671: Even Apple Can’t Beat the Sun

29:23In the meantime, if you want a different podcast app that has different bugs, I can strongly recommend switching to Overcast. I have my own bugs that people keep telling me about, but I don't have that one. So give me a shot. All right. I guess there is like some kind of recommendation engine in Apple Podcasts because this person said they did the, you know, please suggest this thing less. So it's not as if like that was the original theory, like, oh, something is opening. Something is telling the podcast, the Apple podcast app to open a particular podcast. But it seems like what's happening is it's telling the Apple podcast app, open a podcast that you recommend for me.

29:59And so even, you know, but you can change which one it will recommend by saying within the Apple podcast app, I don't like this podcast, suggest it less. It's like, OK, the next time something randomly tells me that I should pop up a podcast that you might like, I'll pop up a different one, but I'll still pop it up. and then the 404 media story remember was about podcasts that had like really long weird names and strange urls and stuff and i don't know it's maybe these are two entirely separate bugs but uh yeah it's it's a complicated world it's that's why it's so difficult to it's one of the other things that it becomes more difficult to do these days is uh as the uh tech support for various people in our lives they will ask you questions about why a thing happened and they're never satisfied with the answer i don't know because there's just it's like well is there a way to know probably not but it's a thing that we will probably never know unless we you know unless we have all the source code and doggedly pursue this with the with the team of people for the next five years but that's not going to happen so the answer is i don't know we are sponsored this episode by zapier zapier is how you actually deliver on your ai strategy not just talk about it.

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32:46There's been a lot of rumors and discussion over the last couple of months about Apple's future iPhone plans. We're going to start with a post from Mark Gurman dated mid-November. Mark writes, Apple plans to unveil three new high-end models, the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and a new foldable in fall 2026. Then, roughly six months later, it will roll out the iPhone 18, iPhone 18e, and potentially a refreshed iPhone Air. I expect this pattern to continue for years to come, with Apple launching between five and six new models annually. The information reported that a second-generation iPhone Air had been postponed from next fall into 2027 in order to add a second rear camera, and that a vapor chamber and beefier battery are in the cards.

33:27The news outlet also cited poor sales as a cause for the schedule change, But from what I've heard, the second generation iPhone Air hadn't actually been earmarked for next year, at least not in recent months. So this wasn't a delay due to the phone's sales performance. The fact that Apple named the device the iPhone Air rather than the iPhone 17 Air signaled that it didn't want to tie the product to an annual release schedule. I'm told the main focus of the second Air will be to move to the 2 nanometer chip rather than major structural changes. The chip upgrade should help improve the Air's battery life, the biggest drawback of the first model.

33:57Apple developed the Air, believing it would make up 6 % to 8 % of new iPhone sales untold. That roughly matches the performance of the iPhone 16 Plus model it replaced. As for the new schedule, Apple aims to have a steadier revenue throughout the year, reduce strain on employees and manufacturing partners, and prevent its premium and budget models from cannibalizing each other's marketing. It also gives the company multiple chances each year to counter new releases from competitors like Samsung Electronics, which has long spread out its Galaxy and foldable launches. yeah setting aside for a moment the ipad air stuff which has been much debated since then going back and forth about the iphone air is not selling actually it's sold out in china actually they didn't make too much of it they're not going to do it next year they are going to do it back and forth two cameras one camera that's a separate drama i think the main big meaty chunk of this story is the idea that apple is going to go from september being iphone time where they roll out a bunch of phones and maybe like the se or some other straggler or the e model in modern days will be later to a cleanly split structure which is they roll out the pro phones and only the pro phones in september and then they wait six whole months and then they roll out the non-pro versions of those same phones that the plain iphone 18 and the iphone 18e and maybe the air i don't know why air wouldn't be lumped with the pro ones but i guess it doesn't have pro in the name oh and the foldable whatever that's going to be called ultra or whatever well i'm sure we'll talk about the foldable as the data approaches.

35:22There are many, many foldable rumors solidifying now, but because that's going to be so darn expensive, I guess that goes with the pro phones. But what do you think about that structure of having, you know, every six months, a new crop of phones, but not having all the new, you know, iPhone 18s or whatever come out at the same time? I don't love it, but I get it. I do like that we are currently programmed that in September, September we will see the suite of phones that 99 % of us care about and yeah there's always the like springtime phone that's a little bit of a one-off but generally speaking the the vast majority of us care about whatever's being released in September and I don't love that there will presumably soon come a time that okay well the pro phones were just updated in September they look great but what if I don't really need a pro phone but I'm not sure if the regular phone has I don't know, a vapor chamber, and I really, really, really want a vapor chamber.

36:18Now I've got to wait six months to figure that out. And that I don't really love, but certainly from Apple's perspective, it makes a ton of sense to stagger this out and not have it all hit at the exact same moment. I think it's interesting. I mean, I think the way that things have always been done so far with Apple, where like almost every phone is released in September, that only sounds sensible to us because that's how it's always been done. but that's only how it's always been done because for a long time they were just one iphone every year and and it wasn't you know once they started and then it was like okay well now we're going to have the one main one and then this one that's like very similar to it but a little bit a little bit you know last year's model or whatever um and then it's only been fairly recently that they've really broadened out the lineup and and had a bunch of different models um that's only really They've been like in the last, what, five to ten years of a nearly 20-year-old product line.

37:15So I think it makes sense to spread things out. How they spread it out, that's up to them. I'm sure they're going to experiment with it and see how it's felt. But I think it is interesting that like you look at any of their other product lines, the iPhone is the only one that works this way. Like where everything is all dropped at the same time every year and very reliably on that timeline as well. Well, the watch too, I guess, right? Oh, yeah, I guess the Apple Watch. Yeah, you're right. Which was a similar deal. There used to be one thing called Apple Watch and they slowly diversified it. That is true, but I think the Apple Watch lineup is so barely diversified at this point.

37:54And it's so kind of like half-assedly updated most of the time that I'm not sure I draw the same parallel. but in many ways it's kind of what I can see the iPhone getting to is more like what the iPad has or the Mac where like the Mac you'll have the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros will be released together but that's a different release often than the MacBook Air and those are both very important product lines that each get their time to shine because they're often released six months apart from each other or whatever. I can totally see that being the case here where the iPhone Air and the iPhone Pro, we can speculate, and we have, and we will, about why the iPhone Air seems to not be a hit.

38:47Honestly, based on this report that says that the die shrink of the chip will, or the process shrink of the chip will solve its biggest problem of battery life, I don't think it will solve it enough and B don't think that's the biggest problem but we'll go back to that some other time but I think one of the big challenges with the iPhone Air is that it was released alongside a really good iPhone Pro update and I think a lot of people who maybe would have had a better chance of going for the Air instead went for the Pro because it had a really good set of new colors, a really good new camera system, really great new battery life.

39:31Like if this was kind of a weaker update for the Pro, like a more kind of routine one, or if this was six months later and the Pro wasn't just updated, I think the iPhone Air would actually have sold significantly better. And maybe, you know, we talk in our, you know, in the Apple analyst and related space, you know, we talk a lot about like that, that fourth slot in the lineup just never sells. The one that's like the consumer line, but the high end of the consumer line. It used to be the Plus, and now it's or, yeah, was it the Plus? I forget all the... Yeah, it used to be the Plus phones. It was like the Max, but with the non-Max internals.

40:10Max size, but non-Max internals. Yeah, sorry, I was getting confused because the biggest Pro used to be called the Plus. But anyway, so, you know, that slot, that kind of like last slot in the lineup that has been doing poorly so far but possibly it's just because there isn't space to market it possibly it's because it doesn't have a chance because everyone who's shopping for phones in the fall is going for the pros but that's that could still be a great slot in the lineup i think the air shows that even though i i would make different trade-offs if i was you know in charge of the universe i would make different trade-offs for that product than Apple did, but there is a slot there.

40:51But as long as it's always released alongside the pros in the fall, that slot will only get attention if and when the pros are really underwhelming. And that's usually not the case. The pros are usually really good in some, in some form or another, they're usually really good. So I can see this making a lot of sense. And people who, you know, people who are not in the like the iPhone hype cycle year round, whatever has been most recently launched, they might be most aware of that. So if they release the Pro in the fall and it gets all marketed out and I mean, yes, Apple markets the iPhone all year round, pretty much everywhere.

41:29There's billboards for God's sake. But like the Pro right now, the Pro has been the whole fall thing. There's been orange Pros all over billboards everywhere. There have been ads for the iPhone Air nowhere. like and john grubber's been talking about talking about this too since since the fall since it launched like apple doesn't really seem to be advertising the iphone air at all anywhere uh there it's all about the pro you see you see the orange pro ads everywhere maybe if they spread it out they can start splitting up that marketing more and giving each phone its time like when the pro is kind of you know by by april everyone knows what that year's iphone pro looks like Everyone knows that year's iPhone Pro's new specs.

