627: Dragged Across the Line
02:03:04 Share

I'm at the beach. I've been working on the restaurant all week. I'm making progress. I still have not done Dante. Of course not. Today I was about to, but I have to set up the iMac that's going to be in the office. And it wouldn't fit under the office shelves. Lift up the shelf, take everything off of it, redo the office. So everything has been like...

you know i'll have a list of five things i want to do each day and then i get through the first two and then i get sidetracked or they are more complicated than i thought or something doesn't work or something doesn't fit and i gotta do something else but i'm getting there making progress if anyone's listening to the show they may be forgiven for thinking that marco is uh

currently uh working on opening a music listening space but i believe they will serve food and drinks there as well don't forget with really good wi-fi incredibly good wi-fi a music listening slash uh internet access if you're an employee space you're making an internet cafe is what you're doing that's what you're doing only the employees can get on the wi-fi yeah we'll sleep i'll tell you what no there's a guest network i'll tell you what they're like

So I went through some crap with trying to get VoIP. So I haven't...

I haven't dealt with VoIP since the old 2006 era Vonage service. Remember? That was the first consumer VoIP thing you could buy. You buy the Vonage box and plug your phone into it, and you get free long distance. It was a very good idea. It was. And in 2006, that was very novel. And in fact, my old boss, David Karp, he used his Vonage. This was 2004. He had a Vonage phone number in New York.

and just moved to Japan for like six months and didn't tell his employer and he worked remotely.

And so he and he would just take calls like on his Vonage phone in Japan because it didn't matter. Like you could get your phone number in the US and then take the Vonage box anywhere and that you had Internet service and it would ring just the same. So nobody would know where you were with your like, you know, allegedly local phone number. Anyway, you know, now cell phones just work that way. But in 2004, 2005 era, this was this was pretty novel anyway.

But anyway, the restaurant has, you know, it's a pretty basic need for a phone. But most of the time they're busy, they don't have time to answer the phone, and they don't take reservations anyway. So there's not a lot of reasons people could be calling and doing something on the phone. So the staff was like, could we please have like one of those messages when you call saying, you know, hi, thanks for calling. We don't take reservations. Here's our hours. You know,

You know, then if you want to talk to somebody, press 1 or something like that to just deflect a lot of the most common calls. Because literally almost every call comes in. It's, sorry, we don't take reservations. Like, it's almost every call. So I'm like, all right, I can do that. Like, there's a thousand services that offer, you know, that kind of thing these days. Well, the VoIP industry has grown a lot since Vonage in 2005-ish. So I...

I looked around and I'm like, all right, well, and they have just like a regular wired phone behind the bar and then one in the back office. This is very, very simple needs. You know, we don't need like extensions. We don't need a big menu. We just need something that can like pick up and give her a prerecorded message and then ring the phones. This should be very, very simple.

So I ask my friend, Chatty G, to give me some VoIP recommendations. You've been doing that a lot now, and you seem to just be taking what it gives you as the answer and continuing, which is probably fine since you're checking when you actually try to do it, but I'm just waiting for it to lead you astray. Well, and in this case, you know, I asked it, you know, for, you know, what are the big providers? Because I, you know, I don't want to like...

you know, pick wrong. And this is an industry that I have not been following for the last 20 years. I don't know what's good and what's not. Frankly, I don't really care about most of the features that it would offer. You know, because if you're buying like a VoIP platform for either your home or for an office full of people, those are going to be very different needs. And both of those are going to have needs and features that I don't have and possibly not cover needs that I do have.

So I just did some strategy research and I ended up with a service. I'm not going to name it because I don't want to slag them, but I ended up with one of the big services. So I sign up.

I buy the, because, you know, again, most, there's already a phone there. It's like an old cell phone. They want to keep it. So I get one of those boxes that apparently is called an ATA, an analog telephone adapter, which is basically what a Vonix used to be. Just network in, phone jack out. And I got like a regular Cisco one of these. It's like the one everyone buys from Cisco. I think the 192, something like that. It's like the most, like the super common basic VoIP ATA box. And I get one of those boxes.

And so I got that and I tried to set it up with the service, which officially supports this box. And it took me an entire night of just banging my head against the wall. Factory resets, reconfiguring, automatic configuration, manual configuration. Nothing I did could possibly get this thing to work with the service. And it was so unbelievably complicated. And the Cisco and let me tell you, Cisco.

