563: Drain the Attic

38:47Basically, it would allow, from an Apple user's perspective, it would allow you to send images to Android users that are not potato quality and presumably receive them in good quality as well. I believe it has an affordance for typing indicators and read receipts and things of that nature. So there's a lot of very cool and interesting features that would improve the messaging experience between iPhone users and Android phone users. Additionally, we got confirmation that these messages would remain green. So it's not like they're going to get a different color. They're certainly not going to be blue, but they will remain green.

39:26So they are still second-class citizens i mean they're still not iMessages and it is worth noting that rcs does not have any official uh spec for end-to-end encryption which is allegedly allegedly why apple was sticking its heels in and refused to implement it um we don't know what their change of pace is but i'm sure it had nothing to do with increased uh regulatory pressure basically everywhere surely that had nothing to do with this whatsoever i think apple would have searched anyway because here's the deal especially with the way they're handling it uh iMessage is Apple's messaging service but there's also a the messaging service that is not owned by any of the platforms it's not owned by Google it's not owned by Apple than that in the olden days was SMS because it was owned by the it was part of the cell network it was sort of shoved into the cell network in a clever way uh it predates the existence of these big smartphone platforms so that was kind of like the messaging system that nobody owned but of course sms was terrible very limited very old not secure in any way whatsoever right so apple from day one not day one on the iphone i guess well i don't know do you remember when how when did i message come but was that before 2007 or after um it was after i think it was ios 4 or 5 steve jobs was alive during for that right well anyway in the whole history of time that apple has had i message which is its better messaging service that you know uses encryption and apple owns it and controls it and uses the internet is built in you know that's apple's thing they've also always had to support the thing that everybody else uses which back in the day was sms i don't think that's ever going to go away there's a huge explosion in and things like iMessage WhatsApp, Line, WeChat those are giant platforms but still they have all those combined iMessage or maybe it's because they're separate iMessage, WhatsApp, line, WeChat, all those things have not yet been able to eliminate SMS.

41:18SMS is still the lowest common denominator. So many things that you do online or whatever, essentially expect lowest common denominator, I need to be able to send you a quote unquote, text message with SMS, at least in the US. Obviously, in other countries, things like WeChat are just so dominant that maybe they have essentially eliminated SMS. But globally, SMS has not been expunged like smallpox. They're still not like small box maybe what was that thing that polio they recently almost entirely got rid of right anyway the u.s we still have sms and a little bit of polio anyway right because it's vaccine deniers it's worth building on that just very briefly because if you're european or basically any other developed country it is extremely weird to to think that sms is still a thing but truly if you're in the in the united states the only common denominator that you can pretty much guarantee that everyone can communicate with is SMS.

42:14We don't have a de facto standard between Line or WeChat or... What's up. Thank you, WhatsApp. I couldn't think of the name of it. I know that each country or region tends to kind of settle on one of these third-party apps that's not by a platform vendor. America never really did that. And so the closest we have to everyone being on WhatsApp is everyone can send SMSs. And so if I were to send a text message to the people in my life that have Android phones, that's going to be an SMS. And like John said, that technology is ancient as crap, and it's creaky as crap, and it stinks for everyone involved.

42:54But that's what we've got. And real time follow up iMessage was 2011. Yeah. And not only is like, oh, we have this lowest common denominator, businesses and websites and other things, they don't just do the lowest common they do nothing else there's not like oh well if you have iMessage we'll send you an iMessage and if you use WhatsApp we'll send you no they'll never do any of that they will only send you SMS which sucks for so many reasons like you know sim cloning and other security things like two factor stuff is very often SMS and only SMS they don't give you an option to use iMessage they don't give you an option to use WhatsApp they don't give an option to use Signal no it's just SMS and I know like oh you know like so many other things uh you know the metric system or whatever it's like well it's just the u.s and a few other weird things but we're pretty big and you know apple google are here so sorry we apologize but uh but that's that's the problem right so rcs right rcs is not as terrible as sms it is not as good as any of the modern end-to-end encrypted systems or whatever but in theory rcs is not controlled by any of the individual platforms not controlled by apple it's not controlled by google it's kind of controlled by all the carriers together but they're so technically incompetent we don't worry about them too much um so if and when the lowest common denominator changes from sms to rcs of course apple was going to support it they're not in a big rush they're not enthusiastic about it they're not going to say rcs is great everyone should use it no but apple hates sms just as much as all of us do and i i think one of their complaints about rcs is like you made a new standard and you didn't deal with encryption that was seems like a bad move and i agree but it's like look if it's better than sms it was inevitable that apple would support it it remains to be seen whether rcs will supplant sms like i know that's kind of the plan it's like it's sms is old and this is the new carrier supported thing that's not owned by apple or google so blah blah blah although of course google has its own proprietary encryption uh extension on top of rcs that apple's not going to use because why would they use a thing made by google but i'm not entirely sure that rcs will come and slowly but surely everyone who's getting sms messages will start getting them through rcs but if it's successful you know people who live in in our world where when people say text message what they mean is sms and mms that people will continue to say text message but oh they don't know it's actually arriving through rcs the new lowest common denominator so i'm not surprised by this but apple will always you know as long as apple continues that policy of supporting their thing and also the lowest common denominator they will track the lowest common denominator they will and it really should be greatest common denominator i know the mathematical foundation of that expression in english does not make sense i'm sorry people from other countries who don't like the math but that's what we call it here again we use literatively to mean figuratively and vice versa it's a mess um so i think that this is a straightforward thing like you know unless apple decides you know what we're just going to go all i message and that's going to be that and maybe we'll expand iMessage to other platforms this is just going to be a fact of life if and when RCS comes up with an end-to-end encryption thing which Apple is trying to contribute to like not Google's proprietary extension but a thing that's part of the standard for encryption I think Apple will support that too Apple's job with iMessage is to continue to make it better than the lowest common denominator and I think they're currently succeeding and even if rcs gets standard and encryption i think our message will still be slightly ahead of it due to the integration due to the probably additional security and so on and so forth so i give a apple thumbs up on this move i was never quite sure why they were so cranky about rcs other than trying to highlight how much better i message is but i'm not surprised to see it supported and i'm not surprised to see them continue to be green bubbles because that's what rcs is the new thing that's behind your green bubbles, maybe.

46:44Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that this was sat on until very large regulatory scrutiny came about. Look, Apple means well and they don't usually hold stuff back artificially. That's true in almost every way. But Apple knew and knows as well as we do that those blue bubbles and the iMessage functionality is not only very strong lock-in to iOS, but also it creates peer pressure. When you have that one friend who turns all your group chats green and makes them suck for everyone else because they're on Android, when it comes time for that person to replace that phone, you know their friends are telling them, just get an iPhone, please.

47:29Like, for the love of God, stop greenifying all of our group chats. And by the way, the other part of that dynamic is another reason Apple is doing this. All right, so that dynamic we're all familiar with oh you green bubble fight it you feel like that because you don't know the flip side of that which i'm sure casey has experienced is you're you're in an iMessage thread and someone is a green bubble right and yes so they get the pressure of like oh why don't you have an iphone or whatever but then what happens is that thread becomes unreliable people are missing messages you can't tell what's what things are going out of order you only see it on one device and when that happens you've already been angered at the green bubble person like oh why don't you have an iPhone be like us get iPhones or whatever right that's already happened now what happens is why don't we use something other than iMessage because it's clear that the iPhone quote-unquote or your iPhones or our iPhones or iMessage cannot are not up to the task of communicating in this group of people that we need to communicate with so why don't we go to WhatsApp or whatever right because WhatsApp is available on Android WhatsApp is available on the Mac and oh, now the thread doesn't lose messages anymore.

48:37And that is what Apple absolutely does not want. So one of the things that is touted about RCS is, oh, now you can have green group conversations with those green bubble people and maybe they'll actually work better. That's the promise. I don't know if that's actually going to happen, but that is, I think, becoming the dominant factor. And I see a lot of my, you know, people I know in my life and my children getting off of iMessage and moving to something like WhatsApp because it is cross-platform and actually works. I mean, I'm sure that plays a role, no question. But I think the regulatory pressure here, it played a much greater role in the timing of this.

49:11You know, I think what Apple is going for here, strategy wise, there's, you know, places like the EU are looking at iMessage as this major, like, you know, abusive monopoly kind of lock in thing. And a couple angles about it that I think Apple wants to minimize in the eyes of regulators. Maybe they want to say iMessage isn't its own separate network, but it's part of SMS or part of messaging or whatever. So that might be part of their argument. But I think a bigger thing is there is this perception, which I think is backed by pretty solid evidence, that the iPhone makes SMS or makes messages from other platforms worse.

49:52It makes the experience worse. And look, if everyone else, if all of Android supports RCS features and Apple's sitting here with the limitations of old ancient SMS, I can see that argument, that Apple is maybe, quote, artificially holding back non-iPhone chat capabilities to make them look worse and to make people want to buy iPhones more or whatever. And if Apple goes to the level of RCS, and not Google's variety of RCS, but just says, we're going to support this standard, and we're still going to color them green so that that way they can say, look, people want to know whether they're secure or not, or whether they support the full feature set or not.

50:29But we're going to rise to the standard of the industry cross-platform standard features. We will support those just fine. So therefore, we are not holding anything back. We are not artificially penalizing Android people. We're going to support this industry standard just fine. And also, if the message is blue, you know that's more secure. I think that's going to be more their argument here. I don't think they really care that much about having the experience actually be nicer for Android people in this particular case, because this is a very powerful thing that sells iPhones. So I think ultimately this is 100 % regulatory defense.

51:06And again, I don't ascribe less than good motives to Apple with a lot of this stuff because I know it's usually not true. In this particular case, the strategic and lock-in value of the iMessage is so massive to Apple's most profitable and most important platform and product. it would be i think foolish to rule it out as a reason i think this is absolutely regulatory defense probably on those angles i think it's more like usbc where apple is going to do it anyway is just a question of the timing and yeah regulatory pressure can rush along the timing or dictate the time but you know usbc they did it a year before they had to rcs i'm not sure how much this is actually going to defend them i mean it looks good and it's a little bit of cover but if the complaint is that you're you the platform owns a messaging service that they privilege they will continue to privilege it right yeah rcs exists and you know you could say oh see look we upgraded from sms so now it's not as bad but yeah the interoperability angle though is actually a problem for apple's customers and if they're not thinking this they should be because not being able to have a group conversation a quote-unquote heterogeneous group conversation meaning people from apple and non-apple platforms not being able to have that reliably makes apple's phones worse right and it makes people want not want to be on iMessage because very few people can sort of purify their life by ensuring that everybody they communicate with is going to have an iphone i certainly can't it's probably like 50 50 of the the business text messages i send and text messages to like you know other parents or like other school related things or you know anybody like people coming to my house to do work are they going to have blue bubbles are they going have green bubbles am i in a group conversation with multiple parents in a school thing or what you just can't there's no way to say they're all going to be blue so what actually happens is you buy an iphone you want to use i message you find yourself in heterogeneous conversations and they're just not reliable and that's frustrating and it makes you think your phone is broken and in this country at least you can't say to the whole parent teacher group hey everybody let's get on whatsapp that does not work no no one knows what that is or wants to do it or they just say i just want to use text and so you're the problem now you're the blue bubble person is the problem because it's working fine on my phone i don't see what your problem is i'm not missing any messages or whatever again i'm not saying that's why apple is doing this but it should be part of their motivation because they actually have a problem and if adopting rcs can make heterogeneous conversations more reliable that's going to be a perhaps surprising to apple huge win for them whether they know it or not all right and then another quick piece of uh i guess this could have been follow-up, but we'll treat it as a topic.