42:09They might not all buy them immediately. People buy their phones when they need to buy a phone. But everyone knows what the iPhone Pro is by April of that year. So Apple does these spring events where they drop in, here's some new watch band colors and some new case colors for our gummy iPhone cases. And maybe now here's a new iPhone model. I can see that making sense. So I think there's lots of reasons to do this from a marketing angle alone. not to mention the fact that you know everything else you know the supply chain the development times the you know there's so so many other reasons financial spread like there's so many other reasons to do it but from the marketing side alone i think it's a very sound idea and that's why all of their products work that way and it's fine i don't know if uh if apple is the one who instigated this tradition or if it's just kind of like a you know a thing that we all converged on but september is kind of the time when most of the fanciest new phones come out like I mean, I guess the iPhone is the biggest one in that area.

43:07And I know they're spread over the year kind of, but it seems to me that a lot of sort of flagship phones are announced around that time. And, you know, it makes sense to keep the pros there because like they're the flagship phones. They're the biggest, most expensive, most powerful, the foldable phone goes there, yada, yada. Although I always did think it was weird that they'd choose like September, which is essentially too late to like buy phones for kids going off to school. It's too late. I mean, not that school systems buy phones for people, but maybe someday they will. But anyway, it's like, it's after the beginning of school, which is weird.

43:38I don't even, I would love to see some history on like how we ended up on this particular time. Um, but anyway, taking out the non-pro phones from that event and putting them elsewhere might, I mean, I get the idea of like, uh, clearing it for marketing, but here's the thing. The pro and the non-pro phones, the way Apple has made them so far have been sort of a family of products and i know they have the a something and then the a something pro but those chips tend to be related to each other they're usually made on the same process or they have the same cores or whatever like they're it doesn't always happen they used to be like last year's chip and stuff like that but either way like in recent history they've been named the same for example the iphone 17 pro and the iphone 17 and if you look at the chips that are in them and the features that they have there's some kind of family resemblance they make some kind of a family um and i say that because if you wait six months to roll out the non-pro versions of the pro phones you just came out with especially if you don't change the naming scheme so the pro phones come out and you're like iphone 18 pro wow look at this and there's billboards everyone everybody loves it it's your flagship phone and there's a foldable one the ultra whatever everyone loves it then six months later they do a second marketing push for the non-pro phones that are also called iPhone 18.

44:56And people say, that's not the new phone. I saw that phone in the fall, the iPhone 18 in the fall. I say, oh, no, no, that was the iPhone 18 Pro. This is the iPhone 18, but not Pro. And they're like, what? No, it's the same number. Both iPhone 18s is just like the expensive one and the cheap one. Why are they advertising six months from now? I think that could lead to some confusion because it's like, it's not like they're withholding it, but it almost seems like that was, the iphone 18 pro is state-of-the-art in september now you're telling me the iphone 18 is state-of-the-art six months later it looks it looks like there's a family resemblance there's the product name that matches up now it maybe won't make a difference because you could argue the people who buy the non-pro phones don't know or care about any of this and as you said they just buy a new phone when they need to get a new phone the only chance they have of delaying is if they know some tech nerd who says oh no don't don't buy now because in one month the new non-pro funds are coming up but otherwise they just buy whatever's there do you know anybody who still does that like i like regular people that i interact with or that i hear from it's always just like oh yeah my phone broke i went to the store and got a new one like that's like there's no consultation whatsoever but the thing is even the non-pro iphones are pretty expensive in the grand scheme of things oh yeah i it like i it is kind of high-end ish buyers i don't know like i i'm not totally against it i just think well maybe what might actually help is something that people wondered briefly whether apple would do or not which is rename the phones to have year numbers to iphone 26 you know what i mean because then if it comes out later in the year you're like oh this is the current phone 26 right or you know as long as it's like car model year is like it's 2025 and the 26 phones are the current ones and then when you have the pro one come out in the six months later the non-pro they both have the year number in them so they they seem like they're it's like when a car model year like oh the the 20 the the 2026 uh you know honda civics aren't coming out until six months into the year no one cares because it's still the 2026 model i don't know i mean i don't think it's that big of a deal i do think spreading the manufacturing has got to help because how painful must it be to like ramp up on every single one of these models of phones all the same time uh at the huge numbers that apple makes them in so that probably helps there but But on the other hand, I wonder how this I mean, maybe this is some kind of financial maneuvering of like that big bump you would get from like phone time is now going to be spread into two smaller bumps.

47:20But maybe that second bump helps is going to help with some some quarter that's traditionally weak for them or something. I don't know. I can't even imagine what the, you know, maneuverings are there. Anyway, it's it it makes sense to me. It makes sense to be spread out like this. But I think there are some potential downsides. and for me as a tech nerd person i'm going to be slightly annoyed in that it's it's another combo i guess i'm not going to be buying hopefully not going to be buying new phones for my kids much longer i mean hopefully i bought them both their last phone that i'm ever going to buy them but you know oh that's not a happy thought i'm told the kids these days uh sometimes don't end up uh you know going out on their own as as soon as you might think they do it's like look i just got them both, I just got them both iPhone 17s, plain iPhone 17s.

48:07And for my daughter, I think that should last her four years of college because she used an iPhone 12 for four years of high school. So thumbs up success. And for my son, this is his, you know, graduating college, uh, often to the world. You've got a fancy iPhone 17 and use that for four years. And hopefully four years from now, you'll be able to buy yourself your own phone. We'll see how that turns out. But it does mean that like, you know, new phone time requires a little bit more caution and a little bit more thought about timings. And, you know, anyway, I don't know. I think it will probably be fine if this gives Apple leeway to, as Marco was saying, like to like maybe give the more diversified phones some more breathing room to sort of sink or swim on their own.

48:55that'll be great because i've always been a proponent of diversifying the line and i don't like the idea of like especially if they plan for like that's why after the iphone launched this year we had some some rumor or something about manufacturing like how many phones did apple order from the factories and they only ordered a small percentage for the airs like i don't remember it was six to eight percent but it was like apple is not shocked by how much the air sold they they tried to predict how much it would sell they told the factories to make that much and it seems like it's selling that much so it's not a surprise to them but apple keeps losing faith in that slot saying oh we made a mini phone not enough people buy we made a plus phone not enough people buy it made an air not enough people buy it they're correctly predicting the tiny percentage of people who are going to buy that but i'm like again like is that is that the end of the world is the phone so expensive that you can't sustain on you know six percent of billions of phones it's still a big number it's still a lot of phones so i hope they give this product line of chance and i also agree with marco that when i read this i thought the exact same thing like uh battery life the the iphone air's biggest problem nope not i don't think it's the iphone air's biggest problem uh i would say the camera is the iphone air's biggest problem but everyone's got their own thing but it seems like uh battery life is not actually that bad but anyway um i guess you know we'll we'll uh live through this together and the weird thing is like you know it used to be we'd wait to september to find out what the phones are like but now just everything leaks so thoroughly yeah people on youtube have like have like the only thing that is not exactly true to form about the phone is that the insides of it don't exist but like it's a it's a perfect like scale model down to the millimeter instead of just being those blanks the case manufacturers do they like manufacture when it looks like it does and i guess the most things we get surprised about is exactly what the color looks like because we didn't know exactly what the orange would look like until we saw it.

50:46So anyway, well, I suspect the plain iPhone 18 will probably leak around the same time as the iPhone 18 Pro, and then we'll just have to wait six months for the real thing to ship. We are sponsored with this episode by Gusto. Look, small businesses, oftentimes, it's just one or two people there. I'm very familiar with this dynamic. It often means trying to figure out a whole bunch of stuff yourself, and this is not the best strategy. It turns out asking for help and going to experts for certain things is a much better idea. You don't have to spend your evenings guessing at tax forms or tracking down onboarding docs.

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52:41iPhone double X or 20 rumors. It's not going to be called 10, 10. Yeah. I don't know. I put that in there. I think I've seen people talk about that, but like, Hey, the iPhone 10 was called iPhone capital X and it was, well, it was, was it, it was pronounced 10, right? What if, what if it's like 10 X? Oh gosh, that would be ridiculous. Anyway. I mean, as, as case, we'll read a second. It's, it's the, that was the iPhone 10 was the 10th anniversary phone and Apple skipped over of the nine, right? Yeah, they released the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 10, but there was no iPhone 9 because they wanted to get to 10-year anniversary.

53:18And, you know, the iPhone 10 was obviously the one with Face ID and it looked very different. It was a big deal. So this is, the idea is 10 years later, XX. We shall see. So Julie Clover over at MacRumors on the 10th of October. For the 10th anniversary of iPhone that came out in 2017, Apple introduced the iPhone 10 with Face ID, notch and minimize bezels, providing more display space than ever before. The 20th iPhone anniversary is approaching and Apple wants to take the iPhone X design even further. Quick aside, it blows my mind. Like, I get it, but Michaela was born in January of 2018. That means I was using an iPhone with, you know, the home affordance and, you know, I was using this style iPhone.