Oh my god. So one of the things I thought was, let me try making sure the Cisco thing has the latest firmware. To download firmware from Cisco, firmware updates for a basic $100 device that Cisco sells, you have to sign up for a Cisco login. Okay, how hard could it be? You have to give them everything. Your EIN, your address, everything. And I finally get through their stupid process, and then...

my account is blocked for a compliance hold. A brand new account! And I'm like, there is never a moment that I was more happy to be a Ubiquiti user than when I'm trying to get the most simple, stupid thing from Cisco. It took them like 24 hours to undo the compliance hold on my brand new account, which I used solely to try to download a stupid firmware update for their stupid VoIP ATA box.

Anyway, you're missing out on by not having a job all those years. You give me a warm memories of trying to get software from Oracle. It was horrendous. So goodbye, Cisco. Like anyway, so this this whole process during this time, I've learned that there was in fact an omission from my chat GPT research.

Shocking. Ubiquity makes one. They have a service. I was going to say, I'm a little surprised that Ubiquity doesn't do it. They do. It's called Ubiquity Talk. They have hardware and software. They have their own VoIP service, or you can integrate with other people's VoIP services. So I'm like, what am I doing with this piece of crap Cisco nothing box that

I returned it to Amazon. I canceled the other VoIP service. I got the Ubiquiti box. It set up in two seconds. It has power over Ethernet, of course, so I lose one wire. Thank God. I love that. It is nicer. It's the same price. It was also like $100.

it is infinitely nicer the box itself infinitely nicer the cisco box was one of those things where like you pick it up and you're like it feels like it's made out of uh aerogel you know that nasa it's like this is the lightest substance on earth like there's nothing in this box where did this hundred dollars go and you know the ubiquity one it's built well it's solid it has poe it even has like a useful screen on it to show you statuses and stuff like

It is better in every possible way. Plugging it in, starting it up with Ubiquiti with their service, everything about it is nicer. First of all, the workflow, the design, it's just Ubiquiti UI. So it's just nice. Everything about it is nicely designed. This was not the case for the Cisco thing or the service I was trying to use it with. Even when I tried to call the service to cancel it, because of course you have to call to cancel,

It took me two hours on hold, two hours on the phone on hold to cancel that service. Anyway, ubiquity land, everything is like flowers and lollipops. It's like, oh my God, this, I just plug it in and it worked. Wow. It's done. And then, oh, I had this note and the number porting wizard, you know, I'm still in the number porting process. So I don't, you know, we'll see how that goes. But like everything about it was just nice. And I'm just reminded like,

why do I ever buy anything? Not ubiquity. Like if they have an off an offering for something, I should just buy their offering most of the time, unless I have a really good reason not to. So anyway, all that is to say, I'm still going on this VoIP journey. It is not completed yet. It won't be completed until I get the number port, you know, successfully ported over, but Oh, it's so much nicer already. Everything about it is so much nicer. I'm glad that you worked that part out. Uh,

And I am not surprised that Ubiquity was indeed the answer. It seems like it is always the answer. It's so nice. Like part of the reason Ubiquity seems like it might be better is because Ubiquity still seems to have, I don't know, a toe or maybe a whole foot in the consumer space still because it's kind of like the prosumer brand. Whereas Cisco and those other enterprise things are just like we sell to businesses, we sell

have certification programs for people who are qualified to set the stuff up for you and contracts and this and that and the other thing. And yeah, you need to do jump through a thousand hoops to even get an account that you get a compliance hold on and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. They don't have to worry about being usable or nice or working quickly because they don't really have any presence in the consumer space that they care about, but Ubiquiti still does. So I think that's one of the great advantages of using sort of, I bet like Ubiquiti,

Cisco and other engineers who work for those other big companies probably look down at Ubiquiti to say, well, that's not real stuff. That's like stuff people put in their houses. But it does mean that their products have to actually work and be reasonable. And where Ubiquiti has come from, when I first got their gear, I mean, probably almost 10 years ago now.

Back when you had the separate... The edge router and a separate cloud thing that you had to run somewhere, like a cloud key or something like that. They've come a long way since then. Even back then, their stuff was still better than everything else that I had used, but you had to give the caveat, you have to be pretty nerdy to set this stuff up. That caveat is rapidly disappearing over the last few years. The only...

