540: The Points Don’t Matter

40:41Everyone has all these rooms that have a good amount of empty space a few meters ahead of where you're sitting. And I was thinking, if this actually becomes a really meaningful computing platform that lots of people are using to get a lot of work done, can you imagine people possibly starting to rent out offices that are just circles? The wall is just a circle that is a three meter radius around you? just go in vr at that point like just turn on the yosemite you know what i mean like but then you could you could just if you're sitting inside your your three meter donut room you could just you could place anything on any of the walls you can even have like you know your coffee sitting three meters away from you over here and you know it's like a picture of your family sitting three meters away over there three meter long arms i don't know if that that quite works yeah in the in the simulator i was playing with the the uh division of a simulator and next code it just came out like i don't know hours before we recorded so i didn't have that much time to play with it uh but you can fly the camera around and one of the first things that it was i flew the camera around to the side of a window to see if it had depth and i'm pretty sure it doesn't like i looked at it edge on and it basically disappeared the other thing i tried to do was take windows and bring them right up to my nose and i think maybe i just don't know how to do that in vision os obviously everything in the simulator is weird if you ever tried to use an iphone app in the simulator it's weird and this is 10 times weirder because you're you're using like a mouse and a keyboard and a scroll wheel to substitute for eyeballs and pinching it's super weird um but i couldn't like it wasn't it wasn't conducive to that i could zoom in i could zoom the camera in but i was like just flying the virtual camera like in the simulator i don't think you'd be able to fly the virtual camera that way and when you're wearing it because when you're wearing it you'd have to push your head closer to the thing but this is another thing to try like again with the with the the idea of the things the floating rectangles or whatever trying to look like they're positioned in space there's that button whatever it is the i forget which button it is whether it's the digital crown one or the other button that like re-centers all your crap in front of you and i think if you were sitting on the couch and had the windows in front of you at the intended you know focal distance and then just got up and walked forward two steps and shoved your face into safari it would let you get as close as you want but it would be useless because now you're now all you can see is three letters of the safari window And if you press whatever button that is, it would recenter things nine feet away from or six feet away from where your head is now.

43:03So that recentering and redistancing thing, you know, makes sense. And it's also why everyone you see in one of these demos, they're not using they're not like, again, they're not walking through their house, walk and talk Aaron Sorkin style and using 17 apps while they walk and talk. They're sitting on a couch. They're sitting at a chair. They're stationary so that the things can be placed into the real world with them, but also maintaining that focal distance. I don't know if there even is a mode where, like, as you walk, your windows follow you, you know, maintaining the six feet distance or whatever, because you probably walk into a wall or do something terrible.

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45:33So the Vision SDK is out. There is, at a glance, some really freaking good documentation. I think hell may have frozen over, my friends, because Apple's been like firing on all cylinders about documentation. It's been very strange. But we'll link to dive into featured sample apps where they have a series of sample apps, including Happy Beam, where you shoot hearts at grumpy clouds, if I understand this properly. But anyways, but it's a full on walkthrough of the code. Not only here's what we did, but why we did it. Like brav frickin' oh, no sarcasm. this is excellent so i'm gonna have to dig into this at some point when i'm not well over my head deep in call sheet stuff um but yeah this looks this looks really really good and it's worth checking out and then it's also worth noting i think john had noticed that jonathan white i believe former apple employee pointed out that if you have a playstation 5 or xbox controller hooked up to your mac that you can use that to navigate in the vision os simulator which is vastly preferable to trying to use the tiny little camera controls they have in a little floating palette again it's very awkward to use to try to use uh a non uh you know a vr headset simulator with a mouse and a keyboard the main reason i put this uh post in here is because he posted like an animated gif of like one of the little you know they have virtual rooms for you to be in in the simulator because obviously there's no headset looking at your room so they have a bunch of virtual rooms for you to try and it's just a box floating in space and he takes the playstation controller whatever and just flies the camera in and out of the room and you can see is just a giant black void with a living room sitting in it.

47:11Neat. Going back a second, when Casey was talking about all their good documentation for this, which I haven't seen it yet, but I'm very happy to hear that. That's fantastic. And them explaining why. I think what's very important here is that they want us to develop apps for this platform that fit and make sense and are good, but we not only have never tried this platform, but we also won't have a chance to try this platform for a while. Well, that's half true. Did you see, you might not have seen, but I think it was Underscore that pointed out that somewhere, I don't know where, there was Apple documentation that said, starting next month, you can do the lab thing that they have at like five or ten locations around the world.

47:54So that is, I mean, and I still think your point, Marco, is fair, but breaking news, apparently it is as early as July, if we all read this right, that one could go to you know cupertino london etc etc and actually try your stuff on vision pro i mean that's that helps but that's a very limited like you know oh sure totally when you look you know when when the iphone app store came out we had already had iphones for a year yeah and we we already and before that we had had smartphones for a while yeah they sucked but we had others you know so like the concept of a smartphone and and what's what smartphone software should be was fairly known.

48:30And then we all had iPhones for a year. And so we knew how iPhone software should behave and how it should be designed. And yeah, it was a learning process. We didn't get it all right, right at the start, but we had a huge headstart. When the iPad came out, we didn't have a chance to use them before it launched to the world. However, we kind of assume like this is probably like a giant phone and just kind of use that as a starting point. And yeah, our initial apps sucked, but they weren't that far off you know and and again it was a learning process with this every other major you know vr ar kind of headset that's had any success at all besides like very very specialized you know narrow markets has been gaming focused and so we kind of have some idea like hey if you want to make a vr game here are some principles that you might want to follow or here are some things that work and don't work that's fine but the the idea of a spatial computing environment, of using an AR environment for general purpose computing, that is still really in its infancy in the rest of the world.

49:32And most of us have not used that. And none of us have used specifically the Vision Pro for this purpose yet. And so to try to make software for this platform that we have no experience with, and that can't really be simulated very well, and even if it was, even if the simulator was really good and this could get into they said they're going to offer dev kits at some point and we mentioned we don't really know what that means or what the dev kits will be able to do but if the dev kit is anything less than a full blown environment that has all of Apple's built and apps already working and everything which it probably will be I can't imagine those will all be ready yet I expect the dev kit to be basically like the simulator in terms of what it has and what it doesn't have, like in terms of other apps and everything, and you're not going to be able to install stuff really besides your own app.

50:25So you're not going to get a good experience of what it's like to actually really use this thing for computing. And because it's so radically different from what we've used before, Apple needs to really step up above and beyond with things like documentation and tooling and explaining the human interface guidelines, explaining why they're doing things, explaining how things should be designed, why things should be structured this way, because we don't know, because we can't use this platform yet. And the good thing is, it sounds like that's what they're doing. And it's going to take a whole lot of immersing ourselves in this documentation and in the simulator and in the tools and reading up and experimenting with things for us to get stuff right.

51:11And it's still not going to quite be right when we get it, because we will have no experience actually really using the hardware and using the software and figuring out how things work and how things should behave, how things should feel, how things should look. There's so much of that. When you look at the iPhone, there's so much kind of built in like, here's how things should be laid out on the screen. Here's how navigation works. Here's how things should be structured. Here's the different conventions that we use. We know none of that with Vision OS. And until we're actually able to use it with real apps, with our real data, with, you know, really in our actual world trying to get things done in our real lives, we're not going to have those feelings kind of naturally inherent to us.