54:00I was using an iPhone X when she was born. That both feels impossible and completely right all at the same time. It's just so weird. I don't feel like, I mean, she's seven now, almost eight, and I don't feel like I have had an iPhone without a home button for that long. And yet, I feel like I've had an iPhone without a home button forever. So it's very weird. Time. Well, how does it work? Anyways, continuing from Julie. We're two years away from the 20th anniversary iPhone in 2027. Here are the rumors that all the rumors that we have heard so far. First of all, all screen. Apple's supposedly working on a display that curves down around all four edges of the device for a borderless visual experience.

54:34display analyst ross young said that apple won't have under display face id ready to go for 2027 iphone but other leakers think it's possible if apple can't get everything under the display we may see under display face id and then a small hole punch a hole punch cut out on the front for the front facing camera then in december on december 8th also for mac rumors this time tim hardwick according to a weibo account that has previously shared accurate supply chain details on Chinese Android hardware. Apple is testing the special, I'm sorry, some very fancy special glass. I didn't include that little snippet.

55:08But anyway, some special glass is a way to let the TrueDepth system's infrared sensors pass through the panel, the display panel, without distortion. This approach is similar to existing industry techniques that use micro-perforated or nano-patterned glass to selectively improve IR transmission in a localized region above the sensor array. A May report by the information claimed that iPhone 18 Pro models will have no dynamic island with just a pinhole cutout located at the upper left of the display. But other rumors suggest there's still going to be a dynamic island. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has also spoken of a slimmed down dynamic island for the iPhone 18 Pro models.

55:42Before I move on, any thoughts on this? And by the way, the micro-preferations thing, do you remember when they did that for the, do they still do it? I don't know, for like the power button on the MacBook Pros where like there was no hole to see the LED. they just took lots and lots of tiny little holes in the aluminum and the light would shine through it do you remember that oh yeah that was amazing yeah when it would like breathe when it was suspended which was incredible i don't remember if that was the same thing oh my mark of the microperforations and the breathing were simultaneous or were they i think the microperforations came after because that wasn't that was well within the unibody era um but yeah those were it was such a cool effect yeah it reminds me of this because like you know it's one of those things that looks magical because if you look at it it just looks like a piece of aluminum you can't see where part of the aluminum has a bunch of small holes and part of like you can't see where the light when the light is off you can't see where it's going to be i guess if you had like a like a microscope or maybe a magnifying glass but with your regular eyes you couldn't see it if you knew what to look for you could see it but like you'd have to be like looking for it and looking right at it and you have to have really good eyes like it was it was it's anyway all this is to say is that it is evidence that you can put lots of tiny holes in a thing and not have the thing look like it has lots of tiny holes and so that lends some feasibility credence to this idea i mean obviously android phones probably already do this with all their um through screen uh fingerprint readers and stuff like that but that's the idea of like can we put a face id sensor behind the screen so we don't have have a notch or dynamic island or whatever and apple's been working on that for a long time um and we'll talk more about the all screen nature of this phone once we get done with the whole thing but uh technology wise nothing in here is completely outlandish it's just a it's always just been a question of when will apple be satisfied with the quality of putting stuff under the screen that is currently not under the screen so that's the camera the face id sensor all that stuff um lots of other phone manufacturers have done it but apple has fairly stringent standards about how well all that stuff has to work so so far they haven't done it but maybe for iphone xx has anybody done it for the camera though because at least like on a flagship phone yeah i think people have done it for the camera i think part of the problem with both the camera and face id is that it's you can't see as much like the camera loses light obviously um there's all sorts of problems with putting stuff behind the screen so if you want the very best front facing camera you can't have it under the screen but you know maybe at some point maybe they'll get to a level quality that apple finds acceptable yeah i am a little curious like i could see apple doing it for the face id sensor because that you know maybe is less sensitive to like getting absolutely every bit of light but if you're going to put a camera behind a screen you're going to reduce the amount of light that will hit that sensor anything you put in front of a camera like you know polarizing films which would maybe be a similar kind of kind of reduction those reduce the light by a significant amount like i think one or two stops and stop terms usually and so if you're putting the camera behind the screen it will reduce the light by quite a bit.

58:41That will reduce image quality. And the front-facing camera is really important for selfies and other, you know, so like, I can see that maybe being tricky for the non-foldable special phone. Now, in a foldable phone context, the front camera for selfies matters a lot less because you can use the back camera pretty easily for selfies on a foldable, and that's actually one of the greatest reasons to use foldable phones is you get a muck you can use the like the good camera for selfies and like flip it around in such a way that you can you know see yourself like that's so anyway assuming it has a front screen at least um and so that that i can see like for the foldable being maybe a thing but for just like the the plain you know if there's like a slab iphone you know flagship of that year i don't know i think that's gonna that's gonna be a tough sell because you look around even android phones for the most part most of them still have that hole punch style design even when they can put other stuff under the screen now all that being said while we're talking about face id and putting stuff under screens Apple, please make Touch ID under the screen and Face ID in the same phone.

1:00:00because ever since you know we have all these rumors swirling about like the foldable might just have touch id now and everyone's now talking about this again and everyone's saying how much they hate touch id or how much they hate face id i hate them both they both fail in lots of conditions touch id we know from many years touch id fails with things like moisture and obviously gloves um face id i don't know if this is a universal thing but this has been true for me for about the last two years through two phones. So I know it's not just one phone. Face ID fails in sun. I don't know why, but Face ID seems designed not to work in the sun.

1:00:42Well, it depends. Like, I forget exactly how it is. I think if the Face ID camera's aimed at the sun, it will almost always fail. I have this happen to me occasionally, and it's been the case since Face ID was a thing in 2017, as we learned, relearned recently. but this has always been the case. I think there's enough failure modes for both technologies that just the realities of them mean that Face ID is obviously going to have problems with certain light hitting the sensor in certain ways. Touch ID is going to obviously have problems with certain contact issues between the sensor and your finger whether that's water or gloves or whatever.

1:01:19Ideally, I would love a phone especially a flagship phone where component costs might not be super substantial. I would love a phone that offered both and gave you an option, even though it would technically be reduced security, gave you an option to just say, read whichever one succeeds first. Like if either one of them succeeds, let me in. That would be amazing. Talk about like getting people excited about a new iPhone. That would do it because then everybody who likes one of those more than the other would all be happy about that phone. So maybe Apple consider that. Assuming that you can't defeat the sun, which I've said it many times, never bet against the smartphone.

1:01:59A lot of people might also say, don't bet against the sun. You kind of can't beat the sun. It's there whether you like it or not. It's super powerful, like the smartphone, right? Even Apple can't beat the sun. So wait five billion years, that sun's going down. So assuming that you can't beat the sun and you can't prevent people from having wet hands sometimes, like try to just embrace the imperfection of the world that you're operating in. Offer both sensors and let whichever one succeeds first let you into your phone actually in five billion years i think the sun's gonna absorb the earth so i think it will win right before it loses anyway um the under the under screen face id touch id thing obviously android phones have had that why i've just been always been assuming that the accuracy is not up to apple's touch id standards for the under screen ones but but the reality is like the entire android world has been doing this forever and it's fine i think they just have lower standards for security like in terms of how how easy it is to fool you know yeah but but so so So what happens then?

1:02:55People who have to enter their passcode a lot end up reducing the security of their passcode. Or the more times you enter it, the more opportunities you have for someone else to scout it. Well, that's the thing. The lower quality under screen thing is less likely to succeed and lead to more passcode entry, not less. I don't know enough about how that works to say for sure. But I've seen the under screen touch ID thing be used on Android phones a lot, and I've never seen it fail. Yeah, no, I just think the standards are lower for the security of it. But keep in mind, like I recently had to, for years, I have used an alphanumeric passcode.

1:03:31It's just like a password on my phone. And in the last couple of years, I've had to enter my passcode so many times that I finally was like, screw it, I'm going back to a number. And so I actually had to reduce my passcode security because now I'm on a number, which is not only just less entropy there than a passphrase or a password, but also as I'm typing it in, I think it's easier for people to spot what it is if it's looking over my shoulder. Yeah, for sure. It is. But I've had to do that because it is just so it's asking me so often for my passcode in the last year or two. Now, you know, look look on a global scale.

1:04:10Like how many people do you know whose passcode is like one to one two because they are just themselves so tired of of entering it constantly. They make it something really simple like that. And then anybody who's ever around them for more than an hour will see them enter their passcode at some point. Like that's so common. if face ID and touch ID are so strict that they are causing a lot of lockout, that people are having to enter their passcode a lot all the time. It's like when you make password requirements so strict, people write it down on a post-it note next to the computer. It's the same version of that for the phone.