The only thing I can say negatively about Ubiquiti is that their product line, it's often hard to tell if you're new to Ubiquiti, it's often hard to tell what you need to buy to get set up. Oh, absolutely. I would really like to get a Ubiquiti set up here, but I'm currently of the opinion if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And we have talked, I remember, John, we have talked on this show about what is the bare minimum in order to have a Ubiquiti set up in your house. And for the life of me, A, I can't remember, which is...

standard for me but b i'm not even sure that data from like six months or a year ago is even still accurate no it's not because and that's the other thing like so it's hard to know what to buy and their product lineup changes pretty frequently so you have to kind of be well versed in ubiquity's vocabulary to be able to look at the current lineup at any given time and say oh i need one of those like i actually i made a mistake um when i the first router i bought for the restaurant um

They have this new compact line of like, I think it's called, you know, Gateway Ultra, Gateway Max, something like that. Everything, Ubiquity is now also Pro Max. Everything, all their names, it's really stupid. But,

But anyway, so at first I bought one of these small routers. It looked like it had what I needed for the restaurant. But then when I went to go add the Ubiquiti Talk thing, I realized the router doesn't support it. And it took a while to realize this because basically those two routers that are at the bottom of that line, the Compaq line...

They support everything you would need for a network, but not their other applications. They have a few other applications that can run on their routers, and Ubiquity Talk is one of them.

So I had to upgrade to the next one up, like not the Cloud Gateway Pro, but the Cloud Gateway Max. I have like the Max Ultra one, whatever the highest one is. And that one supports the other applications. It has like a faster processor and more memory and stuff like that. But even that, like moving from one gateway to another. So basically taking my entire network of like, you know, 15 different Ubiquiti devices that are all like adopted and configured and named and everything, moving that to a different one

That process you would think would be awful. It's not. You plug in the new one and it says, and there's an option, restore from backup. They apparently have cloud backups now to your Ubiquiti account for all your configurations. So you can just log into your account and restore the backup of your router onto a new router and replace it that way. And everything, all your switches come back. It's everything's adopted. Like it, I'm telling you, like this blows me away how, how,

How incredibly advanced this stuff is. This is pro-networking stuff. But what they've done to make it easy and friendly is remarkable. It's really, really great compared to everything else out there. It's very modern. It's very clean. It's very well designed. This is not an ad for ubiquity. We are trying to get them to sponsor our show. I don't know if they sponsor podcasts. But we would love to get them. But this is not an ad. They have not paid us yet. In fact, I just keep paying them. But this is...

If you need something they sell, it's fantastic. And it just keeps getting better all the time. Apple account transfers. Derek Martin writes, I spent over two hours on the phone with Apple support the other night trying to do this. At first, my Mac and iPhone told me that I was ineligible to migrate. It didn't say which account had the problem or what the problem was.

My support advisor was very knowledgeable, but the issue seemed to be that I'm sharing my iCloud plus storage with more than one other person. I am the organizer of my family, me, my wife, and two kids, which is two people too many.

To migrate, I will need to have my wife create a family. Then I must disband my family and transfer the kids to my wife's family and then migrate purchases. If it allows me, there's no way to know if something else is blocking my migration in advance. Then join my wife's family, then have her leave it so that I become the organizer and then have her rejoin it. That should have us back where we began. I feel like there's way too much that could go wrong with that many steps.

Also, the migrate purchases support page makes no mention of iTunes Match, which I've been paying for yearly forever. And though my support person told me it will migrate fine, going on his word alone is not comforting, especially on day one of a new feature. Furthermore, iTunes Match does not appear in my list of subscriptions. He said that's because they are included as part of Apple Music, and even though I pay for music and Match as separate subscriptions.

Lastly, there was no mention of what would happen to our private and shared photo libraries in which we have over 150,000 items during family disbandment and recreation. I will interject very quickly that I also paid for iTunes match for forever and everyone told me, oh, it'll be fine if you're paying for Apple one or whatever the heck it's called, you'll be fine. It'll, it'll, it'll still work. And to be honest,

to be honest, it has, as far as I know, it has worked just fine. And so I can concur that, Derek, you could probably get rid of the separate payment for iTunes Match. But don't do anything else you listed. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, right. I also got rid of iTunes Match and I think it's mostly okay. Although, honestly, who knows what it's doing to my music library. The only thing that's protecting my music library is the