51:54So it's going to be a learning process. But in the meantime, Apple really has to step in. And so I'm very glad that it seems like they are doing that. Yeah, very much so. All right, John, tell me about the John Ternus external GPU question that was surfaced at the talk show. yeah we talked about it uh last week i think um asked about external gpus and turnus said like he doesn't quite see how they would incorporate that into their system of built-in gpus or whatever is kind of closing the door on external gpus and also saying that it just didn't even seem to make sense to him it occurs to me thinking about that that question and other you know and the talk show in general that maybe that is also a question that could have been asked to craig federighi because turn this is the hardware dude right and you think oh external gpus like that's a question for him right because if he's like oh you're gonna make a mac pro and are we gonna support external gpus or not and how can we incorporate those to ask the hardware guy right but there is a software component to this uh as far as i'm aware there's nothing inherent about any of the m whatever socs that precludes the idea of for example using an external gpu for compute like setting aside the video stuff i don't know what the deal with that is but just like just doing it for compute if you're trying to do like you know ai model training or something like using gpus for a computer or whatever especially in the mac pro where you actually have card slots and all the other thing right um so the hardware may be capable but you can't actually use any of those gpus to do anything unless you have a driver for it and that is a software question that turnus doesn't really control that's on the Federighi side it's like hey are we going to support on apple silicon you know apple silicon native drivers for let's say amd graphics cards and it's not like you know craig federighi like his organization maybe writes all those drivers or whatever certainly it falls under the umbrella of what kind of things does mac os support because you know in my mac right now i've got a bunch of drivers for my amd graphics cards and they came with the operating system and the operating system that's craig so uh it would have been interesting to pose the same question to obviously you know he's not gonna make the whole uh talk show just to be the giant mac pro show that would be what it would be like if i was hosting it i was gonna say but and that's why apple does not give you executives to interview but anyway that's that's uh you know it's just an interesting thing to think about that there's more to it than just like oh you know when you design the mac pro hardware you didn't make it support this or you're you know because the soc has the gpu on it i can't do that as you know as i think we've talked about many times in the past intel gpus intel cpus had integrated graphics for years and years and max with intel cpus with integrated graphics also supported discrete graphics in fact apple had this wacky thing in the os where it would use the discrete versus using the integrated and go back and forth and all that stuff and of course in the intel mac pro actually the xeon i don't think doesn't have an integrated gpu but anyway you could have put like instead of a zeon put like an i9 or whatever i7 or whatever the most recent one they put something with an integrated gpu and still use the external gpus apple did all that work for intel but that work is a software work that is not hardware work so that would be an interesting thing to to muse on as we go in the next round of the of the mac pro to see if apple changes course on this uh to see if it would even be technically possible to change course for example with just a new version of mac os with a bunch of drivers that suddenly lets you plug in you know gpus and i don't think it's going to happen obviously on the the m2 ultra mac pro because all their slots have uh are bandwidth starved and they would need extra power connectors to power a big gpu and yada yada but i was just thinking about this that you know uh it's it's not just a hardware question it's also a software question that's fair all right apple has added pass keys to apple id and iCloud logins so they are dog fooding this or allowing us i guess to dog food it um i haven't really messed with passkeys at all um so i don't really have much to say about this but i applaud apple for actually making it possible they say this this from a six color story they said the future has been rolling out uh as of yesterday and can be tested on devices running ios ipad os 17 or sonoma betas and some other people have said if you run if you're running ventura and you use chrome because Chrome, the latest versions of Chrome know about passkeys that you could actually do it on Ventura with Chrome.

56:19That's funny. But they say it's rolling out and it must not have rolled out to me because I tried for a while earlier today to get to the point where it would let me use a passkey or prompt me like by going to the iCloud login page and I just don't have access to that feature yet. So it's coming eventually, but I wasn't able to try it. I have used passkeys with other things like in Chrome because again, Chrome supports them with other services that support passkeys and it's fun and it's nice. I use them in addition to names and passwords. I haven't yet had the guts to take any of the services that support them and say, you know what?

56:51Forget about my password and do everything with passkeys. Although, honestly, it shouldn't really be that scary because, you know, we all know how the world works. Like, oh, well, what if passkeys break or don't work or whatever? It'll do exactly the same thing you do when you forget your password, which happens to all of us. In the end, your email address is the ultimate key to your stuff because people forget their passwords. you'll never forget your passkey but say there was a bug and the computer screwed up and the computer you know forgot your quote unquote forgot your passkey you're just going to use the forgot password link and have them email you something yada yada which is not great but in theory once the passkey feature is worked out and all the bugs are ironed out and it basically works reliably uh you don't have to worry about forgetting anymore and i think humans forgetting is going to happen way more often than icloud keychain like deleting stuff accidentally uh tell me with regard to pass keys and passwords and things like that tell me what's going on in sonoma yeah so there's an app on mac os that's been around for i don't know a decade or two um called keychain access that that gives you a view of your mac os keychain uh it started off looking at just your local keychain and eventually icloud keychain was introduced and they put that into the app it's a pretty nerdy app it hasn't been updated in a really long time it's scary and confusing and in general people should not mess with it because it's very easy to screw yourself up because you'll say i don't know what this is do i need this i'm going to delete this sometimes you need it don't like don't it's like people used to go into a library folder on the early versions of mac os 10 to being like library what the hell is this crap and just delete everything it's not a good idea so on sonoma when you launch keychain access it throws a dialogue in your face that says manage your passwords and system settings go to passwords and system settings to manage your passwords and pass keys set up verification codes and view your security recommendations and has a big button that is the default button that says open passwords and the non-default button is open keychain access for the checkbox to say don't show this message again so for users who are used to using keychain access because they're they're nerdy and they're you know that's the place where they go for passwords they're trying to tell them hey we have a significantly more friendly interface to passwords over here in system settings that you might not know about because it's buried please use that one instead uh if only that friendlier interface to passwords could be a standalone application that could replace keychain access i don't maybe not replacing keychain access does much more fancier stuff so i hope they keep keychain access around but i do like the idea that they are trying to herd users towards the nicer friendlier interface that is in a totally different place also can i take this moment to thank the uh the xcode team or whatever part of the xcode team is responsible for automatic certificate management and in particular whoever at apple made that work for carplay apps as of a few years ago or a year ago I have not had to go into keychain access for probably two or three years now.

59:41I used to on a regular basis because I used to have to do all the provisioning certificates and everything and all that management and everything. And inevitably, something would mess up and I'd have to go in there and clean up some garbage. And I haven't had to do that in like two years. Nice. So thank you, whoever did that. Thank you. Yeah, go team. John, there's good news about Notification Center. We're being told anonymously. Like I said last week, two things I had to say about Sonoma was that my weird bug seems to be fixed. but also that the notification interface actually has buttons that you can click that don't disappear when you try to click them so here's some anonymous feedback on that in sonoma notification center has been significantly re-engineered from mac os sonoma probably in big part because it's responsible for hosting widgets which can now be at the desktop so it wouldn't surprise me that the notification hover bug is finally fixed before sonoma the notification center process would be responsible for all things related to widgets including when to update them the running of extensions and archiving unarchiving of views with sonoma they brought chrono d the chrono demon to mac os so now all notification center has to worry about is actually placing views on the screen so here's to rewriting a part of the system that had been broken for three years i don't know what chrono d i think it's some internal thing or whatever but like i mean this matches with my experience the notification center the interface looks the same it's the same stupid like oh we can't show you the buttons until you mouse over them because we're afraid your little brain will explode.

1:01:05But now when you mouse over them, you can actually click on them. So there is some support for the idea that it's not just my imagination that they actually made this particular user interface work. Now we can get back to complaining that this particular interface is dumb, but at least it's dumb and working as designed now. Hooray! All right, there's a couple of tidbits that we wanted to share with regard to iOS 17. First of all, if you recall, Apple has done for the last year to like a semi-private Slack for WWDC. I was going to say attendees, but that's not really true. People who are interested in WWDC.