1:04:42If you make the phone super strict with their security and causes a lot of lockouts, they're just going to switch to simpler passcodes that will overall reduce their security. so it is better if you can if you can find a way to offer people secure entry that doesn't fail so often and lock them out so often that is generally better i think the face id problem is probably just basically dynamic range of like the the ir that it is emitted and bounced off your face it has to be able to see that right and so if you're if you're a face or the sensor being blasted by the full light of the sun can you pick out the infrared dots that are there because there's infrared light coming from other places i don't i don't know what the problem is with the uh with the sun i haven't actually experienced that but i don't doubt that it happens you never go in the sun yeah i do occasionally but anyway um your your real problem here marco is this well so as setting aside the security things and when when are these things up to apple standard and the other part of that is how much does apple really really really want to have an all quote unquote all screen iphone xx whatever um maybe they'll that will motivate them to lower their standards and make the thing or whatever.

1:05:46But the real problem is Apple's cheapness. They won't put both Face ID and Touch ID because it would cost them more money. And because they're going to be like, can't we just pick one? I mean, just look at how long they've taken them to not put Face ID on the Mac, which is a much more expensive thing that has a much more controlled environment a lot of the time, depending on laptops, blah, blah, blah. So I think that like, even if the technology exists to do both of them, Apple's inclination for the entire history of the phone has been absolutely we'll we will not do both of them we will do one or the other look at the ipads they do one or the other they don't do both they could do both on the ipad right now but they do not and you know obviously side button not under screen um and there's you know room is there's not a lot of room for i don't know how much room the under screen one takes up but it's probably non-zero the other problem you have marco is that if and when they actually do this john turner takes over fixes everything touch id and under screen under screen touch id and face and all the phones, yada, yada.

1:06:43There's a tiny window when this will be useful to you because according to my parents, Touch ID doesn't work for old people. You've talked about this many times. Because their fingerprints, because their finger skin is too loosey-goosey, they absolutely cannot or could not use Touch ID across many, many devices in many, many years. I don't know if this is just them. They claim it's all old people, but there's only a matter of time, Marco, before Touch ID becomes useless to you, according to my parents. So you got to hope, is a turnover in Apple leadership, a change in attitude about picking one authentication device and only one authentication device for a device and then rolling that out before your fingers become too old and saggy to use Touch ID.

1:07:22I mean, hopefully I have, I'm only 43. Like, hopefully I have a little while before that happens. I'm 37. Not old, I'm 37. I don't know what that's from. Nope, nothing. I think maybe you're understanding how long it will take Apple to have a change of heart about this. All right, coming back to the iPhone Double X. Display. Apple is planning to use a brighter, thinner OLED panel for the 20th anniversary iPhone. Rumors suggest that Apple will adopt Samsung OLED displays with color filter on encapsulation, or COE technology. COE displays remove the polarizing film from an OLED panel, applying the color filter directly onto the encapsulation layer of the display.

1:08:01Reflections are harder to deal with when there's no polarizing film, but in this year's iPhones, Apple added a new anti-reflective coating that could be improved for future versions of the iPhone. With deeply curved edges, Apple also plans to add a crater-shaped light diffusion layer that will provide uniform brightness across the display. All right, so these whole kind of like curved around the edge kind of displays, is this a good idea? Like I know Samsung phones have done this for a million years. And they stopped doing it. I already have occasional challenges with accidental input as bezels of everything have shrunk.

1:08:39And I'm not going to argue that the bezels on the iPhone should get thicker because I know it looks really great the way it is now. And that's true. And people do buy these things based on looks to a large degree. But every time the bezels shrink, I have more accidental input around the screen edges. And obviously the phone has software to try to detect that and kind of try to reject certain ones of those. But that also just makes it so that input is less reliable when those systems are active. And so that's not great either. also phone cases exist when you say you have accidental input around the edges i i think you're describing what i've noticed which has been bad for a long time but it's gotten worse for me in the last year or two um i don't know how to describe this in eloquent way and it would be easier if i had a visual aid but i feel like my palm meat on my hands is like hitting the very edges of the display and doing like button activations and stuff it is and it's driving me freaking bonkers.

1:09:38And it wasn't until you said something that it occurred to me, I wonder if it is because the bezels are so darn thin now. Yes, that definitely happens. Now, historically, the iPhone has been a little smart about it. So I don't think I've ever had confirmation on this. But the way I think it works, just based on observation, is I think when you wake up the phone, if any part of your palm or hand is touching an edge, I think it just ignores that area until the next time the phone is slept or changed in some way. So it does kind of like automatic rejection of things that are like we're touching when you turned it on.

1:10:14But sometimes that also means in those areas like are dead zones until you sleep and wake up the phone again. So when you do want to interact with those areas, if you lift up whatever palm is touching it and poke it with a finger, sometimes I've had that not work until I slept the phone and woke up. So I don't know if that's an application layer bug or if that's like if the phone is doing that like at the kind of like the screen touch driver kind of level. I don't know. But that's always been, I've always observed that on iPhones and I don't know if I'm characterizing it correctly or not, but that seems like what it's doing.

1:10:45But as the phone bezels have gotten smaller, especially as you don't use a case, this is extra noticeable. And it's like, I notice it when I've been using a case for a while and then I switch back to not using a case. I notice I have a lot more of that kind of either accidental input or inadvertent like input lockout around the edges. So it is definitely a thing. And again, whether the specifics are actually working that way, I don't know. Hopefully somebody at Apple can write in and tell us. But as you shrink the bezels, you create more problems like this. Now, you also create a big problem of not only are you going to be touching these parts of the screens inadvertently as you hold the phone, but since so many people, I would say probably the majority by a long shot, use cases with their phones.

1:11:36How do you design a case to attach and wrap around a phone's edges if the edges are screen content? And I think the answer probably is you just ignore it. You cover as little as you can and you hope the software doesn't put anything useful there. And probably the software wouldn't put anything useful there. So I'm sure in iOS terms, it would be in the safe area. and apps would be inset with all their content would be inset around to be pulled in from the safe area. Right now we have that on top and bottom and we would just have it on all four sides, which liquid glass is obviously made to account for and to accommodate.

1:12:15So what we would be adding in this situation is basically blurry background content wrapping around a part of the phone that your hand is covering or a case is covering largely so why what's the point why why would we do that if what we're really going to be filling it with is blurry background colors that most people won't even see you could ask the same questions about liquid glass and we have no answer there either um and well it's a part of the uh android i don't know if it's just samsung but part of the android phone uh version of this there's like the waterfall edge where the screen actually curves around the side of the thing there was some notion especially early on of putting content essentially on the side of your phone like text or words or things along the edge that you could read from the side because it wrapped around so much in some of those phones that you could look at the phone from the side and see screen yeah and i think i saw at least one ad that was like and look you can put content there you'll be shocked to learn that i'm pretty sure that did not catch on it's an awful idea and it does like in in marketing it does look cool it looks cool in person too yeah you can imagine like if your phone is face down on its desk or table you could maybe have the edge show you like one line of text and yeah you can no one did or it could light up on the edge more easily like project out light from the edges and do a little there's lots of fun things that you could do with it but like until these phones levitate in front of us we have to grab it with something and the part that we we're gonna end up covering up parts of the screen like i think that the and these are still just rumors but i think the the main thing against this design is that despite all the things we're saying about it it's been tried it's been done it did not catch on like the market essentially said no not interested and it's not Not because there was like some other mitigating factor where there was a big, powerful company saying we don't like that or whatever.

1:14:17It was some of the biggest Android phone manufacturers did it. And it was not popular enough for them to keep doing it. Now, maybe when Apple does it, everyone will copy them again because people will copy Apple no matter what they do. Right. So maybe this will give a resurgence in this type of thing. But yeah, it's very much like the liquid glass stuff. It's like someone thinks this is going to be a cool idea, but practically it's not good and has lots of impractical effects. So we should keep reading this because there's more. You brought up cases and there's a little bit of that at the end here, too.

1:14:51But like as we as the shape, the rumored shape of this iPhone X, X comes into view, it starts to seem very strange. All right. Solid state buttons reading from a different post on Mac rumors. Apple is developing a solid-state button system as a wholesale replacement for the device's traditional mechanical buttons, as per a Weibo account. Back in 2022, several reports suggested Apple intended to bring solid-state buttons to the iPhone 15 Pro in 2023 as part of Project Bongo. However, the plan was reportedly canceled at a late stage. They were then rumored to come up to the iPhone 16 Pro before being shelved indefinitely.

1:15:29According to Leaker, Apple's solid-state button design has completed functional verification and includes haptic feedback. For the side button, volume buttons, action button, and camera control button. Yeah, so now this is an all-screen phone, which if you believe the maximal rumor is that it doesn't even, you know, everything is under the screen. The screen wraps around all the edges. There's no bezels at all. There's no buttons on it because everything is a solid-state button with haptic feedback. Camera. Apple might adopt a camera sensor using low-fic, or lateral overflow integration capacitor for better dynamic range.