53:46Apple has kicked the can with regard to the iPhone 14 satellite features. This is the year-ago iPhones. They had said on launch that you would get free satellite 911 or 999 or whatever your particular equivalent is. You would get that for free for a year. Apple announced sometime earlier this month they're going to extend it for an additional year for iPhone 14 users. And for the 15 users, well, you get it free for a year. So we don't have to worry about that yet, at least. So we're just going to kick that can and hope for the best. Yeah. So basically, to summarize, since launching Emergency SOS via satellite, Apple has not yet announced what the plan will be when your free coverage period of that runs out.

54:31Because so far, no products have lapsed into that, you know, out of the free state yet. and looking at this like can you imagine what a just a pr and just a human nightmare it would be if someone dies and could have been saved by this feature but their subscription expired like i don't see any good way out of this pr wise except just make the feature free for the lifetime of these phones like and ultimately i think that's probably what apple will end up doing here what when they launched it i think they set a time bound in part because they probably didn't really know what their usage of this feature and therefore costs of this feature would really be i'm sure i mean i'm sure they had some kind of estimates but until you get this out into lots of people's phones in the real world it's hard to really know well now they know they have a year of usage from the iphone 14 line having it.

55:29Now the iPhone 15s, of course, also have like by now, I think they have a much better idea of what this feature is actually costing them in practice. And that allows them to do two things. You know, number one, it allows them probably to go to the satellite vendor that they're doing this through, and maybe negotiate better rates over time, because now they have more, you know, predictable usage. And then number two, this allows them to better account for it, and control their costs in terms of how that how are they accounting for this in the purchase price of the phone and i just don't see any other outcome other than they just keep kicking the can down the road until they finally just say all right you know what it's just free forever for these phones because i i don't think it's being used so heavily that they would need you know cost wise that they would need to limit it too much because the feature itself it's already limited in terms of like you can't do a lot of like chatting or data usage over the satellite like it's engineered to do extremely low data usage kind of preset things and and not cost that much in terms of satellite usage so i i bet it costs them little enough that they are they will they will eventually choose just to make it free for the lifetime of these phones because the alternative of having to like asking people to pay for this or only including it in certain you know iCloud plus plans or whatever if they ask people to pay for it they know most people won't pay for it and i you know apple is especially like you know i've heard tim cook in particular has has apparently multiple occasions use the phrase apple products don't kill people like really like he believes very firmly apple products don't kill people in parentheses directly right Now, and that, by the way, like, and I heard, I heard that was in the context of like, of the old car project, like you better make sure you don't mess this up because Apple products don't kill people.

57:24And we'll get and that's a whole, the car project, I think, if it wasn't dead already, I think their their carbon neutral plans killed it because there is you talk about like, how would you make that product carbon neutral beginning to end, including the energy it uses during its lifetime? Good luck. so anyway i think that project is well and truly dead at this point but anyway going back to the the satellite sos thing i i think apple loves that feature they they i think feel very proud as they should that it really is saving people's lives it like they you see these news stories pop up all the time now from from some you know car accident victim or hiker or something that was saved by this particular feature in an area where they wouldn't have had any or many other options so that's a that is a great thing for the world it's a great story for apple it's a great thing that sells iphones and it really is helping people greatly and possibly and and in many cases saving people's lives and and i think for for the probably very minimal cost it is costing apple in satellite usage relative to the you know the overall margin on these phones and everything i think they will probably conclude whenever the time comes that they have to make a firm decision they will probably conclude it is not worth risking losing people's lives who could have had this feature who have the hardware to do it and just didn't buy the five dollar a month extra thing on their on their plan to to allow it because it's so inexpensive the easy way to still get money for this is you just charge for per usage retroactively right so no one signs up for anything no one pays for anything but oh did you use it to save your life guess what you get charged 10 bucks and once you've been saved from the wilderness you'll pay that 10 happily it's the best 10 you ever spent in your life right you're never going to be stopped from sending that's interesting you never need to sign up for anything right but like again they know how low the usage is if the usage is pretty low and you you'd only charge them retroactively right and and they just eat the cost like what if someone's on an iphone and they don't even have an apple id then just do it for free right but in in the common case where someone has an apple id apple knows who they are Apple probably already has their credit card, charge them retroactively, you know, and charge them retroactively a small fee.

59:39You know what I mean? And that's like, oh, it's going to discourage people from doing it. If you're trapped in the wilderness, you're going to use it. You're not going to care that you're going to get charged two bucks. Like you won't buy that extra iCloud space, but when you're freezing on the mountain, you'll use the SOS feature, despite the fact that you know that in your next month's bill from Apple, you're going to see a$2 charge or whatever doing for free would be great. But I mean, once you start going that route, you say, well, you know, it would be great if Apple gave you like two years of unlimited cloud storage with each phone that you bought, because that would encourage people to get new phones.

1:00:05Then people would actually save their photos. I just had this conversation with my sister where she said, Hey, I need you to help me set up the iCloud thing for my photos. And it made me realize she still doesn't have iCloud photo library enabled. So all her photos are only on her computer. What is she? Casey? Yeah. Oh, I have it enabled now. You big jerk. She doesn't have a cloud back. She doesn't have anything. Why? Well, who pays for storage? Like it doesn't, you know, but she's just been, She's finally succumbed to this. After years of being my sister and hearing me complain about this, now she's finally willing to pay, but she doesn't quite know how to do it.

1:00:34But anyway, people won't pay to save their photos. And when the photos are gone, if you told them, hey, retroactively, if you give me$100 for every year that you use this phone and I give you all your photos back, they'd throw that money at you, right? Because then their family photos are gone. But before it happens, like, I'll be fine. It's not quite the same as dying in a mountain, but it would be nice if Apple built into the cost of the phone enough money to give Apple its margins for two years worth of iCloud storage. But of course, if you look at that, well, how much does that iCloud storage actually cost?

1:01:01They make so much more money from the tiny number of users that actually pay for it. Because, you know, what is like you buy a 256 gig phone, what does 256 gigs of iCloud storage actually cost you per year? It's not like two extra dollars. So anyway, this is part of the topic that we probably won't get to this week uh about uh when you pay more for a product uh like how do you deliver extra value for the extra money and lots of historically lots of expensive products have been very expensive but have given you something that you can't get for less money whether it's like buying clothes from an expensive store where you get easy hassle-free returns or back in the day you'd buy very expensive you know luggage and they would be high quality and last a long time remember those days um you used to get things for the money not proportional you'd pay two times as much and but it would be 20 better or you'd pay 17 times as much and it would be 15 better but it would actually be better and it'd be better in ways that that are perceived uh to be more valuable than they are like well you know i don't have to deal with hassles of returns if i don't like it i just returned it no matter how long it's been or was the story about that merlin tells about a some returning snow tires at like a Nordstrom or something and they don't sell snow tires but you just take the return anyway because that's how you keep uh rich customers happy right apple is not in the same class as that but they also sell very expensive phones so it'd be nice if paying that extra money got you some stuff that people consider valuable and free sos satellite service for every iphone customer definitely fits that bill so would uh free storage equivalent to the size of the phone that you bought for the life of that phone and if you only did it for two years instead of for the life of the phone it might encourage people to upgrade as well but apple is not yet on that page so we get five gigs for free Two more little quick things on the SOS thing before I forget and before people write in about it.

1:02:53Number one, there are a lot of cellular Apple devices. I don't know if iPads do it, but I know phones do it, and I think watches might do it too, where even if you don't have a cellular plan activated, you can place free emergency 911 calls from those devices at any time. Yeah, that's a legal requirement in some places too, I think. Yeah, probably. And I'm sure there's some deal with the carriers where maybe Apple doesn't really have to pay for that. But there is some precedent for free cellular 911 access for the life of the device. And again, I'm sure it works differently with satellite providers and legality and everything.

1:03:29But that is something to think about as a possible parallel or precedent to set here. And then secondly, there was a rumor that breezed through this fall rumor season that Apple might be looking to expand the satellite SOS feature into what sounded like from the rumor, basically free text chatting. like freeform, full texting, not just sending kind of canned messages or locations. I wonder if maybe the plan here, and maybe they just haven't finished it yet, but maybe the plan here is to launch a paid satellite messaging plan where maybe the current thing that we know of as Emergency SOS, which is just like location and 911 basically, if that remains free, but then they have like a premium tier, as you know whether separately or part of one of their bundles maybe that is you know you can you can text wherever you are for and that might be useful for people who frequently go outside of cell phone coverage areas um and you know so maybe maybe the plan here is this this free thing will remain free and it will be partly funded by this premium thing that we're going to launch as as an extra bonus you know at some point in the future yeah that would be small potatoes to apple but maybe to the satellite companies they would like those custom they that's lucrative for them because they can you know charge apple a lot which then apple can charge their customers even more because so few on the grand scheme of things percentage wise iphone customers need to be able to text images from sos but the ones that do you can probably charge them a lot because they're you know they live in the mountains and it's worth it to them uh and again that's a tiny tiny percentage of iphone users but a tiny tiny percentage of iphone users is a large number of people absolute values to these satellite companies maybe so we'll see yeah and like there already are like garmin sells these products called in reach uh satellite communicators that a lot of hikers and stuff use and they're they're literally just like little tiny smartphone like things that just have satellite modems built into them and they sell these plans and i think they're like 10 to 50 bucks a month like for the for the plans i have one buried somewhere for like a super emergency stuff but i have like the bottom end plan that allows almost nothing there this is a whole market of the satellite communicator things that allow text messaging at certain plan levels and stuff like that and so there is clearly a market it wouldn't surprise me to see apple get into this market with their new sos feature and to just have it be like a five or ten dollar a month add-on or part of apple one premium plus whatever you know i think that's probably where this is gonna head but i i still bet that the for that the sos feature set we have now at the emergency 911 calling and stuff, I bet that remains free forever.