1:01:41And in there, somebody caught, and then it was eventually posted to MacRumors, that somebody from Apple said, as of iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, disabling the iCloud drive switch will no longer disable syncing in your app. It'll be controlled by the individual switch for your app, which means, Marco, that you can still sync with CloudKit and iCloud stuff, even if iCloud Drive is turned off because of some sort of work provisioning. This is critical for Marco today, but not a small amount of call sheet also rides on CloudKit, and so this is critical for me soon. So I am very excited about this. This is very good news.

1:02:22Yeah, I'm very curious to see, you know, once I get running on 17 and get some real user data out there, like, because, you know, right now, as a quick reminder, I just verified, if I look at my iCloud, my CloudKit state of like whether I can save data in CloudKit, I track this in analytics so I can make a decision in the future about whether to switch to that for sync. And right now I got 12.5 % of my user base saying no account. And I believe that's the result you would get in iOS 16 and below when iCloud Drive was just disabled, in addition to not actually being logged into an iCloud account.

1:03:01And in that case, you can't use CloudKit. So right now I'm at 12.5%. As my iOS 17 adoption goes up, which is already at like 2%, as that goes up, I'm curious to see if this number goes down. And my analytics system is not advanced enough that I could say, like, you know, what is this value just for iOS 17 people? I'm kind of curious to see how that tracks. Maybe I'll add something separate for that. But, you know, we'll see. Right now, this doesn't help me because that's still way too many people to not be able to use iCloud with iOS 16 and below. And maybe in a year from now, that'll be different.

1:03:39You know, right now, I can't, I still can't use this. I can't rely on iCloud Drive being universal enough, or rather CloudKit being universal enough, but maybe next year I will. We'll see. I hope so. Either way, this is a very, very important step towards that possibility that might enable this possibility next year. So looking forward to that. And also with regard to iOS 17, apparently there's now a crossword puzzle like mini app within Apple News+. I don't even remember hearing rumblings of this until today. Maybe I missed it. But starting with Iowa 17, Apple is taking a page from the New York Times and integrating crossword puzzles into the News app.

1:04:18Puzzles will be available to Apple News Plus and Apple One subscribers. This is from 9to5Mac. We'll link it in the show notes. Again, news to me. It makes sense to be in the News app, but this is just sort of raising the bar for everybody else. You know, like people complain when Apple adds functionality to be built into the US. But if they make a News app and part of News is the New York Times and part of the New York Times is the New York Times crossword, like you can see how they got there. I still think there's plenty of room for better third-party crossword apps, but it just goes to show that, you know, you never know when Apple's going to come for your little section of the market.

1:04:49That being said, if it's limited to news plus subscribers, I'm not sure that's a huge threat to the market, but, you know, we'll see. Yeah, I mean, like, it's, you know, again, there's third-party opportunity there for sure because, A, you got all the free crossword apps, and B, what if people don't want Apple News or Apple One? They just want a crossword. Well, they just go to the app store and find one. and uh marco we have news with regard to why apple isn't allowing third-party watch faces and watch west 10 do we as per well do we does this actually say anything no it does say something but what it says is bs as per mac rumors uh in an interview with swiss new paper newspaper something or other published today apple's vp of technology kevin lynch and product marketing employee deirdre called back explained and these quotes are machine translated from german uh lynch said that apple puts quote a huge amount of effort quote into every watch face to ensure that they work quote uniformly and simply quote and said apple needs to plan ahead to make sure watch faces continue to work if we want to change something or add new possibilities this is the most non-answer answer i've read in a little while but what are you going to do because you know apple would never change how someone integrates into their operating system like say a different system for writing widgets or entirely different system for writing apps for the watch like this is yeah so oh wait we don't we don't want to do this because what if we change our mind about how the watch faces work you change your mind about things all the time that's what wwc is about that's what we're all doing new os's come out it's like we can't give you watch faces because what if we change our mind about the api like nothing has changed more than uh you know like going from what was the previous one the crappy one is it watch kit to non-watch kit i don't know but like they change stuff all the time on every OS.

1:06:34That's the nature of what they do as a platform owner. So that is not the reason why watch faces don't exist. you know, we have a huge, put a huge amount of effort and we want them to work uniformly and simply like you can use this as an excuse for why you don't want to have the app store as well. This is, I mean, this may be the reason why they're not doing it, which is basically saying it would be more work if we did it. I agree. It would be more work, just like it's more work to run the app store, but geez, please third-party watch faces. First of all, Yes, I know this is a machine translation, but first of all, Apple's own faces don't work uniformly or simply.

1:07:08So let's rule that out right now. They don't. So that's not a good reason. But also, everything that we've seen from the way widgets are rendered and the way SwiftUI works suggests that they could do a really good watch face kit using the widget rendering system. where your process isn't even needing to run all the time, just like complications, just like widgets. You can kind of use pieces, and they could give you, like, here's clock hands for the current time, or here's a digital version of the time, or whatever. They can give you components, and you can place them in your view and lay them out however you need to and style them with a few custom ways.

1:07:48They could do that so easily with what they've already built and what they're already shipping, not even just brand new this year, but like what they've already been shipping for a few years. So there really isn't any technical merit to this argument. The reason we don't have third-party watch faces yet is because they don't want to. That's it. There is no technical justification. There is no good argument. It's simply they don't want to. Apple has a new system for installing betas. Anyone with a free Apple developer account can do it now. You don't need to pay the$99 like you used to. There's a write-up in Ars Technico about this.

1:08:26Basically, you go fiddling in settings and select which beta train you want to be on, and then you reboot and you're on that train, which is kind of neat. You used to be able to go to the developer website and download an installer, basically. And you could still, I think you can get like a restore image for Apple Silicon only to do that. But that's not what they want you to do. They want you to go to software update, which is buried in, you know, system settings. And you got to know to click on the little I in a circle. Everything's about the little I in a circle. um that that lets you pick hey i want beta updates and importantly it lets you pick which apple id you want to use as the the apple id that has a developer account that is being used to download the thing it doesn't have to be a paid developer account anymore and so you don't have to pay 99 to get access to the betas you can have a free developer account but the question is if you're if you're like us old school mac users or developers we have multiple apple ids which which Apple ID is the one that has a developer account.

1:09:22And you want to configure that. Because if you don't, like, you know, if you're trying to use your real Apple ID with a beta, when you, but another Apple ID has a developer account, you'll end up in your other developer ID in the beta. And be like, but this isn't my Apple ID. I want to be in my real Apple ID. But, oh, I have to stay in this Apple ID because that's the one that gets the updates from the beta. They're two separate things. You just have to, again, the little tiny I in the circle and the stupid system setting interface it lets you pick which Apple ID you want to be the one that gets the betas.

1:09:51And that doesn't have to be the same Apple ID as the one you're actually signed into in macOS or whatever. So I don't know how this works outside of macOS because I've only done the macOS beta. But I think the new system is a little bit confusing, but it's better than installing dev profiles, which is one option. I think it's maybe not better than downloading installers, but we'll see. But just FYI, don't feel like you're trapped to actually using your developer Apple ID as your user's Apple ID. Indeed. And then finally, very, very good news. DP Review was purchased by Gear Patrol. So they are not going away into the sunset.

1:10:26They will live on, which is great news. It was kind of a shame that they will live on after like half of their employees bailed to get new jobs, which who could blame them? obviously the price for gear patrol is probably lower if you wait until after the site is declared to be shut down and half the employees leave but they're also getting a less worthy asset less less uh valuable asset because some of the good people who are at dp review are no longer there all in all probably not handled the best but it's better than it just actually literally dying inside amazon and nothing coming of it so i i'm rooting for its resurrection i do wonder if If Gear Patrol is actually dedicated to it, will they try to hire back some of the people who left to go elsewhere?