stacks of old computers in my attic that have my music library in an unadulterated state slowly rotting on those spinning disks but anyway everything else that was listed is terrifying to me that whole disbanding the family moving the kids over joining and leaving is just like you really have to like you really have to be in a situation where you're like it's untenable for me to continue in this scenario where i have my purchases split in this way and i need to get them joined because i'm

the stuff that was listed to try to get into a good state, not even knowing whether it's going to work, just so much can go wrong. And this is what I was trying to emphasize last episode about Apple account stuff, even though they have this purchase transfer feature now, whenever you are thinking about doing something that involves more than just the computer you're sitting in front of, like there's a server side component part of it, there's a service that's run by another company. It's really,

much more comfortable when the company or service that you're using has the ability to do all the common operations like they have a there's a feature set with a bunch of orthogonal operations where you can do things and they and they're not all intertwined with each other and like anything you can imagine they can do like for example let's say buying something you buy something from amazon you

You know you can buy things. You know you can return things. You know you can search for things. You can add them to your cart. You can remove them. Like you can cancel an order that's on its way. If it's already here, when it gets here, you can do return and send it back. You can return it in the mail. You can return it in a person in Whole Foods. Like...

when you're ordering things, you can split it up into multiple orders. You can send orders to other places. Like anything you can think you can do with buying something and paying for it and returning it in any combination, Amazon can do.

And if you get on the phone with Amazon and you have a problem that involves buying something, did you not get something you were supposed to get? Did the wrong thing come? Was it damaged? Do you want to return something? You can have some confidence that Amazon can do all of those things. And so you're a little bit less fearful of buying things from Amazon because you know all the things you can do related to purchases. I'm pretty sure I can get them done.

That is not the case with Apple accounts or Apple IDs. Hold on. I should say, I just had a horrific experience with Amazon, like pretty bad, where I bought an iPad for the restaurant and it was the wrong, it was the base model. It ended up, the base model is not going to fit where I want it, so I'm using a mini instead. So I went to return the base model, unopened within, you know, a few days of getting it. And the only way for me to return that iPad is in person at a Whole Foods.

The nearest Whole Foods to my house is 40 minutes away. I went on the chat, tried to get them to give me anything else. There is no other option. This was not disclosed anywhere that I saw. I didn't even know this was possible. There is no way for me to return this iPad to Amazon that I just bought and it's unopened without driving 40 minutes to a Whole Foods.

I've never had an experience with Amazon that bad, and I've bought a lot from Amazon over the years. At least you have a way to return it, though. Yes, but they didn't say final sale or anything. There are some complications with Amazon if you're buying from a third-party seller versus them and weird stuff like Apple devices or whatever. But still, I would say that anything you want to do with an Amazon thing, you can eventually get done, especially in exceptional scenarios where you're like, Amazon says they delivered it, but you never got it.

you know, stuff like that, or it was damaged in shipping or whatever. You can probably, you can almost always solve these problems in some way, or you can talk to someone who can solve them for you, who is empowered to solve it for you. But Apple accounts is not like that. There are very few things you could, you're even theoretically able to do with them. And practically speaking, many of the things that you're theoretically able to do, you cannot actually do. And

And no one can help you. You cannot get anyone on the phone who is empowered to help you. You cannot get it. You will get different people on the phone who don't even know what the possibility space is. Is the thing I'm asking for possible or is it not possible? And if it is possible, can you do it?

And they'll be like, I don't know. Maybe. Let's try this. Let's escalate to this. And it just, so many stories of it going on and not like, they have not worked out all the different things. Not all of them. They haven't worked out any of the basic things, right? Even just opening accounts and closing accounts. For the longest time, I was trying to create an Apple ID. I forget what I was doing. I was trying to create a new Apple ID. I think I spent a month trying to do it. Just to create a new Apple ID. Any Apple ID. A new Apple ID. With any address. Yeah.

I couldn't do it from any version of Mac. It wasn't any of my Macs. I couldn't do it from my phone. I couldn't do it from my iPad. I had people on the phone trying to do it. Eventually, it started working. Nobody knows why. Why did it not work? It's like not being able to create an account on Amazon.com for a month and not understanding why no one in Amazon can help you. It's just an unheard of type of scenario. So when I see a message like this from Derek saying, well, the person on the phone said if I do these 17 steps, maybe I'll be able to get into a state where I want, I would be like,

the odds of this working successfully seem very low. I'm not saying don't do it, but just realize that like you're potentially signing up to get into a worse situation. You really, really have to want to get into that goal state and not being able to answer questions like, oh, I have 150,000 items in a shared iCloud photo library. What happens to them? And people go, I don't know. Well, I would want that answer before I started. And I don't want that answer with some confidence. And say someone gives you an answer and they say, oh yeah, totally. They'll be fine. And you do it and they're not fine.

