650: Whatever It Takes to Get the Laundry Folded

35:48So here's the thing. The rounded rectile highlight, which is big, it's like one inch by two inches on your screen. It's big, okay? This is not a subtle highlight. It's a big rectangle. It has a darker rim and a body color to it. And then, of course, there's the window background. The background of the selection is 1.6 % darker than the window background. That's not enough. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I love that you did this research and this math. This is one of those moments that you being independent is such a perk for the show. And I mean that genuinely. How did you come to this conclusion?

36:26I'm not arguing. I'm genuinely wondering. How did you determine this? What was the process to figure this out? I mean, so I took the screenshot in Tahoe. So I figure out whatever they're doing with the screenshot, I'm going to trust the color values. And then I just pulled it up in Photoshop and then just got the RGB values. So the RGB values are the 0 to 255 for the R, the G, and the B, the red, the green, and the blue. it's a gray color so the red the green the blue are all equal values the background is 251 and the selection is 247 so it's a difference of four which is about 1.57 the rim is 3.5 darker so i think the only reason a lot of people can see the rounded rectangle is because the rim is 3.5 darker this is one of those you know i put i put it a mastodon uh both as a joke and not as a joke many people said i cannot see the selection on my screen because my screen is a crappy quality you know older display or something like that it's ridiculous now here's the thing startup disk system setting in sequoia also doesn't have a lot of contrast but it's still twice what tahoe is so on sequoia it's 3.1 for the body and 7 for the rim uh it was already bad so i'm not saying like tahoe made this mistake or whatever why i find this baffling is because as far as i can tell it's not like they redesigned the startup disk system setting in tahoe just something about tahoe came by and sideswiped the already bad startup disc thing to make the contrast half as much as it used to be and when i posted this on mastodon many people said until i read your text i didn't know what you were talking about because i couldn't see a selection at all it's i mean again there is a increased contrast option and accessibility but this is a perfect example of like well it's example of two things one that this it needs to be higher contrast even when that setting's not turned on because it is it's ridiculous right even on a really high quality screen and two what marco just said do you think anyone has time to worry about the contrast of the highlight and the startup system setting when they're trying to get the os to just work and have the animations run at the right speed that's not a god this is mac os they don't care that much about it anyway so i'm really concerned that stuff like this is just forget about this being fixed or changed or improved in any way before this thing releases because it's they have so much bigger fish to fry um so this is just a little thing but i just thought i'd point out because i just found it absurd i i encourage you to look at the images that we will link in the show notes um and see for yourself if on your screen you can see that it's highlighted you're going in knowing one of them is highlighted and one of them is not i'm telling you that that's the case and still you may not be able to see it depending on your monitor yeah it's not great it's amazing like i and so what has probably happened here is you know the the mac apis and the ios apis um they have kind of semantic color values so like not every color is specified okay it's r this g this b this most colors in the ui especially in apple's apps presumably are specified by colors like background one background two like that kind of thing um and or like you know light background lighter background do you have the thing on on ios the constants on mac os are called primary secondary tertiary and quaternary like they they use the whatever we do have those as well yeah and so that's and that's kind of that's like the newer swift ui way of doing it um so so basically like you know the the colors the colors are not specified on everything by color value they're specified semantically in a lot of things so what apple has done with the redesign is change a lot of what those colors mean so they can change that like in one place in some system definition of that and then all the other apps that compile against that will have their colors changed and what john was just saying is like they're not going to have time to go through every single place those are used and see like is this still legible is this still usable does this still even look right or does it look like a rendering error or like i mean what they could do is perhaps say hey does primary on top of secondary is that readable like is the delta between prime because think of it like the contest thing if there was a contest to do this given just plain rgb values integer rgb values let's set aside floating point the only way you can win this contest is by having a difference of one so you could have 251 and 252 if you can't do fractions that's the close that's as close as you can get rgb 251 251 251 and then 252 that's it's one away uh unless you go into floating point values and i guess i guess you could do opacity tricks which is floating point as well but like you're really getting up to like seriously it's either the same color or it's not it's you know how close can we get to the same color without it being the same color and if you have two constants whether it's the primary secondary tertiary or like window background light lighter lightest whatever like whatever sequence of constant names that you have the distance between one constant name and the other that you expect to be next to each other should probably be discernible so there should be some kind of like acceptance test to say hey if you're going through the us and changing all these colors make sure you change them in a way that two colors that the two of the colors aren't like literally the same when they're supposed to be used on top of each other this is all setting aside whether the fact that the startup system setting uses these colors at all because for all we know the person who programmed this 55 years ago uh just did rgb values because they felt like it or just did opacity like a a black with an opacity of 0.001 like who knows what the code does because it could be anything again this is not a highly trafficked, highly revised area of the OS.