1:11:10We'll see. But apparently it will live on to fight another day. Okay, so Safari 17 has a bunch of new features, a plethora even of new features. But one in particular is very interesting, link tracking protection. so my executive summary of this is you know how you get those like really heinously long urls whenever you share something from like instagram or facebook or something or twitter or something like that well apparently safari 17 will do its best to strip out the query string entries that are clogging up those urls and leave only the ones behind that matter and i haven't tried this myself but this sounds good i'm here for it like all these blocking and prevention things it really depends on how good a job it does so it's it's deleting stuff from your url so you take a url and it's going to say like no some of the stuff in this url we think is being used to track you so we're just going to delete it some websites are surely designed so that if you don't have the tracking information they don't work right and that's crappy but other times i do worry that this thing is going to delete something from the url that it thinks is a tracking parameter but is not because the only thing the way it has to tell is based on the the names apparently uh jeff johnson found that there's a query param.wplist file that contains a list of the url query parameters to be removed uh and it currently contains 25 uh of the usual suspects and he lists a bunch of uh query uh parameter names i do wonder if it can get specific like oh on this website this parameter or if it just looks for like you know any query parameter named uh you know gclid which is some google thing apparently um but yeah i hate it when you know ad blocking privacy whatever things cause a website not to work because you're trying to do a thing on the web you're trying to order dinner you're trying to buy movie tickets you're trying to to book a reservation you click a button that to do a thing and nothing happens you're like is this web page broken is one of my blockers screwing it up you know same thing when someone sends you a url and messages you click it you try to load the thing it says i tried to load it and it didn't work and they're like well it works for me and they're like well it doesn't work for me and little do you know that safari 17 stripped out a query parameter that it thought it was for tracking and you can always turn off content blockers and blah blah blah and i hate that dance but i also hate tracking stuff so i i applaud the effort but this is an extremely hard problem especially since you have so little information you've got a string it's shaped as a url it's got query parameters you know some names are commonly used for tracking is it okay to delete this i don't know let's try it so i'm a little bit nervous about this feature but i'm sure you'll be able to disable it if you don't like it.

1:13:46Indeed. I mean, I agree with everything you said, but I'm excited. This hopefully will work really well. Dock Kit is a new thing that is coming with, I guess, iOS 17. There's a WWDC session about it called Integrate with Motorized iPhone Stands Using Dock Kit. And the description begins, discover how Dock Kit can help your camera app create incredible photo and video experiences with motorized stands. We'll show you how your app can automatically track subjects in live video across a 360-degree field of view. take direct control the stand and blah blah blah so uh this sounds pretty cool i haven't looked at the session yet uh this is one of those things where i don't personally think i have a need for this at the moment but i could totally see how you could make like an incredible sunrise uh video you know with you panning as the sun is rising or something like that i think this could be very very very cool the integration of this is exactly the thing they showed in the keynote which is hey you can use continuity camera and facetime with apple tv now and it'll follow you around yeah so like you're putting your your camera like by your tv i mean imagine if apple made a tv set anyway um but of course the only tool it has used is a center stage which is just like a big wide fisheye lens and then we crop a portion of it but now if you had one of these docket things integrated with facetime integrated with apple tv and you had a bunch of kids in front of you on the couch squirming around it could actually turn the camera and use like the good camera and you know change how the picture is framed by literally changing how the picture is framed you know imagine if the the doc kit didn't just rotate but also tilt it and everything you know this is working towards the idea of just everyone sits down in front of the tv and you can just do facetime with the whole family and it just makes sure everyone's in the frame and zooms in on people when they talk and it all looks good and this is a piecemeal way to do it uh supporting continuity camera having an api for these third-party things could you actually find a tv that supports apple tv that supports doc kit that supports facetime that supports continuity camera and put this all together and in your living room with your iPhone and your set of cameras so that it works.

1:15:45Who knows? It's not exactly an integrated Apple solution, but it's more of the type of thing that people always say they want from Apple, which is like a geeky type endeavor where all the pieces are there to do something really cool. You just got to assemble them yourself. No, this sounds very, very neat. And just to be clear, I don't know what it sounded like when I said it, but it sounded like John was saying docket. It is dock kit. And I might have made the same mistake when I introduced this, so just to be absolutely clear. It's two Ks in a row. Yes. It's not hover, it's hover, apparently.

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1:18:10Nick asks, do the capabilities of the Vision Pro make you more bullish about Apple's potential in the car space? Assuming Vision Pro ships, Apple will demonstrate both delivering projects very long in development and a ton of visual capabilities. the thing that i think is most interesting to me about vision pro is the r1 chip i believe it's called is that right the the one that does all the real-time processing um because if i understand it properly the r1 chip is you know a running some sort of like real-time os on it or something like that maybe it may i might be making things up here so definitely check my work on this but um but it runs a real-time os and that's the sort of thing that you would need for like a car safety computer or something like that.

1:18:53I don't necessarily think Apple's going to do any actual automobile. I personally feel like that ship has probably sailed, to use a different vehicle metaphor. But I do think that this is probably either, and I think I said this either last week or the week before, I think this real-time stuff was either born out of the car project or could be used by the car project if it wasn't born there originally. So does it make more bullish? I don't know about that. But it certainly expands the possibilities of things that Apple could potentially conquer. You know, it's one thing to do a screen used for infotainment.

1:19:33It's another thing to do the gauge cluster. And obviously, Apple has already announced they intend to do the gauge cluster. But all of us were very worried. I think, well, how does that work when Apple doesn't really have a real-time OS that will keep the speedometer on your screen and refreshing quickly always. And well, now they have hardware and software to do it. So it's definitely interesting. Although again, I don't personally think an Apple car will ever be released or at least I don't think that's sitting here now. Yeah, this doesn't give me any more confidence in the car project for one very important reason.

1:20:05With Apple Vision Pro, your life is not on the line. I mean, at least I hope not. Like, I guess the battery could like burst into flames in your pocket or whatever, but like the stakes are so much higher i get what you're saying like oh vision pro real-time stuff vision stuff ar like like the technology matches there like some related car thing self-driving cars car visual experience like you can see how this technology overlap but there is no overlapping consequences right this is like you're literally on your couch and yeah maybe the thing crashes and you can't use an app right or whatever the stakes are just so much lower um and it's not you know so oh look apples can ship things that have been in development for a long time the car thing is not about the length of development time the car thing is about the consequences if it's not great the consequences of the vision pro is not great is whatever the product that flops but people aren't going to die uh no matter what apple does in the car space unless it's just a you know better car play even just better car play there's higher stakes like but if they're doing anything having to do with controlling a car or whatever boy that's so much harder and it's and it's an area that apple has never really gone into none of the things that apple ships are so directly responsible for the you know the the life of the people who are using them as something that is actually controlling anything about a car so i still think that apple has a lot of hurdles to overcome to figure out anything in the car space maybe a better analogy would be between health and cars because health you know like they're the blood glucose thing or whatever is rumored health and car both you know things where people's lives are on the line vision pro hopefully no one's life is on the line going back to the real time os thing for a second you know when you look at you know we we did hear rumblings back years ago that apple was working on a real-time os as part of the car project now whether that was the same thing as the real-time os that's running in in vision os we don't we don't know i bet there's some overlap i i bet there's at least some uh you know some shared expertise there and and you know if not some shared code although honestly there probably is some shared code as well one thing we learned last summer when they when they kind of pre-announced that new carplay system with the gauge cluster as you were just saying casey um and we and our technically did a good article about it we talked about it on the show about how like just by by regulatory reasons gauge cluster OSs have to be real-time OSs.