You don't have any recourse. You can't call them up and say, I talked to this person and they said everything would be fine, but they're not. And the person is going to go, oh, that's terrible. Sorry. It's just no confidence in the Apple account system, which is why if you have your Apple accounts the way you want them or they're working, don't touch them.

Just leave them alone. Don't anger them in any way. I mean, it's bad enough that I'm still constantly getting locked out of my accounts. We're like, your Apple account has been locked. And it's just, I mean, at this point it's routine. So I don't freak out about it too much, but like, it's just a bad system where, you know, bots are coming and trying to get into accounts and causing my account to be locked. And every time it happens, it's like, will this be the time where I'm not able to get back into my account and lose everything? We'll see.

Anyway, Derek, if you undertake this, I wish you luck. But if you don't have to do this, at the very least, give it a few more months. Yeah, couldn't agree more. In Apple's defense, they have added...

Additional restrictions and guidelines and whatnot on purchase transfers. There's a knowledge base article that we will link in the show notes. And then our friend Stephen Hackett had a little write-up about it. One of the things that was called out as something that you can't do, or as an example, reading from the support document, you can't migrate purchases if your secondary Apple account is used with TestFlight for testing beta versions of apps from a developer. Open TestFlight and select stop testing for each app to remove it from your account. Woof.

So this was a solution to last week's complaint where they were saying some people had some problems with test flight. And the document said, oh, if you have test flights, you have to just stop them on one account and start them on another. And I had said that Icon Factory had reported that they tried to do that and it didn't work. Apple solution? Change the instructions that say, yeah, you just can't do it if you have test flights. Previously, it said you could do it. And it's really easy. After you do it, you can just remove the test flight from the old address and put in the new one. But that doesn't work. And so they didn't...

I don't know. Are they ever going to fix that? Or are they just going to say, let's just add one more restriction to the pile. If you have anything to do with test flight, nope, don't do it. You got to get off test flights before you do it, which I'm sure makes their life easier. But the number of restrictions that are required and the number of steps, like another thing you should look at in these documents is the number of things they suggest doing before you do the migration is very long. Like sign out of everything. Don't be renting any movies. Undo all these things. Like just, like just,

It seems very complicated and very fraught, and I really wonder how many people fall into the narrow alleyway that is left if you fulfill all the requirements and do all the things. What percentage of Apple's customers can use this feature? Yeah. Stephen Hackett writes, it's a great Apple has built this tool, but my word, this whole thing is complicated. I put that quote in there because you can, if anyone who knows Stephen Hackett can just hear him saying my word. ♪

We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from your products to your content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.

Introducing Design Intelligence from Squarespace. This combines two decades of industry-leading design expertise with cutting-edge AI tech to unlock your strongest creative potential. This empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to your unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity that you can use across your entire online presence.

Also, we now have amazing support from Squarespace payments, the easiest way to manage your payments in one place onboarding is fast and simple. You can start receiving payments right away and give your customers more ways to pay with popular payment methods like Klarna, ACX direct debit, Apple pay after pay clear pay, and so much more.

If you have an invoicing kind of business, they have built an invoicing now too. It's an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. Invoice your clients, get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service businesses all on one platform. This is just some of the many things Squarespace can do for you and your business.

But you don't have to believe me. You can go for a free trial at squarespace.com. Go there, build your site, see how it works for you. When you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So once again, squarespace.com slash ATP for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thank you so much to Squarespace for being just an awesome website platform and for sponsoring our show. ♪

Let's talk about backdoors. So there is a op-ed by Matthew Green and Alex Stamos on the Wall Street Journal. UK kicks Apple's door open for China. And they talk about the implications of the ridiculous law that the UK has enacted and seems to be trying to leverage.

And a quote that John pulled out, which I also would have pulled out had I seen it first, which I didn't. Congress must immediately enact a law prohibiting American tech companies from providing encryption backdoors to any country. This would create a, quote, conflict of laws, quote, situation, allowing Apple to fight this order in UK courts and protect American safety and security. Hear, hear. Additionally, there's a longer blog post from Matthew Green, one of the two authors we just mentioned, which expands on all of this a bit.