1:06:08I sure hope so. Yeah, and it was designed from day one to be as minimally intrusive to use as little bandwidth as possible, just basically to be as cheap as possible, essentially. And to work in more places. Because a lot of times, if you don't have a very good view of a satellite, suppose you're stuck in a canyon or something, if you don't have a great view of a satellite, it might take you a very long time to reliably transmit enough bits to even communicate what you need to communicate so they the protocol that it sends the satellites is very simplified and uses very few bits of actual data transfer because it has to get through some pretty severe not only very long distance but also like some severe conditions and like very low signal or you know high noise ratios and stuff it's made to be extremely resilient and simple that's what i need to use when i'm picking my daughter up from her school because her high school of course is in a cell phone dead zone so when you arrive and you want to text your child and say hey i'm here to pick you up you can't you get to see the little blue bar i message go almost all the way across the top of the screen and then just sit there oh it's frustrating you're just waiting to see that word delivered and they're trying to text you and of course they're on school wi-fi so they think all their messages are going through but none of them are reaching me and why they don't just stick a gigantic cell tower in the center of the school's campus i don't know but by the time that happens my kids will have all graduated but yeah maybe i should try satellite next time help amena canyon slash outside the high school it's like when people used to like like bit pack uh their their um messages to their parents when you're calling on the pay phone from school come pick me up into the like uh the collect calling name field yeah well you accept the charges from hey pick me up at the high school yeah yeah exactly like i explained to my kids that not only could i not text message my parents went to get me i would just sit outside of the high school and just wait and assume at some point a parent will realize i'm not home and come to get me could be hours just could be hours i'm just there i was just there for hours other people are getting picked up by their parents the late bus is long since gone i missed that one i'm just gonna be at the school it's getting dark now now i'm inside because it's cold the janitors are cleaning up and you know and your life is if you can't if i don't immediately respond to your text message to come and pick you up it's like where are you kids these days oh goodness so we've had something in the show notes for months at this point i don't even know But we've had a heading Thunderbolt 5 and a link to an Intel announcement announcing Thunderbolt 5.

1:08:32Thunderbolt 5 will deliver 80 gigabits per second of bi-directional bandwidth. And with bandwidth boost, it will provide up to 120 gigabits per second for the best display experience. Built on industry standards, including USB 4 version 2. Because how could that be more confusing? I know. There's a USB 4 v2? USB 4, all caps, no space. Then a space. Then a capital V and a number 2. Because why not? Yep. How many different ways has the USB consortium named versions of USB? It's so bad. It's like the joke about, you know, term paper, final, final, V2, you know? Yeah. For real, they have gen numbers.

1:09:11They have version numbers with dots in them. They have 2x2. Now they've got V, but then they took the number and shoved it against the thing. It's just, I feel like it's a contest to see how many, like, they wrote down at the beginning they had a brainstorming meeting. they say here's all the ways we can think of to version something and they're just going down the list and checking them off indeed well anyways uh built on industry standards including usb4 space v2 thunderbolt 5 will be broadly compatible with previous versions of thunderbolt and usb why do we care john why do we care well first thing i think is fun about this is the bandwidth boost thing so it's 80 gigabits per second which is twice as fast as our current thunderbolt 4 so yay because thunderbolt 4 didn't get any faster than three it just like it up the usb4 compliance to crap but it was still 40 gigabits now they're going to 80 we like that great double speed right but it also has 120 gigabits bandwidth boost it's like where where do the extra gigabits come from why don't you use them all the time does it come from a turbo button that you have to push to make it go faster yeah no no it comes from nas so the reason they have it is basically to support big displays with lots of pixels at high frame rates like that's why that feature exists and i'm assuming they're not doing it for data because it's like well this is the display mode and we trust that you won't have really long display cables like i'm not entirely sure how they can build the standard so that it supports this for high bandwidth high frame rate displays but not support it for data but whatever that's what they're doing it's part of the spec and i'm glad because if you look at you know 40 gigabits is not really enough to do like an 8k display or even a 6k one at like 120 hertz and stuff you know what i mean like so we need a new standard just the new display port standards that they'll tunnel over this we're also having you know so now let's go to 80 but no no let's not just go to 80 because if i do the math on 80 what if you have an 8k display and you want to do 240 hertz oh we're at a bandwidth again how about 120 and of course you have display stream compression all those stuff so i give this thumbs up and i like the fact that it has um extra bandwidth for display purposes but the one small thing that i want to say about this other than yay i can't wait for thunderbolt 5 to be on our mac someday is whenever we talk about thunderbolt usb setting aside the stupid versioning number things we always complain about the same thing which continues to be an issue because this one as they say will be quote unquote broadly compatible with previous versions which means the connector will be a usbc shaped plug and that's a good connector but our complaint is always i have a bunch of cables that have that connector on them and i can't tell which ones support which things it's just power is this thunderbolt one you know two or three what version of usb does it support you know just you can't tell by looking at the cable and it's doing and i agree with that but i feel like with thunderbolt five is a time to at least recognize the thing that we never talk about but still exists which is the advantage of doing this and i thought of it related to when we were talking about dynamic caching where they're like oh we used to have three buckets of memory in the gpu and if you didn't use them efficiently one of the buckets would be going to waste and the other one would be full that's the problem we used to have on the side of laptops or on the back of desktop computers but laptops space is tighter you would have to divide up your connectors into buckets here are the connectors for this purpose here's the connectors for that purpose and here are the ones for this purpose and especially as apple reduced the number of connectors if they only gave you two from this bucket one from this one and one from this one like i really need three from the middle one but i just have one of those having all of the holes in the side of your mac book pros or most of the holes be usb c shaped and on the good computers support all support thunderbolt or whatever lets you avoid having to do the other analogy i use is the the linux partitioning thing where i got to figure out ahead of time how much i want for user how much I want for slash and how much I want for swap.

1:13:01It's just all uniform. And again, on the good fancy computers, they're all Thunderbolt. Your cables, you've still got that problem. But it solves a real problem on the side of laptops is we don't have to guess how many display connectors do you need? How many networking connectors do you need? How many storage connectors do you need? Storage, display, you know, the other one I just said, like everything that you can do it's all the same shaped hole and all the same capabilities again on the high-end computers even on the low-end ones they're all usbc or whatever that is an advantage it's better than the bad old days when apple would come up with a new laptop and you'd have to get all new cables and all new devices sometimes because this one comes with firewire 800 and all your things are firewire 400 and you can try to get a dongle and it was just we don't have that problem anymore when they go from thunderbolt 3 to thunderbolt 4 to thunderbolt five you won't need to get a new thunderbolt drive you won't need to hopefully get a new monitor that you know all your old stuff will continue to work it will fit in the same size and shape of hole we still just have the problem of you know you can't tell what the hell the wires support or what the devices support but i think on the whole i prefer this world where we can't tell what the wires are but the holes are all the same than the old world where all the wires were easily distinguishable but every time i got a new laptop we had to get all new wires and sometimes all new devices yep it's uh it's gonna be a mess as always the usb consortium my point is not gonna be a mess my point is we should appreciate we should appreciate thunderbolt and usb and all the usbc things we should appreciate the good that's about them if we know thanksgiving is on but we should give thanks because it was worse than the old days it is silly that that that is still a problem but we should appreciate the important advantage that thunderbolt and usbc give us especially now that our phones have the same shape hole in the bottom of it it's a better world.

1:14:53Could it be better still? Yes. But it is better than it was. It's better, but it's still going to be such a mess. I keep coming back to the very oddly named thing. I'm going to have to look it up and put it in the show notes. It's like cable QC or something like that. I forget what it is. But it's a Kickstarter that I backed forever ago that has two USB-C receptacles in it and a crap load of LEDs that light up based on whether or not individual lines within the cable are connected or not. Because if you have a USB-C shaped cable, you can have like USB 2 compatibility, USB 3 compatibility, Thunderbolt compatibility.

1:15:28And this at least gives you some notion as to what that cable can handle. But it's just nuts that this is a thing that we have to worry about. And yes, I agree with you that it's better to have one connector generally, but it's bananas that we have to go through all this to figure out what the hell this connector or this cable can handle. It just drives me nuts. yeah and then by the way if my proposed solution to that would be if they had as part of the standard come out with a tasteful this is the problem with apple uh with why apple reject this a tasteful standardized labeling policy for connectors because they came out with a standardized labeling policy where like the spec requires you to have this symbol on it if it's thunderbolt 2 and this symbol it would be so ugly apple would hate it and they would put it in really light gray ink on their white connectors and no one would be able to see it so it would have to be like in cooperation with apple come up with some kind of thing preferably some kind of like inset arrays thing that you could feel like it's a hard design problem i admit because these connectors are small the quote-unquote good connector companies do do that they put some kind of thing on them where you can tell thunderbolt 4 and it'll say tb4 on it or it'll have a little lightning bolt in a four like or say usb gen or put it put a gigabit rating or the ones that have the little lcd displays in them which is a little bit over the top or whatever but like that's where the solution to this problem lies it's not like let's make all the connectors different again it's let's solve the actual problem is i can't tell what this cable does and yes a cable tester solves it but that's stupid like just we have room on the cable to print or emboss something it's just that everybody does something different there's no standard and if there was a standard it would be solidly the apple refused to use it for whatever it's worth i i first of all i would love if there was like a not a kickstarter but like a just a regular product you could buy uh that that was a cable tester that would that would actually tell you not only like physically what lines are connected but like tell me what consumer facing standards this cable supports yeah so like i don't need to know if it's connected to the to the g positive three line like just tell me like does this support usb 3.2 two by two speeds or does it support thunderbolt 4 or like tell me that and and one thing i've seen from um a couple of people have suggested on mastodon i'm sorry if i i forget who so sorry um but a couple of people i've seen suggest that like wouldn't it be cool if you plugged in the two ends of a cable to two usbc ports on your macbook and apple told you what the cable supported oh that would be amazing like that would be so cool they could just test it to run the data though i think i also saw mastodon one company is doing like look we know people don't know the names of the standards so they just put a gigabits rating on them even better yeah i mean it's hard again because the print the printing has to be small and embossed and you know like it's it's a little bit tricky and standardization would help but if you're if you're interested you can find cables that are labeled in a sane way we we all own ones that aren't i mean look at the look at the uh the image in this diagram or in the the show notes it's from like an intel presentation that will link even in their thing they have a thunderbolt and a four and a thunderbolt and a five so in the in the picture we can tell oh that's the thunderbolt 4 one that's they otherwise are identical but hey a number four and number five i bet though when intel sells their connectors they don't have the four and the five of them or the thunderbolt one thing also like i i uh you know as you know we've been lamenting how weird and broken this world tends to be the the weird and broken area of this world is much more in the usb neighborhood than in the thunderbolt neighborhood a while back i think it was at the 2018 Brooklyn event that we went to, Casey, with the Apple press event that had the new, at the time, MacBook Air, Retina MacBook Air, and the 2018 11-inch and new 12.9 iPad Pros.