1:22:27And listeners wrote in to inform us that I didn't even know this, that Apple's modern chips, the modern Apple Silicon ARM chips, are able to run in virtualization two OSs at the same time. One of them can be a real-time OS and the other one isn't. And I think this is how, I think some part of Google's stack for cars, some part of it does this, I think. And so we were speculating at the time, hey, maybe future iPhone, iOS versions will be able to run this real-time OS as some slice of the resources of the chip and then run iOS kind of side-by-side with it. And that little real-time OS could run the gauge cluster in CarPlay if your phone is running CarPlay without disrupting the rest of iOS.

1:23:17Well, it sure looks like when you look at how Apple describes the architecture of Vision OS, it sure looks like it's that exact same architecture with the real-time OS running on the R1 and running the kind of AR pass-through functions of Vision Pro. And then having Vision OS kind of running inside of that, but the real-time OS is not disturbed. So if some part of Vision OS hangs or crashes or something, your reality is not like kind of weirdly paused or warped or some some way that could make you sick or anything like that so it seems like they're doing that kind of that kind of split architecture here and maybe the car project produced the real-time os and you know gave them the foundations to do simultaneous real-time os and you know other os and maybe they didn't use that to make a car but they use it to make the ar headset and also future carplay stuff with the iPhone.

1:24:12So I think the car project, I still think the car project is as doomed as it ever was, but I think we're also seeing stuff falling out of it that is good and that's being able to be used in other areas. Now, going back to the actual car project as a product possibility, in addition to everything John said, which is correct, that I don't think Apple is super willing to make products that could potentially kill you i think also when you look at the the general purpose computing landscape who else is going to make an ar headset that's that has strong general computing possibilities maybe microsoft maybe maybe google with android i mean microsoft did it's called it's called hololens and it's not it costs as much as the vision pro and is not as good yeah i understand it's it's useful in a couple of very narrow markets but you know it's it's not at all a mass market thing uh and and i don't even think microsoft even thought it would be uh but you know you have basically three companies microsoft google and apple who even could make a general purpose ar headset and we've seen what they make in other areas and they're fine but they're not great so if anyone was going to make a great ar computing experience it was going to be Apple.

1:25:29Look at cars though. And I don't see that, that strong need. Why does this have to be Apple? Lots of people make really nice cars, whatever Apple thought they could add to that market. That would be so much better than what everyone else is making. I don't see it. I mean, look, maybe I don't have the imagination for it. Maybe I'm not seeing something. Maybe I, maybe I just don't know like what amazing thing that they had or thought they could do or still think they could do there i don't know but i just don't like the the amazing computing prowess they have to make awesome computers that you know for general purpose use i don't see them having that that same amazing advantage in making cars you know we haven't heard much about the car project recently it seems like it it gets disbanded and regrouped like every two years or something or even more than that you know maybe it's finally now kind of you know sizzling out i don't know but I sure hope we don't hear more about it honestly because what we see now is like the headset here's something that probably took a similar scope and scale of resources and time investment but what they were making was what is probably going to end up being a pretty great computer and they're really good at making great computers and I can't imagine them spending a similar amount of time and resources making a car that would actually be worth all that time and resources yeah even if the tech was directly transferable and exactly related which i don't think it actually is um it wouldn't matter because that's just the tech in the end the product the car thing if you want to do anything with cars other than just like show the current speed and play songs from your phone like if you're going to control some part of the car like all the self-driving stuff or whatever even a safety system that's the hard part not like oh implementing something that could you could implement self-driving on top of like a platform or with a real-time os and a chip and it controls it now you have to write this software to actually drive the car that's the hard part and it's the hard part both technically because no one's figured out how to do it uh to you know even as well as a human at this point but also it's hard organizationally for apple because they're not accustomed to shipping products like that and that's why i'm saying success with division pro does not make me more optimistic about the car project because the things that are hard about the car project are not the things that vision pro is doing well again even if you are willing to believe that the tech is directly transferable that's not the hard part of the car project the hard part of the car project is outside of the technical platform foundations it's everything else like okay now drive the car not to mention now sell the car and service the car and provide repair parts and a dealer network for the like there's so much about cars apple have a self-repair program they'll just send you a two-post lift in the mail in a big giant pelican case yeah two post loads of pelican case yeah yeah that's definitely it uh yeah yeah all right mark blender or mark blender writes do you have any sort of app uninstaller such as app cleaner on mac os or do you excuse me do you use any sort of it i know the official way to uninstall something simply to drag it to the trash but i find myself perhaps unreasonably worried about leftover files uh leftover files definitely a thing but i haven't run one of these in forever.

1:28:42So I don't know, Marco, let's start with you. Is there anything on your computer that serves this purpose? I don't use anything like this. I don't like having to install accessory apps to serve accessory functions that I think shouldn't need to exist. I know that's kind of a broad statement, but like in general, like I don't run a lot of different utilities on my Mac that are like kind of always there or helping out some, or replacing some system function, for the most part, I like to use the built-in stuff the way it's meant to be used because that tends to not get me into trouble. It tends to not break stuff.

1:29:18And we were always, you know, John was saying earlier how, you know, sometimes like privacy preserving stuff or ad blockers or whatever can break websites. I always worry that using apps like this might break something else. And I don't see the need. I just delete stuff. You know, if something has its own uninstaller, I will run that uninstaller. So, you know, certain things that install hooks and parts of the system you know they'll have uninstallers so i'll use that for regular old apps i'll just delete them this is a big focus of my early mac os 10 reviews was talking about the next based bundle system where you have a folder with a dot app extension and inside it are a bunch of files and that's how applications are made up and i was comparing it to like the classic mac where you had resource forks which were their own sort of structured thing where you could have different kinds of resources that belong to the application and they were individual editable with the resource editor but the next bundle system did that but in the file system and you know because i'm an old school mac user uninstaller is just something windows users use mac users don't need to do that you just drag the app to the trash but the reality of mac os 10 was especially in the early days there were some apps that came with quote-unquote installers which would spray files all over your drive and also when you drag the app to the trash obviously any any file that wasn't inside that app bundle is still on your computer because all you did was put the app bundle in the trash and there has never been to my knowledge any part of the mac operating system in the post mac os 10 days that magically knows that when you drag an app to the trash like that it has to go clean up a bunch of other files or whatever there's no hooks for third-party developers to do that there's nothing of the first-party developers to do that um so this market for app cleaner things is like hey when you drag your app to the trash do you know it's leaving some files behind uh two things about that one sometimes you want it to leave files behind this was true in classic mac os and it's true of mac os 10 i want it to leave the preference file behind because if i ever reinstall that app i don't have to reset all my settings preferences files are tiny they've always been tiny even classic mac os they're definitely tiny now please leave that on my computer so that if i ever do decide to reinstall this app it'll be able to read those settings even if it's a newer version hopefully it'll read an old version of its settings file so that's an example of residue that i want to leave behind second app cleaner apps those have no idea how any individual app works they're making a best guess based on heuristics based on maybe some knowledge of some specific applications but i don't want an app from a third party to try to know what things it can safely delete that other apps put there most of the time you'll be fine because it can say oh well the preferences are in the preferences folder and anything in caches can be deleted and this that the other thing but things get complicated when you get into more sophisticated applications or suites of applications where i'm not confident that a third-party application even could know what the right thing to do is to delete this stuff hell i'm not even that confident that the uninstallers that people write work correctly um so yeah i'd never use one of these app cleaner uninstaller type things now the final note is as matt the mac operating system in the post mac os 10 era has matured over the many, many years, Apple has slowly but surely been removing every single kind of thing that cannot be inside the app bundle.