1:16:00This would join improvements rumored for the iPhone 18 models, like a variable lens aperture. The upgraded sensor would be able to capture up to 20 stops of dynamic range. Lofik enables each pixel to store varying amounts of light based on scene brightness. This allows a sensor to capture detail in both bright highlights and dark shadows within a single frame. According to an account on the Korean language NAVR blog, Chinese manufacturers including Honor, Xiaomi, and Huawei plan to adopt Lofik technology in their 2026 flagship smartphones using new Sony sensors. while oppo and vivo are developing low-equipped models for release next year this is the one part of the iphone 20 rumor that's just a straight up better cameras good i like the idea of like this new sensor type like letting it not do like two exposures at different uh you know they're doing a dark exposure and a light exposure to combine them but some you know has a wide enough range you can do a single exposure so that's cool if that ends up being the case um and a variable aperture again that's been rumored for a while i'm not sure phones are already shipping with that but what that means is that a little tiny mechanical thing that makes a whole bigger and smaller inside the camera exists that's not how any past iphone camera has worked that's how big cameras work you can change the aperture that would be a useful thing but boy stuff is tiny in there like i'm not sure how they would pull this off but that would sure be neat uh and it would it definitely give you a lot of flexibility in camera apps to do some stuff that you can't do as easily right now.

1:17:28Although, honestly, just to get enough light on the sensor, it'd probably be wide open almost all the time anyway. But this all sounds cool. So this is like the one thing, the wrong rumor that I hope is true and that I don't think there's anything bad about it. Yeah, that's honestly, if they can achieve that dynamic range increase on the sensor, that's huge. That matters a lot in all photography and especially in phone photography where you You know, you often don't have time to worry too much about the exposure of whatever you're shooting in. Oh, are the highlights going to blow out? Like, no, you just take your phone out, boom, shoot.

1:18:03And right now, phones are already, and have been for some time, way better than professional cameras at that particular scenario of, like, I have a scene with a wide dynamic range happening here. And I want to shoot something reliably that's going to be good and properly exposed and not blown out, you know, with very little effort and very little time. Right now, phones are best at that because what they usually do is take a quick burst of like, you know, three to five or whatever, you know, however we are up to these days, quick shots all in a row, and they merge them together into like a merged HDR image.

1:18:40Well, if this center technology advancement does what is promised here and allows that same level of dynamic range possibly to be captured in a single frame and therefore be captured in every frame, that's a significant improvement. That can help things like sharpness because when you capture three quickly in a row, things might have moved during that time. You have to kind of account for that. There's all sorts of ways that can play out in very positive ways. So if that is true and if that works very well, that alone, that dynamic range improvement, that's a significant improvement for much of photography, much of the time.

1:19:20All right. And then probably to wrap up for today, Apple's exploring touch-sensitive layers built into official iPhone cases, reading from Mac rumors from mid-November. According to a known Weibo-based leaker, Apple is looking to make protective cases for its Pro models that directly integrate touch-based sensor layers. The leaker provided no further details, but there are some clues to be found in previous research conducted by Apple. A patent application filed by the company in 2024 describes a case with input for an electronic device and outlines a protective iPhone case designed to act as an input service rather than passive shielding.

1:19:56The patent also details how the case communicates with the device using identification and signal transfer through interfaces such as NFC. Some versions also include provisions for biometric input, allowing a Touch ID fingerprint sensor in the case to unlock features in the phone, for example. What makes the idea more timely is that Apple is said to be pursuing a radical redesign for its 20th anniversary iPhone with a display that curves around all four edges of the device. This approach could leave almost no room for mechanical buttons, since indeed there have been reports that Apple may shift to solid state capacitive layers on the anniversary model, enabling a visually uninterrupted design that could make an interactive case a natural companion.

1:20:35so i think this uh i'm thinking of this as iphone xx because it is so much like the iphone 10 which had a big capital x which was a complete departure from the phone design that had existed basically since the original iphone having a screen a home button and just like that whole thing of saying the iphone 10 is gonna it's like the future it's all screen i mean the iphone 10 was essentially all screen and the notch is there previously we hadn't cut out any portion of the screen and it seemed very strange that they did that and it was all you know we didn't know we were going to get used to it and obviously it's the dynamic island now but like they're going to go all screen but i think as i said when the they rolled out the iphone 10 it said apple does not want this notch to be there it's just it has to be there now but when they can get rid of it they will so here's the rumor they're going to go all screen again now the iphone 10 was not a sure thing when it was released because it was so different and yes sometimes the home buttons broke but touch id was in the home button which was a very amazing transition of like you know how we've had this button on our phone well you're putting your finger there anyway guess what we're gonna put the fingerprint sensor and like there's no way that can work and wow it did and like it was so natural you take the phone out of your pocket you press the button your thumb is already on there reads touch id so synergistic and the iphone 10 just threw all that away nope no home button no whatever we call that chin on the phone where the home button was which was a region of the phone that you could touch and know you weren't gonna mess with the screen that was very big because that's where the home button was that's all gone too and in its places face id it's going to read my face does it work in the dark can i fool it with a photograph can i fool it with a mannequin's head do you remember all that conversation um and the upshot was that the iphone 10 i think was just a triumph like that way of making phones has proven to be better there are trade-offs with all these things but the the since the iphone 10 every iphone has been like that and it's been a hit we use them we like them yes some people wish touch id was still there especially in the early years people complained about it but net net billions of consumers with billions of iphones have decided that design with no button on it i mean michaela as you just noted has never lived in a world without that design that's just what phones are like to modern people is the iphone 10 design of just it's a screen it's got some portion of it cut out because we got stuff that you know cameras and sensors or whatever uh you you unlock it by looking at it You flick up on the thing like that worked.

1:22:57This iPhone X, X thing, which is like, okay, it's like the iPhone 10, but like the screen goes even more around and we don't have any room for any buttons anymore. And everything is solid state. I don't know what this is bringing me that like, like the iPhone 10 brought a different set of trade-offs that I think are better for me. And for most people, this brings a whole bunch of new compromises in exchange for being cool see also iphone air yeah do i get more i guess i get a little bit more screen like i like the idea of gettering the notch of the dynamic island because it does cut into your image like there's parts of your screen you can't use because there's no pixels there especially if you're watching like landscape video it has to either you know you're either missing some of the picture or it's got to shrink up like depending on the aspect ratio what you're watching yada yada right but like that's oh that's clearly been a compromise so i'm i'm all for getting rid of that but every other change described here we need the screen to wrap around the edges for similarly stupid reasons to the stupid things we did in liquid glass that there's no there's no benefit to that right and there's lots of problems but now we can't have buttons let's make all the buttons haptic i mean the camera control has not been a huge hit and even that is a physical button that goes in and out despite all its like other stuff that it has in it i'm not entirely against haptic buttons because they did it with the home button and it was actually really great but i'm not clamoring for them either and maybe there's a failure rate that i don't know about on the things like um and then this rumor about the the touch sensitive things being put into phone cases they're saying like okay so if the buttons are like haptic and touch sensitive are they kind of like the camera control and that case manufacturers have to do a thing that transfers the fact that you're touching it i mean the only reason you need it for the camera control is because of the swipey stuff because again the camera control literally does physically move in and out so they don't need it for the button press but now case manufacturers have to be involved to deal with these haptic buttons and then the other part of this the other hopeful part is based on a patent which means you can probably just forget it because you know apple patents everything doesn't mean they're ever going to ship it but it does hint at a design that again other phones have done in the past which is like how about don't put the touch thing on the screen and also don't try to jam it on the side like they do on the ipads because there's not a lot of room there but you got the whole back of the phone couldn't you put a fingerprinty thing there it's like yeah but what about people with cases well if you have this magical case they could transfer the thing through and yada yada whatever like you have a lot of leeway to do fingerprint sensing on the back of a phone with some flexibility now it's harder to aim on the screen you can say please put your finger here people put their hands in different places like i don't really believe this rumor but at least if that was part of the iphone 20 rumor that they're going to put touch id in the back and face id in the front then i would be like okay well now now i'm getting something because we have the touch id or we have the you know the home button error then we have the touch id error then we have the face id error and then the third error would be touch id and face id but the touch is on the back or maybe the touch is on the back on the front or whatever but like this this idea of a so i keep picturing it's like kind of a lozenge shaped phone that is like more than 50 screen the screen wraps around all the edges and it's just it's everywhere and like it doesn't appeal to me in a in a like i was nervous about the iphone 10 but it turned out great i am nervous about this phone now if it is as rumored and i'm less confident that it's going to turn out great.