1:19:18At that event, I had a briefing afterwards, and I probably shouldn't say who, but somebody at Apple, who was fairly high up, I was complaining about how, look, you're leaning so heavily on USB-C here with all these new products, but the world of USB-C dongles and hubs and everything is terrible. Again, this was 2018. You think it's terrible now. It was way worse then. And what this person said has stuck with me. They said, you know, really the world of Thunderbolt stuff if you get thunderbolt certified stuff that actually you know like that has passed a number of tests from intel and certification everything like the thunderbolt products that actually bear the logo and and are tested are held to a much higher standard than most of the usb products and so yes thunderbolt products are fewer in number they are more expensive for sure they usually you know have like less graceful things like you know the power situation like they usually require these giant external power bricks because thunderbolt can supply a lot of power to its ports um so you know thunderbolt hubs and thunderbolt equipment there's less of it and it's more expensive but it usually tends to be really rock solid like this is what this person said in 2018 and i've i've remember that ever since and whenever there's a thunderbolt version of something i'm looking at i choose that and that is not very often but but whenever there is one I choose that and sure enough they've been right like the USB hubs and dongles and docks and stuff I've gotten over the years have all been flaky pieces of crap the Thunderbolt things have all been solid so it is unfortunate that like this is the more technically complex protocol that therefore brings a lot more cost and limitations to it and everything but the world of USB C shaped equipment is much much better on the Thunderbolt side than the USB side.

1:21:20So if you need something to be really reliable, and if there's a Thunderbolt option, and if you can afford it, that it really is better. So that that area of this world, I think is fine. It's just limited. But you know, it's the USB side of things that that's on that side of the of the wall here. That's that's been where I've seen the most problems. We are brought to you this week by Notion. Notion combines your notes, documents and projects all together in one beautiful space. And navigating that space is now easier than ever with Notion's new Q &A feature. This is an AI assistant called Q &A that can answer questions about next quarter's roadmap or find that marketing campaign proposal you're looking for or maybe dig up a long lost link all in seconds.

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1:23:32All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And it is the holiday season. In fact, as we record this, it is the end of Cyber Monday. Still can't believe people use that term. Gary Owen wants to know, now that we are seeing the new crop of TVs, is this the year I should splurge and upgrade my bargain bin 4K LCD TV to something better? John, I think you should probably handle this. So what's the situation? What is the landscape these days? First, I want to apologize to Gary. His question is from January 2023. Sometimes you don't get to these questions for a while. He was talking about CES. I removed the CES part.

1:24:07But I did put this in here because this is my last chance to do this, and people very often ask about this very topic. I'm going to tell you what the best TVs of this year are to buy. First, to answer Gary's question, yes. This is a good time to buy a television to get rid of your crappy old bargain-baking 4K LCD. And, you know, if I could have waited until this year, I would have. I couldn't wait. I already waited too long. But, Gary, you've probably already waited too long. So if you haven't already bought a new TV, you should. Now, people ask me, what TVs should I buy or what are the best TVs?

1:24:40You have to first understand where I'm coming from. When I'm looking for, quote unquote, the best TVs, what I want from my television is a TV that shows the image as accurately as possible. And what does that mean? What does accurately mean? Well, when video content is made, there are various standards for every part of the process, but also including the coloration of the video that the people making it adhere to. They have very expensive monitors, sometimes upwards like$30 ,000,$40 ,000 that adhere to these standards. So they can say, I want it to look like X and they look on their$50 ,000 monitor.

1:25:18And if it looks like the way they want it to look, that's how they want it to be. what i want is when i see it in my house for it to look like it did on their 50 000 calibrated monitor because otherwise they're making it a certain way uh and they think all right i've made this scene so it looks kind of this tinged with this color and it's this dark and it's this light in this area it looks the way i want it people whose job it is to do that the various colorists and the people who control the lighting on the show like they want to look a certain way they've made it a certain way if they send it out into the world and it gets into people's houses and their television is just screwed all up and it looks weird they're like oh that's not that's not what i made i made i wanted it to look like this but then all these people are seeing it this way and that is the difficult uh the difficulty facing anyone who's making video content you want you want to make it a certain way and have control over the process ideally it would look that way in people's houses that's how i'm picking tvs that is not how most people pick tvs most people as we discussed in the past pick tvs on whichever one is brighter right kind of like you pick whatever stereo is louder, pick whatever TV is brighter, whatever colors are the most garish, the most oversaturated, like people just want things they think look startling, look, you know, they, they look dramatic, but that's not what they're supposed to look like.

1:26:33So if you don't care about that, then don't listen to any of my TV recommendations, right? Second thing is I'm looking for the best. The best also is going to mean the most expensive. These are very, very expensive TVs. You should not buy one of these expensive TVs unless you care a lot about the television looking as good and as close to quote unquote correct and accurate as possibly. You don't care. Don't spend this much money on TV. Spend it on something you do care about. So with that aside, in case you're wondering, given that framing, what TV should you buy in 2023? the answer is the sony a95l for the second year in a row sony has the best television by a nose uh it's an oled display comes in 55 65 and 77 inches we'll put links in the show notes to reviews from my favorite youtube channels about this tv including bunny limb which was a blind uh one of the channels does a traditional blind uh viewing test where they invite a bunch of people from the industry in and tv calibrators and stuff to judge televisions with a bunch of test footage but they disguise the televisions so you can't see any part of the bezel or any part of the stand like they you know put cardboard and black stuff all around it just because otherwise you'd be able to tell which tv is which and then your biases of like liking a particular brand might come in and for the second year in the row the sony won that contest as well it's a quantum.oled television it is much brighter than it was last year uh and it now comes in 77 inch size and it is horrendously expensive but that's the answer sony a95l the answer next year may be different so don't hear this and think you're going to buy next year's best sony because maybe it won't be the best next year maybe things will have changed but for 2023 if you want a tv and you want to be the best it's the sony a95l which for the record is three thousand three hundred dollars on amazon on cyber monday but that's the 65 inch right correct 77 is even more expensive that is five grand yes for a television and you can't get it bigger than 77s tvs do come in bigger than 70s anyway so the the runner-up is the lgc3 lg has traditionally been the leader in oled televisions they don't have a quantum dot television but they do have these micro lens array things where they put the tiny tiny microscopic lenses over the front of them that makes it super duper bright um it does have some advantages of the sony 85l but it has more disadvantages one of the advantages it has is it comes in 83 inch size it's also way less expensive than the sony it's less expensive because lg in general is less expensive than sony and it's probably less expensive because the the lg makes the the panels the oled panels and uh the quantum dot ones are made by samsung so sony has to buy them from samsung and has to repackage them um lg c3 is great if you care about gaming which you'll notice i didn't mention before the lg televisions support more high bandwidth ports for like pc gaming if you want to connect a gaming pc to this and play at like 120 140 hertz uh the lg supports more better gaming related standards so not that the sony is bad for gaming but if you are connecting a gaming pc to it or even if you're connecting you know xbox series x and you want to run that at really high frame rates with hdr and everything the lg tvs are a better bet uh speaking of oleds the the final thing i'll tell you about the best televisions this year is since they are both OLEDs OLED burns in it just does uh if you have never had an OLED television or you leave CNN on your television all day for hours at a time don't get an OLED you'll be sad if you are going to play a game with a permanent opaque HUD on this screen for hours and hours and hours every day for years at a time you will burn in your television don't do that don't get an oled we'll put links in the show notes to our tings uh many months at this point maybe years long uh burn-in tests of oled so you can just hopefully it'll be like one of those scared straight videos so they show you to try to keep you off drugs in school when you see what these televisions look like if they're left tuned to cnn all day with a news ticker at the bottom you will maybe think twice about leaving the room with the television pause to go to the bathroom i know you these tvs all have screensavers and they have all sorts of features to mitigate this but the bottom line is do not leave static elements on your oled screen for long periods of time they will burn in you will be sad it will look bad don't do it that's also part of the price you're paying for the very best picture quality it means you can't play a video game with a permanent hut on it for hours and hours a day you cannot watch cnn for seven hours a day on these televisions it will ruin them don't do it watch movies watch tv shows yeah and definitely don't play Minecraft unless you want to see the heart bar on everything you ever watch forever after that.

1:31:07Yeah, that's why I was so excited about Tears of the Kingdom because I forget Breath of the Wild this, but Tears of the Kingdom has a mode with no HUD. I was like, yes, played the whole game, hundreds of hours on my television, no HUD. It's also a more immersive experience. It's great. Although the Hallmark Channel is now putting a stupid bug in the bottom corner of the screen half the time, which is really annoying. Does the Hallmark Channel usually specify in very immersive experiences? I'm just like, what they have in the bottom is like, uh you know i don't know what that the branding is for like hallmark home for the holidays like i get it we know we're watching a hallmark movie you don't need to put red text in the lower right corner of the screen for two hours it's annoying um so what if you can't deal with an oled what if you plan on leaving it on cnn all day what other options do you have they do make televisions that are not oleds that are almost as good but not quite and my recommendation there is the sony x95l which comes in 75 and 85 inch sizes only so this is a really big tv this is an lcd television with led backlights sony does a really good job with these of controlling the backlights and controlling bloom while still again sony's big thing is still having accurate color and all these things you have to actually go to the settings and turn them into whatever the accurate mode is called uh i forget i think it's called like custom or professional on the sony's it's called filmmaker mode on the lg which supports filmmaker mode which is a branded thing to basically say just show it how it's supposed to be shown setting up the televisions is complicated and it's beyond the scope of these buying recommendations but uh yeah and the other option for lcde televisions is the sony x90l which is as far as i can tell it's like a smaller size version of the x95l it comes in 55 65 75 85 and 98 i guess it's probably older it comes in really big stuff it's older than the x95 i just don't understand why the x95 only comes in 75 and 85 but it does but both of these televisions are good choices if you don't care about gaming because you should just get an lg something if you do um and but you can't handle oled because you're just not going to deal with that burn-in stuff so sony x95l sony x90l these televisions will not have oled's burn issues they will not look as good as oled's but they'll look pretty darn good and by good i I mean, pretty darn accurate.

