651: Your Judgement About Pockets

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52:18The iPhone 17 Pro's rumored new MagSafe design. We're reading from MacRumors. Leaker Jin Boo today shared a photo of the alleged MagSafe magnet arrays for third-party iPhone 17 Pro cases. On existing iPhone models of MagSafe, the magnets form a complete circle, but the new layout has an opening in it. and there is a link to myjin's official website and we will also link the picture of the iphone 16 pro with a mag safe case where you can see clear as day that there is a circle of mag safe magnets the apple logo is pretty much directly in the center of it and in the 17 pro allegedly the apple logo has been moved down so it's kind of in the way of the bottom of the magnet circle and so there is no magnet circle.

53:03So here's the thing. If you look at the My Jimbo things where like the parts that he's got, if you scroll down the page and see like those teal little pieces, you see that? There's no Apple logo on those. So while I'm willing to believe that this incomplete mag safe circle is the design for the back of the phone because these parts leaks seem, you know, it's around that time that we'd be getting these types of leaks. I'm currently wondering what does that mean for the Apple logo on the back of the phone? Because I don't think they're going to put it where this Mac rumors mockup put it. Like they, what they did is they, the back of the iPhone 17 pro basically has a full width camera mesa and then below it has another rounded rectangle.

53:47And they put the Apple logo in the center of the lower rounded rectangle, but the center of the lower rounded rectangle is not the center of the MagSafe circle. It's lower than that. So that's where the mockup put the Apple logo. I guess you could just move the Apple logo up and put it in the center of the partial circle? Or, what do you think of this? No Apple logo on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro. No way. So what's your guess for where will the Apple logo be positioned or will there be one? Assuming that this MagSafe design is true. I think it'll be where it is today. There's just going to be less MagSafe stuff beneath it.

54:22So you think it'll be centered in the partial circle? Mm-hmm. It's interesting they chose not to do that because I think one of the other rumors, you'll see i think there are separate rumor stories that are like the apple is going to be centered in the rounded rectangle not where it used to be i don't know what to think i mean the actual back of the phone you don't see the mag safe shape so this is only an issue when you have like a clear case this kind of thing i can see apple just maybe like discontinuing the clear case if that's gonna be a problem but like that's fair i i think ultimately the apple logo i think will remain in the middle of the circle, not in the middle of the flat area.

55:05Because with the Apple logo in the middle of the flat area of the back of the phone, it puts it pretty far below the overall center of the phone, and I think it kind of just makes it look droopy. You don't want the Apple logo to look like it's beneath something. Obviously, Tim Cook is beneath a lot of dignity right now, but you don't want the Apple logo... Couldn't help yourself. No, of course not. you don't want the apple logo to be down on on the shape of the phone you want it to be like prominent center or up like you don't want it to be on the lower half and that's what this is depicting i can't see apple doing that yeah i think they're still going to have the clear case i think the apple logo does actually look better centered in the in the rectangular part just because if if it is styled as they're showing here where it's like two color two tone like it's a different color than the rest of it so you can clearly see it but uh i'm thinking back to do you remember the um the case the apple case with a bunch of holes in it i think it was on that was it on the c phones yeah it was on the 5c i remember how badly those holes lined up with like the apple logo or whatever that was on the back of the phone and people it looked very on apple like i think they're willing to have awkward alignment between the phone body and the case but we'll see this is one of the more interesting rumors this because these phones have been so thoroughly leaked with like down to the fraction of a millimeter models of every single phone in the lineup of being out for months now uh that this is this is one thing we that that it seems there seems to be disagreement on is where the apple logo will go because the mock-ups for case designs don't actually include that information because it's not important when you're designing a case because the apple logo is not it's not indented it's not poking out it's just part of the flat surface so keep an eye out for where will the apple logo be or will there be one i agree that will probably still be one All right.

56:52Apple's new Answers team eyes ChatGPT-like product in AI push, writes Mark Gurman. Apple has a new Answers team developing a stripped-down rival to ChatGPT to help users access world knowledge. Earlier this year, Apple formed a new team called Answers Knowledge and Information, or AKI. This group, I'm told, is exploring a number of in-house AI services with the goal of creating a new ChatGPT-like search experience. The AKI team is led by our former friend, Robbie Walker, a senior director reporting to AI chief John G. and Andrea. Walker previously oversaw Siri, but lost control of it after engineering delays.

57:25Following that shakeup, he was assigned to the New Answers initiative and has brought along several key team members from his Siri days. While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an answer engine, a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general knowledge questions. A standalone app is currently under exploration alongside new backend infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight, and Safari. Apple's recently begun advertising job openings for the team on its career site. Several listings specifically mention experience with search algorithms and engine development.

57:55I can't tell from this rumor whether the answer engine thing is a search engine or is an LLM or both. because this is described as a chat GPT-like search experience. When I think of an answers team... i mean i guess it depends on what they're being asked to answer but like i think there's still a place in Apple's software stack for something they can answer questions from like a knowledge base. You know what I mean? Not make up statistically likely answers from a knowledge base that it was trained on, but like literally look stuff up. Kind of like what Gruber is going on about when they have the whole thing about who won the Super Bowls.