41:48Keep in mind, like the scale of what we're dealing with here, you know, when iOS 7 was released, I mean, that was 100 years ago. Everything was less. Everything was smaller. There were fewer platforms. There were fewer apps on those platforms. The apps themselves had less code and fewer screens and fewer features and less UI. it was a long time ago now the number of like possible areas that changing these system constants and metrics and things the number of areas those affect is huge now there's so much surface area to test and to revise and to fix and that like that's why i was saying you know a couple months ago when there were rumors of a big redesign coming that's why i was saying it's a really big deal because it touches everything and what we're going to see for a year maybe at least maybe two years we're going to keep finding little edges of the ui uh or or the or screens of apps oh that button is now an ellipsis because the text is being cut off because the metrics changed or oh this this button over here that used to be like you know a contrast button you could see now it's gray on gray on gray because those colors changed we're gonna have a year or two of that across not only the os's and apple's apps but then across third-party apps because like when third-party apps compile against the new api there is a flag that you can opt out of the entire new design you can put it in your in your info p list and i think a lot of apps are going to do that for a while but if you want any of the new design you have to take all the new design and so as soon as you want any of the new design all of these like little subtle constants and metrics in the apis will change across your entire app and so you have to go through every single screen and retest everything and fix it in a way that's not going to mess up your ios 18 and earlier compatibility as well if you're if you're still maintaining that compatibility so like the the workload for both apple and its apps and for third-party developers is massive and you you just can't do this in a summer like i i kind of i mean i i kind of i don't i hate to go here but i i kind of feel like the design team is doging through the system here just ripping stuff out and yeah and just rushing to change things that have huge effects that they either don't fully appreciate or maybe are just disregarding but the reality is whatever whatever their reasons are thinking behind it it takes a lot of time to adapt the software to the changes they're making and i think it takes way more time than they have.

44:24So that's why I think it's just going to be a year of UI bugs everywhere across everyone's apps. And speaking of the contrast, one of the changes that I had to do to switch glass, I have a thing in my appearance setting that lets you pick where the palettes are on the screen. It shows a little rectangle that's supposed to represent your screen with radio buttons and the cardinal directions, top, bottom, left, right, upper right, upper left, so on and so forth. And it shows a desktop background. And it's hard to believe for such an old school Mac user, but the idea of having a desktop background image and then putting a radio button on top of that image, it seems like you should always be able to see the radio button because radio buttons are circle and they have an outline and inside them is a dot.

45:09Like, how could how could a radio button not be visible? It's like they used to be opaque, right? It was an opaque circle. So I don't care what the background is. I don't care what desktop background you have. when I put a radio button control on top of your desktop background image, you should still be able to see the radio button, right? And that was true right up to Tahoe. If you put a Tahoe radio button on top of lots of different kinds of desktop backgrounds, it is basically invisible, basically like this highlight color that you see here. So I had to literally draw a circle, like I'm drawing a custom drawing of a opaque circle around the radio button when it's not selected to say, here's the radio button because apple's own controls are not visible on many different even just like solid color backgrounds forget about cool patterns and stuff like that that's the type of attention that needs to be done to every single screen to say are the controls still visible you mentioned again with a button i bet there's a lot of screens that are gonna come up even during the setup process people are gonna be like how do i keep going in this process is that word a button it's kind of like ios 7 all over again only instead of not drawing the borders around the buttons they're trying to draw the borders around the buttons they're just so low contrast you can't see them all right and in our final piece of follow-up for tonight apple intelligence news summaries are back baby with a big red disclaimer that reads summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines verify information reading from ars technica apple intelligence notification summaries for news apps are back in tahoe beta 4 upon installing the new update users of apple intelligence compatible devices will be asked to enable or disable three broad categories of notifications.

46:41Those for news and entertainment apps, for communication and social apps, and for all other apps. The operating systems will list sample apps based on what you currently have installed on your device. Apple disabled news notification summaries as part of the iOS 18.3 update in January. Incorrect summaries circulating on social media prompted news organizations to complain to Apple, particularly after one summary said that Luigi Mangione, the alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had died by suicide. He had not and has not. yeah so this screen is interesting because that red text that you read it says summarization may change the meaning of original headlines verify information um that only appears on the news and entertainment one the communication so call social and all other apps don't have that warning so this is you know again when apple just disabled this feature uh because people were complaining uh you know it's like as i said at the time the reason they disabled is because they can't fix it Like there's no way to make an LLM that doesn't make mistakes when trying to summarize stuff, because that's just the nature of the technology as it currently exists.

