550: A Wizard With No Choices

30:50Garmin sells GPS navigators specifically made for truck routes. You can input the height, width and length of your vehicle and the device routes you the safest way. But personally, I don't want to fork over$300 for a device that has the UI of the early 2000s. I wait with bated breath until Apple implements truck routes and Apple Maps. Until then, I'll stick to using my iPad Pro 11 inch mounted on my dashboard. Yeah, and we actually got a number of emails from people who drive trucks for a living who almost all said that pretty much the big dog in this space is still hardware GPS units. These ones that Jonathan's talking about, that Garmin makes them specifically made for trucks.

31:27And because the apps are so bad, many people still use hardware GPS units. Which, I mean, it does make sense, but that is a bummer that that's the state of the art. Yeah, I mean, basically, because smartphones chased all these things out of the dashboards of regular people's cars they retreated to smaller and more lucrative markets like this thing and some people said about these gps device things that they like the idea of you just buy this one dedicated device you pay a couple hundred bucks for it and that's it as opposed to like the crappy app that marco was trying to use where it was like 250 a year i don't think there is an expensive subscription or if there is any subscription it's less expensive than that so yeah i know some people were very satisfied with these some people thought they were crappy and anachronistic and some people were very satisfied with them because they were crappy and anachronistic so there you go then andrew larson writes i i genuinely i know i've said this a couple times i love that we have listeners in every freaking corner of the universe i really think at this point i know hello internet has been defunct for a while but i really think we're getting to hello internet levels of coverage in terms of our listeners i don't think we have any astronauts yet right that's true not to not to my recollection we'll work on the astronauts but But yeah, anyways, Andrew Larson writes, I'm a general manager at a U-Haul retail store.

32:43For apps for routing, I recommend two things. There's an app called InRoute, that's I-N-R-O-U-T-E. This app is super cool and has many features you've maybe never thought to have in an app for routing. It's affordable and includes something called RV mode, which may help. For anyone super concerned about the routes that allow or don't allow trucks, I recommend the out-of-app purchase of a hardware GPS. Long after the average consumer driving their Honda moved on from TomTom and Garmin, the market specialized in more niche features such as these, as well as marine focused models for Marco's inevitable future boat purchase.

33:18The other market to retreat to. Yeah, right. So, speaking of listeners in all sorts of places, not only is Andrew's recommendation of the InRoute app, you know, pretty app, I heard about it from a few people, we also heard from the developer of the InRoute app. It's made by an indie developer, and the developer Rob wrote in, unlike the two apps that i tested it reroutes you if you go off route and there's no pricing tricks after a seven-day trial it renews for five dollars a month discounted plans blah blah there's apps for carplay mac under catalyst and ipad and unlike most navigation apps your data is completely private and rob links to the whole um you know the whole privacy policy thing so pretty cool that like you know not only not only do do we hear from people who can tell us like which apps and gps things are better but literally the author of one of them is also a listener of our show and wrote it that is very cool yeah and you can see it from the screenshot of zap here it lets you enter the height width and length and weight of your vehicle you have options to avoid tolls avoid ferries because you might not want to drive a big truck onto a ferry avoid highways and you can have routes that are the most curvy or the least curvy or the least ascent of elevation so exactly the options you'd want to have because you have all those things are it's more than just like hey will i shear off the top of my truck on a bridge stuff like how curvy it is and how much it goes up and down and avoiding ferries are things you would not think of uh for regular routing but are very relevant if you're driving a big truck uh so yeah this is definitely an area where the platform owners probably need to get a little better especially since in america anyway pretty much everybody is driving these monstrous vehicles that can't park in normal parking spots i mean maybe they don't care about uh curves or shearing off the top of their things but if the current trends continue they're not going to be able to fit on parkways either yeah so anyway uh next time i rent some kind of truck or rv i will try in route because that sounds like the best option again i love the coverage that we have it makes me so very happy yeah all right and then finally john uh how is your gift box coming along how are things going in home pod land shortly after the end of the show i did come up with the use i think i might have come up with this on the program or maybe on the boots the bootleg i don't remember um i'm like i know what i'll do with these i'll put them in my wife's office because she currently uses a very small not very good sounding sonos toblerone thing i think i did talk about this in the show anyway like i'll put them down there for her and so the day after we recorded i'm like okay i'm gonna get these two home pods i know where they're going now bring them down to the office set them up on her desk as a stereo pair this should take five minutes right no of course not um i don't even think you can reset them in five minutes well so first i was trying to yeah i was trying to be like okay so it should just work i plug it in and of course it's not showing up and i go to home app and i try to add accessory and they're not showing up i'm like i probably have to factory reset these so i look up the instructions and how to factory reset them uh and i do it like three or four times and it doesn't work and then i even got to the point where i messaged marco and i said are these still attached to your apple id can you delete them from your apple id so i was like maybe he needs to do something at his end wait i didn't get those messages where'd you message me son one of the many places that you don't look apparently was it in the document no it was in slack i believe Steve, you were at mentioned.

36:30Oh my God, Marco. So the listeners missed. So we got to back up because this is a good story. So we had agreed to talk about and do before the show our St. Jude donations, as we talked about. And so a few days ago, John had said to the two of us, hey, let's do this 15 minutes early. And is that cool with everyone? I said, yeah, sure. So I am sitting at 7.45 our time, waiting for Marco to hit go on the Zoom room. and then Marco shows up, and I'm immediately there. He goes, oh, what are you doing here? I said, well, we agreed to be early. We did? So it is made clear to me that, Marco, you either need to move our Slack communications to iMessage or something, or you just never cared about what we say, and that makes me sad.

37:22No, normally I am better at this, but it's been look i'm like selling one house renovating another house doing all this back and forth like it's been it's been quite a few weeks i mean i'm not it's not i didn't have an expectation that you'd immediately respond to me or whatever but i figured you would have seen it eventually within a week that's all i'm saying like so and when i did send that message i thought about how should i send this and i briefly thought oh i'll use i'll use i message but i'm like no in the sort of in the hierarchy of importance this is not that important i don't care if he ever see you you know, and doesn't respond to me immediately, I'll just send it through Slack.

37:55So, and what happened was before I could get a response, I figured it out. So it didn't matter anyway, but that's, that's the level I was thinking, but you know, so I'm not, who cares that you didn't respond to it, but I figured you would have at least seen it a week later, but that's, that's the hole in your system. Although actually in Marco's defense, I can't come, I can't put my finger on this message because I was going to try to figure out when it was. Oh, I deleted them. I deleted them. Oh, all right. Oh, so, okay. So I can't be at fault for not seeing it in like. Well, I deleted them like 24 hours later.

38:23I figured I didn't want you to be distracted because I'm like, I know you're busy. And maybe if you saw it 24 hours later, you're like, oh, I need to help John. You don't. I got it figured out. So first I put a message that said, don't worry, I figured it out. And I left that there for 24 hours. After 24 hours, I said, I don't want you to accidentally see the other ones and not see they figured it out. And so I deleted them all. You know, I am so here for busting Marco's chops. But in this one, I think he might get a pass on this particular one. Well, this doesn't explain the let's get online 15 minutes early thing.

38:50That's true. That's still sitting in there. Anyway, so I did figure out the factory reset. And for people who don't know, if you read the instructions and it's like, you know, unplug your thing for 10 seconds, plug it in, wait 10 seconds, then hold your finger on the thing for 10 seconds. And you would think it's like, oh, yeah, they want me to unplug it, plug it in, then hold my finger on the top of it. Right. If you do that and don't exactly follow their instructions, nothing happens. Yeah. So you have to plug it in. Wait 10 seconds. If you plug it in and then just lazily wander over to it later and put your fingers on it, it doesn't work.

39:20anyway my bad um so i reset the thing uh configured it and i'm doing like the right one you know it gets set up it takes a long time and asks me a bunch of stuff i give it a name blah blah you know fine whatever then i go to do the left one and it is not happy like it does through all the steps it goes to reset uh add device it shows up says set up blah do all the things blah blah you don't really have any options like basically you're just tapping through a wizard where there are no choices it's like do you want to transfer settings it's like well it's literally the only button and there's no x or closed box or whatever so yeah i guess i'm transferring settings anyway the left home pod gets stuck on a thing where it just says configuring uh and like the other one said configuring for a while too but then it didn't say configuring and when it's in configuring you can go to the options and it says not all the features of this home pod are available yet but when it's done configuring they will be and you can do stuff with it like play audio but you can't put it in a stereo pair you can't do timers you can't do all sorts of other stuff whatever i'm sure it'll be fine i just leave it down there i come back down an hour later it's still configuring whatever go back through some other stuff come down two hours later it's still configuring now i'm googling for home pod configuring for hours million results everyone's home pods are configuring configuring for hours what should i do oh you know burn down your home and move to a new country and get a new identity like that's always the answer because like when people have computer problems they're like delete your apple id you know marry someone else like send your children for all for adoption like it's just reset the world and like maybe they do that and it solves their problem but i'm not going to delete my apple id i'm not even going to sign out of my apple id i'm not going to reinstall my operating system like i'm not gonna you know i'm not doing those because i'm like that doesn't make any sense why that would work uh and they're like oh it's configuring because uh they just updated a new version and if you have the old version of because you know they did the thing where you update your uh your uh home the apple home thing or whatever updated quick aside is that safe because i've been staring at this thing for probably months now and i'm so scared to do it is that safe to do i think it is i did i finally did it online okay but when that just came out people like oh don't upgrade your home because if you have some old home pods they won't be able to join the new home and blah blah one of the things they did just that they did try was like try making a new home like in the home app and then try setting up the the new home the home pod on the new home and i did notice that this home pod was running whatever the os is called version 15 and the current version is like 16.6 or something so like it just needs a software update so i just need to maybe i just put it to my in the fake home and get it to update uh and eventually i got it to the point where i would try setting it up i've reset the thing so many times now try to set it up and it would be like it would go through all the steps and it would be like okay we're going to update your home pod i'm like yes yes update it to 16 but then it would just be stuck on configuring and so i gave it like eight hours and it was still configuring and then i gave it 24 hours and it was still configuring and again if you google for this so many people are like my home pod stuck on configuring what do i do and so i figured all right i'm gonna make a genius bar appointment i'm gonna make an appointment oh my this is so much worse of a gift than mine was oh yeah oh my word you know i'm gonna make a genius bar appointment and what am i gonna do i'm gonna carry my home pod to the apple store and i'm going to put it on the counter and say, can you please update this to whatever OS 16?