58:39You can just put all the Super Bowl winners and the scores and info in like a structured database and have a thing that knows how to pull that info out. And it won't be wrong because it knows as long as it correctly interprets which Super Bowl you're talking about, it can look it up in the structured database and just give you the answer that it has in its database. And I guess the info in the database could be wrong. But you know, once you get the database, right, there's not a lot of variability, it will give you the scores that will give you the teams will give you the years, it will give you whatever is in the database.

59:05That's not an LLM. The LLM may parse your question. But this could be a tool that the LLM uses to say, hey, if anyone asked you about Super Bowl, if you interpret whatever mumbo jumbo, they told you that they're asking about the Super Bowl, LLM thing use this tool and then the tool would be the answer engine that goes and looks up all the state capitals the populations of various countries you know like facts to have a fact right and I think there's a place for that Siri used to do that like that was basically how Siri worked if you asked it sort of quote-unquote world knowledge questions it either had some kind of database with the structured information that it could give you or it didn't and it'd be like I couldn't tell you that but in the age of LLMs with quote-unquote world knowledge they'll make up anything you can ask them anything and they'll tell you something all right and that's why people are trying to make lms to be essentially like tool using devices where their their job is to interpret what the request is and to figure out which tool to use and then those tools are not probabilistic word generator things but are instead specific tools that do a particular task like look up some data in a database or whatever i hope that's what they're making because one of the things that i feel like is a frustration with uh lm type stuff is we expect from our experience in the past with computers we expect computers to be good at the things that humans are not good at so computers can do math really really fast humans can't and computers get the answers right all the time unless it's a hardware failure computer humans don't but with lms that all changes all the things that we expect them to be good at of like their their speed and infallibility don't exist anymore and it's sometimes tricky to find out how to get value out of a thing like that like we want them to be like well the computer says it must be right i asked it about the super bowl and it understood my question it told me this team won and this was the score but it turns out that's just statistically probable nonsense and it's wrong right um having a plain old boring set of structured data retrieval tools like an answer engine that can be used by an LLM to look stuff up once it understands what the user wants.

1:01:11Seems like a really great idea for me. And I really hope that's what they're doing. But then seeing the names associated with this, like Robbie Walker who got all that bad press about the Siri stuff, it also seems kind of like, well we kicked all these people off Siri, so we need something to do, so give them this other thing. And it doesn't make me feel like it is a high priority project. I mean, we'll see what happens with all their AI efforts and projects. Like, it's obviously finally in a state of significant flux. That's good. We know that's where we wanted them to be because they I think we can agree they were heading in some bad directions before or simply not heading nowhere.

1:01:47Right, yeah, exactly. There's going to be a lot of fits and starts and big attempts, small attempts. I think this is great. At least they are trying things now that seem like they are both achievable and important to their customers. um you know like if they were gonna have some big moon shoot projects i'd rather than try to build a world knowledge ai than a car or a vr headset honestly um so i think this is good news like even if it never becomes anything or even if they try it and it sucks i'd rather they try this kind of stuff than not i can't tell if you're saying moon shoot as a as a humorous reference to your past saying of that word or you just forgotten that's i forgot all right now i remember yeah i like here's the thing do you remember when they whatever the announcement might have been a wwc at the the apple intelligence one they're like and we've fed it siri knowledge about our products and now you can ask about our products and people tried it and it would just tell you to go to settings that don't exist in settings and stuff like that like the value of features like that essentially goes to zero if you can't rely on it giving you answers and it's kind of embarrassing for like Apple's own products that like they're advertising the fact that you can ask your phone how to like you know how do I turn on dark mode and it tells you go to settings go here go this like if it's wrong you're like you're the phone the one thing you should know about is where the stuff is in you it seems it's and once you get a wrong answer once or twice from that you're going to stop asking it because it seems like it's just wasting your time this is where an answer engine can come in handy I feel like you could structure that data in some way that it would always give you an answer that is relevant to whatever operating system your phone is running whatever you know like it should it should know this right this is a knowable tractable thing it's just so much more work to do it that way than to just feed all the knowledge base articles and documentation to an lm and then cross your fingers which is what everyone wants to do they're just like we'll just throw all the stuff at it and and then put it in front of customers and it it's right most of the time so that's good right yeah so i've my fingers are really crossed about this knowledge engine thing because i want this to be a deterministic tool that is used by the lms and i don't want it to be we just fed a bunch of documentation to a different lm so it can give you a different set of maybe right answers yeah i mean i agree with you that i think this is definitely something that they should be exploring i also agree that if if the reporting about robbie walker in particular and gian andrea actually are is anywhere near true and they are not as great as maybe they should be to be put in these positions i don't know that scares me a little bit and it's certainly like a well we don't want to fire you but just go over here and play for a little while like a toddler right like distract distract it doesn't seem like it's the a team right exactly which i mean may and maybe we're darn wrong maybe robbie walker and john gian andrea were completely riddled with...

1:04:44Well, I mean, all we know is that they didn't produce results. We don't know why, but we do know that they had a job and they didn't do it. Exactly. But we'll see. I'm really hopeful that this will turn out to be something fruitful. I don't even really care if it's an LLM or not, as long as it works, but yeah, we'll see. We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. So there's a whole business out there of data brokers. Data brokers basically profit off your data.