47:40It's not an unsolvable problem. It's just that Apple has not solved it. And I believe nobody has solved it. So unless they come up with a breakthrough, they're just going to have errors. And Apple solution was disable it, wait a little while and turn it back on. Still doesn't work all the time. But if we put a big red warning on it, like our hands are clean, done and done. Anyway, at least they give you the option. and the red they pulled out the red text the red text is there and it says verify information so we'll summarize it for you but don't believe what we say you got to click through to check uh and so i think that kind of nullifies the usefulness of the summary but uh i saw gruber say online he said well it doesn't matter because if i see anything that looks weird i'll always click through on it to figure it out the tricky bit is sometimes incorrect information doesn't look weird sometimes it just looks fine like the result of a sporting event maybe one team wins maybe another team went maybe it's a lopsided contest and you're like really they won but if it was closely contested and they say team a won when really team b won and it was a close game are you going to click through on that because it looks weird to you no you'd be like hey team a won but you're wrong they didn't it was incorrectly summarized verify information or just disable news summaries we are brought to you this week by our members uh if you are not a member we're here to tell you about atp membership what is it and why should you get it uh and and can you get that information without going to our website and reading a bunch of text on our fact yes you can here we are to tell you my pitch for membership is that it makes the show better if you like the show you'll like the show better if you're a member first of all you don't have to hear any ads so if you're a member you wouldn't be hearing this right now you certainly won't hear any other ads if you want to hear the ads you can because some people like them but you don't have to hear them so you can add free version of the show second you get atp overtime which is in every single episode there's another topic that we talk about that's usually pretty good and juicy that you don't get to hear if you're not a member uh if you want to hear the quote-unquote bootleg version of the show which is the unedited feed or with all of our cursing and mistakes or whatever that includes everything and that's published like the second we stop recording you can also get access to that also we do once a month roughly bonus episodes where we talk about all sorts of stuff We have maybe 30 of those bonus episodes up and every month we make another one.

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52:28Let me reboot that. John spent a lot of time working on how to make gift memberships possible. And you can do that on the website. And it's very, very easy and very straightforward. So you can ask for a gift for a birthday or a holiday or something like that. And you can be gifted ATP membership. So really and truly, I really think John's hit the nail on the head. It makes it better for you. And it honestly makes it better for us too. So everyone wins. At the end of the year where I do the thing where I like thank the patrons, which I'm not going to do now. Well, can you get to your time at the end of the year?

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56:07All right, let's do some topics. And apparently, John, you want to take us on a tour of Apple and interfaces. Yeah, I've been thinking about this since we've been talking about all the liquid metal stuff. And it's kind of like the thing with the AI crawlers causing large bandwidth or whatever. Something that sort of goes unsaid. But I think it's worth saying because not everybody has the same context for these discussions. Certainly, they don't have the old man historic context that I have. But I do feel like as time passes on, like part of the reason we're in this situation with liquid glass and everything is because institutional knowledge and historic knowledge just goes by the wayside.

56:42So I want to just give like a brief refresher on some of the foundational things that are being left by the wayside as we continue in this modern age. And that is the idea that trying to make interfaces for computers so people can use them. There is a science aspect to that. Apple at various times has been at the forefront of that science. uh we'll put a link uh in the notes to a couple of books from uh bruce tagnazini who was a user interface expert who worked at apple many many years ago and was very influential in the field um tag on interface and tag on software design tag is short for tagnazini his last name um talks about the science of interface design you've probably heard of some of the science things if you're kind of an old school mac user like fitz law which is like okay well with graphical user interfaces we have pointing devices the user has to put the pointing device on a target to you know click on it or do a thing with it so that whole task of targeting how easy is it for people to get a pointing device onto a target when using a mouse or whatever um and you can imagine similar things for using your finger on a screen and stuff like that and they you know use science say okay well that turns out to be a function of the size of the target the distance from you are like the the how does the interface work is it one-to-one does it have an acceleration curb you can do science come up with ideas test them run experiments and try to determine more efficient more useful easier to understand interfaces apple and especially in the early days around the era of the early days of the mac a lot of the things in both in the mac and subsequently following on from the initial mac os to the later ones were informed by this scientific progress and this also includes user testing saying we have an idea for an interface but it doesn't make the computer easy to use do people understand it some of the ideas that are in the original mac are like let's make a standardized interface so you learn how to use a scroll bar you can reuse that knowledge every app has a standard scroll bar every app has a standard window with a title bar and a closed box so that when you learn one app it's the same everywhere this was a revolutionary idea in user interface design from the previous days when every application just did whatever the heck it wanted interface wise but the mac was like every mac app has mac windows and mac scroll bars and mac buttons and mac radio buttons and mac checkboxes standard controls right that it sounds boring now but this was a this was in advance and it was you know it's an idea and it was tested and it has uh rationale behind it to make the interfaces easy to use so that's the science aspect of user interfaces there's another aspect of making good user interfaces which is the art of it apple's aqua introduction which i don't have a video of because maybe they didn't give that on the the wc discs but anyways macworlds or not wc macworld san francisco 2000 we'll put a link in the show notes to your youtube video of it the quality is terrible but i don't have a better one i'm sorry the quality is so bad i watched it earlier today and i don't think i'd ever seen it before because i was not in the apple world in 2000 i will briefly sidetrack us and say that a direct quote from jobs during this presentation is he says, menus are semi-transparent too, except for the text.