From that blog post, to satisfy the laws of one nation, Apple would have to break the laws of their home country. This creates a conflict of law situation where, at the very least, simple, quiet compliance against the interest of U.S. citizens and customers is no longer an option for Apple, even if the shareholders might theoretically prefer it. I hope this is a policy that many people could agree on, regardless of where they stand politically.

Yeah, this is an interesting angle on this that I heard is essentially passing a U.S. law that makes it impossible for Apple to comply because if they complied with the U.K. law, they would now be in violation of the U.S. law and hoping that Apple will decide that, you know, secret trying to secretly be run afoul of a newly created U.S. law is a worse situation. And so Apple wouldn't be faced with the idea of like where Apple has to like, you

you know, disobey UK law, like of their own volition, they'd be like, we literally can't do this because the US laws, they were a subject to say that we can't. And now I'm not a lawyer. I don't know about this whole conflict of law situation, so on and so forth. But it seems like a good thing to do to like essentially not rely on Apple doing the right thing, right? Which increasingly is a good thing to do.

So like instead make it impossible for them to do the thing for Apple to do the thing that we don't want them to do. Take it out of their hands. If we had a functioning lawmaking body, this would be a thing that would be good to do.

um although i saw some other feedback i didn't put in here saying that there really is no way around this there's nothing they can do to appeal or change it the only thing that can help with this is the uk deciding they don't want to enforce this in this particular way against apple uh but this is all happening in secret so we do really don't know what's going on but uh fingers crossed that this resolves itself in some sane way and fingers crossed that we hear about how it's resolved rather than just

Never hearing anything about the story again and not knowing what the heck has happened. We got some very amusing anonymous feedback with regard to Unix compliance for Mac OS and

This anonymous person writes, long ago, I was part of the team that did the Unix compliance work at Apple. The Unix conformance suite is vast and comprehensive and the closest thing Apple has to unit testing for the command line tools and kernel interfaces. Cool. The conformance suite frequently finds bugs before Apple's largely manual testing. I think this is the most important reason Apple keeps up with it. There are government contracts that require bidders to comply with various standards, normally not the Unix standard, but frequently some substandard that the Unix standard

tests cover. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's not surprising, but it is sad. Like it is even in big companies with all the money in the world, it is difficult to allocate sufficient budget for testing and to maintain that budget because it's just a cost center. Those people never make anything right. And you can explain their value and how they're adding value to the product by making sure things don't break. But,

And eventually somebody somewhere is going to decide they are not convinced by that argument and they can save money on next year's budget by trimming just a little bit from all those engineers spending all that time working on tests. And it's annoying because every time something changes, they have to change the test. And it's like, why are we paying all the...

Very frequently, they'll look at like, here are the people we have making new features for our products. And here's how much we're paying for the people to test them. And they're like, why is that testing so much? Sometimes it's almost as much as you're paying for the products to make them. Sometimes it's even more if you have a complicated thing. And just people want to cut it. People want to say, we shouldn't be spending money on that. Can we slim that down? Could we cut the testing team in half and just have them work smarter and not harder? And that's how you end up in a situation where you have Apple with more money than they know what to do with.

just have incredibly insufficient testing like so much worse testing than like open source projects run by volunteers like in on a percentage coverage basis right if the unix conformance suite is like the only thing that is testing the command line tools it's basically just saying like i hope nothing breaks and those command line tools no one ever uses because we're not looking at them and the fact that we have this automated test suite for the unix compliance is the only thing that's ever going to find them because we're sure as heck not paying anybody

to make sure that stuff doesn't break, which is why over the course of decades, so many things break in Mac OS and other operating systems. And maybe they pay enough people to do it in iOS, or maybe there's just fewer moving parts on iOS. Cause it seems like iOS has less breakage over time for like, uh, less used features. Uh, you know, even things like screen time, they were broken from day one. So it doesn't count, but on the Mac, uh,

just so many parts of the operating system have it's so clear that no one has looked at them for so long and they just slowly you know get ignored and fade into the background all of a sudden they break and this question is how long does it take for someone to notice that they break

And then how long does it take to get them fixed? We just saw that with the disk cloning thing that SuperDuper relied on. Not an obscure feature, like being able to make a bootable version of the operating system, but it's not something that Apple apparently tests anywhere or uses for anything that they care about. And so when it broke, it took, whatever, like three months to get a fix out the door. And they didn't even notice it broke until...

