructed these things are. They seem like way overkill. It seems like you could have a dance party on the top of the desk and it would be fine. It's just so heavy, right?

1:39:55And the motors are nice and smooth and quiet. So, yeah, I also endorse the Uplift desk. But personally, I haven't used them. I don't know. I think maybe I could get used to it if I had to. But it's just something about sitting feels right to me when I'm using a computer. So that's what I'm doing. And my desk is really old. But I just want a really big, flat surface for my desk. i can imagine replacing and if i did replace it i would get a sit stand desk because at this point like if you're buying an expensive desk anyway and you're looking for a high quality expensive desk even if you don't care about standing at all the easiest way to find it is to buy a sit stand because you know they'll be solidly constructed because they have to be for all the motors and everything and you can get them at all sorts of shapes and sizes all sorts of finishes and they're very solid again my experience is only with all of the whatever brand i had at work which some of them might have been uplift but i know a couple others were different brands and then the uplift one that I bought at home and every single standing desk I've seen in the past decade has just been a plain good solid desk so thumbs up thanks to our sponsors this week trade coffee squarespace and hello pillow and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join at atv.fm slash join we appreciate that very very much thank you so much and we will talk to you next week Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause 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 So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.

1:42:01It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. I was using Casey's app to look up the year of this movie earlier. marker when you're talking about the car play thing you're like people love their phones you remember saying that so this is from the 1992 movie singles uh which actually has a podcast connection uh in in that movie which i assume neither one of you saw or has even heard of nope correct okay anyway uh in singles it's like a kind of a gen x movie it's a dumb plot where some girl has to pick between two guys who are both jerks anyway um one of the people is this nerdy guy and he's like he's like in the the pacific northwest somewhere probably seattle you know it's kind of the base of the movie anyway um he's proposing uh that they should add a train to you know for public transportation to some metropolitan area and he calls it super train from roderick online he's like super train we're gonna put in super train and it's gonna you know here's how it's gonna be so great it's gonna help make commuting much faster and reduce traffic and blah blah super train right and uh the the everyone who he showed it to like and you know the people who are in power would look at it and go i don't know people love their cars and that was the refrains of the whole movie that people love their cars no matter what he said about super train it was always people love their cars and now here you are saying people love their phones to the car makers and the car makers like wait in the 90s people love their cars now you're saying they like their phones they love their phones they do they do love their phones they do love their cars but not for computer app platform media things for that they love their phone for cars they like the whole wheels and rolling and moving from place to place stick to that yeah marco you uh you went on an adventure recently it looks like i sure did so where'd you go bud we decided for various um kid birthday party reasons um the birthday party for my kid this spring happened at dave and busters oh is this the one in time square or near time square or something no god no no there's there's a couple on the aisle it was one of those you you've heard of uh the app store and casino games for children welcome to casinos for children that's that's kind of what i'm getting at so all right so it had been the last time i was in a dave and busters oh it's been forever for me yeah i mean i think it was when i lived in pittsburgh in like 2004 oh wow that's that's even more forever than what i'm talking about and i i've been occasionally to like arcadey things in the intervening time but not much like once or twice total and and so it's been it's been a while and i was surprised by a few aspects of it so for those of you who don't know if you're not like you know americans or whatever dave and busters is a chain of kind of arcade sports bars i guess like is that how you like They're these big arcades that also have bars and food service for adults, but it's mainly a giant arcade.

1:45:09So they have arcade games, and then they also have games that give you tickets that you can trade in for garbage toys at ridiculous rates. Just like skating rinks and stuff like that in the past. So anyway, the kid part of it went totally great. We rented a room for it. It was a multi-child party, and it was great, and it went very well, and they were good for that. but what was interesting is we got to see like what modern arcade games are and certain things that have changed and certain things that haven't so number one what I wanted to do first you know once all the kid stuff was settled and the adults had a little bit of time to walk around and play the games while the children were doing the same thing first thing I wanted to do was I want to play freaking Guitar Hero I love Guitar Hero I don't have any modern version of it on any system that you know nobody makes plastic guitars anymore so let me go play Guitar Hero I queued up the best Guitar Hero song which is Black Magic Woman by Santana.