1:26:37So we'll see. But it just, I just, the whole reason this thing is in here is because I'm like 20th anniversary phone. I'm not, I'm not excited for it. I'm excited for the camera, but you can put that on like a quote unquote normal phone. Like, and we'll see, like, again, I felt like I had the exact same, I would have had the exact same attitude had I known more about the, uh, the iPhone 10 before it was released and it turned out great, but I'm, I'm not optimistic about this right now. I mean, I don't know. I think I am cautiously optimistic. It sounds like it'll be really, really, really cool.

1:27:06But the iPhone Air is, to me, very cool. And there is no chance I'm going to run that as a daily driver. There's not enough battery, certainly not a good enough camera just for me. And I know several of our friends are really loving it and I am genuinely happy for them. Not for me, though. And I wonder if this will be a similar situation. This doesn't have any of those compromises. Like this is going to be like, you know, it's a flagship phone. It's going to have all the cameras, all the tech, all the battery. It's not going to be super duper thin. Like there's the folding phone, you know, thing for that.

1:27:38Like it just, this just seems like, like the iPhone 10. It's like the flagship phone. It's got the most of everything in it. It's the fastest processor. It's the best cameras. It's the most cameras. It's the most pixels. It's the most screen. It's the most technology. It's just, I guess it's mostly the wraparound screen and the haptic buttons. I think right now are bad ideas. Now, I can't say that, but I haven't seen them. Maybe they're actually great because I would have said that the home button, the haptic home button was also a bad idea. But by the end of the haptic home button, I liked it better than the regular home button.

1:28:06So it's hard to predict how these things are going to go. Wraparound screen a little bit more confident with, like I said, because it has been done before. And it's not like, oh, they didn't do a good job with it, but Apple will do a good job. I think they did as good a job as you could do with the wraparound screen. Like it was a screen that wrapped around. And then it's just a new place for you to break your phone by the way casey because now when you drop it if it's on the edge you can you can crack the screen from the edge too yep thought about that immediately no i i definitely think like the the if this if it would rely on like all of these special case considerations that's going to make it a no-go for so many people because like how many people do you see using third-party cases it's almost everyone oh like you said they'll just cover it up i bet they'll just cut third-party cases will just cover up all that side screen well because you because otherwise what people buy cases for protection, yeah.

1:28:57You have to protect everything about the phone including all of the edges. That's why much to John's chagrin, they all have closed bottoms now because everybody wants protection edge to edge because that's what most people need. I can see that being a problem but I think though I can see why this could end up being really weird and bad. I don't think it will. I think they're going to succeed in making something that is really cool. My question, though, is, you know, again, like what Casey was saying, like the iPhone Air. The iPhone Air looks cool, but people are not choosing it in large numbers.

1:29:35Why? Because people tend to have one phone for a pretty long time and they need to serve them everywhere and do everything for them and always be ready and be able to take on whatever challenge they might find in their lives during the few years they're going to have that phone. So, people don't buy weird convertible phones, they buy SUV phones, because they want something that's going to do everything for them all the time. The iPhone Air is really cool in certain ways, but made some really big trade-offs. And most people are not choosing the phone that made those trade-offs. With this rumored iPhone 20, we don't actually know what the trade-offs are necessarily.

1:30:19like you know we can we can guess it's probably going to be the flagship high-end phone so it's not going to have like you know severe cost constraints it's probably going to not be the absolute thinnest although i would say they're probably going to try to make it very thin but you know other things can fall out of that so for instance as you make the phone thinner well do you include the camera bump in that if so you're going to reduce the camera quality that is a big problem for people are you going to reduce the battery capacity that's a big problem for people. As we see with the Air, are you going to maybe make the speakers not as good?

1:30:53That's a big problem for people. There's a lot like every everything that is made worse about the phone in exchange for whatever is making it cool is going to lop off parts of the market that would have bought that phone but now won't. How many chunks are you going to lop off and how big are they? That's the question. The iPhone Air lopped off some really big ones and that's why not a lot of people are choosing to buy it. But this might be a different set. Hopefully it's a less extreme set. And maybe the wraparound screen, maybe that's just like a really minor little detail that most people don't really notice most of the time because it's covered up in cases and it turns out it doesn't matter at all.

1:31:33Maybe it doesn't wrap around as much as those old Android phones did. Maybe it's essentially, it doesn't wrap around at all, but essentially it's like zero bezel. Right. Or maybe it wraps around a couple of millimeters into the edge but it's not, like you wouldn't necessarily be able to read something on the side yeah like that you wouldn't see it from the edge like again this is hard to tell with rumors until we start getting like case designs because that that i feel like is the the most difficult one the haptic buttons as i as i think we discussed with the 15 pro they were going to like the haptic volume buttons or it's just one thing i mean that could work again they have the history of the home button making it work but complications in case design like the it hasn't been terrible with the whole thing with like hammer control with the cutouts and then take case manufacturers taking a while to have the pass through it's just a little bit of an annoyance so i guess there's that transition period i mean if you remember with the iphone 10 the the thing about the iphone 8 that was released alongside it was it still had the home button so apple was hedging its bet saying we got this new thing but if you don't like like to marco's point if you look at this and you feel like it's making trade out so you don't agree with we do have the old thing that you're used to over there but i feel like when they ran that experiment they were like oh no 10 10 is the way to go and so from that point on it was like i mean they kept around touch id phones for a while or whatever but it was like full steam ahead like our mainline flagship phones are going to be iphone 10 ish phones from now on and they never looked back and i'm assuming they want that to happen as well so maybe the uh the version i'm conjuring in my head that has like the worst possible wraparound screen and like the worst possible haptic buttons is not uh realistic for apple who thus far has not really screwed up a flagship phone especially not a radical red granted there's only been a couple of radical redesigns of the phone, I guess, what, the iPhone 4?

1:33:14I mean, there's been a bunch of ones. There's the 4, the 6, the Bendy 6, then I guess the 10, and I guess 20 would be the next one. They haven't really screwed it up too badly ever, and they usually do a good job. So I should give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm just a little bit nervous about it. We are sponsored by this episode by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data brokers online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. So data brokers are those sites that like if you do a search for your own name on the internet, you'll find all these sites that are like advertising, giving away your home address or your phone number.

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1:35:37Let's do some Ask ATP. And Tyler Kindy writes, How do you all manage your contacts? Do you use Apple's Contacts app or a different one? Do you sync your contacts using iCloud, your email provider, or some other service? Do you tend to keep your contacts up to date with current addresses, birthdates, etc., or just keep it at the bare minimum? For me, I use the Contacts app. Well, I only ever access it on the phone via the phone app, but on the Mac I'll use the Contacts app. Anyways, I store everything in there. I sync via iCloud and that seems to work pretty well for me. Amongst my friends, both online and in real life, I am the weirdo that keeps track of any date I can get my hands on, any address I can get my hands on, because you never know when you need it.

1:36:16So I will put birthdays in there. I'll put anniversaries in there if I know them, just because sometimes it's nice to know that information. So you can tell someone happy anniversary and they're like, what, weirdo? Oh, thanks. Anyways, but no, I am a pack rat when it comes to many digital things, including contact information and iCloud works just fine for me. Let's go to Marco next, please. Marco, what do you do? So first of all, whenever Casey wishes me a happy anniversary, I never think what a weirdo. I always think, damn it, I wish I was as good of a person as Casey. That's very kind of you, but I think I'm dancing right on the line between weirdo and considerate.

1:36:55So you all can decide. That's like Casey and Casey is also almost always the first person that you see online wishing people happy birthday on that that's because i wake up whether it's in slack or on you know back in the old days it was on twitter or you know now like casey's always right there first thing in the morning happy birthday so and so so it's wonderful being in casey's world because he he wishes everyone happy everything and he makes us all wish we were as nice as him okay now that's how i manage my contacts i have been using apple's contacts app for a very long time. iCloud syncing, once it became available, has been fine for me.

1:37:37I think I even used mobile me syncing before that, and I think that was fine too. It was not fine. For me, I'm saying, I know for a lot of people it was not. But for me, it's been fine. I don't think I've ever caught a sync bug with the contacts app. I do, as mentioned a couple after years ago, I do wish they would add an archive status on contacts or something similarly equivalent so that I wouldn't need all of the people I have ever known to be one accidental tap or search away from accidentally calling in a weird way. I would love that concept. But barring that, it's been fine. As for how I keep things current, back when my wife and I used to send out Christmas cards, like seasonal Christmas cards every year, whenever I'd get somebody's new address, I'd put it in their contact card.

1:38:29But we kind of ran out of time and stopped doing that a few years ago. And ever since then, I've kind of been like, well, I don't know where anybody lives. As long as people didn't move, I still have their address. But if you moved in the last year, I don't know where you'd live. But it's fine. And birthdays, I try to keep track of the ones that are close to me. It's a very short list. And I don't need to keep track of that many because Casey does it for me. You're welcome. This is a service I provide. John, what do you got? I use Apple's Contacts. I use iCloud syncing with it. I try to keep it mostly up to date.