42:32That's the only thing I wanted them to do because I figured the problem's got to be that it's running 15 or something and it just needs to be running 16. Maybe it can't be in a stereo pair with one that's on 16 or like maybe you can't join to the new house. But I just wanted to run a software update, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to get this thing to do a software update. Like that's all I want. I don't want it to join anything. I don't need to just like just run a software update. This is actually a little bit easier on the HomePod mini, by the way, because the HomePod mini has like a what is it yeah margo probably knows a usb a micro usb connection what does it have on it it wait the mini has a connection i thought it was it was a fixed wire no there's there's a there's a usb port on the the homepod mini because one of the options was hey do you want to do basically you want to update the os by doing a restore by connecting it to the finder you know to connect to your mac with usb launch the finder and basically do like an os restore oh yeah the the end of the power cable is is a usbc plug yeah all right anyway there is a way to sort of hardware restore because i was like let me just can i just get these the version 16 of this os and just blast it onto there with the wire but with the original home pod the answer is no so i made the genius bar appointment uh and then it was like the day before the genius bar appointment was supposed to come and then i went down there to get the home pod but before i did it for let me just look at the home app to see what it's like maybe take a screenshot of it being in configuring and it And it updated itself.

43:53And the answer is, how long does an original HomePod take to update itself from whatever the OS is called, version 15 to 16? The answer is somewhere between 24 and 48 hours. That's so bad. With no progress indication whatsoever that it's doing anything. It just says configuring. And then, of course, once it updated itself, it joined into a stereo pair just fine or whatever. So these products, boy, just a combination of so many of Apple's greatest hits. It's just completely opaque, no progress indication. And it just took way too long. It shouldn't take that long. I know they're slow. I know they're like little crappy watch processors, but more than 24 hours for an OS update?

44:32I think my Series Zero watch updates its OS faster than that. It was ridiculous. They are configured now. Still haven't gotten any opinions from my wife on them. I'm not sure if she's even actually used them because she hasn't actually been working from home recently. She's been traveling for work and has been going into the office. so uh i await reviews but they are at least configured oh and by the way out of sympathy my upstairs home pod decided that it was not going to work correctly anymore i asked him to turn off the lights and it's like i had some bs excuse about like i'm not on the network and don't know what you're talking about so anyway i asked the google thing to turn off the lights and then luckily i'm now an expert in resetting home pods and i reset the one upstairs and restored that to factory configuration and reinstalled everything the one upstairs is on the thing where it's like you're not signed into your Apple ID please enter your Apple ID password have you seen that one Marco in your life um like on the iPhone yeah like if you go to the home app on the iPhone it would be like your HomePod is not signed into your Apple ID and if you go to the settings you go to the settings for the HomePod and it will say please enter your Apple ID password and I've been doing that for years every once in a while it just forgets my Apple ID password or thinks it does so I manually re-enter it on the phone this time it said I don't know I'm not signed into your Apple ID please enter your Apple ID password So you go to settings, it has a little button, basically some blue text that says enter password.

45:45I tap that. Does it prompt me to enter a password? No, it does not. No text field appears. Instead, I get an indeterminate spinner and it says authenticating. I'm like, authenticating with what? I haven't entered a password yet. The button says enter password and normally it shows a text field. But now it just kept showing a spinner. But don't worry, that spinner spins for like three minutes and then just goes away and you're back at seeing the screen that says enter password. So that's why I factory reset that one. So now all my HomePods have been factory reset on average, let's say seven times.

46:12And so far, so good. Wow. That sounds fun. I got to tell you, this is definitely making me love my Sonos stuff even more because that stuff really does just work. It's incredible how I've never owned a HomePod. And it's because all I've heard is that they're garbage. Like, I know they sound great. You know what it is? it sounds like me describing my BMW, which to this day, I will say, God, I love that car so much. God, it was such a good car, but it was only running for about 10 minutes at a time. And that's how all of you sound when you describe your HomePods. That is very apt. Like, it's the HomePod.

46:50Look, so I have a long history with HomePods. I'm back on the down, you know, on the roller coaster, the roller coaster of HomePod opinions. it is a roller coaster because when they work they sound so good and they do sound better than almost anything else in their category especially if you care about size like if you're looking for something that is small and sounds good there is almost nothing else in the market that being said I am currently testing a pair of Sonos Aero 100s in replacement of my HomePod oh really I will have more to say on that in a future episode. Just to be clear, though, I am becoming one of those Sonos a-holes that I will perhaps quit the show if you tell me that you don't absolutely love them.

47:39So consider your opinions wisely. Let me just say that the relationship with them is more complicated than I would have expected. Oh, really? But not in bad ways for the most part. so anyway I will have more to say on my Sonos era 100s in a future episode but they are still in the place that my two new home pods were so the experiment hasn't failed but it's also it isn't all roses but there are some surprising roses so anyway we'll get to that in another time and just keep in mind by the way these home pods that I have are mine is like the very first one off the you know like when they just were released and probably at least one of marcos is like that uh i think both of the ones i sent you i i had four of that of the first gen home pods i sent you two of them i still have two and i bought them all fairly early on in the home pods life yeah you can kind of tell because i've spent so much time in the stupid home app that if you look at the model number like the model number looks way shorter than you think it should on these things like the normal model numbers for apple things is like mla something something slash a you know those things the model for these things is mqhv2 that's it that's the whole model number it's way shorter than like if you look at what the model number is i think on the version 2 ones or any of the modern products so that's my indication that all the ones i have are super duper first generation i'm just glad they work at all i guess well do they i mean and by the way what is the os called i know it used to be called audio os but is it not called that anymore what is it doesn't say what the name of it is what is the os it was it never had a public facing name and it still doesn't when apple refers to it they will always refer to it obliquely with they'll say something like like our home platform or something like they'll always refer to it not by name because it officially does not have a public name but it was called audio os internally for a while i'm just not sure if it's still called that it was and i'm not even sure if the home pod mini and home pod 2 even run that like that was what it was called on the home pod one the original one but i i think they might have changed the software stack for the mini and the two but no one really talks about it we are sponsored this week by Celltrios, a shoot em up slash shmup game for Apple's platforms, this category I first learned about this back in the Super Nintendo days with Gradius 3 and it's that kind of game you've seen these before, where you have the little ship and it's a side scroller, and just waves of enemies keep coming at you, and you have to blow them all up with these big customizable weapons and everything, you pick up power ups, you gotta go around obstacles that kind of game it's super fun i love shoot them up slash shmup games i love them and what's great about cell trios is unlike many modern games there are no ads there's no in-app purchases there's no subscriptions and nothing is locked you can play it over and over again for as long as you want with lots of customization options to keep it fresh and available exclusively for Apple platforms.

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51:51all right uh we got news yesterday i believe that the next apple event which is presumably the iPhone event is on September 12th. It will be at 10 o 'clock in the morning Pacific, which is one o 'clock in the one true time zone. As expected, none of us got an invite to be there, but that's okay. We'll watch. We're going to talk about predictions next week, but for now, Marco reminded us that we should probably do some exit interviews. So Marco, do you want me to quarterback this or would you like to um i can do it um so yeah so this is the this is the um even though i have the least experience of the three of us working in corporate jobs um i came with this idea a few years ago to do an exit interview of the outgoing devices that we have been using for the past year on the eve of the new ones presumably being released or announced and because i feel like you know it's one thing when in this case you know we're going to talk about the iphone 14 the Apple Watch Ultra and the Apple Watch Series 8 and maybe some other stuff like the lightning port it's interesting you know when these things come out you can talk about oh you know that and we will when you know when the iPhone event show happens in a few weeks we will talk about like oh here's the cool new stuff this sounds good this looks good you know the reviews say this is pretty good then you get it like oh yeah this feels good this looks nice whatever but it's different after a year you know after a year the novelty has worn off and you get to really evaluate like how was the iPhone 14 Pro or how was the Apple Watch Ultra version 1 actually living with it for a longer term?

53:23How does it perform long term? Are there any flaws that didn't seem like a big deal at the beginning but became a big deal later? Things that you thought would be a big deal that weren't a big deal later? So I feel like this is kind of a fun segment to do and I don't think anyone else really does it. So this is kind of like the ATP innovation besides one of us I think might have invented a follow-up at some point. that was me it was me just oh yeah it was yeah yeah that makes sense um so anyway you can't put that on the record it's just gonna confuse the ais they're already confused you now need to make a very uh neutral direct statements correcting the record no they they're already hallucinating like as if they're at a fish concert which we will also get to later but anyway um uh so exit interviews First, the big one, the iPhone 14 slash 14 Pro.