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1:06:55All right, let's do some Ask ATP where Steve writes, I have a desktop laptop, MacBook Air. It has an external SSD permanently attached, which I use for time machine backups. Whenever the MacBook wakes from sleep, it pings a notification, disk not ejected properly. Eject M1 time machine before disconnecting it or turning it off. Can I stop this from happening without having to dismount and remount the drive every time I walk away from the computer? It's annoying and worrying that I might be corrupting my backups. Before John starts fussing about desktop laptops, we know that desktops would solve this problem, but you can't move a desktop, John.

1:07:26That's the other problem. I don't know if desktops would solve this problem because the problem is like going to sleep and waking from sleep. Desktops also go to sleep and wake from sleep. That's fair. All right. See, I was trying to get ahead of all the complaining and moaning about laptops, but it turns out you're not complaining and moaning. What I'm saying is you're worried you might be corrupting your backups? Yeah, you should be worried. If it says disk not ejected properly, that's not an annoyance that you should live with. That's an indication that something is going wrong. We've talked about this in past episodes.

1:07:54What's going wrong? is it whatever chipset is running the interface on your external drive mechanism is it some driver issue with your version whatever it is it's a problem and you should do something about it because you can't allow this to stand anyway one of the workarounds believe it or not there is an app for this uh from uh uhst claire software what else do they make they got keyboard maestro and a bunch of other stuff anyway um it's called jettison the tagline is manually take control of your external disks directly from your menu bar automatically eject disks before your mac sleeps or after your display powers off with jettison just close your macbook unplug and go this is working around this apparently uh issue that is common with external disks with mac os by saying install this software and like you don't have to remember to manually unmount your things when you put your thing to sleep we will automatically unmount them before your macbook goes to sleep and I maybe remount them or whatever.

1:08:48But like what you're trying, this is a, not hacky, but this is an unfortunate workaround for a disc that keeps remounting itself. Really, your disc should not be unmounting itself when your Mac goes to sleep. As someone who has had many, many external drives connected to many, many Macs, you should be able to put it to sleep and wake it up and you should receive no messages about volumes unmounting. You shouldn't, it's not happened, but you know, we don't live in a perfect world. So check out Jettison. All right. Jeff writes,

1:09:46projects there it seemed to make no difference so i moved it back to my internal hard drive i was about to pull the trigger on a two thousand dollar mac mini with 48 gigs of memory and two terabytes of storage when this morning i checked my storage and 100 gigs had suddenly rematerialized can you explain this or give me some insight on how the storage relating to xcode works john tell me about file systems if you please yeah so free space in mac os is tricky because of the fancy features of the apple file system it's just it's just a fact of life you can't have these fancy features without some confusion about free space there is no obvious thing that apple should do that would make it clear to everybody all the time there just isn't so that's that's an unfortunate complexity of modern computing life the workaround is just by so much storage you never need to worry about it but that's very expensive especially in apple world so one of the things that could be making your hogging your space and then having your space suddenly reappear are local time machine backups if you are running time machine and it's not clear if jeff is but if you're running time machine time machine does this thing where it makes local snapshots where it takes a point in time snapshot of your entire volume uh periodically sometimes several of them and those snapshots keep data alive even if it's subsequently deleted because as long as data is referenced by any existing snapshots it can't be actually freed up so if you take a snapshot or time machine takes a snapshot behind the scenes without you knowing and again this has nothing to do with like an external time machine disk i'm saying if you're running time machine and like you unplug the time machine disk doesn't matter these are local snapshots on the volume that is going to be backed up it makes these snapshots because that's what it can back up from it takes a snapshot and then you delete 200 gigs worth of stuff you're not getting that space back until the snapshot that references those 200 gigs also goes away.

1:11:38Time Machine will delete these local snapshots periodically. It doesn't make them forever. So they sort of go off the end. I don't know how many it keeps. I don't know how long it keeps. The policy always changes or whatever. But like within a few days or hours or whatever, the snapshot that referenced those 200 gigs of files that you deleted, that snapshot will be deleted or discarded. And now nothing references that 200 gigs worth of data. And then you get it back as free space. You can see the complexity of the finder trying to show what your free space is. When you delete those 200 gigs, don't you want to see the number go up by 200 gigs but what if it didn't really delete it what if it's still referenced in a snapshot should it lie to you and tell you that's free space sometimes it does because in theory there's this system in mac os that considers that space quote-unquote purgeable so if it needs space and it doesn't have enough it can say what can i purge and one of the things that can purge is your time machine snapshot so it might show you that you have that 200 gigs free knowing that if any app tries to use that space it's a the mac os would be like oh actually that space isn't free but i can make it free just hang on a second i'll just delete the snapshot and that's time consuming it's tricky and the big complaint about mac os is it doesn't purge the purgeable space fast enough or in a timely enough manner so even though there's supposedly space available it doesn't become available fast enough anyway uh we'll put a link and a couple links in the show notes explaining what time machine local snapshots are and how you can view them used to be able to used to have to use a command line tool to do this but now plain old disk utility will show you your time machine snapshots and will let your local time machine snapshots and will let you delete them with a little minus button in disk utility so no longer do you have to do command line hacking i have found in my experience i often have to manually delete local time machine snapshots to free up space in a timely manner because mac os is just too slow and too reticent to purge that purgeable space so that's one thing the other thing is xcode taking up space xcode does take up tons of space in places that people might not uh realize so much so that there is a pretty good app dedicated to this called dev cleaner that i've been running for a long time do you guys run dev cleaner yes i do no there you go casey you found an app for you so it is it runs periodically even if you forget to run it it will periodically pop up a notification and say hey you haven't run this in a while you should probably run it now and it shows you all the space take being taken up for xcode stuff that you can safely delete now safely is you know one of the things that will show you is how much space is being taken up with archive builds of your app you probably don't want to delete those at least i don't maybe i'm just hoarding them or they're good for debugging or whatever but like it will show you those so don't think you can just delete everything you have to have some knowledge to use this tool it will show you things like sdks that you've downloaded that you're not using anymore oh i'm not doing ipad development anymore And in fact, there's two different iPad SDKs downloaded.