Well, they would have noticed if they had looked at the bug reports, but you know how that goes. They did file feedbacks. They did file feedbacks that those things were broken, but who's to say whether those feedbacks had any effect? We do know that the feedbacks were filed early in the beta process. That beta became a release. That release shipped. It shipped with the thing broken, and it didn't get fixed until much later.

Finally, what was foretold years ago has finally come to be. Humane, the people who make the AI pin, they are shutting down and they have sold the festering carcass to Hewlett Packard because where else would it go? This is from The Verge. Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116 million and will stop selling the AI pin. AI pins that have already been purchased are

will continue to function normally until 3 p.m. Eastern on February 28th, Humane says in a support document. After that date, pins will no longer connect to Humane servers. As a result, the AI pin features will no longer include calling, messaging, AI queries or responses, or cloud access. Humane is also encouraging users to download any pictures, videos, and notes stored on their pins before they are permanently deleted at that shutdown time.

Hewlett Packard is buying Humane's Cosmos or Cosmos, I don't know what their operating system is. Yeah, right. Their operating system, bringing on Humane technical staff and will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, Humane says in its press release. Humane reportedly started looking for a buyer shortly after the launch of the AI pin at a price as high as $1 billion, a lot more than the $116 million acquisition price announced today.

I mean, yeah, if you're like, how much money would you like? Well, I'll take a billion dollars if you're asking me how much money I'd like. I mean, that would be ideal, yes. But yeah, I mean, to nobody's surprise, the Humane AI pin didn't work out. To nobody's surprise, anybody who bought it, this weird device that had a monthly plan and was extremely server-based, is getting screwed that this device that you paid a lot of money for

has lasted approximately a year before it will stop working on very short notice completely. I mean, this is what happens when you buy weird stuff from startups that looks like it's not going to work very well and not going to have market success.

The good news is this will affect basically nobody because who is still – first of all, who is using it to begin with? Second of all, who would still be using it now? My guess is the number of active users they had now going into this week was probably measured in the hundreds at most.

So I don't think we're talking about a lot of affected people here. Probably less than that. But yeah, 10 days notice isn't very long. That's what happens when companies fail. I'm kind of surprised they're getting bought for that much money. I guess those patents must really be worth a lot. I guess they're getting some staff as well, but who knows how long they'll stay on. Keep in mind that the stories that talk about this

tried to emphasize that they're not buying the AI pin product. They don't even want that. That product is just dead, gone, shut down, right? So sometimes when companies get bought out when they've failed, they're

The company that buys them wants to sort of continue their product in some way in a modified version. They're like, nah, we're not going to make it happen at all. So you can just shut all that down, shut off all those servers. That's not what we're buying. We're buying patents, we're buying people, and we're buying whatever that OS is. And who knows what HP will do with that. But honestly, $116 million sounds like a lot. I think they raised something like $230 million or something. Yeah.

Not a great return on investment for those investors, but that's the way in business. Sometimes people take risks. The consumers take risks. I think most of the people who bought this knew they were taking a risk when they got it. Not all risks pay off. So I hope you enjoyed your discussion.

slash one week or however long you spent actually using this pin thing. It didn't work out for a lot of reasons. There was another story in The Verge that I couldn't tell if it was a... I read the story, got angry about part of it, tooted about it, and then realized, I think I got angry about the same exact thing in the same article in the past. So I think it might have been just like a repost of an article. It had today's date on it, but it looks like an article that was written months ago and they just reposted and maybe changed some part of it. Anyway...

They were saying how like Humane has failed and it's all their fault.

A lot of it is their fault. But as we discussed at length when we were considering the Humane pin and other things like that, there is some portion of the blame that goes to the platform owners because part of the reason Humane's product was so terrible is they couldn't do a lot of things that would make sense for a product like this because the platform owners wouldn't let them. So arguably, that's a reason not to try to make this product. So still, it's kind of unhumane. But the headline specifically emphasizing that it's all Humane's fault really misses the point.