54:13Now, John, you have the 14, right? I have the 14 Pro. Yeah, that's 14 Pro, yeah. All right, and so do I. And Casey, you haven't dropped this into a well yet, right? You still have a 14 Pro? That is true. There is a couple of, or there are a couple of very, very, very hairline scratches, not impacts, but scratches on the screen. But yes, it is, for all intents and purposes, a fully functional, unshattered iPhone 14 Pro. I will say, the screen on my 14 Pro, you know, every year the phone tweaks the screen glass formulation in such a way to try to make it more drop-and-shatter resistant. And some years, and even within variations within certain years, some years you get a screen that just scratches like crazy.

55:01Because usually to make things more shatter resistant, sometimes you have to tweak the properties of the glass in some ways that make it a little bit softer and make it more scratch prone in exchange for not shattering as easily. My 14 Pro has been either the most or the second most scratch prone iPhone I've ever had. this screen was what like it had visible scratches on the screen within i think two weeks of owning it and it's only gotten worse over time and like i know it's not just i don't just carry around sand in my pocket because are you sure yeah exactly are you sure there's not sand in your pocket i mean granted of the three of us i'm the most likely one to have sand in my pocket but this doesn't happen with any of my other devices it hasn't happened with past phones with a couple of exceptions from long before like before i was at the beach um it doesn't happen with other devices like it's just certain phones have very scratch prone glass for whatever reason and the iphone 14 pro for me has been the worst for in a long time so i i i have scratched my screens minor scratches over the years so i know it's not like i it's impossible for me to scratch a screen but i'm looking at this and i'm cleaning it off with my shirt while you're talking i can't find a single scratch of any kind any size any lightness anywhere in my screen and i'm not super careful with my phone i just use it as a phone it's fallen off my nightstand 50 times onto the ground in front of it like i've dropped it while walking down the stairs like you gotta use magsafe man i put it in pockets all the time all i put it in jacket pockets i put it in my jeans pockets i put it down on surfaces right side up and front side down not a single scratch anywhere on it so i'm i like the sand in the pocket theory i don't know what you're doing to your phone no and usually that my phones usually are like that they're usually scratch free and that's why it's it's notable when one isn't but anyway we've heard we've heard before like some years like there will there will actually be variations in this property within different phones of the same year like with it like different iphone 14 pros might actually vary in this way so i can't fault the whole line for it but it has it that was a very kind of unfortunate thing about this phone right from the start for me but moving on from that physically speaking this phone is heavy and dense and I really don't like it.

57:12And I really am very excited about the rumors of the next ones being more used, more using titanium for the frame instead of stainless steel. The steel is really heavy. Titanium is less so. Aluminum is even less so. And actually, a few months ago, I bought a yellow aluminum iPhone 14 non-pro as a test device because I needed more test devices as I discussed previously. and the 14 non-pro feels great in the hand in large part because it is noticeably lighter weight than the 14 pro it's not a small difference like if you look at the actual weight numbers the weight numbers make it seem like oh that's maybe that's maybe a moderate deal when you hold it in hand it's a huge difference the 14 non-pro feels fantastic and it still has the giant glass back glass is heavy but it has obviously a much simpler camera module because there's only two cameras, not three, and they're smaller.

58:09So that's probably some of the weight right there. But it also doesn't have the stainless steel edges. It has aluminum. And aluminum is actually even lighter than titanium in most uses, depending on, you know, structure and everything. But, you know, if you think that the new phones using titanium are going to automatically get as light as the non-pro phones, probably not. Because not only will they still have giant cameras, and non-pros probably won't, or less giant, but also aluminum is still lighter than even titanium. which we actually see in the apple watch uh which we'll get to in a little bit so anyway um the 14 pro is super heavy and dense and i i really i'm glad to hear rumors that they're going to maybe address that i hope they go as far as they can with with addressing that um one of the reasons they might not want to address that is battery life i have found the 14 pro to have okay battery life it's not great it's not bad it's okay um and batteries are very heavy and very dense so maybe that's part of the reason why this phone has to be so much heavier because it needs that additional battery power excuse me it needs that additional battery power to power the always-on screen and i think of all the features and updates to the iphone 14 pro pro line or 14 at all line the always-on screen of the 14 pro to me is the the single standout feature of this generation.

59:34Promotion, that was last year, wasn't it? Yeah, it's been around for a while. Promotion launched on the 12 or 13 Pro. So that wasn't new this year. But the always-on screen, that was the big new thing. And that changes so much about how many of us, not all of us, but how many of us can get value out of our phones. A lot of people don't use it. A lot of people, they just kind of don't have their phone resting in a place where they would see the screen. So they don't really use it or they don't like how it how it behaves in some ways that they turn it off i turned it off i tried it for a couple weeks and i turned it off i've never looked back i just do not want that feature uh and the the extra battery life is a bonus but i have to say my battery life has also been weirdly variable kind of like when you run betas and you're like oh i'm running a beta something must have gone nuts in the background and and like burned down my battery every once in a while i'll have a day where i'll look it'll be like 5 p.m and i'll look at my battery power i'm like what the hell happened today like why why why am I so low on battery?

1:00:30But that's rare. Most days, I talked about this when we first got the phones. Part of it is because of my MagSafe charger in my car. You know, it's a MagSafe mount, but it also charges the phone. So if I'm driving anywhere, it's like 8 p.m. and I have 85 % battery, right? Because I've been just driving around running errands and every time I'm in the car, the thing is stuck to the charger. But even days when I don't drive anywhere, just battery life is a non-issue. I mean, and maybe also because I'm on Wi-Fi a lot. like when i go for dog walks and stuff like that just battery life has been fantastic except every once in a while it'll just be like where did my battery life go i don't know what's going on i think obviously i think it's a software issue i think what it shows is the 14 pro has a good sized battery and it's only betrayed occasionally by software features whether that be just the the the the baseline overhead of always on screen which again i don't use but if you do use it you're you're spending some battery on that obviously or the something weird has gone on with some app or some part of the os on this particular day in the bird of mine battery but in general i would say the battery life of this is i think probably the best it's been in recent years for me on phones i remember my 12 being worse um and you know i agree this phone is big and dense and heavy but that's a trade-off i'm willing to make to basically not have to worry about battery life anymore students are.

1:01:48Yeah, my battery life, I think I echo what John is saying. Now, it's also hard for me because I often have my phone plugged in for doing testing or whatever. So consider your source. I am at best an unreliable narrator for this. But I echo what you're saying, John, that there are days that like a process just runs away or something happens that I feel like something wrong has gone on and my battery is just slaughtered. And Erin has actually been saying, because she doesn't have her phone, her 14 Pro on a charger very often during the day. And she has been saying that her battery life has gotten real bad recently.

1:02:27And I've taken a couple of glances at the battery stuff in settings. And I can't say I've come up with anything obvious that, you know, oh, this is exactly what it is. And when I've looked at it on my own phone, I've definitely seen some occasions where Instagram has seemingly gone kind of bananas. but my goodness i i feel like normally my battery is pretty darn good her battery i think like marco because marco you said yours was really crummy right her battery i said it's okay it's not it's not great it's not bad it's okay all right well hers is like crummy to okay and then yeah mine waffles and varies between the two it's very unusual well that's been a story recently people like oh the 14 to the 14 pros have some kind of manufacturing problem with the battery and they're only a year old and their battery like that battery health number they give you it's like lower than people expect where is that i'm trying to find it in settings and i can't find it settings and then battery i thought entering and battery so what all our phones are basically a year old because we all got them on the lunch day right and here they're actually mine is a little bit younger because i got it replaced because of the camera within like the first month but anyway what is your uh battery health at on your year old uh iphone 14 pro 100 i'm kidding mine's at 90 93 that's mine's 97 uh oh wow goodness again i think i think you know i did get mine replaced i forget when i was you go back in the archives remember my camera was weird that's another thing about this phone this is the first iphone i think i've ever gotten that basically had a manufacturing defect which is you know it's a lottery whatever you know but i've had a lot of iphones and this year i got unlucky uh i had that fogginess to the camera and so oh yeah yeah i think it was in it was within like the first month or two that i had the phone uh but yeah their solution was to give me an entirely new phone because apparently i didn't want to replace the camera module and a couple other people have that problem as well so whatever so mine is actually younger than a year but 97 after you know nine months or whatever still pretty good and both of your numbers seem reasonably but some people like oh i've had it for a year and it's like an 81 and this is a manufacturing defect batteries are kind of one of those things even more so the screens that marco was talking about where uh you know you never know what you're going to get you might get lucky or unlucky with the build quality on the battery there they are complicated uh delicate sandwiches of chemicals that can go wrong in all sorts of ways uh solid state batteries can't get here soon enough but in the meantime we got these pretty complicated little lithium iron uh sandwiches shoved inside our phones uh and you know i don't know maybe there was a manufacturing problem maybe they've changed suppliers midway through or whatever but my personal experience is you know After less than a year, nine months or whatever it is, 10 months, 97 % capacity and pretty good battery life, except for when the software goes off the rails.