1:14:21I can delete those. You can delete those because if you ever need them again, Xcode will redownload them for you, or you can redownload them from Xcode. It'll show you locally cached documentation. It will show you everyone's favorite derived data. It will show you all sorts of other stuff. It will show you, and the sizes, and you can decide which one of these things do you want to delete. And I always forget about it until a notification appears and says, hey, you haven't run DevCleanerRod. Do you want to run it? And that will find some stuff that you can delete. Now, I don't think it explains Jeff's situation where hundreds of gigs are disappearing.

1:14:51It shouldn't be that big, but it does let you get a handle on Xcode and the space that it's using. I would also check if you have like multiple versions of Xcode or like if you have the .zip file sitting in your download folder. And, you know, this gets into just general, like using something like Grand Perspective or Daisy Disk or whatever to find what's using space on your disk. But for Xcode in particular, there's an app for that. It's called DevCleaner. Check it out. And if you are on the Xcode beta train, or just if you use Xcode for long enough to have multiple versions of Xcode, or have gone through multiple versions of iOS or whatever the platforms are, when Xcode downloads the iOS runtime files or the watchOS runtime files, or downloading those components after you install the actual app, it doesn't delete the old ones.

1:15:44So if you're on the beta train, like this summer, we're on the beta train, we're on beta 5, Every time you download the new beta, it downloads the iOS support files for that version of the beta, which are like 7 gigs. When you get the new beta, those old files stick around. They're no longer used if you replace beta 4 of Xcode with beta 5 of Xcode or whatever, but those stick around. Recently, those have moved to a system folder that tools like DevCleaner can't clean, but Xcode itself. if you go into the xcode settings there's a tab called components and if you scroll into the bottom it will show you all the old versions of those components of basically like you know old ios builds and stuff that you probably can delete support for because you probably don't need them anymore because the version of xcode you're running you usually can't even use them if you want it to or if it's for you know some ancient version of xcode do you really need separate support files for iOS 18.4 and 18.1 and 18.0.

1:16:44Like, probably not. And you can always redownload that kind of stuff if you need it. So, go into the Xcode components menu and you'll be able to delete a lot of stuff from there. And then secondly, if you are running the iOS simulator, say, on your Mac to test out things on iOS, I run into this problem a lot because my app that I'm testing is Overcast and it downloads files. It downloads podcasts. and so if I like launch a new simulator and I log into an existing test account that already has some podcasts subscribed it's going to start downloading those files off the internet to my Mac and it's going to keep those in like a file container for that instance of that simulator so it could be downloading like a gig or two of mp3s if it's like a big enough account and those are just sitting in some container folder somewhere and I'm testing with them and everything but then later on if a new version of Xcode or iOS comes out and I start building my simulator against that, it is a new copy of the simulator with its own container.

1:17:44And the old one just gets abandoned. And so buried deep inside usually your library folder somewhere, there's device support or simulator folders that contain all of the data that has been downloaded by your app running in the simulator in various times. And if you aren't actively going and cleaning those out, those will add up too. So you do have to be fairly diligent with Xcode development for disk space, both Xcode itself in the component menu and if you're running simulators, like what's going on in those simulators and are you then abandoning them with gigs of data just sitting there forever?

1:18:21So there's a lot of potential to reclaim disk space by kind of watching Xcode like a hawk and almost none of it has to do with, as Jeff said, moving the Xcode app itself to an external disk because that won't change anything. It's still going to be storing all these other folders on your boot drive or whatever that is. And that being said, I would suggest if you have the ability, no computer from Apple that you intend to use Xcode with should have less than a terabyte of SSD. And even the terabyte you do have to babysit. The terabyte is what I use from my travel laptop. And the reason I know all this stuff about where all these folders are right now is because like two days ago it was down to like 30 gigs free i'm like what out of a terabyte what happened and sure enough i had like 200 gigs of xcode waste going on across the computer it was it was quite quite something to find um but but even even a terabyte like if i had the 512 i wouldn't fit like that would that that would not be enough for all the stuff that i do even for a travel laptop because i'm also doing xcode terabyte if you can should be your minimum and i think next time I buy one, I might even go two terabytes because these things are only growing over time, especially as we're getting into LLMs and downloading models and stuff like that.