1:32:28It used to be that whole swaths of common functionality could not be inside the app bundle. And now they've just been moving them all in there. Extensions, secondary applications, helper apps, login launch items, menu bar things, like so much stuff that used to have to be outside your application that have to be sprayed into your slash library folder at the top level of your disk or until the slash library or whatever all that stuff now can live inside the app bundle which means that when you drag the app to the trash a really good modern well-behaved app you've deleted its login item you've deleted its menu bar thing you've deleted its like uh you know embedded helper application you've deleted everything right i mean you may even have deleted its helper uh command line thing because they could have just put a symlink in user local that just something into the bundle or whatever not every app is that well behaved that's true but the path that apple has been paving is we have a way for everything to be inside even safari extensions if you ship a safari extension now the way you do it is you embed the safari extension inside an app it's not like the safari extension goes into slash library slash safari slash extensions and you have to remember to dig it out of there to get rid of it no it's literally inside the app bundle in your applications folder that's where it is and when you put the application in your applications folder mac os scans it finds the safari extension and tells safari about it so apple is trying to make it so that when you drag it to the trash that it's not just an illusion that really you are trashing everything having to do with it finally there are still some apps that spray things in various locations which is why i use and recommend the app what is it called launch control which lets you see the things that are outside the app bundle that apps may install and that is the only thing remotely like an app cleaner that I use.

1:34:11And all it does is show me what exists. And then I use my knowledge and experience to know which things I can safely disable or delete. But app cleaner is even more dangerous than keychain access, not app cleaner, launch controls, even more dangerous than keychain access. Do not muck about it. And if you don't know what you're doing, it is very easy to break things. Instead, just ignore apps in this class and just hold on tight and wait until everything is actually moved into the app bundle for every app you care about. Dave Copeland writes, in the discussion of google auth and syncing there was an implication that keychain can perform a two-factor authentication i've seen others say that one password can as well but how is that a second factor doesn't it turn a second factor into a first since access to your computer and keychain means passwords and 2fa shouldn't 2fa be kept as a separate factor on an iphone or other device uh i i feel like i can take a stab at this but john i think might have been you that have added some very relevant replies into the show notes here yeah we don't have to answer it because it was answered by other people on mastodon so here's sebastian cohen saying this is all just two step not two factor this can still be valuable in case your credential entry gets intercepted for example so i know this confusion about what is two factor what is two step or whatever you have to think about what is this protecting against uh one of the things this protects against is if say your password is intercepted somewhere your two-step thing even though they're both on your phone or both on your mac or both on your whatever saves you here because the thing that was intercepted or was dumped from some database or website or whatever is just your password they don't have the other factor even though both of the factors are on your phone like the password's on there and the tf2fa code is also on your phone what they got was a cracked password dump from some website that had bad security they just have your password they don't have the other thing um and uh drew True writes, the central threat model motivating 2FA is not that someone has access to your computer.

1:36:03It says they've captured your password from someone else's insecure system. Given the centrality of email to the account 2FA management workflows, if someone has access to your computer, they can likely reconfigure your quote unquote true 2FA too. This goes back to what we were saying before. Your email account in the end for most services is the key to everything. If they have your phone, don't worry about the fact that your password and your two factor code are both, you know, in the same place in settings. worry about the fact that they have your phone that means they have access to your email that means they can reset any password and all the 2fa stuff and it's just yeah so you're thinking about the threat modeling wrong if you think uh if only my second factor was someplace separate i would be safe there are cases where that's true but if someone has access to your computer your phone as you like if they have that kind of access you're probably screwed no matter what unless you're really hardcore with the security keys and you never keep them in the same place as your phone because how did they get your phone they didn't get your little yubi key thing at the same time like you know security is difficult um but i will say that the whether you're it's just two-step or two-factor it is better than nothing it does protect against more scenarios than just a password which is why i recommend it same same thing with pass keys they have a different set of trade-offs pass keys you don't have to worry about forgetting them they're impossible to fish because the human does not choose when to submit them the computer does and the computer is not fooled by fake looking emails um so yeah security is complicated but two factor is not pointless it is just different than you might think it is thanks to our sponsors this week squarespace and rocket money and thank you to our members who support us directly you can join please do at atp.fm slash join 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-r-m-n-s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-c-r-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a.

1:38:35It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So I have some updates with regard to computers and cars. so which one would you like to know first car i don't remember where we last left our heroes you would you would ruin aaron's car yes and you still don't drive an ev somehow and you consider yourself a driving enthusiast well because i would like to shift for myself sir and and yes i'm aware of the toyota garbage yes everyone sent us that yeah i can't decide if that's delightful we were way ahead of the curve on that we talked about this almost a year ago, I think, on the show.

1:39:20Remember when we were talking about the EVs with manual transmission? I think it was a prototype Mustang at the time. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, pro tip. You do not, if you're an Allstate customer anyway, you do not need to use SafeLite Auto Glass in order to replace your windshield. And may I recommend that you do not use SafeLite Auto Glass to replace your windshield. That good, huh? Oh, it's been a nightmare. So we are on our second replaced windshield in as many weeks as we speak. The short, short version is, somebody came out to install the new windshield. They said, oh, they sent me the wrong thing.

1:39:53Your car has a heads-up display. This windshield will not work with the heads-up display. So we wait another week or two. A very nice gentleman comes to install the windshield at our house. And he says, oh, this isn't an OEM windshield. It isn't a Volvo-produced windshield. It's a third-party windshield. It should be fine. So, okay, great. And then the next time we get in the car, everything is lit up with warning signs with regard to safety stuff no lane keeping aid no speed limit signs no pilot assist nothing stupendous okay so we call safe flight we go on the way there where i'm going you know expecting them to do their super fancy calibration on the way there all the warnings go away super so i get there you know this is you know a 15 20 minute drive away i get there i say to them look it wasn't working now it says it's working just can you hook it up to whatever computers you have and at least just tell me that it should be fine?

1:40:49And they did. And they said, yeah, it should be fine. The next day, everything lights up again. Stupendous. All right. So I go back to say, well, I call SafeLite back and say, hey, it's me again. Can I have an OEM windshield, please? Because obviously everything associated with this is screwed. I said, sure. Hey, how long do I have to wait for that? Like a week and a half. stupendous so we at least at this point have a windshield that that from the outside looks good but the heads-up display is like blurry um and none of the automated driving sensors work it ended up that we drove like an hour and a half just a couple of days ago to go to the blue ridge tunnel which i think i've talked about in the past just for fun it was on father's day and uh we took the volvo because we took the dog with us and yeah we didn't have any we didn't have any form of cruise control because it wouldn't even let you do like regular cruise control because it didn't, it wasn't able to do automated cruise, you know, the, the distance following cruise.

1:41:46And it was like, well, if I can't do automated cruise, there is no other cruise. And so that was kind of a pain, but whatever. So, uh, today, literally today we went back to safe light in downtown Richmond and they put in a Volvo windshield and they recalibrated everything and knock on wood. I think everything might be okay now, but it has been a week or excuse me, a month and two days, I believe, since I slightly shattered Aaron's windshield, and it is now hypothetically fixed. What a nightmare. And as I'm going around and around with Allstate, with Safelite, and all these other people, come to find out, and this is what I said earlier, despite the fact that when you fill out a claim online with Allstate, they're like, oh, it's glass.

1:42:28Here, go to Safelite. They'll take care of it. Come to find out you don't have to use SafeLight. And I could have gone to Volvo from the get-go and had Volvo do it, where Volvo presumably knows how to replace their own windshields and certainly should know how to calibrate the goddarn thing. So I could have done that, but I had no idea. And so the Volvo people were very nice, but they were like, my guy, why didn't you bring it to us? And I was like, my guy, I didn't know I could, but sure enough, I could. So anyway, so pro tip, if you have a glass issue, You might want to investigate with your insurance whether or not you have to go to the SafeLight people because you might not have to.