1:05:09so going back to the always on screen for a moment um i think what if you were one of the people who was turned off by it initially and then turned it off initially um in one of the later point updates of ios 16 they added the option to make the background of the sleep screen just black instead of showing your wallpaper in like a dim state and i found as soon as that came out i turned it on and i've left it on since then not only does that probably save some tiny amount of battery life because it's not lighting up all those pixels but also i'm not so not so tiny amount of battery because it literally isn't lighting them up right but i mean but i mean but it's lighting them up very little in the other mode but anyway um i have found that helps a lot with the the awkwardness and downside of always on when we were first all getting used to it was sometimes it was difficult to tell whether the phone was active or not and you had to like tap it to like brighten it up that distinction is much easier to see and detect when the background is black when it's in the in like the sleep mode so i have found that option significantly improves the um the always on screen for me and so if you haven't tried that option i would say try it yeah i did i did try that one and when it came out it didn't really change it for me i don't know what it is it's not like that i hate it or anything but it's just that i just don't want the screen on my phone on when i'm not using it like it's never in a context where i would look at it to provide useful information and i can never build that habit by like you know putting it on it wasn't i wasn't doing it for battery life it was entirely just the user experience of like i just want my phone to be off and completely black when i'm not using it uh and and i like the idea of tapping to wake it up and i don't just don't want anything on the screen so i don't think i'm ever going to go back on this feature because it's just not i just haven't been able to build the habit of looking to my phone to see useful things on it when i'm not using it yeah yeah Yeah, Erin is in the same boat.

1:06:58She almost immediately turned off the always-on display, which is why it's even more striking that her battery life is such garbage because her display is off a lot. So I don't know what's going on there, but it's frustrating for her, and I don't blame her at all. Overall, I would say iPhone 14 series, pretty good. um the main areas i hope to see improvement are weight and maybe some of this you know battery inconsistency management in some way well that is very likely to be software uh influenced if not 100 software related um but yeah the the size and weight i would love to see this thing get a little bit lighter yeah i would agree with that one of my concerns about this generation of phone this is probably not a real concern but it's a thing i think about a lot is uh the camera system okay obviously the 3x camera is still not great which is disappointing because sometimes i want that reach but i tend to avoid it because i know how much worse the 3x camera is and it's it didn't get any better this year from last year i think and i would like to see some advancement in the 3x camera and then the 2x camera like the 2x camera being also the 2x camera is worse than the 1x camera but i think you it also does a thing where it will take a crop of the 1x camera at certain distances for 2x that's what it is that no that there is that is there's a 3x there's a 3x ultra wide you're right all right so it's a crop of the of the 1x camera 2x is always a crop yeah okay so and like the thing is i never like when i when i find myself at 2x i'm like oh but i don't want a crop of the 1x camera i should just take this at 1x and crop it myself because why it's it's like you know i have cameras that can go into crop mode too and if i had to put an aps-c lens on it yes of course you need to use crop mode but otherwise i would never use crop mode just take the full shot and i'll crop it later why why make that decision ahead of time and lose information so every time i go to take a 2x picture i'm like i should change to 1x and just crop it myself later and i don't like that tension i mean half this is a me problem not the phone problem but 2x is a convenient distance a lot of the time for me and i really wish i didn't have to make that trade-off like i didn't i wish that wasn't a thing i wish i could get like basically i guess i'm asking for a 2x camera like the ultra wide i know it's the third you know third camera on here and i do use it like when taking pictures of like my son's dorm room when you want to get the whole room or whatever but i don't know i'm i'm dissatisfied with the zoom ranges is what i'm trying to say with the camera and it's not a particular fault of the 14 pro because it's not much different than the the 13 pro before it or like the apple's been doing this thing the difference here is you got the 48 megapixel thing where you can take the full 48 megapixels and i have to have done that a few times and that's fun or whatever but i'm dissatisfied with given the amount of area they use here and given the amount of cost and everything on all these cameras i wish there was a better balance of zoom ranges for me to take photos with that were more satisfying to me i don't i don't again this is this is just a me thing probably because of the way i take pictures and and the fact that i'm used to using my quote-unquote real cameras much more often than when i'm using the iphone i find my camera choices somewhat frustrating and i fluctuate between them and so if they if they could resolve that or like improve on that measurably i'd appreciate it like a better 3x camera would be a step in the right direction a better balance between 1x and 2x uh you know i i'm gonna say ditch the the 0.5x but i wouldn't ditch it maybe just make that camera a little bit better too because honestly those pictures don't come out great i don't know i'm very picky well i'm glad you brought up the cameras because i actually i forgot to mention this and this is kind of a big thing i i'm not a huge fan of the the default photo processing on the 14 pros cameras um in in particular it tends to look like too much like 1990s unsharp mask usage you know It tends to crank up the contrast on edges too much, and it makes photos look a little bit too over-sharpened and unrealistic and over-processed by default.

1:11:09And whenever I'm seeing an iPhone photo in my library at anything bigger than the phone's screen size, so maybe if I'm viewing it on my Mac or on an iPad or something, that jumps out at me. Like, oh, that looks a little harsh. And that's the word I would use for it, is harsh. Now, the iPhone still remains the best camera for weird or variable conditions or poor conditions. Because, you know, what it does computationally is still excellent. And it's much easier and faster and more consistent to get a usable shot from an iPhone in weird or poor conditions than from any other camera, really. but in good lighting the iphone looks really weirdly over sharpened now like the picture from from the iphone 14 pro and i know that you know they did all the stuff with the 48 megapixel sensor with the with the weird like pixel splitting thing um frankly i have not seen what appears to be a noticeable improvement from that i don't shoot raw maybe that's my problem maybe i should be using a pro camera app and i should be shooting raw and doing that kind of processing and everything to have better control over it.

1:12:18But whatever it is, I am not super happy with the photos I've gotten out of the 14 Pro. So I'm hoping, every iPhone that comes out, Apple tweaks the treatment of the camera, whatever the built-in filters and stuff are. They tweak it all to match whatever the sensors and ISP are that year. And that's great. And some years, it's better than others. And I think this is one of the kind of down years. Well, I think part of the problem with what they do with those tweaks because uh you know they do they change this off for every year and it's not just to match the hardware but they make different artistic decisions essentially of like uh i assume probably internally chasing like the uh the worst case scenarios like oh when you take a picture in this kind of lighting it our current algorithm for sharpening or edge enhancement really just overdoes it and it looks terrible so we should tweak it so that that worst case scenario is not as bad um and all of that adjustments to software you know and they brag about them in the keynotes and they will again say look at our processing look at what a great job it does on this thing right um think the fundamental problem that both uh that i probably have and you marco will as well maybe casey won't mind is that they their target like what is the goal if we've done a good job at this their target is uh we want this camera to take photos that most people are happy with and kind of like all the tvs that people have in vivid mode all the time or whatever or with motion smoothing turned on what most people are happy with is not what we're going to be happy with and so like their default processing may be getting closer and closer to succeeding but as it gets closer and closer to that it's not what we want like we you know if you want the cameras to look neutral and not too enhanced use a third-party app like obscura or like uh what is that other one the halide yeah there you go um like there are there are other choices you don't have to use the apple and although apple does make it very givy to use the apple one maybe you can use the action button on the new iphones to to launch the camera app of your choice um but i but i feel like their goal is to achieve something that we don't want that most people will find the look of over enhanced over sharpened very contrasty photos to to give a thumbs up and say i like that better it looks good but that's just not what we want out of it so i feel like we are it's hard to fault apple for that like they should make things that that make most people happy but if you have different taste in photos or like don't want them to look that way you're gonna have to try a third-party app i don't know i i'm certainly a less sophisticated photographer than either of you two but i i don't think the camera is bad at all and i don't generally disagree with the choices that it makes and in fact to my eyes i think that my 14 pro camera is except in like perfect sunlight the best camera we have in the house like i love my olympus my olympus micro four-thirds but indoors it's not even a contest it's not even in the ballpark and outdoors the olympus is better for sure unless i want an hdr photo or you know or whatever the case may be like there are other times that the iphone is again better than the olympus even outside although it's much much much more rare i quite like the iphone camera although i desperately want a longer reach.

1:15:41Like I would love a 6X camera. And so I don't think I've told either of you this yet, but if we do get that Periscope camera and if it is only on the max, I am strongly considering going for the obscenely oversized phone for next year, because I really just would love to have a much, much deeper zoom. And I think I might be willing to try it to see if it's, to try the big one. Have you been keeping up on the rumors? I don't remember what the rumored zoom range is, but I don't recall it being six. I thought six X? I thought, no. We'll do some, we'll do more research on it for next week's episode when we actually do our predictions.

1:16:15But as usual, pretty much everything about all these phones is leaked. Yeah, exactly. All right, we should move on from the iPhone. I do not have an Apple Watch Ultra, so I have nothing to say about that. John does not have an Apple Watch Ultra, so he has nothing to say about that. So Marco, what do you think? I do have an Apple Watch Ultra and it is better than I expected. I did end up switching away from it during beta season. I devoted it to a different beta path than my main watch because you can't back restore watches to previous versions. So I haven't really worn the Ultra since the summer began for the most part.

1:16:52But it's very interesting. I think the Ultra has largely succeeded at being a new market for the Apple Watch. I don't know to what degree it has succeeded in being an extreme watch for extreme sporting people who were previously buying garments and stuff. I have a feeling it probably hasn't eaten too much into that market because a lot of that market, it still doesn't have certain features or characteristics to address. But just anecdotally, I see tons of Ultras out in the world. Tons. it seems like this has been a very successful and well-selling product and i have to give apple credit for it being the first like really new and different apple watch since the introduction of the apple watch like it's a it was a major change a major departure in lots of different ways um especially in the physical design of it and i think they largely succeeded um i i assumed when when they announced the um specs and the size i assumed it would be comically way too big on me and it isn't it's not small i would say it couldn't get any bigger on me but um but it actually works um because of the design of it some of like you know like the the angle that the straps exit the sides um certainly like you know some of the some of the dimensions and some of the the way it falls in your wrist it actually fits on more wrists than you would expect based on its its state of measurements um so fit wise it's great um i think the the industrial design of it succeeds in making it look more rugged and hardcore um and in certain ways it is um not in all ways you know but in certain ways it is that's good battery life on the ultra is indeed great because it is a much bigger battery i love the use of titanium as the only choice of material because that made it light enough still because you would think it would be really big and heavy and it's not light but it's not noticeably too heavy it's it's like right in the middle it's right where you want it to be so that's really nice um i love the orange accents on the action button and on the crown the one of the downsides though is that this watch having these prominent orange themed accents that restricts what strap colors look good with it and also the design of the ultra the way that you know the watch being large to begin with and and a slightly different strap exit angle on it to make it fit better on on with its big size that actually changes what straps look good on it compared to other apple watches and it has its own collection but i would say it needs more uh the the strap selection for the ultra is still pretty limited in terms of what both looks okay with it and works well with it um you know physically i i think the rubber straps.