59:56And I was just like, oh, really now? It just made me think of all the liquid glass discourse of these days and how that relates all the way back to 2000. Yeah, again, I wish there was a higher quality one, but I think the Aqua introduction, this is the first time the Aqua user interface was revealed to the public. And it was quite shocking coming from the classic macOS interface, which was nothing like this at all. That shows some of the art because there's lots of things that are in Aqua that are there not for scientifically backed user interface reasons, but because they want to evoke an emotional response.

1:00:32As Jobs said in the keynote, one of the design goals was that when you see the interface, you want to lick it. There's not a usability angle on that. That's part of the art of it. You want to make it attractive, fun, cool looking. And that is an important part of interface design uh because the the you know there's you know this this youtube channel i watch that that uh it's a food channel i forget what the name of it is but they always talk about the different aspects of taste of like i forget what it is like sweet sour bitter umami um what am i forgetting uh whatever a whole bunch of salty salty there you go thank you um but then he always adds uh i think an unfortunately named but an important thing which is the human factor which is like how does the food look what memories do you have it over your childhood or whatever and you think well that's not that's not an aspect of taste but it is it's such a big part of the food experience yes there's all the taste factors that go into a food but there's always the human element in any interface design making something cool or lickable or attractive or like makes it feel fun or makes you want to use it and want to touch it and want to manipulate it there that's an art uh to it and And so ideally, any good computer interface has ideas that are founded in science that we found to be a good way to let people use a computer, that it makes them be able to be successful, makes them make fewer errors, makes it understandable, makes it easier to use, makes it powerful so they can do the things they want to do without lots of effort.

1:02:02and also the art of interface design that makes it attractive and makes you want to play with it and makes you excited about using it and makes it feel like a pleasant place to be and does not cause anxiety and like a million different things right and that whole science aspect of interfaces sometimes feels to me entirely forgotten by everybody not just apple not just people who work in the industry by users by journalists by everybody has like forgetting the idea that There even is an aspect of user interface design that can be founded in science. You can test things and see if they make the interfaces better.

1:02:40And you can have ideas about how you might make the interface better that are founded in reason. Maybe if we have standard scroll bars everywhere, then once someone learns how that scroll bar works, they'll be able to scroll in every application instead of having to relearn it. That's an idea. And then they can test that idea. And the idea, there's reasoning behind it. There's logic behind it. Let's have an idea for improving the interface founded in some kind of logic that seems like it should make sense. And let's test that idea. And I can't remember the last time I've seen anything like that anywhere having anything to do with interfaces across this entire industry for like decades.

1:03:17All I ever see is the art and debate about the art and whether the art is good or bad or whether they like how it looks and whether they don't like us. Do you think it's cool? Do you not think it's cool? And the art part is important, but it's not the only part of interface design. So if you're listening to this and you've never heard anything about this, you don't know anything about the science of user interface design or it sounds boring or whatever, I encourage you to either buy or find an ebook or PDF download or whatever of these very old, like they're thrown in the 90s, this Tog on interface and Tog on software design and just read them.

1:03:46Is it relevant to today's things? not really but it will give you the mindset of like how do i think about interface design if i want to use logic and reason to come up with ideas that i think will make the interface better and then test those ideas because that seems so incredibly absent all the debates about liquid uh i keep saying liquid metal i know i do all the liquid glass interface stuff um it many people say oh it's misguided the foundations are wrong so on and so forth that the reasons they give for as marco has said in past shows like the reasons they give don't make any sense and are basically bs because they don't they're not logical like the things they say that it does it doesn't do and even if it did do it it doesn't it doesn't make any logical sense why that would make the interface better it's like it's it's a tautological thing we wanted to do this therefore we wanted to do it therefore it's good like they don't even attempt to say how like it's just anyway so i i just feel like that's entirely missing and then it's part of it is you know so when jobs came back he was so heavily into the art and he didn't like all these nerd eggheads doing the science part of it you know he changed the balance for sure and i feel like it has only accelerated to the point where now alan dye who apparently comes from like a marcom background which is marketing communication like and print design doesn't even have a background in user interface design but i assure you user interface design still is a field of study at least in the academic world where people try to make, you know, interfaces more usable to people by using reason and testing things and not just, you know, having a whim and deciding I want, you know, stitched leather because I think it's cool and reminds me of the seat backs on my private jet or whatever the heck the story behind that was.