1:19:38It's only going to keep getting bigger over time. It's also worth noting that the DevCleaner thing is apparently open source on GitHub as well, so it's on the Mac App Store, but you can also see the source code and try to build it yourself or whatever, so that's nice. And then, I've seen a bunch of stories recently about people who are like, my Mac was fine, had plenty of free space, and then overnight i lost 500 gigs and it turns out to be like i don't know spotlight importer uh that just got it caught in a loop and was just making tons of little files or some driver that kept crashing and every time it crashed it made like a four kilobyte crash log and it was crashing hundreds of times a second and there was a directory with six literally six million files in it stuff like that can happen uh with first party and third party software how do you find that how do you find what's happening?

1:20:25How did these people find what the problem is? We'll put a link in the notes to the app that I use, which is a grand perspective. What was the, what was the other app before grand perspective? I always, there was Omni disk sweeper. I always was a big fan of space gremlin and Daisy disc is the one that everyone else likes. Yeah. I like this, but grand perspective is a, is a clone of an app that was exactly like grand perspective that had different name anyway. Oh yes. I know what you're thinking of, but I can't remember the damn name of it. Yeah. Grand perspective gives you a bunch of visual squares.

1:20:54is each square the area of each or rectangle each the area of each rectangle represents the number of bytes uh the and it's i forget if it's free or cheap but anyway it's well worth the money because you can see the big boxes like it takes a long time to do a scan but just look at look for where the big rectangle is or look for where the giant fleets of tiny rectangles are and you'll find you'll very cool if there's a directory with six million files in it after you run grand perspective and let it run over like 48 hours or however long it takes to do it you'll you'll see the six million files that you didn't expect to be there because they will dwarf everything else the only advice i will give on grand perspective is in this modern age and in any kind of multi-user type environment if you have more than one account on your mac keep in mind that it cannot see stuff happening in other people's accounts when you run it on your account so you should go to that other account and run it there as well to get a complete picture because you're not gonna because it can't like it can't read those directories i don't think it like it runs as rude at least the mac app store one doesn't like run as root and have it permissions but that's how you find those things i mean you can do it from the command line there's a million different ways you can do it but if you're looking for a gui app run this thing let it run it will take a long time and it will show you a graphical representation that you can then hover your mouse cursor over all these little rectangles and show the little info pane it'll tell you exactly what file you're hovering over or what directory and then you can reveal that on the finder and you'll find where the problem is fixing the problem might be tricky especially with a spotlight importer or something but that's part of the detective work that's required so uh yeah i recommend you do the same marco if you if you're pushing up against limits of a one terabyte thing and you only found 200 gigs of x code waste to delete so maybe there's something else going wrong yeah i mean and you know also part of it is like you know i have there's 200 gigs of photos that are that were downloaded not even with keep origin if you're gonna put try to put your photo library in that laptop too yeah yeah yeah like and not even with keep original just like you know with the automatic storage thing yeah that's that's the problem with it oh optimize storage sure we'll use every ounce of free space you have and never purge it when you want space back is that what you wanted yeah remember back in the day i used to keep my icloud photo library file in a disk image that had a quota set on it i haven't done that in a long time i wonder if that still would work i mean i'm surprised it ever worked but i i understand the motivation but just like there should be a setting in photos that says optimize storage underneath that it should say and never use more than x amount and it can put a minimum on it like well you have to let me use at least this much because you have this many photos or whatever but it doesn't and so it just does whatever it feels like it's doing by the way the chat room has uh told us all that the uh the grand perspective predecessor was called disk inventory x or 10 ah yes all right uh and then finally tonight alan bale ward writes how do you recommend dealing with spam for those of us running our own mail server well i can stop here don't run your own mail server it's it's that simple like yeah i'm not trying to be a turd but Like I am happy to read the rest of this, but truly I get the motivation for not wanting to do Gmail or not wanting to do fast mail, even though I cannot overstate how good my experience with fast mail has been.

1:23:52I get the motivation. I am super duper in, into self host, self hosting these days. I get it, but this is a bad idea. It's just not a good idea to run your own mail server. I cannot stress enough. It's not a good plan. I'm going to read this because I'm not trying to be cruel to Alan, but that is truly my answer is don't run your own mail server. Alan writes, for those of us running our own mail server or not using Gmail, that has a good spam filter. There doesn't seem to be any spam filtering on iOS or iPadOS. The best solution I have is running spam sieve on my Mac and leaving mail open all the time.

1:24:27Is there a better way other than switching mail providers? No. If it matters, I'm using OpenSRS for my few domains used by myself and a few friends and family, which costs 50 cents per mailbox per month, a lot better than the$18 Canadian per user per month from G Suite. I think this question isn't just saying if you run your own mail server, which I agree you should not do it because it's just asking. It's a nightmare, which is a shame, by the way. It should be possible to do it, but the current situation, the current spam environment makes it pretty much untenable for you to do that. But even if you're not running your own mail server, but you're simply not using a service that has its own decent spam filtering built in like gmail tries to have um for example apple's mail services they're doing something related to spam that you have see if this sounds familiar no visibility into and no control over one of the reasons i've never used my apple email account as my main email account is because i have learned so many hard lessons about uh their spam filtering a that's not good at filtering spam and b it has stopped me from receiving legitimate messages many times with no explanation and no recourse so i don't like apple's email service for that reason but a lot of people use it and find it fine anyway um spam civ i used for years but of course alan has identified the problem spam civ is a thing that runs on your mac for it to do its work it needs to be running and it only works on the mac that it's running on that was good for the days of pop before we had even imap where all the email was just downloaded onto each individual mac that's not the world we live in although spam is really good uh and it's tunable and configurable and if you are in a situation where and and if you're using with imap it will be reflected back up on the server obviously because when it files things in spam it's following them in an imap spam folder so spam is not just for pop so i do actually recommend that but if you're not running your mac then spam sim isn't doing it it's work and if you don't have an always on mac i see the problem there uh mail route mail route whatever former sponsor of the show ages and ages ago that i'm still using is a server side mail filtering server so you basically have your mail delivered to mail route and then they filter spam and then forward it on to where it was really supposed to go i like that because it runs on a server that i don't have to deal with someplace else it's basically transparent it doesn't matter what mail client user whatever because as far as your client is concerned when the mail arrives it's already been filtered and i think they do a pretty good job i use that for a bunch of my like non gmail account things and it blocks a lot of spam um it's and i never need to do anything with it now does it block all the spam?