1:19:45Is it the ocean band? Is that what they call it? The rubber ones with all the rod holes throughout them. Those, I think, are the best strap for it overall. And the navy blue one, I think, is the easiest and the best looking one overall. I wore that most of the time with it. I also later on put the silicone loop on it, which doesn't quite look as right, but it was a little more comfortable on my wrist um but i would love to see more strap options and and maybe i i know this is heresy for people who love orange because and i love orange in case you haven't you know noticed with my app icon and everything um but maybe an option where the side button is not orange to give it a few more color options with straps um we'll see about that but anyway um the speaker on it's nice and clear and loud you know i don't i don't personally use it for anything but i'm glad it's there different hardware is good the crown guard on it the you know like the the protrusion around the digital crown and side button to make them harder to like hit off basically if you're climbing a wall i was hoping the crown guard would make it more difficult for the buttons to be pushed say if you are wearing weightlifting gloves and your hand tilts up like you're like if you're in like a high plank or a push-up here so your hands like up relative to your wrist it's very easy for the corner of a weightlifting glove to accidentally push the crown or the side button if you're wearing your wrist if you're wearing your watch in like the regular orientation on your left wrist and i was hoping that the crown guard in the ultra would prevent that kind of accidental crown crown and button pushing from happening with certain workout gear and it doesn't because the crown and buttons still protrude out slightly from the guard and so something that pushes flat against the guard will still push those buttons casey johnston would want me to tell you you're not supposed to wear gloves when you lift weights i'm sorry that would solve your problem though right um that would solve it sometimes i mean certain certain positions of my wrist i like even the skin bunching up could theoretically push those buttons yeah um but it certainly happens a lot more while wearing gloves yeah you know speaking of this guard the crown guard and what it's supposed to do and how it's working for you this whole watch kind of reminds me of i mean i don't know a lot about the watch world so maybe this is a non-apt analogy but and maybe there's a better one in cars but like it for it being like for extreme sports or whatever it seems like the apple watch ultra is the watch that people buy because it looks like a watch that someone who did extreme sports would use but of course they're not going to do it to kind of like the you know aspirational it's like aspirational off-road suvs yeah like the rolex submariner you're not going to go diving with that watch right almost no one does but you're right and so it seems like the the apple watch ultra i mean i guess it does probably have more abilities for the supposed purpose than maybe some of the other watches but the entire watch market seems to me to be get this watch that looks like a watch that a mountain climber would use but you're not a mountain climber get this truck that looks like someone who's going to go off road would use but you're not going to go off road you're going to drive to starbucks right and so get the apple watch ultra because it looks i mean and the watch market every watch to me looks like why does this watch look this way the explanation is like oh that's for like when you're climbing a mountain or when you're under the water that you could just like but you're never doing those things like yeah but you don't understand like the whole watch market seems to be like that so to me the the Apple Watch Ultra seems like it hit that bullseye perfectly, which is no one's actually going to take this thing diving, but you see so many of them around for the same reason you see all those other ridiculous watches around that have features and looks to them and crown guards or whatever.

1:23:16It's like, well, you know, when I'm picking up my coffee from the desk, what if I hit my wrist on the edge of the desk? This crown guard will prevent me from accidentally hitting a button, you know? No, I mean, there are legitimate reasons for the crown guard to be there for some people. You are right that the vast majority of Apple Watch Ultra buyers will never do anything extreme enough to justify them. And that's OK. People buy watches, number one, because they look cool. And then number two, because they provide some kind of utility. And that utility usually is not super ultra damage protection in your extreme sports.

1:23:46Although you have talked about like the actual utility that Spotify provides is a big flat screen. Yes. Which has nothing to do with extreme sports and has everything to do with like, oh, do you actually want to use apps on your watch because you get utility from them? Well, using the apps on this screen is nice because it's big and it's flat. Yes. And that is one area where the Ultra really excels. If you are using your smartwatch like a computer, it's simple as that. For many people, the Apple Watch is mostly doing passive, tracking your activity, maybe popping up an occasional notification, but you're not really interacting with it that much for most people.

1:24:18But if you're a nerd and you're actually interacting with apps on a regular basis on the watch or trying to read long texts or whatever, like having that larger and totally flat edge to edge screen actually makes those things a lot better. So from that point of view, it's like the Max phone in the sense that like, if you're actually, if you're really heavily using it as a computing device, having a bigger screen is nicer. So from that point of view, the Ultra succeeds as well. The last thing I'll say about the Ultra is I think the action button has been kind of a miss, both in the physical placement of it and in the software abilities that it offers.

1:24:51um it's very difficult to use the action button well um and and also it is in my experience wearing the ultra i hit it accidentally all the time and i think that could be significantly improved right now the action button is on it's if you're looking at the watch in the regular orientation it's on it's kind of in like the bottom left side of the watch i think if they swap it with the speaker and put it at the top left that will improve it because right now it's very difficult if you if the wrist if the watch is on your left wrist like as it usually is for most people if you want to push the crown in what you will typically do is using your right hand pinch the watch with your index finger on the crown and your thumb right on the action button so even after wearing this watch for months i never got used to that i know i would constantly still hit the action button inadvertently uh and so i ended up turning off its function like and i I tried, that's the other thing, like the functions that it offers are very specific to certain workout needs.

1:25:54And I didn't have any of this particular needs. So I tried things like maybe I should have it start the stopwatch or stuff like that. And I never found a good use for it that, first of all, would tolerate accidental input without being too annoying. And second of all, that justified the kind of clunky nature of using it. So I think the action button, it's a good idea to have more buttons on the watch that are software programmable. That's great. It needs some tweaks, both in its physical design and its software design. And maybe we'll see that in future versions. But other than that, I really think the Apple Watch Ultra was extremely successful in what it set out to do.

1:26:29It seems to be very popular. And I think I'm looking forward to where it goes next. That being said, for most of the year, I was spending much more time wearing my Apple Watch Series 7. I'm not talking about the Series 8, which we're about to mention. Because the Apple Watch Series 7 is the one I prefer over the E8. The Apple Watch Series 8 now deserves an exit interview. It was just like the 7 with almost nothing changed. So why do you prefer the 7? Because I guess they don't have enough titanium to make all their watches out of it. So they removed the titanium option from the regular Apple Watch Series 8.

1:27:10And the Series 7 comes in titanium. So that's what I've been wearing. And titanium is by far my preferred Apple Watch metal these days. It is almost as light as the aluminum, not quite, but it's in the ballpark of as light as the aluminum. It looks very nice. I think it looks significantly nicer than the aluminum and with its nice brushed pattern and the way it reflects light and everything. And it's a little bit less flashy and less noticeable with scratches than the steel. So I love the titanium. And if I'm, if I was going to buy a new Apple watch today of the regular series, I guess I'd get steel, but which I, and I wore steel for years and I love it.

1:27:47but I love titanium more. And they got rid of it with the 8. And presumably because they probably didn't sell a ton of it, and maybe because they wanted to save it all for the Ultra. But I'm hoping in future Apple Watches, that makes a comeback as an available medal for the regular Apple Watch series. Because ultimately, the regular Apple Watch series is more comfortable on me. That's why I used it more than the Ultra for the last half of the year. It's more comfortable on me. It fits my wrist a little bit more gently. And I like the way the straps work a little bit better on it. so that's why I went back to the series 7 and not the series 8 and the series 8 really doesn't offer a whole lot over the 7 in fact between 6 7 and 8 there have been very few changes they're all even running the same system on a chip the same processor so I'm and rumors are they're going to finally update it for the 9 we'll see but the grade I would give the series 8 is it wasn't even interesting enough for me to buy and that's saying a lot because i buy freaking everything and even the series 8 i couldn't justify so i have a series 8 and i mostly agree with you i like it it's not terribly interesting i wish i had a better battery that's all i got i am the small series 8 i am on the 41 or whatever it is millimeter um the battery is sufficient I typically work out half an hour to 45 minutes every single day.