1:46:07It was such a frustrating experience because first of all you know you don't really use coins and stuff anymore in these kind of arcades you get like cards or you know RFID thingies and you scan them and it deducts from your credit balance or whatever so you know first you gotta like you know go buy a card put you know$25 or whatever on it and then you know you go to the games and they express the prices in arbitrary units. So it's like, this game costs nine. Nine what? How many what's are on my card? God knows. So first of all, they're obfuscating the price so that you pay more. That's great.

1:46:43We're off to a great start. Also, the cards come in intervals of$25, but there is almost no way to spend exactly that, because the prices are not divisible correctly. So you end up with like you know three dollars or two dollars or whatever of unused credit that you just kind of can't use on anything so that you know they get they get you there of course see also every ios game that has in-game credits that you buy like this is this you know nintendo too like this is a popular scam so okay i know at least i know i'm getting scammed so i go play guitar hero i i beat my little card against the thing and it it like kind of gets me and then just doesn't work and it's like beep it again and i'm pretty sure i paid twice for my one game that i got and then i play the game and you know guitar hero has like the five fret buttons that like you play the game with by pushing those buttons and one of them just outright doesn't work i'm like okay i'm pretty sure i don't suck this badly like i'm not i'm not missing every green note so like certainly like i the ones those are really obvious i can hit those and i'm hitting all the other ones and every so the game was like you know partially broken it was hard to play it double charged me i'm like okay here we are off to a great start but you know i'm putting on a good face because you know it's my kid's birthday i'm not gonna like you know i'm not gonna like act upset or anything but i'm like i'm having i'm already like irritated slightly now there are some games that i think were pretty impressive i was surprised how few new games there were since last time i'd been in an arcade and i think it's different now because now like you know when arcades were a thing when we were growing up you didn't have great video games at home or in your pocket constantly now everyone has great video games everywhere like they're so commonplace and on such like common hardware that everybody already has you don't need to go to an arcade to play a good video game you already playing good video games in other forms what the arcade serves is like weird novelties you know the multiplayer you know two or four player link up racing games those are always fun i love those um although again even those it was like mario kart and cruising usa or cruising world whatever that whatever the cruising usa franchise is up to now maybe and like a bike thing and that was about it so i thought that was kind of interesting there were a couple of like you know gun shooting games one thing i had a lot of fun with was they now there's this category of game where the screen is a whole bunch of really little bright leds and they use it to to show like old old games like uh i played space invaders this way and so you have this giant it looks like you're playing on a scoreboard for a sports stadium it's that's a micro led but it's not so micro like when we talk about micro led tv that's what we're talking about but they use that in sports stadiums but you've got you were playing the non micro version yeah i was playing macro led version of space invaders it's interesting because like first of all it's dave and buster is because it's it's like you know a big arcade it's very dark inside there's like you know it's it's like almost pitch black and it's lit only by the lights it looks almost like a um you know an old style vegas casino of like you know no windows anywhere they don't want you to see the outside world so it's very dark and it's lit up pretty much only by all the games and their big displays and everything so it's it looks a lot like a casino it sounds a lot like a casino and so anyway so i you know these games they they ranged in quality you know some i had a lot of fun playing space invaders with my kid they had like two different guns like you'd both sit down you'd play together like co-op space invaders on this giant like eye searing you know sports scoreboard display it was kind of cool like that was very novel they had you know they had the carnival games where like you get the tickets if you're able to like throw all the balls and knock over all the things or you know skee-ball and stuff like that but it's like you get the tickets i was gonna say did they have skee-ball because the day that skee-ball leaves those places it's really the end of an era they did they did have it but all the kids were like this is this is not as good as the others because you have to score too much to get the tickets and so here's what happens we paid whatever it was per kid so that the birthday kids had these wristbands with RFID thingies on them.