1:26:53No, but it has rarely caught a message that I wanted to get through. And it does send digest emails saying, here's some messages that we're questionable about. And you can click on individual ones and say, no, let that one through. I don't know if it learns from me doing that. But every once in a while, I have to say, no, let that one through. Anyway, mail route. That's another option. I'm sure there are similar services like that. That's what I would look into. Instead, you know, if you don't have something that's running all the time where you can run spam civ on a mac or whatever look for a server-side solution that runs on a server that you do not run like again you can just go to fast mail as casey was suggesting which should do presumably all this for you but if you want to assemble your mail life experience from pieces and like and why am i using mail right why don't i use it well because i have a bunch of email addresses for domains that aren't real i didn't want to use google domains or anything like that i just wanted to be freestanding and eventually i started getting enough email that spam became an issue and i was looking for a solution to that so i plugged in mail route and it's so far been working for me but i'm sure there are other alternatives yeah i would say i use mail route for a long time and yeah they were a sponsor um and my experience with them was pretty good overall however i did have to go in and like occasionally check their their kind of like maybe quarantine to say like because there it would occasionally catch messages that i did want and flag them as spam so i did have to kind of babysit it a little bit but it did do a very good job of filtering out spam in the meantime but overall casey's casey is the most right among us don't do this don't run your email server in this day and age there's there's lots of reasons that it's it's becoming increasingly difficult to do that in a way that is in a way that both you can you know reliably deliver mail to everybody and that you can reliably filter out spam and it's like the cloudflare situation uh yeah because of because it costs so little to spend send email spam became prevalent and then spam eventually overwhelmed all the legitimate mail and that allowed a few powerful mail providers to become so big that then they could do deals amongst themselves about sort of mail exchange and who they'll trust and the rules that they're set and now if you don't have a mail account on one of the big mail providers it's very difficult to be independent so now those big mail providers have an inordinate amount of control over the mail ecosystem so whatever they decide to do amongst themselves uh you are subject to that you are if they just decide we're not going to accept any mail unless it does x y and z you better do x y and z otherwise you can't deliver to millions and millions of people and this is just another yeah i mean so there's two things one bad actors ruin stuff for everybody and the bad actors in the cloud of full case would be the ai crawlers that are crawling too aggressively so they they make an environment where uh we can't have nice things you know someone's in there just making a mess and stomping around and breaking everything and so you need someone to try to create order and that creates these big powerful companies which now have too much power.

1:29:40So yeah, I'm sure, I don't know if this is tragedy of the commons or there's some common cliche or parable or lesson that repeats itself over and over again that I don't remember the name of that this is an example of. All right, thank you very much for listening, everybody. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is you get to hear more of us every week. in our ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week's Overtime, we're going to be talking about post-quantum cryptography, which is exactly as cool as it sounds.

1:30:18Post-quantum cryptography support in the 26 OSs in the networking stack. We're going to be talking about that. You can hear us by joining atp.fm. Thank you, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.

1:30:36Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into 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-N-G Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long This is a safe space, right?

1:31:36I'm not loving that neither of you has confirmed that this is a safe space for me. Well, we'll do our best. Yeah, there's no promises here. I think once you say what you have to say, once you give us the situation here, I want us all to do our counts. Okay. I got home from the beach on Sunday, and we went out to dinner with some friends of ours. and I forget what was, I think it was like a late breaking dinner in the sense that we hadn't really, really planned on going. And then all of a sudden it was like, all right, let's get in the car and go. And I was in my workout clothes, which is a ATP athletic shirt.

1:32:14You know, the, it's kind of Under Armour style athletic shirt that I love and a pair of exercise shorts from a former sponsor, which I adore. I really truly do. That being said, the zipper on these shorts has given up the ghost on both sides. So I don't generally go out and like do social things in this outfit in no small part because I often stink, but here we are. But occasionally exceptions have to be made. And this is one of those exceptions. And so we went to dinner and then I was getting back into Aaron's car in the passenger seat as I was leaving dinner. And Aaron said, oh, I just heard something fall.

1:32:52Was that your phone? To which I said, Oh no, yes, it was. And sure enough, I shattered the back of my phone. This is, I believe the third phone I've done this to. I had a very long stretch of never having done this. And then we had the incident where I jumped up to wash her former Volvo while I had the phone in a back pocket of regular shorts, terrible decision, a hundred percent my fault. Uh, and it shattered on the ground thereafter. Uh, and then I'm pretty sure I broke another one, although I don't recall how now. And then I think this is my third. And to be clear, what is your case situation?