1:29:12And I will top up when I'm showering. And if I do take a little siesta, which used to be fairly common, but now is fairly uncommon, I'll top it up while that's happening. But today I didn't lay down or anything like that. And I had a fairly busy day. I did a 45-minute workout and I'm at 14 % and it's about 9.30 at night. So it is enough to get me through a day, but not with a lot of breathing room. So I would love either a watch with a much bigger battery that is not the Ultra. I'll have to try the Ultron again whenever I do upgrade because maybe it would work on my wrist. But nevertheless, I would love either a much bigger battery if possible, or perhaps more likely a much more power efficient CPU because these watch batteries really are being to this day are still being stretched to their breaking point i think and i would love to have have more just give me more yeah it does depend a lot on what you do like especially it depends a lot on things like um how how long in a day you're running it in a workout mode um and then and certain certainly like whether that workout mode is using gps so like if you're going on an outdoor run oh yeah that's not typically what i'm but yeah especially if you are like using cellular to stream the music like that's that's just about the the most power intensive thing you can do on the watch is like workout mode plus gps plus cellular that will drain it significantly whereas if you are you know just mostly like in regular watch mode sitting around somewhere where you have wi-fi not doing a whole lot with it that'll last a long time um and and certainly you know i i never really got into sleep tracking so i don't do that that whole that whole um game where you try to charge it when you're in the shower like i never i never got into that um i'm just charging it overnight and when i'm in the shower so mine my battery life has been great i'm also using the larger one the 45 millimeter um series 7 but um okay this is a song about alice we're talking about the series 8 uh so yeah series at apple watch it's totally fine but it's barely anything changed from the seven which itself was not a massive change from the six so uh hoping hoping for better things with the 9, but the Series 8 is still a great watch overall.

1:31:23It's just, it doesn't really provide much over the predecessor. And then finally, Marco made a really good point. All the rumors are pointing to this is the year of USB-C. It's finally happening. So the iPhones that we have in hand are the last iPhones with lightning ports, RIP the lightning port. And And I will start by saying this can't come soon enough. I am so ready for this. I am so ready to ditch lightning. I don't have any particular problem with lightning. And I think in the context of a phone, it actually is really, really nice. But at this point, I will take ubiquity over any niceties of the lightning port.

1:32:08And I think that's probably no small part influenced by the fact that I use Qi charging overnight. I do have a dock that I'll have to replace on my desk for when I'm working. But the only time I ever really plug in my phone because I have that, you know, wireless CarPlay dongle, it's the CarLinkit one. Mine is ancient. Just get CarLinkit and that's the one. Because I put this in the show notes and every single time people are like, what one do you have? CarLinkit. C-A-R-L-I-N-K-I-T. Well, anyways, I have wireless CarPlay for me. Now, Erin, I could get her one of these, but I don't think she cares.

1:32:44So her car will need to get a different cable, presumably. But by and large, in my day-to-day life, the only time I'm plugging in my phone is when I'm having one of those Syracuse-style off days with my battery. And we have one of the iPad or whatever watt chargers hooked up to a USB-C to lightning cable down in the living room. And so we'll use that as our emergency top-up station. that's about the only time I plug in my phone and any other time I am wirelessly charging or doing development on it so whatever um I am so here for USB-C I would love to not have to worry about lightning anything and I say that as someone who never touches lightning even my travel setup as we talked a couple of weeks ago is that Qi based uh Mophie three-in-one thing so I don't even bring lightning cables when I go traveling but but still it would be so nice to go USB-C only.

1:33:35I mean, hell, when I go to Wegmans or whatever to do work because I want to get out of the house, I would love to not have to bring a lightning cable and worry about that. It's just, the ubiquity is what does it for me. The world has moved on, although not from micro USB, but that's neither here nor there. The world has mostly moved on, asterisk, dagger, double dagger. So please, please, please give me the USB-C iPhone. The lightning port was great. It served its purpose well but it's time you know for exit interviews i think we could give i think i would like to give an exit salute to lightning because i feel like it has served its purpose very well uh people who don't remember how old this is so 30 pin lasted what like almost 10 years now we're like 11 years for lightning yeah it was the iphone 5 that launched with lightning yeah so so for in terms of how long a connector lasts it's about average and as casey pointed out like this one apple has been essentially drag kicking screaming it's upgrading like it's not like they did it super fast and i bring this up because the story about these connections is always everyone's annoyed when things change right you know people don't like change i understand that but timing wise this makes some kind of sense and if you go back to the beginning of when the light lightning came out it was replacing 30 pin which there are people listening to this program don't know what that is go find one and look at it you'll be like people used to connect their phones with this it It's hilarious in the way that a VHS tape would be hilarious to someone who watches Netflix.

1:35:02It basically looks like a SCSI cable compared to Lightning. It's just so big and so awkward and delicate and weird. And Apple replaced it with this one extremely tiny... They didn't just make it a little bit smaller. They made it smaller enough that we're not going to have to worry about the size of this connector for the foreseeable future. They made it so there's no wrong way to plug it in. Micro USB and basically every USB except for USB-C. yeah it's no wrong way to plug in it works both directions they made the little connectors are a little tiny solid piece of metal that is not going to bend or break or whatever like the connector itself was the thing that you plug in was very solid and this was coming into a world where there was no equivalent usbc didn't exist at that point so they had to make something themselves which is people say you know might think it's apple at its best and worst it's at its best because they're like they saw a technical problem they solved it in a very clever way with something that was better than anything else in the market and it's at worst because lighting was 100 proprietary you had to pay apple money if you wanted to sell accessory that had the made for iphone whatever you know and for a while i think apple was like the only factories that made this connector maybe they still do and like it's it's proprietary and you know apple made money off of it and it would no no other phone in the entire world used this but the apple sells a lot of iphone so it was fine right and the thing is they made this proprietary connector and eventually usbc came out with some help from apple that had many of the same advantages but was industry standard and eventually that rolled out across the industry but what apple didn't do was as soon as lightning had essentially served its purpose and now we have an industry standard connector that we can all go to they didn't immediately leave that part of that was because they don't want to give up that made for iphone money right i get that part of it was because they're putting off the painful change because whenever you change people complain and it's painful but part of that i think is let's just give lightning its natural lifetime one new connector for your phone every decade is a reasonable cadence for technological progress 30 pin lightning usbc if each of those three gets 10 years that's fine i know everyone's going to complain because they're going to be like oh i just got this phone and now the connector changed and you know like because you haven't had that phone for 10 years maybe this is your very first phone and all and you buy all these lighting accessories and you didn't know this event was coming and then it comes out and the phones are all using different things next year you got to get rid of all your like change is always going to be hard for somebody i get it but apple did not make a proprietary connector and then say oh never mind we don't need that anymore and switch after two years because that would have been worse for customers that wouldn't have allowed the ecosystem to build the whole ecosystem of docks and other things that work with lightning connectors and on top of that apple did improve the lightning connector over the course of its life they couldn't fix some of the fundamental things about it in particular i think we've talked about this before but all kinds of connectors or most kinds of computer connectors have some part of it that's springy and some part of it that is rigid and the springy things grip on to the rigid part the rigid part doesn't move it just is there to be solid and the springy parts grip it right and in lightning the springy parts are inside the phone and the rigid part is of course the connector if you look at a lightning connector nothing on it flexes it is just a solid piece of metal with little divots on the side and the springy parts are in the phone usb-c is the opposite usb i believe in usb-c the springy parts are inside the connector and the ridded parts are inside the phone in practice that hasn't been that big of a deal but in general the usbc design is smarter because if something if some springy thing is going to get loose from constantly having you know the connector put in and taken out it'd be better if that thing that gets loose is on a cable you can throw away versus inside the phone that you can't really replace the plug on it that easily right the other thing is we all remember and probably many of you are still experiencing this to this day i know i am you can look at a lightning connector and see those little like black smudges on them yep that is a thing that as far as i know apple did fix in later revisions of their devices and cables that are that work with lightning because i think that was because one of the pins constantly had some amount of power on it and get these little black scorch marks and there was a period when the lightning cable went from like the little apart the little plastic part that wraps around the metal thing with the contacts on it that plastic part got thicker and i think it's because they changed the chip that was in there people might not know but a lot of apple's cables have actual computer chips inside them which doesn't really justify their price their price but anyway it's not just a bunch of wires with the connector um and i think they changed it to make whatever that pin was that was getting the black marks like pulse its uh energy instead of doing i'm probably getting the details wrong here but the point is apple revised lightning somewhere within its lifetime to fix one of the few actual flaws that it had and even that flaw wasn't that bad because we all have these little marked lightning cables i use them all the time they still work fine they don't damage your phone they don't cause your you know it's not a hardware virus that infects all your phones and now nobody can charge the main problem that people have with lightning which i'm not sure will get any better with usbc is pocket lint and crap getting jammed up there and that is more of a mechanical issue than an electronic one but it is a issue with all these types of connectors i'm not sure how usbc will go because i've never had a usbc phone before but fingers crossed but anyway that electrical problem with it they fixed in a later revision and you might not know that because if you still are using your old cable with the very small very slim piece of plastic around the lightning connector you're not getting the advantage of that i think you have to have the the newer cables that are identifiable by me anyway among apple's cables as being a little bit thicker around that thing and for those ones i've tried it i have some of those cables and i have some that aren't and the newer cables with the thicker thing never get the black marks and the old ones still do so i think apple has been a an excellent steward of this proprietary connector i don't really begrudge them the made for iphone things there's plenty of third-party ripoff things that uh that you know that didn't pay for it or whatever but it's had its run it did its job i'm glad it was there i'm glad i didn't ever have an iphone with micro usb on it god forbid right i'm glad we didn't have 30 pin for longer and i was happy to use lightning for all this time but of course as as all we tech nerds agree it's time to go to usbc i'm not sure if when we go to usbc i'm gonna miss lightning lightning is still a tiny bit smaller a tiny bit thinner but you know it's it's time uh i'm ready to take the hit i'm not sure what the public reaction to it will be but there's there's really just no alternative setting aside the eu stuff and all them being forced to do it or whatever lightning has run its course and of all the things that apple has done hardware standard wise i think they did a pretty good job of it's not perfect again the little black marks and the the many cables they made with inadequate strain relief and all the other things they've done but there's been a pretty good third-party ecosystem for lightning i don't think it has ever had any catastrophic errors where like oh we screwed up with the connector and it just doesn't work the pocket length thing again i don't know if that's going to be better or worse with usbc but i you know i'm trying to think of everything in terms of tier lists i don't know if lightning would be s tier but it would definitely be a i i think it did a great job i salute lightning as it is on its way out the door yeah i think the what i think the key innovation of lightning was the reversible connector that was that was unheard of before like i don't i don't think any major computer connector was reversible before that you know what did that the headphone jack couldn't put it in the wrong way unless you had an original iphone and tried to use a regular headphone but setting that aside like there have been connectors where you don't have to worry about how to put them in i think it was a computer innovation to say oh guess what we have connectors but they only fit one way it's like a kid's it's like a kid's shape sorter isn't that easy and i was like okay maybe for literal scuzzy cables it's pretty obvious which way the shape sort of goes by the time they're the size of micro usb or god forbid usba where it's externally symmetrical and internally asymmetrical mistakes were made and apple corrected that and apple helped correct that with usbc as well yeah like you the only reason why we are down on lightning now is that the rest of the world went to usbc and now we are so close to the you know one cable basically although a million asterisks on it the rest of the world and also apple apple everywhere except for the iphone and the airpods and the keyboards and the mouse yeah right but you know even even setting aside all of those accessories which you know i know there's rumors they're going to do new airpods cases that makes sense you know probably with air parts cases with usbc i'm sure we'll be able to buy the case for like 70 bucks yeah you have to get rid of lightning everywhere like i know we'll talk about predictions but like getting rid of lightning on the phones like that's the big one but it has to go everywhere and eventually i'm assuming it will go everywhere i just hope they don't drag their feet on it and have like keyboards that connect with lightning four years from now on max yeah and that's that's my fear because they really don't update the peripherals that frequently um i mean the magic mouse hasn't updated since it used double a batteries and the um the you know trackpad i think was never updated until well the current design of it you know it's it's many years old now um you know the keyboards got updated with touch id that fairly recently so i don't know how much they're going to update them again who knows but anyway uh what's great about this move if this happens is that um you know i'm going to be able to get rid of like maybe 40 of the cables that are in use in my backpack and around my house.