1:33:21And the final thing that I'll say is if you want to hear about televisions that are not horrendously expensive because you don't care about any of this accuracy BS, watch the Digital Trends Best TVs of 2023 video that we'll put a link to in the show notes. It shows you televisions that regular people buy for way less money that are also really good and that are also way, way better than Gary's Bargain Bin 4K LCD television. Because technology has come a long way. and for reasonable pretty low prices you can get a really good looking tv that is way better than the television you bought like five years ago especially if what you bought five years ago was not a horrendously expensive television that actually took a lot less time than i thought i think that might have been quicker than your thunderbolt 5 and i've also gone through i've been advising a friend about uh buying uh fancy televisions this year so i had to not that i'm not usually on top of this stuff but i had to go through the list and find what all the best televisions are and for a little while it was touching go because 1885 L was released after all the other televisions so for a while it was like is the sony going to be the best one this year but the answer is yes so it's kind of a shame because 2024 is going to be here and the 2024 TVs guess what they'll be better so you have to do what I did which is like at the time you buy you just look at what's available and buy the best choice if you keep waiting till next year's model next year's model will always be better so there's just no getting off that treadmill and that's how you end up replacing a plasma television with an oled like i did out of curiosity um what what part of the year does the model year typically turn over for tvs that's a good question it used to be more synced up to be kind of like spring after ces but the sony like barely came out in the fall i think some of that might have been like delays with the second generation qd oled panel so at this point it's like i mean you it's still mostly spring but because the best tv this year is out in the fall it spreads it over the whole year so like the reviews have kind of been staggering out it's like oh the lgs are out pretty soon because they're not too different from the ones that came before and then samsung's qd oled comes out because they make the panel and they give them cell source dibs and then finally sony's comes out so they're smeared across kind of the whole middle of the year which kind of sucks but it's just that's something you have to you can't like there's no like oh buy now and then there'll be a year turnover if you buy the sony 85l now but sony comes out with a new tv in the spring you'll have a very short window when this was the best tv available but you know that's that that's the way it is you can't you can't wait forever and i honestly i think the jump from the first generation qdo led panel to the second in terms of maximum brightness and everything is bigger than whatever the jump will be next year from the second generation to the third and who knows maybe there won't be a new panel and maybe it'll just be a new chipset that is the one annoying thing that i should mention here which again you can't do anything about but um the reason lg is good at gaming is because they make their own chips for handling like the hdmi crap and everything i think they're the only company that supports full bandwidth 48 gigabits per second hdmi 2.1 on all their hdmi ports every other tv in the entire world supports it on like two ports and why because they have to buy their chipsets from i think media tech or whatever there's a couple other companies that do it as well maybe and these companies only support 48 full 48 gigabits per second on a small number of ports their chipsets just don't support it on so they put four hdmi ports but only two of them are the quote-unquote good ones again this only matters for high frame rate being like 120 frames per second high bit depth stuff so it really only matters for pc gaming or high you know high-end console gaming but really pc gaming so most people don't care but it is disappointing that like we've been you know hdmi 2.1 has been out for many years now and still when you buy a television you have to look in the manual and say which one is hdmi 1 or 2 or 3 like which one of these are the quote unquote good ones and do i care for the device that i'm connecting it there was a rumor back before ces speaking of ces that uh media tech was coming out with a new pentonic chipset that was going to have hdmi 2.1 on all four ports uh but that was marketing bs live because as we discussed before you can call yourself hdmi 2.1 if you support like any subset of the features so yeah only two of the ports were 40 gigabits per second uh and that was disappointing so you know it does make that much of a difference but like i next year the year after at some point all the hdmi ports are going to be the good ones it's kind of like if you bought a macbook pro and there was like one thunderbolt 4 port and the rest of them were usb and you had to remember which one it was that's what televisions have been like i don't know for many many years now and i just we're just all waiting around for one of these third-party companies that does the the chipsets say all the ports are good they're all they all support all the things and we're still not there and that's one of the reasons by the way one of the reasons sony is expensive and one of the reasons it wins it's because sony puts its own additional processing chips inside there to help out the crappy media tech one to make the television look better it also adds a little bit of input lag which is another reason you should get an lg if you care about gaming steven tallow writes ever have a file stored in iCloud drive randomly revert to an earlier version I had a large PDF stored in iCloud Drive.

1:38:20On my up-to-date MacBook and iPad, I found that iCloud Drive suddenly reverted back to a version of the file that predates the most recent edits by four days, losing around 10 sets of edits that happened over those four days. I had no time machine backup because I'd been away from my time machine external drive and assumed I was safe because I was editing a file live synchronized with iCloud Drive. Apple support escalated to Apple engineering and engineering replied that no forensic data was available and the recovery of the most recent version would not be possible. So in other words, apparently piss off, Stephen Teller.

1:38:52That's not fun. I use iCloud Drive extremely sparingly. So I can't say I've witnessed this. Marco, have you ever had anything like this happen? Are you even using iCloud Drive for anything? I use it again, like you, extremely sparingly. I only have a relatively small number of files in there usually it is you know it's the handful of documents that i have in like numbers and pages and stuff just for ease of cross device use from those apps um but for the most part i don't really use it i still use dropbox as the backing store and the maestral client app to access it on my max um and so yeah basically i use dropbox and with a third-party app and uh that's it so i've never seen this problem.

1:39:38And in part, one of the reasons I don't use iCloud Drive for more things is that we occasionally hear about problems that are in this ballpark, some kind of data integrity problem or data loss problem that it just makes me, I know lots of people out there are using iCloud Drive just fine and never having any problems. And in my very light use of it, I haven't seen any problems like that as far as I'm aware. But because we've heard occasional things like this from people it makes me hesitant to ever dump dropbox and go all in on iCloud Drive yeah well one thing to emphasize here is uh once again cloud storage is not a backup I know that's you know like to be oh he's away from his time machine drive like what can you do or whatever but like you know you think you're safe because it's safely in the cloud that's not a backup that's a live that's the live place where you're messing with the data and if that service messes it up that's when you need your backup and if you don't have one it's bad uh iCloud Drive, I've always been wary of it.

1:40:37In the beginning, it was super-duper buggy. And even though it's supposedly gotten better, regardless of what you think the reliability is going to be based on anecdotes that you hear from people or on podcasts or whatever, one thing we do know is it has very limited user control. There's not a lot of knobs and buttons that you can press. We'll put a link in the show notes to some articles from Eclectic Light Company, which is a website that delves into lots of these nitty-gritty details. iCloud Drive on macOS has changed so much since it was introduced it's always been the same service and you like you pay for it and it has like a branded name or whatever but what has implemented that the actual code that runs on your mac and probably also as far as you know we don't know but it's the code that runs on the servers that has changed so much over the years but through all of it it has never been a time where it's been like Dropbox where there's like a button you can press that say sync everything now or you know like do the thing like Dropbox it would just in in the olden days you just launched dropbox and it would when it starts up it would look at all your files and it would look at everything into the cloud and it would synchronize them and do something and if you wanted to do the thing again you could quit it and relaunch it which is a crude type of control but not even having that type of control in the mac has always been a problem people will be like i'm getting on a plane i want to make sure these three files are synced uh which little icon in the finder do i click how can i make it do it now i put click the little cloud icon and it should be downloading but it's not changing what can i do like apple has this problem we've talked about it with photos or whatever i cloud it's part of the design of iCloud and like when i say design i don't mean like the way the code is laid out this is the features that they've chosen to expose it's great if if it worked 100 reliably but it doesn't and when it doesn't you're left reading articles like these like company ones and doing kill all bird d or whatever the hell they're trying to find out whichever demon controls this these days and figuring out what's changed in Sonoma versus the previous version and whether you're using the file provider version of the thing.

1:42:38It's not what I want out of my cloud storage. Dropbox is also increasingly not what I want out of my cloud storage. Sometimes I look at it and I'm like, I yearn for the days of FTP, where you explicitly did operations, and when you did them, they were completed. Obviously, the best defense I can solve this is having actually real backups, but I'm personally super-duper wary of iCloud Drive still because I don't feel like it gives me enough control. And I'm still using, miraculously somehow, the non-file provider version of Dropbox, which I mean is the version of Dropbox that doesn't use Apple's new file provider APIs and uses whatever the bad old version of Dropbox used where it did sneaky things behind the back of the OS.

1:43:16But that one still, for me, despite all of its nags and annoyances, works reliably and I can, when I quit it, I know it's not running. And when I launched it, it syncs everything back up again. And, you know, there are other solutions to, you know, there's many other companies that are looking to be cloud storage for you. I know iCloud Drive is built in. My kids use it for all their stuff. So far, they haven't come crying to me to tell me all their stuff is gone. And practically speaking, most of their stuff is not backed up. My son is at college. He's not getting time machine backups onto the Synology like he would when he was back in the house.

1:43:47So it's just iCloud Drive or nothing. In my experience, Google Drive is more reliable. Not the Mac version of Google Drive. but Google Drive as used through the web, which is a lot of what both of my kids use for their schoolwork, because schools, as we've discussed in the past, like to use the Google family of products. And I have faith in Google Drive as used on the web. I say this at the night that there's a story about Google Drive files disappearing, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. So no cloud storage is perfect, right? That's why you have to actually have backups. Cloud storage is not a backup.

1:44:19You could have a backup in cloud storage, but if you're like, I don't need a backup, my files are in Dropbox. My files are in Google Drive. My files are in iCloud Drive. That's where your files are. That's what you need a backup of. You know, that is not a backup. That's what you need to back up. Make another copy of that. Put it elsewhere. Not in iCloud. Take it to the stuff that's in iCloud Drive and put it someplace that's not iCloud Drive. Take the stuff that's in Google Drive and put it someplace that's not in Google Drive. You can cross back up them to each other. Hell, my photos are also, quote unquote, backed up to Google Photos as a backup of Last Resort.

1:44:52in addition to the 700 other places they're backed up just because it's another place, right? And what you're hoping is they don't all get hosed at the same time. So yeah, anyway, moral of the story is I personally would still stay away from iCloud Drive, but I know lots of people use it and it does come with your back. All right, Marcos Vinicius Petri writes, considering that push notifications are unaffected by disabling background app refresh, which apps should we allow or block from refreshing in the background? What kind of convenience will I lose by disabling it and how much more battery will my phone consume if I leave everything turned on?

1:45:24So just as a single data point here, with CallSheet, I sync a handful of things like search history and spoiler settings and stuff like that. I sync that via iCloud, via CloudKit. And that is done, as far as I can tell, that works by Apple sending push notifications to your phone to say, hey, go update yourself. And I'm not explicitly requesting that. That's just based on the fact that things have changed in CloudKit. Apple will say, oh, you need to go and fetch these updates. And that all happens through this background app refresh mechanism, as far as I'm aware. And so if, for example, you turn that off the call sheet, is that not true?

1:46:06Okay, so correct me. Well, so background refresh for apps is an API that apps can register with the system and say basically like, wake me up six hours from now and let me know like when I can update my data. CloudCut seems to be kind of a separate process, but background refresh, there's this framework called BGTask and it used to be done via a few older methods, but that's the current way to do it. And it's literally, you request that the system wake you up sometime in the future so that you can then have a short time, usually like maybe a minute or half a minute in the background that you can fetch the newest data from your server or update your widgets or whatever else.