1:43:09But that seems resolved as far as I can tell. With regard to Aaron's computer, I don't think I mentioned on the show, I might have mentioned it offhandedly, but the MacBook Adorable randomly came back to life after I let it sit for a couple of days. I didn't do anything. I don't know what happened. It just decided to work again. But that isn't really a long-term solution. And I still don't love the idea that with the MacBook Adorable dead and even with it alive, potentially, I didn't really have any sort of backup plan if my computer kicked the bucket. I do have the Mac Mini that I use for Plex and channels, and it is more than computationally capable of doing a podcast recording if necessary.

1:43:47But it would be kind of a pain to move it and attach monitors to it and so on and so forth. So I wouldn't want to have to do that. so I was trying to figure out what the right answer is in order to replace a computer you know replace Aaron's computer with something more modern you know preferably Apple Silicon and and so on and so forth and I was hemming and hawing about what the right answer was and it was it seemed kind of wasteful to you know replace what is effectively her Kroger online shopping computer if it's still puttering along somewhat working but out of the woodwork came I don't know if this person wanted to be anonymous and I will assume anonymity just to be safe.

1:44:27But out of the woodwork came a random person who I know through the internet, but not extraordinarily well, who was kind enough to say to me, I have an M1 MacBook Air that's collecting dust. Would you like it? To which I said, oh my freaking God, yes, I would. So this exceptionally kind individual who if I would name generally, but I didn't think to pre-clear this conversation with them. They shipped, well, I paid for shipping because it was the least I could do, but they shipped this computer to me and it has arrived. I have loaded it with Aaron's stuff. Oh my word. It's so much nicer than the adorable.

1:45:05I will always and forever love the adorable. I will always love that computer. Always. But oh my God, it's so much nicer than the adorable. It is so fast. And this particular model, I genuinely, I said, I'll take it. I had no idea how much RAM, no idea what disk it had in it, did not care. It doesn't matter. Even the lowest, tiniest configuration is miles better than the MacBook Adorable. Exactly. And sure enough, it arrived. And because this person is a developer for a very big technology-related company, not Apple, but someone in that kind of neck of the woods, this computer happened to have a terabyte hard drive and 16 gigs of RAM.

1:45:44I could not have asked for this to go any better for me. So thank you to the, whether or not you want it to be, anonymous individual who has, well, I mean, I guess I paid for the shipping, but they still shipped me the computer. And I am so thankful for it because now I have a backup computer, which now Marco is thankful because I have a backup computer in case my computer has problems. And it is genuinely very nice, so much nicer than we need or deserve. And so thank you very, very, very much for doing that. It was extremely kind. And the best part of this is a person after my own heart, right?

1:46:20I opened the box. Well, first of all, no, it's the silver, whatever. But no, I opened the box and first of all, it came in the Apple box. I had no idea what was being shipped to me other than that it was an M1 MacBook Air. That's all I knew. And that I understood it to be in good condition, you know? So I opened the shipping box and sure enough, there's the original, you know, MacBook Air box. Bonus points for this individual. I opened the box and there are probably three lunatics in this world that would have done this. I'm one of them. I bet John is one of them. And this just wonderful anonymous human not only kept that like shrink wrap, not shrink wrap, but you know what I'm saying?

1:47:01that like plastic stuff that's wrapped around the computer when it was shipped when it was shipped from apple not only they keep it they put the friggin computer back inside it the best they could i i was overjoyed to see this oh i do that too when i when i sell a computer oh fair enough i apologize marco for selling you short that i thought you were a little more normal than i do that so so this extraordinarily tasteful individual they did that they sent me the power brick. I didn't expect that. Not only did they send me a USB-C cable, I'm pretty sure that it had been used at some point, but they have the dexterity to somehow put it back in the little cardboard thing that it came in.

1:47:43Maybe they never used it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it had. The trick is never take it out of the cardboard thing. Just FYI, someone who also packages products will just never take it out. Yeah, exactly. But either they never did and I'm mistaken, or they took the time to make it look really close to the way it came from the factory. Again, this is a person who gives a crap and I am forever indebted to them and in love with them in a friendly way. So Aaron's computer problems are solved because now this incredibly kind individual has sent me a M1 MacBook Air, which I don't deserve, but I am so thankful for.

1:48:17the best part of course of this whole story though is that Aaron's working on for Declan's yearbook it's very weird the way his school does it you order it online you don't get it until the summertime you don't get to go around to your friends and have them physically sign it but you can electronically sign it it's very unusual but anyway she's been working on this for the last several days and trying to amass pictures because you can pay a couple of bucks to put in a few extra pages with your own pictures and content in it It's like the world's crummiest photo book, but it's really cute. And Erin's been working on this really, really hard.

1:48:52And I look over at her, and she's using the goddamn adorable. And I'm like, Erin, what are you doing? And she's like, well, I was going to say, what did you do with that? What did you do with the adorable? Apparently, you did nothing with it. I didn't do anything with it yet. I've also been well over my eyeballs deep in call sheet stuff. Like, everything's fine, but I'm trying to get this out the door and blah, blah, blah. So I didn't do the due diligence of like hiding the adorable or anything, or even in Erin's credit, I didn't really have a lot of conversation with her about it other than saying, hey, your new computer's ready.

1:49:23But anyway, so I look at her using this damn adorable and I'm just like, oh my God, how are you doing this to yourself? And I was like, well, why don't you use a new one? I don't know. This is the one I grabbed. I was like, okay, well, that's fine. but anyway so the car hypothetically fixed thanks to me just being uh basically a karen to safe light and finally getting them to do the job properly um and then the computer's fixed thanks to this incredibly kind listener uh someone in the chat is perhaps tongue-in-cheek perhaps not saying am i going to pay it forward and send your adorable to someone i should but i'm not because i freaking love that computer and i will keep it forever even though it is a pile of garbage you You're going to give someone an unreliable, crappy computer?

1:50:01That's not paying it forward. That's a punishment. Yeah, that's not a gift at all. Exactly. So, yeah, that's my updates. That's good. Man, you've had a better tech week than I have. I have had a terrible family device week. Oh, no. What's going on? All right. So, long story short, someone in my house, who is not me, accidentally sat on someone else's iPad and caused what appears to be a crack in the screen. how bad how big how deep tell me more it's it's so subtle that it could be easily confused for for a scratch on the surface but it's across like a third of the screen well i think we have developed a hierarchy here now rock paper scissors style so an ipad can destroy a car windshield but a butt can destroy an ipad so if you if you touched your butt to the windshield of your car just blow it right off a million pieces well done john well done anyway so the owner of the ipad was extremely upset uh at at the butt crack uh situation and um you know because the ipad is this is the owner's primary computing device um and they didn't cause the damage i thought But it would be inhumane to make them suffer with this damage forever.

1:51:24But it is a crack. It is not a scratch. The pencil doesn't work across it. There's a whole bunch of little weirdness about it. And this person uses the pencil. So I decided I have... This is an M1 11-inch iPad Pro. I have the exact same one as my iPad. I'll just swap it. Now, my iPad, because I use it so infrequently, but when I do, I really need cellular usually. Because of that, I had gotten the T-Mobile super cheap data plan on it. It was like five bucks a month or something. It was super cheap, way cheap. Normally, we're an AT &T family. It was way cheaper than AT &T's cheapest option. So this was active on T-Mobile for, I don't know, a year or two.