1:44:11So that's, you know, traveling is going to be so much easier. I can't tell you how often I go to reach for either a USB-C cable or a lightning cable. And the one I find is the other one. And so that's going to be really, really nice. Also, a great thing about USB-C over lightning is that both ends of the cable are the same. It's going to be great when it comes. But yes, the lightning port itself, you know, for when it was designed it was way ahead of its time and it has really served us pretty well with surprisingly few downsides all this time and so it really has been extremely successful and uh yeah i think giving it a an exit salute is totally warranted i won't i won't even like put one finger down to simulate the blackened pin like no i'll give it all the fingers that's the thing about the black and pin like none of us like it because no one likes to see anything blackened on a piece of electronics but practically speaking like i think that is basically a cosmetic issue that only annoys people who want things to be perfect like i've never even heard of it causing problems again the problem people have is lint lint fills the things and they don't work oh no it caused me problems the the blackened pin it it would eventually make a device or its cable not charge anymore really i've never seen that happen and we have i like i have like a original lightning cables that are blackened just completely messed up with it but they still work so i don't know maybe i've just been lucky i'm between the two of you it happened to me i don't remember if it was devices but certainly the cables but it was very rare when it did happen to me yeah and it was it was usually on older things to to avoid it you have to use one of the new cables with one of the new phones and it's so easy not to do that because we just have all these cables around you just mix and match or whatever and you're like what are you talking about they never fix us all my cables are blackened i did the test myself several years ago and i said i'm only going to use this new what i know to be one of the supposedly fixed cables on my nightstand with my phone and i've used it for years it's perfect no blackened things on it uh the lightning the lightning cable it was a little annoying to be its own thing you know it was a little frustrating to run into someone with an android phone and not be able to charge your phone because they had you know like micro usb or whatever garbage connector but even still i i think it's an s tier cable slash port slash whatever for me.

1:46:31It really did serve its purpose well. It's riding into the sunset. It's riding high into the sunset. Happy and accomplished. I salute you, Lightning Port. I salute you. Oh, man. All right. Next member special. Tier list, different connectors. Gosh. The list. That's not a bad idea. I know. I'm literally putting it on the list. Thanks to our sponsor this week, Seltrios, and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us 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 because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research.

1:47:18Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So this is going to be quick, partially because we're running long and partially because I don't actually have that much to say yet. But last week I had teased, certainly in the bootleg, I don't recall if that made the released version, but I teased that, are you ready, Marco?

1:48:17I will give you a moment to grab what you need to grab. I teased that I have bought a new Synology. I did get a new Synology. I did get a slight discount on it from the Synology folks, which was very kind of them. Synologists? Yeah, the Synologists. I will talk about what I got and briefly describe why, but I haven't really started using it that much. And I'd like to get this off my chest first because I'm very annoyed and frustrated. I love Synology products. I love, love, love them. I talk about them incessantly because I love them so darn much. I adore them. And also... You can hear the comma going right there.

1:48:59Also, I am real crabby about their migration story. Now, I will probably get the details wrong because I was doing this in haste and I was doing it like a week ago. Now, I did take some notes for myself. But the migration story for Synology, the thing they want you to do, and this is genuinely very cool that they support this, but what they want you to do is take all the drives from one Synology, slap them in the new one and call it a day. What? Which, that's what they want you to do. That's like the easy peasy way to do it. I would assume that wouldn't work. I know, exactly. So that's why I do genuinely think it's pretty cool that that's supported.

1:49:35No BS, I really mean that. But I have noticed in the intervening 10 years, so we were gifted from Synology, each of us got a DS1813 +, and 18 indicates 8-bay, if I understand Synology nomenclature properly. The 8 indicates 8-bay. the 13 indicates that it was new on or around 2013 and this is a like extremely beefy for home use or really meant for like small office use synology eight drives uh ours all came preloaded i believe with three terabyte drives i i know mine is a darn ship of theseus at this point i can't speak for marcos i think john you said you've only replaced a couple but i've replaced zero.

1:50:22Oh, that's nuts. I seriously, most of mine are replaced. But anyways, I adore my Synology. It's run great, but it's getting longer than two. And I wanted to get a new one. And so what I decided was I'm going to get a slightly smaller one. I will get a six-base Synology and I got a 1621 plus. And I did that because, hey, guess what, fellas? In the last 10 years since we got our Synologies, our jobs have gotten big. Old school platter spinning disk drives have gotten freaking big. And Prime Day rolled around. And I think, I genuinely don't remember, but I think it was something like$1 ,200 all in, which is unquestionably a buttload of money.

1:51:01It's a mountain of money. But once every 10 years, I don't think that's so bad. So I got four Western Digital Red 18 terabyte drives. If you don't care for Western Digital Red, I don't want to know. Ignorance is bliss. It's fine. This is what I've chosen. Please don't scare me with horror stories about Western Digital, because I can already hear you clacking on your keyboards writing me emails. Nevertheless, I bought four 18-terabyte Western Digital Reds, and that's what I put in this new Synology, four drives. And not only could I not move all eight drives from the old Synology, but now this new Synology supports BTRFS, Butter File System, whatever you want to call it.

1:51:40And I would like to move to that, because I do a podcast with a Mr. John Siracusa who is very opinionated about file systems. And my impression from John was that butter or whatever it's called is better. So I wanted to do that. You could use that on your own one too. Some of my things are BTRFS I think. Not if I don't, not without reestablishing the entire volume. Yeah, you gotta reformat stuff. Exactly. So I go to install the drives on the new Synology and that works fine. It does say oh these aren't the drives we prefer because Synology has very annoyingly gone and started selling their own hard drives.

1:52:15So, of course, they get very picky or they can get very picky about what drives you use. And in fact, part of the reason I didn't get a newer Synology was because they have cranked that up as the hardware's gotten newer, the annoyance and like, oh, you're not using our drives, you're not using our drives. And I didn't want anything to do with that. That's kind of crappy. It is undesirable, to say the least. And trust me, oh, trust me, I have lit up my context at Synology about how I think this is really gross. Don't you worry. I cannot believe they didn't send this with like a bomb inside of it after all the complaining and moaning I've done to them.

1:52:52But nevertheless, I put in the drives. That works. No sweat. It installs DSM, Distation Manager, which is their operating system, whatever. All well and good. So I go to make the volume, which is Synology speak for basically binding all these four drives together. I chose Synology Hybrid grade two, which is to say I could lose two drives and still have enough data in the remaining drives and parity checks and whatnot that I could recover. That's because I did SHR1 in the eight-base analogy. And you will recall right at the beginning of COVID, I lost a drive. And then in replacing that, almost lost a second drive and almost lost my entire data set, which would have been absolutely terrible.

1:53:33So... Refresher memory, though, both your old one and your new one, you're essentially setting up as a single volume no well yes to the new one no to the old one the old one six of the physical drives was one massive volume and then two of them i did whatever the equivalent whatever the rate is that it's just it's two physical hard drives thank you treated as one and the only thing that goes on that volume is time machine and so that's all redundant if i lose it i lose it not the end of the earth i am issuing time machine entirely on this all right Or maybe I will choose, maybe I'll get an external drive or something to do Time Machine in the future.