1:39:06Birthdays, they're in, I don't think I keep a lot of birthdays in there. I don't know. I'm trying to kind of do demand page birthday stuff when I find out it's someone's birthday. I've been, in the past several years, I've been asking them what year they were born because what I wanted to just know is not just that it's their birthday, but how old they are. So I don't want to just put like March 5th as their birthday. I need a year. So because then then if you have that in there, if you had it in your Apple contacts thing, your phone will say it's blah, blah, blah is 22nd birthday. So you don't have to do math in your head or whatever just tells you how old they are.

1:39:38So I've been trying to keep the birthday things up to date. I also try to keep the addresses up to date. We still do send out holiday cards. Here's my request. Marco just talked about archive contacts. I've wanted forever and still want the exact same thing I wanted forever in photos, which is shared contacts like family shared contact thingies right i mean it's it's such a low volume of data compared with photos it seems like it's so straightforward they should just do it i'm glad the contacts now sync reliably they didn't always do that back in the bad old days but i really because the problem is my wife you also uses apple contacts and she has people's birthdays and anniversaries and mailing addresses and so i have some of that we have almost a huge overlap like 90 percent of the same contacts but they diverge massively so anytime we want to look up anything about a person we have to compare notes what do you have for this person what do you have is that the right is that the current address or is this the current is that is that the right phone number is that we have different birthdays is like that problem could be solved the second wrinkle i have is okay so i use apple contacts and i try to keep them updated i also i also curate a nice collection of photos for people who i frequently message so i have they have the photos that i want i keep those photos in a folder somewhere else because they constantly get overwritten by thing anyway the other thing i really want out of the contacts syncing service actually i had a note about this let me see if i can look it up uh no i i guess i guess the family share thing is the only thing i need to talk about right now um oh yeah the the the wrinkle on on my end is that i don't use an email client that has access to apple contacts so i've got this big contacts thing with everyone's email address in it but i use the gmail web interface and it has its own context database this is no connection to the apple context database and you would think this would be a terrible problem but it is not it's just not i never look things up in google contacts and i guess i don't send a lot of outgoing email or if i do it's from like they've emailed me recently like it just i i can't explain it i it seems like it should be an awful problem but i've been doing it for i don't know a decade or like since gmail has existed i don't pay any attention to gmail contacts i don't curate them i don't edit them there's nothing in them the only thing that's in them is the stuff that gets auto populated by gmail um so yeah that's what i do with contacts it's a giant cesspool a giant auto completing cesspool in gmail where i do most of my emailing but in practice it doesn't matter and then my actual contacts database which i use for everything else and i try to keep nice all right dimitri myronenko writes how do you all handle version control in your apps for my personal projects i use either public or private github repos however if i had an app as a business uploading my code anywhere online feels very insecure but only having a copy of this source code locally and via backblaze is also an invitation for disaster do you run your own git server off site well this is the sort of thing that i would very much do and i very much do not i use github i use private github repos for anything that's private public in the rare occasion I'm trying to do something out in the wild.

1:42:49But that's fine. There are so many more important things stored on GitHub that if somebody really wants my source code that badly, like have at it. That's not an invitation. That's not a challenge for goodness sakes. But you know what I mean? Like, I am such a small fish in such a giant ocean that I'm not too worried about it. And I like that I have GitHub, you know, to not only back things up, not only to store things, It's always available, asterisk, et cetera, et cetera. I also super-duper love the way GitHub Issues works and the wiki and stuff like that. And I presume if I self-hosted, a lot of that would come with it.

1:43:23But I like having that taken care of for me. I pay the 50 bucks-ish a year in order to have an account. I probably don't even need to anymore, come to think of it, because they made their free plan a lot more robust a couple of years back. But anyway, I pay about 50 bucks a year to GitHub. And it's been working out great for me so far. Don't plan to change. Since I started with Marco last time, let's go to John first. I just use GitHub for everything private and public. The great thing about Git is that, you know, everybody who has the repo cloned has all the info in the repo as of the last time they did a poll.

1:43:58So if anything disastrous ever happens with GitHub, you know, I've probably got all I haven't lost anything. Like I've got multiple machines here with the whole repo on them, especially whichever one I just pushed from has the latest stuff in it. And then the other good thing about Git is it's just a bunch of boring plain files. So that means all my backups have all those.git directories in them that have all the info. So like I'm not worried about GitHub. I mean, to Casey's point, it's a pretty big thing. So it is an attractive target, but I'm not an attractive sub target within that target. Microsoft's been doing some kind of crummy stuff with GitHub.

1:44:35But, you know, the good thing about Git is you don't like it. You can move someplace else and have a different origin server. so yeah just plain old github and git repos so that's what i do for all my source stuff even when you know the default in xcode if you start a new xcode project i think a little checkbox is checked that says you want me to make a local git repo for you um and i always just leave that checked even for like little toy projects that i make locally i always just use git locally and then if i decide oh actually this is for a bug reproduction then i just change the origin to be github and push it up there um i actually used to have a little note because i could never remember the freaking git commands to do that but now github when you make a new repo github puts those instructions right on the page because they know what's happening they're like look we know you're probably going to do this you probably already made the repo on your computer you've probably been doing stuff with it and you probably now want it to be a point to this empty github rebuild you just copy and paste these things it's it's very convenient so that's it marco mine's also really boring i host my stuff on github private and public um like casey i used to pay for the private plan.

1:45:35I now don't because they made everything that I paid for free. Yeah, I use the free plan too. Yeah, and it's fine. I've never had a problem with GitHub. I know relying on something like that is not always perfect and it's not, frankly, always my style, as many of you know. But in this case, self-hosting it would be... It's like hosting your own email. It's like, yeah, you can, but why? Although it's actually a lot easier than hosting your own email. Like I said, Git is so portable. The whole point of it, it's decentralized. The whole point of it is that everyone has everything. It's not like, oh, well, all my history is in GitHub, but I only have my local.

1:46:14No, your local thing has all the history. That's the whole point. It is the most portable thing you can ever be, right? And there are so many other servers that can be the origin server for your Git repo. We're just using GitHub now, but if they ever go bad, we are all so protected by the decentralized nature of Git. unless like there's tons of development going on in the repo that we're not doing. But as solo developers working on solo projects, presumably there's at least one computer locally that has all the history in it because that's where the last push came from. Yeah. Also regarding the idea that hosting your business code would be insecure, as long as you're hosting it somewhere, I would say the odds of GitHub being hacked are probably lower than the odds of your server being hacked.

1:47:04When it comes to the main stuff like this, the big tech giants have a really good track record for security. When was the last time iCloud got hacked or Gmail? What about Outlook? Never. You never hear about this. I don't know. I mean, they could be getting hacked and just not telling us about it. Well, yeah, but like you, by like, you know, hitching yourself to that ship, whatever the metaphor is. Wagon. Yeah, but thanks. You know, if GitHub is hacked, the world has many bigger problems. And then finally, I would also suggest that like, suppose in that nightmare scenario, suppose GitHub gets hacked and somebody can read your source code along with probably everyone else's.

1:47:54first of all why would they look at yours second of all if they do look at your source code this seems like this is like the the software version of like oh my god they're seeing me naked and learning all of my secrets like you would like that's that feels like a really just nightmare scenario thing but when i think like what would somebody do with my code i mean first of all if they want to fix some bugs for me that'd be great um they can they can also run their own linode cluster for$9 ,000 a month and that I'm sure they would do fine. But ultimately, like, what are they going to do? My app is mine because of the customers, the brand reputation, like, you know, the app store listings, like all these other assets that wouldn't be able to be stolen so easily with if you just had a copy of the source code.

1:48:42You could upload your own, you know, you could take my app code and make a clone and upload it to the app store. but you need to write the whole backend or host the whole backend which is a separate repo so if you only have one you might not have the other but whatever host the backend and then again the level of complexity it would take to actually do something with that would be a lot I don't think the value of losing your source code in some kind of leak or hack is as high as most people think and you can verify that by looking at situations where occasionally some high profile source code has been leaked or has been stolen or somehow exfiltrated from its company, what has happened?

1:49:24Not much. If you're a big enough company, if you're doing operating systems, if the source code to Windows or macOS leaks, which I think for Windows, I think it did. Didn't a somewhat modern version of Windows have a source code leak about five or ten years ago? I think so. Anyway, so there's security risks of maybe somebody, by seeing your source code, maybe they could find a vulnerability that they can exploit. But keep in mind that the core OS for iOS and macOS and all of Apple's OS is actually open source. And if you want to find a security flaw in the kernel code, the kernel code is open source.