1:05:23Like, again, that's an important part of it, but there has to be a balance. And I feel like the balance is way, way, way, way, way too far in the direction of the art and emotion side which again is an important factor um but it's can't be the only factor and if you're on way on the art side and you make an interface that people don't find appealing now you've got a real problem because it's not usable it's not useful it's like you're making the interface worse and people don't even think it's cool looking so hopefully lots of people will think liquid glass looks real cool because i think in many aspects the usability of it uh is has gotten worse and the supposed foundations of its design don't make any sense and surely weren't tested in any way because we're using the interfaces and finding all these obvious problems and they don't care and they're they're not fixable because the design itself is fundamentally just flawed and i guess not the end of the world like i agree with what marco said like you know you can use it it's mostly i said this since the beginning since i've been using tahoe like i don't particularly like it i see that it is doing dumb things for dumb reasons but in the end you mostly get along you know it doesn't stop you from using your mac it's not some kind of fundamental change that like now i can't even use my mac or whatever the accessibility options there are they're turned on i just don't find the art appealing and i think they made the interface worse and what i'm craving is a return of a better balance between the science of interface design and the art of interface design and i you know this has been an industry trend for everybody for ages and And within Apple, it's, you know, it's like epidemic proportions of too much art, not enough science.

1:07:04Yeah, I don't even know if the really, really high ups even know that this is a science or respect it as one. Or have any people who work at Apple whose degree is in user interface design who are doing it. I mean, like, and I'm sure, I mean, I hope some of those people are still there. but it's very clear that they are not the ones making the big decisions anymore and and that's that's a shame because you're right like this is a knowable and known field this is a studied field a rigorous studied like real discipline and and evolving like i'm not saying it's stuck in stone you advance it you try to come up with new ideas using new technology like it should always be advancing yeah and it seems like they they don't respect it um because unless they're just i mean either they're really bad at it or they don't even know this is a thing that they should be respecting um and i'm thinking the latter is more likely i think i think a lot of it is the hangover from jobs because he he eventually had such a disdain for that thing because he would have an idea in his head about something that he thinks is really cool and they would say there's some aspect of it that is not good for usability and it was like don't be a naysayer like he really intentionally pushed apple in the other direction which is you know i i have good taste don't tell me about the stupid science stuff that's how you get boring interfaces like platinum was boring aqua is exciting see how i fixed apple by doing this and in many respects he was right that the pendulum had swung too far the other direction but he's such a forceful person it was such a powerful leader leader in apple for so long and so influential and the company was so successful that i think he was uh very able to drive out the power and influence of the science space user design within Apple.

1:08:49And then when he left, everyone's like, well, we should just keep doing what Jobs is doing because he's great and we're great and everything. And it just continued after he was gone. And I think now the company is reaping the non-benefits, reaping what they sowed. Like they've successfully expunged all people who know how to make better user interfaces in exchange for artists. And now sometimes when the arc goes wrong, there's nothing left. All right. a couple of days ago, yesterday maybe, I think it was, as we record this, Apple announced services, services, services. And this one is AppleCare 1.

1:09:26Reading from Apple's announcement, Apple Today on the 23rd unveiled AppleCare 1, a new way for customers to cover multiple Apple products with one simple plan. For just$19.99 per month, customers can protect up to three products in one plan with the option to add more at any time for$5.99 per month for each device. Devices must be less than four years old and headphones must be less than one year old. Only devices in the customer's Apple account can be covered under AppleCare One. Starting tomorrow, customers in the U.S. can sign up for AppleCare One directly on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac, or by visiting their nearest Apple store.

1:10:00AppleCare One includes all of the benefits that come with AppleCare Plus, including unlimited repairs for accidents like jobs and spills, 24-7 priority support, quick and convenient Apple-certified service, and battery coverage. AppleCare One also expands theft and loss protection beyond iPhone to also cover iPad and Apple Watch. Fees and deductibles apply. AppleCare One pricing is the same regardless of the products that are covered, meaning a customer can enroll their phone, iPad, and Apple Watch and save up to$11 a month over enrolling in separate AppleCare Plus plans for each device. Additional items can be added for$5.99 per month each.