1:54:07But I am not doing anything with it on the new Synology. So it is four drives, two empty bays, one giant volume of what is, I think it's like 34, 36 terabytes. Because it's two times 18 minus some overhead. I want to say it's like 34 terabytes. And my current Synology, the volume is something like 12 or 15 terabytes. And I'm using 10-ish. so I have two spare bays and I have something like 20 terabytes 20 extra terabytes of free space anyway so I make the volume and it says these aren't Synology drives and I say I don't care and it's okay fine I've established my SHR2 volume with butter, BTRFS, whatever, whatever all is well I go to do migration assistant and the first thing it said was well you should really just move the physical drives I said I can't do that because I have two freaking less spots okay fine so then I go to do the migration assistant again and I can't get it to work.

1:55:03And the reason is, is because I have two-factor auth on my old Synology and I will on the new one when I finally get it up and running. But I have two-factor auth on the old Synology and the old Synology is so long in the tooth now that when the migration assistant goes and does whatever verification it does for the two-factor auth, it doesn't complete in time and the two-factor auth times out. So I created another user that doesn't have two-factor auth and I go to do that whole dance with migration and the migration assistant, and it's like, yep, you're good. Oh, oh, no, you're not good. Oh, God.

1:55:38You're not good because your old Synology is on, I don't even, I genuinely don't remember what file system, I guess X2 or whatever, like the - Yeah, EXT4, EXT4. The EXT4, there you go, thank you. The old Synology is EXT4, your new volume's BTRFS. So guess what? Get beeped. So - Oh, actually, so wait. replacing the drives you mentioned that a couple times now that that's what they want you to do and at first i was like well that's dumb because the whole point is you want to get a new synology that could store more and if you get a new synology and put the old drives in it but here's what i think they want you to do which is even worse i think the idea is take the old drives put them in the new thing let's say you have the right number of days to do it and then what they expect you to do is to basically swap them one at a time take out one put in a new bigger take out another one But remember how long it took for you to replace one drive on your old Synology?

1:56:28Literally days. And that had a third of the storage. So it would take you like a year and a half to replace all the drives, during which time the thing would just be thrashing constantly. Like, I don't know what they expect you to do. So it's very disappointing to hear that their migration assistant for what I think is the more sane approach is not ideal. Yeah. So if you are someone who has a better answer for this, I am all ears. But basically what I did was I said, all right, here we go. So the way I have my files organized on my Synology is that the top level has a handful of folders, but the primary one I happened to name Archive 10 years ago.

1:57:08and within my archive is like everything that's in Plex and all sorts of other junk. Like basically 98 % of the data in my Synology is in the archive folder. Maybe not literally 98, but a lion's share of that data is in the archive folder. And I mounted the old Synology as a network share from the new Synology and said, go. And a day and a half, I think it was later, because I'm running this, the old Synology is on a bonded two connection, you know gigabit ethernet connect uh to the to the switch this new one i only connected one of them i don't know if it really makes a difference anyway but it took like a day and a half to transfer something like eight terabytes but the problem that i have and why i've been kind of kicking this can down the road a little bit for the last week is that the old synology is a moving target like i'm constantly adding updating changing whatever on the old synology so i think what i have to do is like either log into one of these via the terminal which you can do and is very easy or or somewhere else set up some sort of like fairly regular uh rsync which synology can do that they have a feature that can because i i sync one of my synology volumes to another separate physical synology with a feature built into their operating system to do that for you well then you and i need to talk after the show see me after class you think i actually know where that setting is in the settings no i set that up 10 years ago but yeah i could probably find it Well, let's talk about this after class.

1:58:36But yeah, so I'm going to need to do something like that to do, to some degree, have a, not a literal, but a figurative hot swap between these two. Because at some point, I'm just going to need to move from one to the other. And my intention is that the old one will be a, not maybe a hot swappable, but a local backup in the same way that I have a Synology remotely at my parents that has a full backup. I'm hoping that the 8-bay one I'll move to a different room or put in the garage or something like that and that'll become a local backup for emergency purposes but nevertheless at some point I need to cut everything over which means I need to get all the data in sync between the two which isn't that big a deal but is something that would require some sort of automated thing like rsync or whatever Synology's bespoke thing is and actually I believe that one of the migration assistant approaches is basically our sink under the hood or something like that, or maybe it's not my migration system, maybe it's something else, but nevertheless, I'm going to have to do something along those lines, but as much as I am super jazzed for this new Synology, and I mean that, and I they still have a full-throated endorsement from me, or maybe a maybe not a full-throated, maybe a almost full-throated endorsement, the one gotcha that I have had in the 10 years of Synology bliss is, wow, is this migration story real bad, and it really really bums me out, and it's I'll get through it.

2:00:02I'll get past it. And as with many things, if this is the most of my problems right now, I am so very incredibly lucky, but golly, what a pain in the butt it is. And so at some point I will have more to say about this, but that's basically all I got for right now. I was thinking about if I, but I always think about getting a new Synology and someday my thing is going to blow up and I'm going to be sad. Um, but like what I think about is like, oh, you know, I kind of made a mess of my various volumes and stuff. I'm like, oh, I wouldn't want the new one set up this way. And what I periodically do, cause I'm paranoid is I do the thing in Synology where you can essentially back up your system settings to a single file right have you done that I know of what you speak and I think I did it like a couple of years back but I don't think I've done it since yeah you can do it to the network and you also download a local file and this is just like the settings of like I guess it's stuff like what network am I on and like you know I don't know like it can't be that much obviously it's not the data right it's just a tiny little file that does the configuration so my thought would be I'd get a new one I would do a backup of my old system settings restore that backup onto the new one set up all the volumes how i want and then i would essentially do like the i guess the equivalent of a clean install on a mac where i manually well you know with rsync or whatever copy the files from like oh here's all my plex stuff manually copy those to where the plex stuff is on my new thing i'm not sure how i would handle like the plex metadata because i honestly don't even know where the heck that is hiding on my synology but like basically take all the files and app configuration from my old one and put it in where their new home is going to be on the new one myself, one batch of things at a time until I had everything updated.

2:01:29And because that process would involve something like our sync to catch up to essentially, you know, to say, okay, now I need the last little bit before I cut over. I just repeat those same commands that I ran before. And hopefully they just take less time now, because most of the time they're saying I already got that, got that, got that, you know? And that, that was my plan. And you describing their migration system makes me think that I should continue to have that be my plan because at least that's a plan that's 100 under my control and it probably would be slower and less thorough but because i'm not getting rid of the old synology it you know i just got to do that to the point where i think i got it set up do the cut over and the old synology for a long time will probably still be there and i won't use it as a local backup of anything i'll just let it sit there exactly as it is encased in amber and if i'm like oh something's not set up how is that set up on the old synology i'll just go look until a year has passed and i'm satisfied that the new one yeah does everything the old one did and then i'll wipe the old one and you know use it as a backup or something yeah no i completely agree with that approach the only thing i would say is i'm not sure what the writer answer is should you put the data there first or should you restore the settings i i i'm quibbling over a minor issue at this point you gotta do the settings first gotta well i don't know because like the settings aren't they're gonna do i'm gonna do restore the settings and they're not gonna be quite right and things are going to be screw up and maybe you'll even conflict with the old one because it'll just be like i want that ip no i want it no i got the dynamic dns like i'd want it to be entirely empty while i'm screwing with getting the system settings right and changing my mind about how to format things and looking at all the different features and they're like the data would be the last thing i would do or like okay now it's set up the way it's named the way i want dynamic dns is set up the networking is the way i want i figured out the ethernet connection everything's all good it's in physically the place where it's supposed to be then i would start copying data over the only the The only big question for me is the only app I really care about that has metadata is like, where is the Plex database?

2:03:20Where is that Plex thing hiding? I don't actually know. There's a really good write-up that I'm not going to be able to find and we'll forget to put in the show notes. But Plex does have a migration like FAQ or instructions doc or whatever somewhere online. And I've followed it before. And I think I've done this like four or five or six times. And I think all but one. It worked pretty much flawlessly. and it will describe to you where you need to look for the metadata and things of that nature and if you follow the instructions and if you follow them fairly religiously it turns out it will generally work so you're gonna have to dig it up somewhere but if you follow those directions it should be fine well that's good to hear yeah plex isn't really pretty good i just haven't ever tried it before but it occurs to me that i have no idea where it is and also every time you install plex in the synology it makes a bunch of directories where it thinks you should put stuff and of course I never put my stuff there so I don't know how many of those directories I have hanging around as like decoys with this little tiny like trivial empty databases and metadata stores that are just waiting to trip me up.

2:04:20Well that's not the real location that was five versions ago where I put it. Yeah. Anyway, so I am excited. I am genuinely excited. And again, don't take this one faux pas. Maybe that's not what I'm looking for. This one stumbling block as a reason not to get a synology. because they didn't ask me to say anything about this. And I'm telling you the honest truth. But I really do advise you. These devices are so nice to have. And it's so wonderful to not have to worry about hard drive space. But golly, if you're looking to upgrade, tread carefully because it is a bit of a pain. Everyone sent hate mail to Synology that say it's unconscionable that you don't let people use third-party drives.

2:05:01Like I don't begrudge them selling their own drives. And they can even say this is the easiest way to do it. and they should offer like a better guarantee. That's exactly what I said. When I was lighting up my couple of contacts at Synology, I was like, look, if you want to sell your own drives, fine. If you want to say that you get more or better support when you use your Synology branded drives, fine. But to be sounding the alarm, oh my God, oh my God, you're going to blow up your Synology. Like that's just not necessary. Yeah, I mean, like we were saying when we talked about this, like they'll mark the volume as degraded and you can't even replace drives on it in the extreme cases.

2:05:32And, you know, there's third party ways to hack around this, but it's just you don't want to have a business where it's just routinely understood that you have to install a third-party hack to allow you to use drives that work perfectly fine so shame on you synology