1:51:03And so they were unlimited video games, but they had a limit on how many ticket things they could get. They quickly ran through the video game part because it was unlimited. They quickly exhausted themselves of their value there because they're all these kind of shallow arcade games. They're all made to play for 90 seconds and then you move on. So they burned through those fairly quickly. and then it became time for the ticket games now in casino gambling you pour money down the drain because you are motivated by the chance of maybe making some money and it's really i mean i'm i'm not a big fan of the destructive nature that has on a lot of people um i recognize that's a pretty you know that can be a pretty dangerous thing a pretty harmful thing to society when it goes wrong um so you know i i'm i'm kind of sensitive to like should we really be teaching children this mechanic and this is what this is part of the reason why i'm so down on a lot of app store stuff because when you look at you know the way the way the app store gaming environment is it is a lot of simulated gambling or oftentimes even sometimes real gambling um and i don't i don't love that we we somehow consider that a separate thing you know i i think if we're going to look gambling as a society and say this should be you know tightly regulated and it's kind of a problem and some places don't even want it at all i think we should apply a lot of that same scrutiny to what we you know have children play on their on their phones and ipads and and i think apple needs to be substantially more strict than they are in that way but it's hard for them to be that strict when they're making so much money from it but anyway it was interesting though when the kids switched over to the ticket games the ones like okay well you you can use you could you put in your money or you use your credit and then you you know a ball falls from the top and if it hits this thing you win and everything it's like carnival games everything is slanted against you like there's little tricks and gotchas and deception and like kind of cheats that they do so that like oh you're definitely going to miss this clown thing that you're throwing the ball at because it has all this hair sticking out the side that makes it look wider than it is or like you got to hit it really hard otherwise it won't fall over and the ball would just bounce off or you know like stuff like that um you know he played this this like kind of controllable plinko it looks like plinko from the prices right but you drop the thing down and you're trying to get it in the center slot but you can like turn some gears along the way to kind of steer it and amazingly he got it in the first time but he couldn't get it in ever again after that because you you can look at like see the designs like oh they've actually angled everything away from this center hole so that like it's it's every every single thing was designed that way it was like oh this is deception this is a trick this is playing on people's perceptions this is cheating people like every single thing like that and it was crazy watching some of the kids you know some of them had like a healthy balance of like oh they they'd try it once like ah this stinks and they move on you know some of them looked like gambling addicts like i've seen people like in vegas casinos the kind of people who were like sitting at a slot machine for a really long time just kind of mindlessly pumping money in and that's how they spend their entire day just slowly losing money and it's it's it's not a good thing to see the look that those people get in their eyes are kind of like glazed over like giving up like i got but you got to keep going because you might win that's what i saw in a lot of these kids eyes it was scary on one level i'm like you know this this has kind of always been this way and maybe i just didn't see it when i was younger in these places more often on another level that doesn't make it right it's it was it was really just kind of like i don't i don't think this is a good thing and the psychology that it's training us to have it made me really uneasy the fact that this is like a thing that is ostensibly for children seeing actual children like be taken in by the by like the the scam and the addiction of of that of those feelings it was it was kind of messed up and but yeah it definitely made me think like man i i do wish apple would be better on the app store about that stuff because i don't think it's right or in good taste or in keeping with the brand they want to have that apple makes so much money off of casino games for children in the app store that use real money and plan people's psychology to basically set it on fire.

1:55:35All the stuff, the loot boxes and all the weird gem conversions and all this stupid stuff. It's just ripping people off. And Apple knows it, but they make so much money that they convince themselves not to care. And in my opinion, that's not good enough. They should do better. They know better. I know the people there know better. I know that they care about their brand. They care about what it represents. They don't want to be a mindless casino for children, but they are and i really wish they would do better i wish they would have the courage there it is to actually stand up for that and say you know what even though we're making a killing by taking a third of this kind of dirty money that's going through us maybe we'd be better off overall for our brand and for our customer experience and for what's right in the world to maybe maybe put more strict controls on a lot of that stuff and make it a lot more honest and a lot more consumer friendly.

1:56:34But they won't do it. I wish they would. Yeah, it's been a long time since I've had a Dave and Buster's. And, you know, I remember when I was really little, my grandparents, actually, they still live there. They lived in a little teeny town outside of Scranton, which you would know is the place that the office takes place, the American office anyway. They lived in this little tiny town outside Scranton. And I remember that there was a arcade there that was called family fun center and it was one of these sorts of things it was like a lowbrow version of dave and busters uh where you're like a really crummy um chucky cheese where most of the games they had regular arcade games memory serves most of the games are these ticket dispensing things and i would put like i wasn't given infinite money but you know left my own devices i would put infinite money into these different games like skeeball and a bunch of others in order to try to win, as you had said a little while ago, the world's crummiest prizes.