1:46:49There's a couple other mechanisms as well. There's a background processing task, which the phone will only let your app do if it's plugged in, but that allows you to use a bunch of CPU power in the background, which normally you'd be terminated for doing. So if you need to do something like Overcast does its search indexing with that process, where if you plug your phone in overnight, it'll probably wake Overcast up at some point in the night and overcast will make sure the search index is up to date for all the all your you know downloaded podcasts the other method of background refresh sort of is you can send from your servers you can send a silent push notification that simply wakes the app up it's called a content available push notification and that wakes the app up in the background and gives you a few seconds really to like you know kick off network tasks or try to try to do something in the background and those are not guaranteed to wake your app up they're kind of like a best effort thing and the system can throttle them if it's not really a good power state or if it thinks you're sending too many of them and so all those mechanisms are throttlable and actively throttled by iOS depending on the power state whether there's Wi-Fi or not in some cases but power state's the most important so in low power mode I believe it does almost none of these things or none of these things that's one of the things that changes when you turn on low power mode normally in other cases it will it will monitor the battery level so if your phone is plugged in it will allow these things to run pretty much whenever whenever they want to on some responsible non-abusive interval if your phone is not plugged in but you have like you know 75 battery it's probably going to let these things run now yes you can go in there and you can manually toggle off all these switches and everything but my hot take on this is you're wasting your time don't bother let the system manage it because the system's really good at managing it like it it isn't it when when when you're when you have background app refresh enabled for an app the system is not letting the app continuously run in the background it it is still doing a kind of like you know wake up periodically do something quickly and then we we will suspend you again kind of mechanic there.

1:49:05So the app is not running continuously. And as mentioned, you can only do the super CPU intensive tasks from the background processing task type that only runs when the phone's plugged in. The regular background app refresh when you're out there on battery, the phone is also enforcing certain CPU usage limits so that you're not burning too much battery power then. And it only lets you run for a certain amount of time. So you can't be doing that much for that long. The other side of it is like, If you turn off background refresh for an app, oftentimes you are making things worse for yourself. There is precedent like, you know, when a while back, we've talked about this before, a while back, if you would, quote, force quit an app, if you'd remove it from the multitasking switcher, it wouldn't allow background refresh.

1:49:47And Apple, in a later iOS version, changed that to no longer affect background refresh state, or at least maybe it acts as an input to how frequently to do it, maybe, but probably not even that anymore. because people were disabling background refresh unintentionally by, quote, force quitting the app, and then the apps weren't working that well. They were not getting updates. The apps were not working the way the user expected them to work. When you go mesh with these settings, you think you're achieving a certain gain, but you probably are not achieving that much of one because the system's automatic behavior is really good at managing this stuff.

1:50:23I mean, again, see also force quitting apps. There's a lot of overlap in what I'm saying here. You know, force quitting an app because it is stuck on something is one thing, but force quitting an app just because you think it'll save your battery power, that's a little squishier and a little bit harder to prove and oftentimes not doing what you think it's doing. So same thing with disabling background refresh. Generally speaking, you should leave it alone. Unless there is a specific problem you've identified with a specific app that is really out of control in some way, but it's very unlikely to be due to background refresh because the system manages it pretty tightly.

1:50:57one factor you might want to consider is if you have a lot of apps installed but there's a bunch of ones that you never use like ideally the system would notice that you never use them and not allow them to background refresh but it does currently i don't think it currently does that to the degree of it no it does well i'll give you an example i have flighty installed i rarely use it but i do use it but very rarely when i'm picking someone up from the airport or when i'm flying myself which is enough to allow flighty to do stuff in the background because it's not like well he never uses this app but 99 of the time i do not want flighty to refresh in the background so if i and if i found that it was using a lot of background uh energy or whatever if it showed up in my battery list or whatever i would say why is flighty on the list i don't have a flight that i have to deal with for three months at that point you could turn flighty off you have to remember to turn it back on though because you're gonna be like why isn't flighty working to marco's point like why am i getting updates about this flight uh yeah you wanted to you know so if you're not going to remember to do that if you're not going to micromanage it then you might want to deal with it manually for apps that you not apps that you never use but apps that you use infrequently and flight tracking is a great example because this especially things that do a good job they're constantly checking where is this flight where is this you know and hopefully there's the apps are smart and when you don't have anything in your my flight so i still won't do that or whatever but like you want the value from that app when you use it but if you know for sure i'm not interested in flights for three months then you can turn it off um the other option is just uninstall apps that you're not actually using which might be better for your life for a lot of reasons but um yeah and if you really want to if you if you're like oh i'm gonna i'm gonna do the opposite i'm gonna do opt-in i'm gonna turn a background refresh off on everything and i'm only going to turn on on the apps that i care about just use low power mode at that point low power mode will do that for you essentially not allowing things to run in the background except for super duper essential stuff if you really care that much about your battery or if you have a phone that like the battery is dying on and you don't want to replace the battery use low power mode and you'll see what it's like to have a phone that doesn't really refresh in the background anymore and then every time you launch an app all the data and it's out of out of date or whatever uh that's if you have apps that are currently disabled if you ever launch them and you're like oh i launched it i got to wait for it to refresh if the app is good and you enable background refresh it will make the experience better so that when you launch the app oh look all my podcasts are already up to date i don't need to pull to refresh them because it did it already when it was plugged in overnight right that's a great example because like podcasts you know people mostly care about let me see my new podcast for the day they don't need to see the new podcast every two minutes it'll refresh during the night when it's plugged in if you allow background refresh so you know consider that for the apps that you do use, make sure background are just turned on for them.

1:53:38I would even go as far as to say don't do what John just said, but turn it off if you don't use it for a while because A, iOS, I don't know if the current versions do this, but frequency of use and most recent use were factors that iOS would consider when deciding how frequently to allow apps to background refresh. So that's already kind of being done automatically for you as far as I know. At least it was. and secondly the whole idea of oh I'm going to turn this off now and maybe I'll remember to turn it back on later, you won't, you definitely won't, it will stay off and flatty will just suck for you so you shouldn't be this is like back when I worked on the internet it was always kind of frustrating when we would get reports from people saying feature x is broken on your website and after some digging, it turned out to be, oh, they're running some browser extension that interferes with the JavaScript that breaks this website.

1:54:37And so it's like, they modified their experience, then later something broke, and they blamed us and not themselves and the modifications they made. And that causes support headaches, and it causes bad user experiences, and it causes oftentimes bad reviews. I feel like when you're going and messing with those kinds of settings with, you know, I'm going to lock down these apps and make sure they can't abuse my system, then what happens is you have worse experiences with those apps and you might not remember why or you might not realize why or you might be toggling a switch that does something that you didn't quite intend for it to do where you didn't fully understand what it did and so you're better off again unless you've identified a specific problem with a specific app that you need to address this way don't mess with it just let it do the defaults because again ios does a very good job already at managing background refresh frequency for apps.

1:55:30And so you don't really need to override it. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hatch and Notion. 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.

1:56:06And 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-G, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long. What do we have to talk about? I had the idea of maybe our fitness requirements slash routines because we were talking about that earlier, Casey, and it seems like you seem to be wanting to exercise every day or something like every day. And I thought that was kind of an interesting thing to discuss because I don't think that has always been the case for you.

1:57:13No, it certainly hasn't. Um, near history. Yes. Longer history. No. Um, I'm trying to think when this became a thing, but it's probably, I would guess it was during COVID. I don't know. I can look at my streak in the health app and see how long it's been. Um, there have definitely been days that I have not done a dedicated workout, but my streak for closing my exercise ring, which is my trends. Yes, my trends, which I don't know if underscore even supports anymore. I have 870 days of, that's with rest, I think, which, oh no, that's without rest. 870 days of exercise goal hit and move goal hit.

1:57:59Apparently I missed my stand ring once a couple hundred days ago. So I only have 204 days there. I guess I'm no longer a blue ring stud. But nevertheless, yeah, I think whatever, that is a deep cut. So whatever 870 days before today was, I started getting more serious about doing something that at least vaguely smells like exercise every single day. Typically, I'm doing some sort of video-based workout. Sometimes that's Apple Fitness Plus. And often, but not always, it's lifting weights. Occasionally, it'll be like a HIIT high, what is it, high-intensity interval training. Thank you. Oftentimes, and I feel like I've talked about this on the show at some point, but it certainly hasn't been recently.

1:58:47A lot of times what I'll do is I'll do – it used to be called Beachbody. Now I think it's called Body. You would know them because they're the P90X people. And their whole service is very interesting. there's a lot of really gross stuff to it about how you need to take such and such supplement and otherwise you'll never get the exercise the gains that you want and so on and so forth which I don't pay any attention to but what they do have is they do have a pretty robust library of basically fitness and exercise videos I don't like Fitness Plus but one of the things I like about Beachbody is that there are programs so where Fitness Plus in my opinion falls down and I haven't really used Fitness Plus in the last couple of months.

1:59:32And I think they're starting to add features like this. But one of the ways that Fitness Plus falls down to me is that it doesn't have any concept of a longer-term thing. And so you can go every day and just pick out a random strength training video, and you can specialize and say, I'd like an upper body strength video, or I'd want a lower body one or a full body one. But there's no real concept of like, over time, I would like to have some sort of consistency that is externally directed. Whereas with Beachbody, or whatever they're called now, you can do like a three to six to eight week program where you're doing basically the same moves in different orders and in different combinations and whatnot over the course of that two months or what have you.

2:00:20And so unfortunately, because I like food too damn much, I don't know the next time you see me, Marco, I don't know that I'll look that different. In fact, for all I know, maybe I've gotten bigger. I haven't been on a scale in a while because that doesn't really matter to me that much. I don't recommend it. Honestly, I understand the utility of it, but I mostly agree with you that I don't think that number is terribly useful. But I can tell you unequivocally that I am the strongest that I think I've ever been in my life. Not to say that I'm an exceptionally strong person, but I am way stronger than a total complete weakling, which is how I spent the first 38 to 40 years of my life.

2:00:59So there's that. There are definitely bulgy things that vaguely resemble muscles in places that never used to be. And I mean, again, you'll look at me and probably be like, oh, you look about the same to me. But there's certainly, I can notice some changes. And Erin said something, and this all but stemmed from Erin starting to take fitness and nutrition. She's much better with her nutrition than I am with mine. She's taken that much more seriously over the last, you know, two to three to five years. But one of the things she said to me a couple of years ago now that really rang true to me was leaving aside that you want to be there for your kids, leaving aside that is the right thing to do to exercise if you have the ability to do so.