1:49:57So have at it. Right. And so I think the actual risk profile of having someone else look at your code is way lower than most developers think. and the actual risk of something like GitHub being hacked and allowing access to your code that you didn't authorize, that is also very unlikely. And the odds of you getting hacked yourself, either your computer getting hacked and the local copy of your source code on your computer somehow being stolen, or however you would host it on whatever server you would put it on, I think the odds are much higher of a loss that way than of GitHub being hacked. All right.

1:50:43Thanks to our sponsors this week, Gusto, Zapier, and DeleteMe. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're talking about the RAM shortage that's happening recently and kind of the flip side of the Apple Intelligence RAM dividend that we've been talking about a few times in the recent past. so you can join us to listen and every other member exclusive content bit that we do every episode, occasional member specials it's a lot, it's a good time, get more of us, it's great thank you so much for listening everybody, we'll talk to you next week

1:51:23now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin cause it was accidental oh it was accidental John didn't do any research 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 R-M-N-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 Because I didn't put it in yellow and bold We forgot to talk about gift memberships God damn it God damn it Do you want to do it now and drop it in my phone?

1:52:32Wedge it in No, we're not going to drop it in It's going to be the end of the show. This is our punishment. It's the reward for the people who made it this far, and it's our punishment for not doing it at the front of the show because we're bad. Goddamn it. All right. Hey, so we did the thing, or didn't do the thing, depending on how you look at it. We were supposed to talk about something way at the top of the show, and we didn't. And so we're going to talk about it way at the end of the show, and I'm going to use one final opportunity as I sit here on the 22nd of December to say that if you are a slacker, or procrastinator or just generally need an idea for an excellent gift, let me tell you an excellent gift you can get.

1:53:10The nerd in your life is ATP membership. You can do it for a month. You can do it for a year. You go to ATP.fm slash gift and you can gift someone ATP membership, which is really great. You will not spoil the surprise or anything like that. We will basically, as the flow that John created tells you very explicitly, it is up to you to notify the recipient. We give you a special code, URL, whatever. And it is up to you to give that to the recipient to actually give them the gift. John, anything you would like to add about that? Nope, it's pretty straightforward. Again, we've had a lot of success with this system.

1:53:48There's nothing for you to lose. What if I went to that screen and I forgot? Oh, it told me to save this code, but I forgot. Am I ever going to see that code again? No, it's on your member page. Just log in. Every gift you've ever given or received is listed there, along with redemption instructions, the URL, the code, everything. it's pretty straightforward system it's a great gift it's a last minute gift that you can deliver it instantly uh and i think uh there is probably a nerd in your life that might like it and if you are now here's the problem with this who are you talking to someone who's going to give this to me as a gift they're not listening to the show i'm listening to the show and i want it as a gift well on your on the store page if you log into atp.fm or you go to atp.fm slash gift or atp.fm slash store if you are logged in both of those places will say hey do you want someone to buy you a gift membership, give them this URL and that you just give that URL to somebody and say, click on this and buy it for me.

1:54:37That will pre-fill the form with your information and get it sent to you. So yeah, the people who are going to buy a gift membership probably aren't listening to the show. The people who want to gift membership probably are listening. So that is a thing you can do as well. But either way, if you just tell them, Hey, I want an ATB membership, go to atb.fm slash gift and get it for me. They'll figure it out. It works fine. Excellent. And remember you get the bootleg or they the gift recipient gets the bootleg member specials ad free feed uh if they hang on to the membership long enough uh discounts on our time limited merch the whole rigmarole all sorts of fun stuff so atp.fm slash gift uh john you have a problem i is my understanding tell me about this yet another reason i'm not agreeing to still it's like what are we on we're on 20 uh 26.2 uh with 26.3 in beta um the first real strike against me in app development was the the xcode 26.1 that broke my ability to have new icons in the new old os and old icons in the old os which really annoyed me as if i didn't need more annoyance related to icons in this thing uh and now the new annoyance i got a bug report that said hey the new glass uh appearance and you know tahoe you know liquid glass appearance for my app switcher palette uh in switch glass which was essentially the main tahoe feature was like hey there's this new glass thing i should use that as one of the options you already had like six options of how you wanted to look one of them actually three of them are glass there's regular glass clear glass and tinted glass all of which are appearances and they're like hey it doesn't work right anymore uh things don't show behind it like if you move a window behind it you can't see through the glass i'm like what are you talking about of course you can't it's just that's exactly how glass works you put stuff behind it and does a little warping effect or whatever but sure enough i fired it up on 26.2 and it didn't work and so there we go new sample project in xcode uh made a reproduction and like i was i was making the bug report because you just you just make a window you put glass appearance on it and then you put like i put a yellow sticky note behind it it's like nope can't see the sticky note through it and i'm like well here was the complication like has this never worked and i'm just forgetting like what i start so i feel like i'm just what's going on here like i could swear this worked fine unfortunately by that point i no longer had any machines that were running 26.1 i just had 26.2 and then like 26.3 beta but i didn't have 26.1 anymore the majority of the time it took me to report this bug was figuring out how the hell to get 26.1 back on one of these macs i hate the install process for like installing an old version of macOS and external drive so much on modern mac i understand why it's there i understand the secure boot blah blah blah but getting the full installer which apple does not make easy and then getting that installed and having a play no you can't install on that disc and this disc is not signed in with an accountant and it's owned by the oh i hate it so much it used to be so much easier speaking of things that were easier back when there was less security anyway eventually i did it i got 26.1 back on the thing and sure enough worked fine back then worked in 26.0 worked in 26.1 26.2 totally and this is not like a minor features this is on macOS the glass appearance does not glass and maybe it's like okay well a glass is fine within a window but if you think of something like the dock or switch glass it's kind of like just like a floating window with a glass background so like if you drag a window behind the dock you see it through the dock it's glass right my thing used to be the same thing and they totally broke that in 26.2 and i believe also in 26.3 beta just 100 % it broke it like you put a window behind it and you don't see the thing behind it maddening so anyway i'm making the bug report and i'm like okay but now that i know that i've got a machine that runs 26.1 and then one that's running 26.2 now i can take screenshots of one and the other and say this is how it used to look this is how it looks now this is a regression you broke it and i was taking the screenshots then i'm like dragging them into like the feedback app or whatever and i'm like i'm trying to i'm using the space bar to quick look to say okay was this the one before or after the breakage and i'm looking at the screenshots and it's it looks right in all the screenshots cool what what the hell i'm like maybe i just took it wrong so i go back to the machine and take another screenshot like no what so this is one of those things where the screenshot when you take a screenshot everything renders correctly but on the actual screen it doesn't so i took a video with my phone of the screen like an animal i posted it to mastodon i'm like look i swear to you this is broken here i'm gonna just i just put my i put my phone on a tripod in front of my laptop screen and hit record and i said it's broken look totally totally broken the worst part is that um if you if the window appears or the glass appearance turns on or whatever when there's a thing behind it like so let's say you put the yellow sticky note behind the thing and then like you know put a liquid glass window appears in front of it then the yellow thing shows through like the yellow sticky note shows through like all fuzzy and glass and distorted but then if you drag the sticky note out from underneath it the part of it that appeared behind it gets stuck there like it's it's like a pre-rendered background like it sticks there someone sent me uh i think it's in the same acid i'm said a screenshot no it was in a slack channel like the thing that comes up that says like do you sure you want to restart your computer that's like a glassy you know that little dialogue that comes up that's a glassy thing too if that comes up over a background window and then you move the background window out of the way the little residue of that background window stays there like so it's super broken across the whole os not just like not just in app kit apps not just in my app doesn't you know it works in the doc but like system dialogues will retain a burned in copy of the windows that were behind them after you drag the windows out.

2:00:30this is not giving me lots of confidence in Tahoe. Again, this is 26.2 this broken. This is not a.0 thing. So Apple continues to annoy me and the quality control of this release seems not great. I hate to say I told everyone so, but I'm not kind of repeating myself a lot here. But like when you do a giant system redesign, you basically have a year in beta. This entire cycle, 26 series OSs are all going to be like a little bit beta probably for most or all of the entire year. just because it's a huge undertaking. This is part of why it's something that's not, you know, to be undertaken lightly.

2:01:09It's a huge undertaking. And there's just a lot that changes and a lot that needs to be tweaked and fixed and redesigned and adjusted. And there's not enough time in the regular summer beta cycle that Apple enforces. There's not enough time in that to do a whole redesign with a high level of software quality. They just, and, you know, rather than change their schedule, which they're not going to do. This is what we have to deal with. It's a year of beta. Enjoy. To be honest, I'm running Tahoe on my computer, and it's fine. Not to say that you guys are wrong or anything like that, but in my experience, it's been fine.

2:01:48Next time a dialogue comes up, one of those glassy, translucent dialogues, and it comes up over a window, move the window out from behind it and watch how a piece of it stays stuck to the dialogue and tell me how fine it is. Well, how does that happen in the.2 release? how how like what are they doing because they were fixing bigger bugs in the other they were fixing it like it's just yeah it's it's not reassuring