1:33:28I am caseless, caseless. And I have dropped this phone several times, not on concrete, like I did this time. I don't know if you want to offer this additional information. No, I mean, I know full well the risk I'm taking. I know full well the risk I'm taking. So you think your count is three. You have shattered three phones. I think that's right. And that one watch that also happened when washing Aaron's car. We're not talking about watches. This is just phones. It's not actually big. It's how many. You've had an iPhone since what? The first one? The 3GS? The 3GS was my first. That was the third one.

1:34:01Yeah. So that's a pretty good run for only three shattered phones. Although it is concerning that all three of them are fairly recent. They're my recent. Yeah, yeah. Something has changed in your judgment about pockets or something? Apparently. I don't know. But I mean, this was ultimately my fault. It's still my fault. but I put myself in a position that I'm not usually in. I'm in a pair of shorts that I know is not the best phone containment mechanism, and I left the house, which is something I don't typically do in these shorts. And so it's my fault, but mistake's been made. Well, so what actually happened, though?

1:34:31Was the phone in your pocket in the act of getting into the car squirted it out? That's right. Okay. What's your count, Marco? My count of what? How many phones have you shattered? Zero. I'm zero as well. Not once? Either of you? Wow. I'm impressed. Genuinely. I'm going to add iPod Touches because although I didn't get my first iPhone to the iPhone 7, I had the iPod Touch since the very first one. So I have always had phone-shaped things with screens on them. Although, granted, it probably didn't take the iPod Touch out of the house. Although I did, but I had it in a pouch. Anyway, I'm at zero.

1:35:03I'm trying to think. I don't think I have ever broken an electronic device. I can't remember anything off the top of my head. Maybe I'm forgetting something. Didn't you sit on it? Someone sat on an iPad in your house. Someone did sit on an iPad in my house. It was not me. It was not your butt, huh? No, it was a different butt in the house. I don't think I've ever broken anything like that. I'm very impressed. Like I said, I had a very long run. Coincidentally, I think this is actually all Stephen Hackett's fault because Stephen was breaking phones left and right for years, and I had never broken one.

1:35:34Now, to my recollection, Stephen hasn't broken a phone in a long time. Did he start using a case? Maybe. I don't know. He's traded. He started using a case. You stopped. Exactly. No, that's right. I just listened to Connected and I believe he said he is caseless in the winter, if I recall correctly, and case in the summer. So it would have saved me if I had followed his strategy. And by the way, speaking of the sounds of phones hitting the ground, once your children get a little older, you will start to become more familiar with that sound. I cannot count the number of times that I can now recognize whose phone it is and where they're dropping in the house.

1:36:11that phones have been dropped down the stairs dropped onto the floor just like onto onto the concrete like what you're getting into a car and falling out onto the ground has happened so many times uh thus far i believe cases have saved it in all circumstances although there's a very deep scratch on my daughter's phone screen she says she doesn't know where it came from but i'm not surprised because it's dropped all the time like she's literally dropped it down the stair like boom hits you know like from the top of the stairs to the bottom hitting all the stairs on the way down and somehow to survive with just an apple clear case on it that phone is getting replaced with her graduation gift slash college phone because she's used this phone for like five years i think four or five years so she's getting a new phone to go off to college but it's been a it's been a trooper um but yeah you'll probably be more familiar with that sound i'm saying is get cases for your kids phones oh no absolutely absolutely yes and that will be a requirement.

1:37:05But I was doing the, you know, AppleCare is my case, which I do not advise. I do not advise this. This is insanity. I mean, it seemed to work out for you because in the notes here, like you had AppleCare on it, right? I did. So I did an express replacement because I've learned from my mistakes with regard to the AirPods. There you go. That's why you dropped it because you just wanted to use the knowledge you had gained from past episodes before you forgot it. Shoot. And now that I think about it, I could have written off the 30 bucks, whatever it is to repair it. But what I did was that night, which was Sunday night, I went on Apple's website and said, I would like a express replacement, please.

1:37:41You know, I broke in the back glass, blah, blah, blah. That was easy peasy. It arrived yesterday, which is Tuesday. I did the transfer, which took forever. I will, no matter what I do to transfer phones, I always make the wrong choice and always, it always takes forever. And I think some of that - You just have a lot of data. I was about to say, I think some of that is, I just have a lot of data. But some of that, I think I'm just making maybe not the best choice. But either way, it did transfer. Most everything worked just fine. I didn't have any major issues. Then I wiped the old phone, put it in the box that the new phone came in, dropped it off this morning at FedEx.

1:38:15And the way this works is there is a$1 ,300 hold on my credit card because if I don't return the old phone, they basically think that I've stolen one. So they're going to bill me for it, which fair enough. But sometime in the next 24 to 48 hours, presumably they will get the old phone. They will look at it and laugh at my misfortune. And then they will refund or I guess release all but$30 in order to, because I'm pretty sure the repair is 30 bucks. It used to be a lot more for the back class. Now it's 30 bucks. And I got to tell you, Apple Express Replacement, I wish I'd listened to everyone when they've told us this numerous times over the years, but it was pretty great.