2:01:39And the three of us now have the luxury that we can do this at basically any time of day. And if I'm completely honest with you, most of the time I work out at about two o 'clock in the afternoon, sometimes after an afternoon siesta, not always, but sometimes. Hey, whatever works for you. Hey, whatever works, man. But one of the things that Erin said to me, which now is less relevant because both the kids are in school, but she said, you know, I want to see my kids, our kids, you know, taking – I want our kids to see us taking care of ourselves. And for that to be clear to them that it's an important part of our lives is doing some sort of physical exertion and activity.

2:02:14And so, like I said, you know, typically during the week, I'll do some sort of generally strength or, you know, HIIT training, generally directed by some sort of program on Beachbody or whatever it's called. A lot of times I'll do like an eight-week program on Beachbody, and then I'll take a couple of weeks and just do random Apple Fitness Plus workouts to kind of clear my palate. And then I'll choose a different program on, you know, a week program or what have you. And then typically in the weekends, in lieu of like a full-on rest day, Aaron and I will go on a long walk together. So we'll walk like effectively a 5k.

2:02:45So like three, you know, three ish miles and we'll do that on the weekends. And that gives us our exercise. And we're not lifting over the weekend. That is probably 80 ,000 words where 10 would have done. But since you asked that, that's where I stand. Yeah, exactly. But you also, you and Tiff both have also gotten very, and this happened, I think before the pandemic, because I feel like I saw the beginnings of this when we last saw each other in 2019. But you guys have also gotten extremely serious. You made mention of your bespoke laptop for fitness and your personal trainer and what have you.

2:03:18So this has also been a pretty serious thing for you guys. Yeah, it really has. I mean, you know, it started out that, you know, it was probably seven or eight years ago. Tiff started training with this trainer that was in our neighborhood that, you know, a few of our other friends here were using. And then I thought it was just like for all the moms because that's what all the groups were. and then like one day it's like you know you should really start this i'm like i don't i don't think the moms want me to come into their fitness class um and and it turns out that like he that he was just starting a guy class together like they like they there was like one guy's class that was happening like one day i'm like all right you know what i'll go to that sure and it was hard for me because you know this i was i was in my you know early to mid 30s at this point i've never I've never been like super overweight, but I've never been fit in my life before that.

2:04:09And so I never felt good going to gyms. Like I go to a gym and there'd be, you know, all these like big guys and their big muscles going on all the equipment. And like, I can't do any of that. And I don't even want to be here seeing you do it. And the last thing I want is for me to try to do that in front of all of you. So I'd had gym memberships occasionally before, and it just never stuck because I would go and I would be intimidated or not know what to do, frankly, and I never really enjoyed it before. Anyway, so fast forward. So this trainer, I was a little, you know, still skeptical to go, but I finally made myself go.

2:04:52And this guy, he has really become a very good friend of our family. We've been training with him for, geez, something like seven or eight years now. He is very unlike what you would expect a trainer to be if you've never had a good trainer like he you know when when most people picture you know trainers from from gyms you picture those guys or some kind of like you know drill sergeant you know come on step it up you know don't be a wimp or you know you picture that kind of thing and i am not compatible with that at all um but the good thing is our trainer is wonderful and is nothing like that at all he is relentlessly positive he never makes you feel bad about yourself at all.

2:05:34He trains people at all levels. Like I went to the first class I went to that was a group class with him. There were guys who were older than me. There were guys who were younger than me. There were guys who were more fit than me, guys who were less fit than me. Like I didn't feel intimidated. And he is so amazing and positive and awesome. If anybody actually needs a trainer, feel free to write it because he what happened was during COVID, he moved and we switched to FaceTime. And so he does training via FaceTime and Zoom now, which you would think wouldn't work. it surprisingly works like he sees everything and look the downside of course i'll tell you i'll be honest the downside is personal training one-on-one is expensive you know because you're paying for someone's time directly to work with you so of course it's going to be way more expensive than most other ways to do this the advantage if you can swing it is that for me nothing ever stuck because i would be like oh you know i'm a little i'm really busy today or i'm feeling a little of low energy today i'm going to skip the workout today when there's a person who you are going to meet that changes things i i will make all sorts of excuses to not do a workout on my own but i i also one of my greatest personality flaws it makes me makes me vulnerable to every type of salesperson imaginable is that i really want to please people i i very much care about like being there for people in my life, showing up, pleasing people, making people like me.

2:07:04I very much care about that to a fault. And so I never miss workouts. Basically, like if I will jump through ridiculous hoops to make the scheduled workouts in part because I am meeting a person who is now a friend of mine and I don't want to disappoint him. And anything he asked me to do in the workout, even if it seems really hard i'll try it because the last thing i want to say is i don't think i can do that like and and so you know it is it is wonderful again if you're in the market for for a virtual trainer um i can strongly recommend my trainer he is the best and if you think there is like if you think like oh he's maybe you know if you're intimidated by the idea of a trainer or you think it's like some kind of drill sergeant thing trust me this is not that at all like he's so good and so positive and never makes you feel bad about yourself and every workout is different and you can be like oh i slept weird on my neck my neck hurts like all right we'll modify and he'll modify it on the fly to like you know fit whatever you need to fit like he's great anyway so that that really has changed things for me because i went from you know before training with him i went from basically never exercising or very rarely exercising to at first doing it once a week, then slowly ramped up.

2:08:20Now we're, now we're doing three times a week. And between those, I will occasionally row or run depending on the season. Um, and now I've finally crossed over to the point where I care enough that I feel bad when I don't work out for a while. Like if we're traveling and have to miss a couple workouts, like I really feel bad and I'll, I'll try to like, you know, go to the hotel gym or whatever and do something just so I'm, you know, so my body stays awake in certain ways like and that's kind of how it feels now like when you know like whenever i go on vacation for a while or i'm not able to work for a while my brain kind of feels like oh i really want to use my brain but i haven't been able to because i'm out or whatever now my body feels like that like now if i'm out and i like if i'm traveling or whatever and can't work out for a few days my body gets that same kind of like itch to like hey i want to do something i need to need to do something which if you would have told me 10 years ago that was that'd be saying that right now i would have told you you were crazy but that's what happens and and i'm glad i'm glad i have gone through this this journey because i too like you like i i don't i probably don't look that strong because i'm not doing like bodybuilding stuff i'm also 41 this is only so ripped i can get but um i am way stronger than i've ever been before even though i look about the same i think but I am way stronger than I've ever been before.

2:09:41And as you get older too, and this is one of the greatest things about having somebody guide you like a trainer or a training app or something. I would never think to do some of the exercises that we do. Most of them I would never think to do. And there's all sorts of like little weird muscles that I've now strengthening and training and toning and everything. And that's great as you get older because that is good for like avoiding injuries as you get older or, you know, of chronic pain centers and stuff like that like i used to get rsi i don't anymore i used to get back pain i don't anymore and now i know like as i get older the areas in which you can get pain or injuries only go up as you get older and so now i know like because i'm doing all this you know wonderful mixed training of all these different muscles i know that my odds of getting those injuries and chronic pain down the road are lower and that if i do get any kind of weird injury my odds are better that I that it will heal better and faster and you know it won't affect my life as much maybe and so as you get older it's kind of like saving for retirement like you should really start doing it as soon as you can ideally um and and and the earlier you start the more you'll appreciate that when you're older that's how like an exercise routine is also like when you're young you can get away with not doing it as you get older you really can't get away with that as easily anymore and the best time to start is is now if you can like do something and whatever it is like i know our friends over at cortex uh love the fit bot app i know gray talks a lot about how that has that has really changed his life and that that's that's something that like if my trainer ever stopped stop working or something i would probably try that next but ultimately for me i i really need the human that i want to please uh for me to really stick with something uh very quick real-time follow-up then i'd like to hear john what your situation is I was poking about generating links for the show notes, and I thought I had seen something about this, and it appears I was correct.

2:11:39On Fitness Plus, they now have a feature called Custom Plan, where the little marketing blurb reads, stay consistent on your fitness journey with custom plans. Choose your personal preferences, including the days, durations, workout types, meditation themes, trainers, and music, and Fitness Plus will generate a custom plan just for you. And with Stacks, which is another new thing of theirs that I haven't played with yet, you can move seamlessly from one workout or meditation to the next with no interruptions, just set it and then get it. So this is more along the lines of what I feel like I do get from the Beachbody stuff, which I think is called just body now.

2:12:10And I never felt like I got that from Fitness Plus, particularly the plan part, like the stack thing where you roll from one workout to another, whatever. But the whole custom plan thing, again, I haven't fiddled with this yet, but once I finish my current program on body, then I'll probably at least fiddle with this custom plan thing. And I will say that if you're new to this, well, first of all, talk to somebody who actually knows what they're doing, preferably like a doctor or a fitness specialist, which is not either of us. But the Fitness Plus stuff is a really good introduction. And they're really, really good about not being bro-y.

2:12:47The body stuff can get a little bro-y from time to time. And not to say it's all dudes that are training, but given that it came from P90X, you can see how it could get a little aggressive. And generally speaking, it isn't bad. And generally speaking, I actually quite like it. Again, if you can filter out all the, you know, take this chemical, that's the only way you'll get fit business. But nevertheless, the Fitness Plus stuff is a really approachable way to ease into any sort of fitness and just see if it's something that you can physically do without hurting yourself. And if it's anything that you enjoy.

2:13:23So especially if you happen to be an Apple one or whatever it's called subscriber, I would definitely at least give it a whirl. And I really do quite love having, and this is unique to fitness plus because, you know, it's integrated and all that. You can see your rings right there on the screen as you're doing a workout, which is super nice to see yourself as you're doing this workout, see yourself cranking through your red ring and your green ring and what have you. I find that to be very motivating. And speaking of rings, then I promise John, I'll give you a chance here. I think what has helped for me is having gotten a 800 plus day street going.

2:13:58And there definitely have been a couple of days where I probably should have just not worked out or whatever. But on the whole, I think similar to you saying, Marco, that you had someone to answer to, I have this momentum that I don't want to lose. And I think that has been helpful for me. and so you know i'm gonna be doing a little bit of traveling soon and i've been thinking through and i was talking with marco about this you know what what can i do for some modicum of exercise during this travel window and i think what i'll end up doing is just going for a walk which is not what i would normally do on a weekday but it's fine i just want to do something to get my body moving something to close my rings and keep that momentum going because i probably speak for marco but i definitely will say for myself that too many missed days and i can i can see myself immediately just giving up on it just out of complacency, like not, not because I desire sitting here to not work out.