1:10:33With AppleCare One, customers can now add products they already own that are up to four years old if they are in good condition. To verify good condition, products may be required to undergo a diagnostic check using a customer's iPhone or iPad Or at an Apple store prior to being added to the plan This provides customers with more opportunities to protect their devices Even beyond the current 60-day window to purchase AppleCare Plus The Verge writes that AppleCare One is a good deal, but not for everyone AppleCare One lets you protect up to three devices for$19.99 per month Apple claims that customers can save$11 per month by enrolling in a phone, watch, and pad in AppleCare One Compared to paying for three individual AppleCare Plus plans for those devices But that's not true across the board for all of its models.

1:11:10For example, the monthly cost for iPhone coverage with AppleCare Plus starts at$9.99 for the cheapest and oldest eligible models, whereas the iPad and Apple Watch start at$4.99 and$2.99 respectively, totaling$17.97 per month. In this case, AppleCare One is a slightly worse deal than buying the plans a la carte. Where the new service shines is if you own some of Apple's most expensive products, like the iPhone 16 Pro, the Apple Vision Pro, and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the M4 chip. Paying for a monthly AppleCare Plus plan for each of these three would cost$47.47 total per month That's almost$50 According to a list of prices Apple PR manager Anna Mitchell shared with The Verge AppleCare One on the other hand would still be$19.99 for any mix of three products Mitchell confirmed, which is obviously the better deal by a huge margin What's important to keep in mind is that just like AppleCare Plus With AppleCare One you still have to pay deductibles and fees for each and every repair And those costs vary depending on the device as well as the type of repair you need how much you can expect to pay which is in addition to your monthly apple care fee is listed on apple's website and we will link to a couple of things with regard to that yeah so the service fees and deductibles tells you like like casey had to pay 29 bucks or whatever for his airpods thing you'll see on this thing hey if you get any kind of apple care plus airpods thing you're going to pay 29 so you can find out what that is for your product and then uh we'll link to the main apple care page which has the plans of the prices which will become relevant in a moment um a couple of selected fact items here from apple's apple care page uh can i add my family's devices to my apple care one plan that was one of my biggest questions because a lot of like the you know what is it called icloud what is the icloud that's the uh apple one apple one thank you apple one uh that is kind of like a family thing where you can get everyone in on it but uh as for apple care one the answer is apple care one plans covered devices that are on the same Apple account as the subscriber.

1:12:57And I'll have a little bit more on that with my personal experience in a second. But if you're thinking of like, oh, I'm just gonna put my whole family's devices under one AppleCare one plan, it only counts if they're on the, whatever account you buy it through, your Apple ID, I keep saying Apple ID, your Apple account, it's only for devices that also use that same Apple account. And then how do you buy it? It's actually kind of tricky. They have an answer in the back which says, oh, it's just easy. You just, you can do it online or through your app or uh you know through your device or whatever uh you will i'm sure they will push it more uh harshly but like an easiest way to do is just go to your phone go to settings general and then there's a warranty and repair thing and you'll see the come on at the top of the page so for once apple's advertising of features that helps you to find things i did that on my phone um and it brought up a nice uh little after i said yes i want to try upgrading my plan brought up a nice little thing that says hey given these devices i think it just picks three random devices or maybe picks like the most attractive random devices so it says you can save up to 17.98 per month when you protect john's iphone 16 pro tina's iphone 15 pro and john's ipad pro m4 luckily i named my devices so you can tell what they all are so hey almost 18 a month in saving it's saying right there if you upgrade if you go to this instead of what you currently have you will save money um and i did that upgrade coverage thing and then it just told me you and process my request because the thing is slammed um so i it took me all day to get through all day it's just been totally down like you it it brings you to the apple pay prompt you double tap you do face thing it says processing and then it says oh i couldn't do it sorry but eventually it did let me do it um and that led me to the plan prices page because after you do this after you see that it'll come on and says you can save 18 a month do you want to do this yeah i do want I do want to save$18 a month.

1:14:44So I did it. And fine, you're done. But then after you've done that, so now I'm paying$19.99 in a month for these three devices and I'm saving$18 a month. But you can add more devices to this AppleCare One plan for, what was it,$5.99 per device? I think that's right, yeah. But the question is, if I add this device to my AppleCare One, is it cheaper or is it more expensive? So for example, with the Apple Watch, that's$2.99 a month. If I add it to the plan, it becomes$5.99 a month. and nowhere in the interface did they say, are you sure you want to add that device? Because you'd be paying more. No, they don't tell you that at all.