1:57:30Oh, yeah. They were so bad and so awful. But I would rack up those tickets. And I remember Family Fun Center would give you like laminated cards, like about the size of a credit card if you had like a thousand tickets. And I would like, I would gather up all my tickets and I would, you know, I would cash them in insofar as like I would get my little card that said, oh, I have like, I would have 2000 ticket cards and whatever, whatever. And I would save them up in like the three or four times over the summer that I'd go to visit grandma and grandpa. Like I would go to family fun center and earn some more.

1:57:56And then eventually maybe one day I would have enough for like the prize I really, really, really wanted. And you know, you could get like a game boy if you had 11 trillion tickets, but you would have to have, you would have had to have spent like$13 ,000 to have earned 11 tickets. It was, it was, it was a mess. But as a kid, I mean, I loved it. Gosh, I love that place more than almost anywhere in the world. And I loved when we went and visited grandma and grandpa, because a lot of times we would go into Family Fun Center and get to play for a couple hours. And I loved it so much. I mentioned on the last show, I was happy that I was born when I was in terms of the various technological arcs and the internet and everything that I got to see them when they develop.

1:58:34Well, this is one instance where I'm glad I was born when I was because I got to experience video arcades before they got crappy. And I didn't get to see them transition to being crappy and I didn't get to experience the crappy. So yeah, my video arcades were coin-op video game machines that you put quarters into uh not tokens but real live quarters and the video games were really good and at that time the best video games you could find anywhere on the planet were arcade games which made sense for the time because they were incredibly expensive like like those machines like a pac-man machine did not cost the same as an atari 2600 not even close like they're very expensive the big giant crts in them alone were expensive plus circuit boards and the fact that they were custom and maintenance like you have to have people come service them because they would break all the time yeah i mean but they made tons of money in quarters right so this the reason you know anyway the point was like you'd go to the arcade because you couldn't see that stuff at home all right and they like they try to make home versions of arcade games and they were worse right and so you were willing to plunk the quarters into the machines and play them uh yeah and they sounded like video arcades they look like them and you know they're just you You know, that experience has burned in my brain.

1:59:44And when they got bad, I had stopped going to video arcades. Eventually, the industry learned you can make more money by selling people games and home consoles. And that's kind of why the games look like the way they do. You know, the graphics on them are not as good as they are on your phone. Right? They're just not. Right? These huge machines and the graphics are terrible. That never used to be the case. It used to be the case that the best graphics in the world were on these extremely expensive arcade machines. Unless you had a Neo Geo. That's true. well that you know that came from that came from arcade stuff yeah neo geo and a couple of like it basically was an arcade machine that you took your tv and you paid about as much for it as well when it flipped i think was around the dreamcast era some somewhere around the dreamcast era there was one console that was essentially made they made a an arcade version of a console board instead of like the other way around and that's when you knew it had entirely flipped and the arcade was no longer going to be the place where the best games were it was good their best games were going to be on console and pc and the arcade was going to be whatever junk was left over there was that middle period where they tried to share the technology and they did there was a whole bunch of consoles that i think mostly from sega that were like it was literally the same hardware in in the arcade and in the home thing but then i honestly i don't even know what's in those arcade things is it just like you know an iphone se 2 like inside there playing the games i mean these days yeah it's probably like a raspberry pi or something that's the other thing i'm surprised you didn't mention that um the other variety of things i see in modern quote-unquote arcades is essentially maim cabinets right like just i don't know how they get away with it but it's like oh here's some old a bunch of old video games probably not really licensed but who cares in what looks essentially like a maim cabinet kind of like your big star uh space invaders thing at a wall but without the big screen it's like oh great i came to an arcade so i could play you know emulated video games for my youth on a crappy screen i'm like i hate those places but yeah no i i was there for the brief shining moment when they were good and then i left Beep, beep, beep.