2:14:54I actually do enjoy it, like Marco was saying, but I, it would not take that much to get me to be very complacent and fall into my natural state of being, which is, I'll, I'll worry about that tomorrow. So, um, the rings have been helpful for me, even though they've probably also caused me to exercise at times and maybe I shouldn't, I shouldn't have, uh, John, I will stop talking now. I apologize. What is your regimen? Have you worked on this at all? I think before you quit and went full indie, I thought you had said that this was one of your priorities. But have you had time to make it a priority yet?

2:15:26I hate working out. I don't like it at all. That's not what I prefer. In my youth, what I wanted to do was play sports. And as a side effect of playing sports, you get exercise. But that's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it to get better at the sport and to enjoy the sport. and the exercise is just a nice side benefit uh i ran i played tennis in high school i also ran in high school and in running i got terrible terrible shin splints which uh kind of ended my running career prematurely at the end of my high school career uh and surprisingly has stuck with me since the age of 18 to the ripe old age of 48 or whatever the hell i am now um they're still there lurking uh they uh you know and what it what it basically does is eliminate running for me as a possible activity which i think i probably would have done because even though running is not you know i'm gonna say it's not that much of a sport but it's not like a sport with a ball or a type of skill thing it's more of a you know it's an endurance thing it's it's aerobic activity and stuff like that but there is a goal like you're trying to get your times to go better or whatever and not being able to run for exercise kind of sucks.

2:16:35But I hate the idea of just doing a workout for the sake of a workout, like exercise with no goal in mind. And so for most of my adult life, I haven't done any exercise or working out at all, which is probably not a great plan. I also didn't do much sports stuff because a surprising number of sports things make my shin splints flare up. even something as simple as basketball or tennis even though you're not don't seem like you're running that much you are kind of running a little bit uh and so and you know practically speaking especially when i was had my jobby job and doing all my extra things at the same time there was just no time kids family work uh side jobs all that there's no time to do anything it's part of my burnout part of what uh made me leave my job was i need some time to do something right so now uh in my indie career i have carved out some time to do something and what i've latched on is the thing that i can do which is not it's better than nothing but it's not really complete there's still lots of holes in my thing here but what i've latched on to is the thing i can do it's kind of like running but you don't go anywhere and that's weightlifting because weightlifting has the same kind of number go up mentality as running or i guess i'm running it's number go down right but like that's that's essentially the game right there is a there is a gamified component of it there is progression oh my time is getting better i'm lifting heavier weights it has the advantage that lifting weights doesn't take as much time because you know you do a couple of sets of a handful of reps uh and it's really hard to do but it's over relatively quickly and even if you have like you know 30 seconds between them or whatever like it doesn't take a really long time unlike like if you're doing some kind of aerobic exercise you might have to do it for a very long time to get benefit from it but you know five sets of five reps with a weight that's just at your limit that you slowly increase over each week as you do it uh that does something and it's better than nothing i still need much more aerobic exercise that i'm getting i still am not really doing a complete workout i should still really be playing sports but uh this is not really a surprise to me but maybe surprise to people who have young children and think, oh, it'll be so much easier when they're older.

2:18:48Maybe there's a period in the middle there where that may be true. But once you start getting towards high school in the end and like the whole rush of college and, you know, the whole college application process and SATs and driver's licenses and the teen years in general, there's a big push kind of towards the end of like getting the kids out of the nest that involves a surprising amount of parent involvement. So much more than you had been doing when they were like 12 or 11 kind of at the same level that you were doing it when they were much younger only it's much much worse because they're full-fledged people and the things they're doing are more like have adult annoyances because now they have to deal with bureaucracies and you have to help them navigate them and it's just anyway all that is to say that although i have carved out time i do weight lifting about three times a week i'll put a link the show notes to uh casey johnson's couch to barbell uh program which is loosely what i initially based what i was doing on and bought a bunch of weights during covid like so many other people did and i've upgraded that weight set a few times and have an adjustable things now i don't have a very fancy setup i don't have a home gym i don't have a gym membership i don't want to go to the gym that's another good thing about weight lifting if you can buy heavy the right kind of heavy objects for lifting and you can do a surprising number of exercises in your house i think marco is also doing all his exercises in his house with limited equipment you don't need you don't necessarily need a gym to do stuff and believe me the weights i'm lifting are not heavy but they're heavier than nothing and that and that is what's important and for the few periods of time when i have like you know i didn't do any working out when i was on my long island vacation and i came back from it you feel it you skip a week and you're like what happened i mean i guess it also doesn't help that them you know old and putting getting close to 50 or whatever um but yeah like it shows me that something's happening and guess what number goes up you know you start out lifting this much weight and then after a week you add five more pounds then you have another five more pounds and you add another five more pounds like eventually you get to a limit where i mean i eventually i'll get to the limit of my my weight sets where they can't put on anymore but i haven't reached that yet uh so that's what i'm doing it's better than nothing but it's not enough and so my you know it's always like oh tomorrow will be better right my current plan is like okay or i have one kid in college now and one kid going through that process when i have both kids out of the house and in college then i won't be which i'm currently driving my daughter to school in the morning picking her up in the afternoon driving her to see her friends in the evening driving her to her driving lessons driving her to her driving test which is scheduled for december and we'll see it like lots of driving people around that's not good exercise but that does occupy a large portion of my day dealing with you know kids activities driving to get my son at school driving him back to school which i did today a lot of driving and so even though i have more time and i have carved out three days a week to do exercise and i have tried to pack an efficient kind of exercise in there because again i think weightlifting is very time and space efficient um i i would like to do more and honestly if i get more time you know my daughter goes off to school i want to do a sport thing i don't want to work out like wait i don't i don't enjoy the way of anything either even though it's kind of gamified would much rather be doing a sport but in terms of like the results that i see like in capabilities gained before you couldn't do x and now you can do x right weightlifting does have that going for it it's just super boring and i'm not really into it so i really want to get back into sports but tune in in about a year and a half when i have a year and a half two years i don't know what it's going to be when i have both kids in college assuming I'm you know not destitute and living on the street at that point I'll hopefully be doing more exercise this is how much college will cost for Maggie you gotta put in the clip from The Simpsons it's terrifying I don't even want to think about it scholarships kids it's just to put a period on the sentence from my point of view to build on what I think both of you have said it is a pretty amazing feeling particularly as someone who has always associated himself or is self-identified as a nerd as someone who is not strong and not fast for more than about, you know, 50 yards.

2:22:59It is extremely cool to get to the point that I need to get a, that I need to pick up a bigger weight than I did before. And then what's really amazing is when you have to order a bigger weight than you previously had, you know? And so like, I don't remember exactly when it was, but Aaron and I both needed, you know, a set of 40 pound dumbbells relatively recently, a few months ago. You've got to get the adjustable dumbbells. You don't have adjustable dumbbells. No, I had those. I hated them because they're so big and clunky. They're very difficult to manipulate. I love them. I love to be able to just dial in the weights.

2:23:36They are kind of big and clunky, but I feel like that's part of the challenge. It makes them harder to deal with. You know what I mean? That's fair. I get this. Because I did. When I was using the smaller weights, I was using non-adjustable ones, but then I had to go the next size up like Casey's talking about. and at that point I just went adjustable and I don't regret it. Yeah, I mean one way or another, but the point is just that when you're ordering something that facilitates 40 pounds, be that because it's literally 40 pounds or because it can add plates or what have you to get to 40 pounds, that's a cool feeling and then eventually we needed a 50-pound dumbbell and we're getting to the point that we probably need a second 50-pound dumbbell and we didn't get two at the time because we didn't think we would need a second, but both of us are kind of getting to that point.

2:24:16We'll maybe need 50-pound dumbbells and that's a really awesome, feeling and in the same way like you said john that you're seeing a time go lower and lower as you're running seeing my weights go up and up is is a really rewarding thing that i never had that experience as a kid so oh yeah neither did i don't i mean john was the most athletic of the three of us probably but like i was never strong but i was always uh yeah i was i felt like i was athletic and even when i before i was working out a good judge is doing crap around the house like uh to compare before i was lifting weights and after i was lifting weights uh both of those eras i had to carry my uh downstairs freezer up and down out of my basement and it felt similar both times like so even when i am totally doing nothing i've been coasting on good jeans essentially to not be terrible like it's i i don't know you know maybe i'll feel when i get old eventually but it's like i still feel like i can do all the things i did i could spend an entire day crawling around a crawl space and you know picking up things in the yard or going up and down on ladders all day or like whatever uh and i have no problem doing it the only difference is is that if i'm not in my pre-working out times i would be more sore the next day or these days probably not sore at all um but i can still do it all i don't get out of breath doing things i you know i do need more aerobic exercise but i'm coasting on good genes a lot for that so that needs to be short of i like bike riding too but i feel like i'm gonna die being hit by a car because i do not live in a bike friendly place so the risk reward trade-off is not great so then you're like you're driving your bike to a bike trail that feels like weird and wasteful so aerobic activity is still a problem stationary bikes so boring and i don't have room for one in my house so it's it is still a thing that i'm working on uh but you know we'll revisit this topic when both my kids are in college to see how much better i'm doing yeah i mean ultimately i think the the best answer to that is figure out something that you can get in your house like whether it's a stationary bike or elliptical or a rower or something some kind of aerobic machine that you can tolerate that can fit somewhere somehow in your house like in a child's bedroom who no longer lives with you yeah i mean honestly yeah that's what a lot of people do like there's a reason for that um i think that is the ultimate answer because you know generally like yeah weightlifting is great but you're right you should also be doing some kind of aerobic something um i mean i'm walking the dog every day but you know what that's like i mean it's like tess is technically aerobic you're walking a few miles every day and i walk at a brisk pace but me yeah i mean that's ideally you'd have more than that but yeah i mean and it's i i too case you like the the number of times that somebody has called me strong in my life i can probably count on one hand um but they've almost all been like in the last two years so and i remember every single one of them uh because that it means a lot to me because I was always the scrawny nerdy kid you know I was I was not very athletic um I actually was held back in t-ball for an extra year uh you couldn't reach the t oh that's brutal no I just kept uh yeah anyway uh so but like you know to to be you know growing up that way for and spending most of my life that way and then you know at age 40 you know to be able to to do to have someone else notice that you're strong that that is not the common case in most of my life i'm not strong either and my son has zero ounces of body fat his entire body and is young but when i was doing my weight workout when i first started i encouraged him to this was over the summer after his freshman year of college i encouraged him to do one workout with me and he did one and he's like i'm never doing that again he could do it like it's not like he couldn't do what i was doing but i was at the point where i was about to increase the amount of weight and he was just like the next day he was complaining about how sorry he was everything so i think he's got a college student bod which is looks fit from the outside again he's got you know six-pack abs not an ounce of fat his entire body but he's weak he's small and weak yeah and the problem the problem is once your metabolism slows down and you and you get a little older then yeah if that becomes much harder yeah i said take a look at my midsection this is your future so

2:28:35Thank you.