1:15:20So you have to go to the applecare.com, apple.com slash applecare, scroll down to the plans section, click on the thing that you have, like Mac or iPhone or display or whatever, and then click on all model pricing and then look for the model that you have and it will tell you what the monthly and annual fees are. It gets more complicated because like, what if you're not paying month by month? What if you paid for two years in advance and you're paying annually? The annual prices are way cheaper than the monthly ones in some cases. So you have to do a little bit of math in your head and figure out how many of my devices should I add to my AppleCare one plan so that I'm not losing.

1:15:57Like I want I'm only added if I'm going to save money. And that was a little bit tedious. They don't make that easy. It's nice that on the very first come on, they will say, do this. And this is how much you'll save for these three devices. So I just took their advice. I said, great. Those three devices, I will save that much money. i believe you good but the other devices i added i only added devices where after i looked up the pricing everything i determined that it would be cheaper to add the device than to leave it so i had to leave a bunch of devices on their existing plans either because they're on multi-year plans that are cheaper or because they're monthly plans that are less than 599 like a mac mini is 349 a month you should not add that at 599 a month because when you do add it it cancels your old AppleCare and it refunds you any, you know, fees that, uh, anything for like the remainder of the time that you aren't going to use or whatever.

1:16:44And by the way, I think it refunds it to you as an Apple gift card, which is kind of janky, but whatever, I'll end up spending it. Um, so I did that. And then like for the family thing, one of the devices that I put on after looking up the price, it was a MacBook air 13 inch, which it's monthly fee is 699. My son's M2 MacBook Air is out of warranty. This is one of the good things about AppleCare one. It's been out of warranty for like years now, right? As long as it's less than four years old, you can put it back on warranty, which I don't think you think you'd ever be able to do. Like, I think it's like, like I said, a 60 day window.

1:17:17Normally after your AppleCare expires, you can, you know, you can put it back into AppleCare. Now you have four years to decide to put that into AppleCare. And I didn't mean for my son's Apple, MacBook Air to expire. I just bought like a two year thing and just let it expire because I forgot about it. So I want it to be back on AppleCare and$599 is cheaper than$699. so I put it back on and it worked and it did that and it put it back on uh and then I saw some orange text underneath it that says this device will be removed like on like my warranty screen where it says here's all your apple care one devices and it's this device will be removed I'm like why why will it be removed and I kept tapping into it or whatever and eventually I realized it's that rule that we said before apple care one only applies to devices that are on the same apple account as the subscriber.

1:18:01So what I had to do was go to my son's MacBook Air, make an account for me, sign into my Apple ID on that account. And that makes it happy because now it thinks it's quote unquote my MacBook Air. I mean, I did pay for it and technically, you know, I do own it. But anyway, so that's your way around the family thing. That works great for Macs where I can make a second account and sign in with a different Apple ID. Doesn't work so great for phones because if your kid's got a phone you're not going to sign into your apple id on your kid's phone probably maybe you can sign in with your apple id in the store or something and find some workaround but i wouldn't want to risk it too much there so that's my advice is look into apple care one anyone who's listening to this who has any apple care on anything especially if you have expensive devices like they said in that uh verge article or whatever if you have something with pro in the name or some kind of expensive mac uh you'll probably save money you can add your kids devices especially if they're Macs if you have an account on it signed into your Apple ID but just be careful that you do the math with all the links we'll put in here to figure out whether you're actually saving money or not and I was very disappointed to learn that like for what I don't think I could get month to month or anyway I didn't get month to month for my pro display XDR I wish I did it has been out of warranty for a while now and I fear I see an underscore having the big red line on his XDR that he keeps making appointments at the Apple store about and then as soon as the appointment comes up the red line goes away so he cancels it i fear every day that my xdr will have a problem because i i don't want to get a smaller monitor but i would never buy this big monitor again but i can't put it like they're more than four years old my 2019 mac pro and my xdr that i bought at the same time they're both more than four years old they're ineligible to be added to an apple care one plan so i'm just sitting here with my fingers crossed and the other thing is my wife's studio display.

1:19:51It's less than four years old, but it doesn't show up anywhere in the UI for me to add it to the plan. So I don't know the deal with that is. Maybe I did add her Mac mini or sorry, her Mac studio, but I didn't see the monitor. I don't know if that's bundled with it or something because I bought them together. But anyway, that's my advice. Check out AppleCareOne. You will probably save some money. All right. Thank you to our members for being our exclusive sponsors today. You can join us at ATV.FM slash join to become a member. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.