1:52:08When I transitioned it over, that plan didn't carry over because it was some weird prepay thing, and the eSIM instantly got lost when I did the restore and everything and all this stuff. I'm like, who needs T-Mobile anyway? It isn't that good. And the new owner of what was previously my iPad actually used the cellular pretty heavily. And oftentimes, while we're on road trips, it's like, all right, well, T-Mobile is not great for that coverage-wise. I want this to be on AT &T now. Let me just interrupt you very quickly to go on a very brief tangent. I want to be a T-Mobile customer so badly because they seem to actually treat their customers, as far as I can tell, like human beings rather than just another cash machine to extract money from.

1:52:54Well, try canceling an iPad plan. It's not super easy. Okay, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. But I think I might have talked about this on the show. A year or two ago, I did the T-Mobile try-on or something like that. I'll probably forget to put a link in the show notes. But you can download an app on your iPhone if you have an eSIM, and you can literally provision your eSIM on your iPhone to have a T-Mobile data plan for a month. And so you can tell your iPhone, hey, use Verizon, AT &T, whatever, for your existing, or excuse me, for phone calls, but use T-Mobile for data. And you can even tell it, don't fall back to your old carrier, so you know, like, oh, if I'm not getting data here, it's because T-Mobile sucks.

1:53:36I tried this admittedly a year or two ago. And when T-Mobile worked, it worked really damn well. But let me tell you, in the Richmond, Virginia area, it was very spotty, very, very spotty. And I tried it thinking maybe I will switch in now. No chance. Or at least maybe I'll have to try again in a few years, but not right now. So it bumps me out because they really do seem, cancellation issues aside, they seem to treat their people, their customers okay. but golly the service around here anyway no good so anyway i apologize carry on so you're you need to now cancel this plan that's been orphaned yeah so i can't anyway long story short t-mobile makes it hard you gotta like talk to a web chat person and they it was it was it was complicated anyway got that done so now i have this ipad that was on t-mobile that its new owner really needs it to be on at &t i have had the hardest time ever trying to get this done now one could argue why don't i just fix the butt crack screen i don't know i don't know why for some reason i didn't get apple care on this ipad i i should have gotten apple care i i often do for family devices i didn't on this for whatever reason the out of apple care repair price for an m1 11 inch ipad pro for a screen is six hundred dollars oh gosh uh now a new one of the same configuration is eleven hundred dollars uh so you know that's less but it certainly doesn't feel like a good way to spend money um and i thought my ipad use is relatively minimal i don't care about this crack so i'll take it as mine no big deal fine anyway so switching the other one over the good one trying to get this iPad that was on T-Mobile to now be active on AT &T has been a nightmare.

1:55:25I have had so many, like, all right, resend the eSIM, please. Like, try to get carrier settings to update. I have verified that T-Mobile is no, it's no longer active on T-Mobile. The plan I paid for has, has expired like weeks ago now. It is no, it's definitely no longer active there. Going back and forth to AT &T, both web chat, and then I brought it into a store and it's like, it'll it'll activate in just my house and then if i leave my house and go anywhere else it deactivates there's no service what it or it'll activate for like a day and then the next day no service that doesn't make any sense i finally have it right now where it partially works because i abandoned the e-sim and the person in the at &t store gave me a physical sim and that has made it work a little bit better than the e-sim has but now and like there's like eight of those messages stacked up in settings saying AT &T wants you to install an eSIM.

1:56:19This whole system, I've always had it work pretty well. Where I get a device and it's only on AT &T from the moment I get it and I never have any problems. I have activated and deactivated so many iPads and watches for AT &T over the years. And it's great because you can do them all through the web interface, like no chatbots, no calling anybody. I don't think it works with phones, but for smartwatches and iPads, you can do that with AT &T. It's all web-based. So you can go on, cancel, add new ones, no big deal, it's super easy. This one, because it was on T-Mobile before, has been a nightmare.

1:56:53So I strongly suggest people out there, the thing that Casey just told you to do where you try T-Mobile, yeah, don't do that. Definitely don't do that. This has cost me so many hours, literal hours of going back and forth with either doing the eSIM dance, calling T-Mobile, going to AT &T. i have honestly thought i should just replace this ipad it would be easier at this point to buy a new ipad and to save myself hours of time than it would be or you know or to pay the 600 to get the butt crack fix like if you would have told me like two weeks ago hey look you can pay 600 to solve this problem or you're gonna have two weeks of stress and like at least 10 hours of wasted time i would have paid the 600 like knowing knowing now what i know then that would have been the better idea my time is that valuable right now i'm so crunched on all angles like i need i need to recover time from different places in my life this ipad is like ruined by this weird cellular weirdness that i can't get either apple or at &t or t-mobile to figure out it's it's been a nightmare so yeah word of advice when you get an apple device leave it on one carrier for its entire lifetime.

1:58:04Do not change carriers. And especially in the eSIM era. I would be saying the same thing as you after that experience. But for what it's worth, I have never, not yet anyway, had any such problems. Like if you recall a year, year and a half ago, something like that, we switched from AT &T to Verizon. I'm pretty sure we were, I don't remember if we were on eSIMs for AT &T at this point. I think we were, but we went to Verizon eSIMs and that was all fine. um you know i i've put different sims on it or e sims on and off ipads if i'm not mistaken i have never run into this i used to use t-mobile physical sims years ago because they used to have this absolutely extraordinarily great prepay plan it was like five bucks for like five gigs that you could use over the course of like something like six months or something like that and that doesn't seem like that much but if it's an accessory device that you're not using to like watch youtube nonstop, just a few gigs will last a real long time.

1:59:01And that was the best, but they don't do that anymore. Anyways, I haven't had these personal experiences, so I don't want to make everyone forever and always think that eSIM is garbage, but that experience is unquestionably garbage. Like, that sucks. And what do you do? Like, if Apple can't do it and if T-Mobile can't do it and AT &T can't do it, who do you turn to? Do you throw the thing in the ocean and start anew? Yeah. And like, I posted the Amastadon like a few, maybe almost a week ago now. I heard from a bunch of people, many of whom have had similar problems, and they're like, oh, well, you have to go to super high-level support with AT &T or Apple.

1:59:34One person said they had to go through AppleCare and get the whole device replaced. Oh, my gosh. Actually, most people said that. Most people said the AT &T, you got to get them to properly register the IMEI in their system. It's somewhere. It's not associated right or whatever else. And I had the person in the store at least look at that, and they couldn't figure out any problems with it. Someone else said that it takes all these levels of escalation through different customer support. I'm like, how many more hours am I going to spend? Honestly, I was looking at trade-in prices. I'm like, can I just trade this in?

2:00:02How quickly can I solve this problem without going through hours more customer service and then mailing it off and being without it for a week and all this stuff? Oh my god. There's so – and all of this for the stupidest problem of the cell service doesn't work. And for this iPad, cell service is a must. It's very frequently needed for this iPad. So I'm not going to just not have it. I'm not going to tether. believe me we've been we've been doing that for the for the last like we just took a big road trip did a lot of that it's oh tethering is the worst uh yeah anyway i need cellular for this ipad and i'm seriously i'm like about to replace it like it's just it's that bad that sucks i'm sorry anyway i'm glad to hear your windshield and computer worked out for now for now see if your friend has any extra ipad pros lying around yeah right like this is your punishment for not selling me that ipad marco do you want this one yeah if you don't need cellular i mean i don't need the cellular but it's too late now i already bought a brand new one but i was ready to buy your m1 ipad pro off you and you're like yeah i want to keep it i might need it for something and look what happened i can offer you the butt crack one for a good price no because apple's traded and currently values it at 80 oh your chance to sell to me was before someone cracked it in half with their butt I'll give it to you for$81.

2:01:18Pass. Wow. Even then. Who wants a thing with a cracked screen? If you don't use the pencil and you don't look that closely, you'd never know. Yeah. Yeah. The little slivers of glass are driving themselves into your thumb. You'll barely notice.