1:38:52I don't have any particular problem with my local Apple store. They're always very nice there. they're usually relatively quick despite serving a tremendous geographic area as i've whined about many times on the show but it worked out pretty great so i i really do suggest if you are in a position where you can do an express replacement for a product you should give it a shot worked out well i think also regarding you dropping your phone and being lucky enough to shatter the back glass i think a lot of people would just put a case in that phone and just keep using it i mean obviously if they didn't have apple care but even sometimes even with it because i see so many people using phones with shattered screens, which I don't advise, but shattered back.

1:39:30It's like, oh, I'll just put a case in that and just forget it even exists, right? That's true. But if I were to get a case, I would want some sort of leather case, maybe not the exact one that you like, but something similar. And that's the cost of two replacements of the back glass. Oh yeah. No, I'm not saying you said you had, you had AppleCare, you should get a new phone. But I think a lot of people without AppleCare would have just chosen to continue using that phone. It's like, I see a lot of beat up phones in the world. Oh, absolutely. If I had to pay the like$400 or whatever it is in August when I'm likely to get a new phone.

1:39:57Let me check my math next freaking month. There's no chance I would have got this repaired. But that being said, I do intend to pass this down to either family members or perhaps resell it or what have you, maybe trade it in. Um, and so because of that, I would like it to be in at least decent shape when that happens. And so, uh, yeah, I paid my, well, I presumably will be eventually build 30 bucks, which kudos to Apple for bringing that down from, I think it used to be a hundred bucks for the back glass. Now it's 30 bucks. I believe maybe, maybe I'm in for a rude awakening, but I'm pretty sure that's right.

1:40:29And, uh, and it was basically zero time without a phone. I guess it was the two hours that took the phone to transfer, which I feel like if I were to go to the Apple store, maybe they would replace the back glass, but it wouldn't surprise me if they just handed me a refurb there as well. So one way or another, uh, again, express replacement gets two thumbs up. If you already are paying for Apple care. And you got a fresh battery for your kids or whoever gets that phone next. Also thought about that too. Very true. I mean, the really remarkable thing is that, you know, like if you totaled your car and then within a few years you totaled two other cars, I would be surprised if your insurance company continued to want your business.

1:41:07In this case, it is kind of remarkable that Apple isn't dropping you from AppleCare. You know, I never thought of it that way, but you're not wrong. The risk is spread over a very large risk pool of billions of iPhone users. So I'm not sure they're going to start narrowing it down to finding people who are prone to breaking phones. Because we just all pay for all our AppleCare plans that we pay for that don't result in any kind of repair. That helps pay for the cases of the world. That's how risk pools work. Anyway, so yeah, that is my follow-up, if you will, about Express Replacement. You should try it.

1:41:40oh you know what i didn't i didn't mention though is that i'm on my like sixth screen protector or something like that yeah well that is just obviously it's a bad screen protector that doesn't agree with your life but you're just like if you keep giving me free ones i'll keep taking exactly which i don't like at a certain point like you should just maybe try a different screen protector maybe for your next phone well no but here's the thing i i actually had this conversation with myself because i i thought i was going to quote unquote lose my screen protector because it didn't, I didn't think it was damaged during the fall.

1:42:09It was all in the back. And I'm not going to like, even though I would like to, I'm not unfair or untruthful enough to deliberately damage it. So I can send the picture to Belkin to be like, Oh, guess what? It's broken. As it turns out though, there was a little bit of damage on the front that I just didn't see it from at first. And so just seconds ago, as we, as we were recording, I got the email from Belkin saying they're sending me what I think is literally my fifth or sixth screen protector. Belkin's going to be the one who drops you to be like, sorry. That's all 100%. 100%. But that being said, I was thinking, Mel, you know, these Belkin ones, to your point, John, I'm constantly freaking breaking them.

1:42:44And some of that is surely on me, but some of that may be the screen protector. And I thought about doing like one of these other ones. Like, I forget which one it was. I can look it up. But somebody had recommended a particular kind of screen protector, like just strong recommendation for a different kind of screen protector. And I think they had like two in the screen protector box that you buy. Now, granted, I think this one was like 10 or 15 bucks and Belkin one was like 40, but two apparently is not enough for me. And I don't think most other screen protectors do this like basically infinite conga line of replacements.

1:43:11Putting more than one in the box doesn't give me hope that it's going to be very sturdy. Exactly. There's something to knowing it's going to break. I think it's more like whenever I get screen protectors like from Amazon Brando Brands, they always come in batches of like six, you know,$9. like i think the reality is screen protectors just don't really cost anything to make and it's fine like they don't really care if they throw in a bunch of extras you know compared to like the cost of okay so so you know obviously one of the challenges of screen protectors is if you apply it and you get a speck of dust under it you know sometimes you can fix it sometimes you can't sometimes you just kind of like ruin one you gotta try again and like imagine all the people who would like be angry and leave one star reviews if they only had one or whatever and they're like oh we gave you two and so you can just try again like i i bet it's worth the companies who make these things like giving a bunch of extras in lots of cases because it you know it's just so cheap it's you know no sweat off their back meanwhile you know the customers have better experiences with them and you feel like you're getting a good deal Beep beep beep.