1:20:21It is more of us every week exclusively for members. If you want to hear this week's Overtime, you can go and join us as a member. And this week's Overtime is an amazing exploration of the Mac control panel through this amazing... I think it's one of the best web apps I've ever seen. It's really quite something. We're going to talk about it in the after show and kind of all the joy around exploring the old Mac control panel. That's this week's overtime. And how it ties into what I was just talking about with the interface design. Exactly. Yes, there is a lot of relevant tie-ins there. So we will talk about that and more.

1:20:56Atp.fm slash join to hear all that. Thank you, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week.

1:21:04Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Margo and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon 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 And T-Marco Arment 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 All right, John, do you have a correction or an addition to an earlier topic? Yeah, my bad. I should put more detailed notes for myself.

1:22:11When I was talking about Apple and interfaces and the science and hardware interface, one other point that i wanted to make about the aqua introduction which again i encourage everybody who either wasn't alive then or or or has just never seen it um to watch that video because it is it is a trip when they introduce aqua they talk a little bit about some of their reasoning behind things but also in their human interface guidelines of the day they talk more about it maybe we'll find a link to that and shove it in the show notes but you can probably find it somewhere and actually it might be difficult you might have to go to archive.org or something anyway an example of a combination of art and science with some kind of rationale behind it which may or may not have worked out but but anyway it's an example of something with a rationale that makes some kind of sense aqua has transparency in it that was one of its innovative features there's transparency in the interface which was new for mac os and new for desktop os's to the degree that aqua did it It was a compositing window manager that you could have like soft shadows that are transparent, lay it on top of stuff.

1:23:13The title bars of windows when are inactive or transparent, pull down menus for transparent, stuff like that. Part of Apple's pitch about, hey, why are these things in the OS transparent and these things not? Had a logic behind it. Sheets, which were an innovation in Mac OS X, were, they still exist. They're basically little dialogues that are attached to windows. So for example, if you have a document window and you want to save it back in the old days in classic Mac OS, they would throw up an app modal dialogue, which means a dial, a save dialogue will come up and say, where do you want to save this document?

1:23:50And that would block the whole app. Even if you had five documents open on a big screen, because you were saving one of them, you couldn't say, oh, before I decide where to save this, let me go over to this other document. It was like, nope, this document is app modal means this entire app is currently in the mode that's saying you are now saving pick a directory to save this document and give it a file name right totally block you can go to other apps and use them but this dialog will block the entire app the innovation of sheets was it would be attached to the document window and yeah that window is blocked until you decide to save or hit cancel but other document windows are fine um and so the sheet sort of came out of the uh with an animation sort of like vertically sort of came out of the document window towards you and then curled down to let you know unambiguously this sheet is attached to this window first of all it's it's within the bounds of this window but also you saw it come out of this window it is clearly like a like a like a necktie for this window so it is document modal right and why is the sheet transparent because it's temporary same thing with pull down menus from the menu bar they appear briefly on top of something else and they're transparent parent not because it looks cool not to highlight your content but because in the original aqua interface transparent meant temporary meant i'm going on top of stuff briefly but then i'm going away i'm pulling down a menu but when i'm done it will go away they violated that sometimes certain things were transparent that weren't temporary like the dock which was there all the time um similar but yeah and they use it for other things like the title bar of the of an active window was opaque but title bars of background windows were transparent one of the things they learned after they released it was you can't read the titles of background windows because they're all transparent and the titles overlay each other so they walk that back right but i do want to highlight like the combination of art and uh and science here of saying we think transparent stuff looks cool it's a cornerstone of our lickable user interface that's part of the art of this it is very appealing to people people are dazzled by it it's great right but when and where should we use transparency let's come up with some kind of rationale and that rationale of temporary interface elements that briefly appear and then go away those should be transparent to highlight their transient nature whereas more permanent things are opaque and yes they violated that in a few areas here or there but that's an example of combining those two things of coming up with something that you think is cool but then deciding how and where to deploy it with some kind of rationale that makes some kind of sense and yes they should have user tested the transparent inactive window title bars and realized that it makes it so you can't read the title bars of windows because they all jumble up i think i did a screenshot of that in my original mac os 10 review right so there were infallible aqua is not perfect i complained about you know i arguably made an entire career complaining about the usability problems with aqua right but i you know it's it's such a even aqua for all the things everyone hated about it and all the things I complained about it is such a contrast in that they at least try to explain why they were doing things and when you hear the explanation you go alright that makes sense and still you get to then try it and see how it works out and they probably should have done more user testing but anyway that was the point I meant to make earlier and I didn't so I shoved it in the after show go team perfect