Something very important about these products, which is the best way to make anything remotely like this is with much tighter integration with the phone platform. And the phone vendors did not want to allow that. Specifically Apple, but even Android, don't really want to allow products like this to have the integration that would make them good products. If Apple decides to make one, you can be sure it will have great integration and work well. But third parties, Apple's like, yeah, no. So this is another example of

You know, stranglehold the platform owners have narrowing the possibility space for products, leaving the only possibility a terrible product like Humane's pin that never worked well and never had a chance.

Yeah, but I mean, to be clear, it's not Apple's fault they failed. They knew all this going into it, and so did every... Like, we were all saying this. It's Apple's fault that a successful product like this cannot be made. That was... Yes. By anybody. Yes, but it also should, you know... I mean, honestly, I think in this case, I think the investors got duped on... I mean...

Oh, what a mess of a product this was. It's one of those things like sometimes when we see when Apple put something out, sometimes it's very clear like, oh, they didn't read the room here. And it's clear to us on the outside. Well, that's not going to work.

And you wonder, well, how did this get through the process at Apple? You can point at certain things here and there. It doesn't happen that often with Apple because they're a pretty well-run company. But you look at things like the outside eye display on the Vision Pro maybe, where like

You can see why maybe some designers thought this would be a cool idea, but maybe somewhere along the process, the process failed in like that shouldn't have made it out to the public. Well, the entire Humane AI pin product and everything Humane seemed to do should have been cut before it went to the public. And it was very obvious to everyone when it came out, like, um, it's kind of a weird idea. It's probably not going to work.

Not a great selling proposition either. It's shocking they lasted a year of it being in the market. I think most of the time was spent trying to sell the company. Oh, almost certainly. And going back, I do think that

Their whole thing about being like an AI device, that does seem like that was a later pivot, that the original goal of Humane, the company, was before the LLM revolution, and the original goal of it was probably something else. And they probably pivoted to this because their original goal wasn't going to be plausible. It was always going to be a voice thing. It's just that you could imagine a device like this working with Siri level of intelligence if it actually worked and had good integration and wasn't a terrible product.

That's a lot of ifs. Right?

every product that was huge has people saying this is terrible and it's never going to work. So how do you distinguish between the ones that everyone says are terrible and never going to work and are terrible and are never going to work and the ones everyone says are terrible and are never going to work and turn out to be the next big thing? And that's the challenge of being an investor. And the way most investors work is,

well, we're just going to throw money everywhere and the 1% that it pays off will pay for all the losers. Humane is one of the losers. Like you always hear that. It's like, oh, we only need one, you know, unicorn to pay off and it makes up for all those other companies. But no one ever asked, well, what are those other companies? They're companies that fail. Most startups fail.

Sometimes they fail after being given millions and millions of dollars. Like that's the reality of the thing. You know, we in the tech world, you think I just hear about the ones that succeed. I'll hear about like who's going to be the next Uber or the next Airbnb or whatever. But behind that are hundreds of companies that fail. It just so happens that this one for a variety of dumb and non-dumb reasons had so much press despite everything.

you know everyone thinking it was going to fail and they got so much money behind them i mean it's not you know 230 million look at how much open ai is has raised so far so maybe we'll be talking about them if it turns out they really have no mode and all that money goes down the drain and uh and everyone else has uh lms that are just as good as what they do but anyway yeah sometimes companies fail and when they fail it's not pretty and people who bought their products uh

don't end up getting their money's worth but that's that's part of the risk and and you know if we i i would have bet good money that this product would fail before it was released and definitely after it was released everybody pretty much agreed but it is true that even the really successful ones just if you described it to anyone they would say that's never gonna work this is a stupid idea anyone who looks at this will tell you it's a stupid idea i can't believe you're even thinking of doing this

Uh, and most of the time people are right, but one out of a hundred or a thousand or whatever turns out to be, you know, a huge success. And that's what keeps the investment money going, you know, random rewards or whatever that experiment with the rat stuff or whatever. If you hit the little paddle, food comes out randomly. It makes people keep putting in anyway. Uh, sorry for all the people who worked at humane and tried to do good work on what ended up being a not good product.

We are sponsored this week by Factor. So I'm sure you've probably heard of Factor before and you've probably heard of other meal services where they send you a whole bunch of ingredients that you have to spend a whole bunch of time to put together and make a meal. That's not what Factor is. Factor is different.

So Factor, the way that works is they have chef-made gourmet meals that they send to your door. But what I mean by that is they arrive fresh and here's the kicker, fully prepared. So you've got this entire meal ready to rock. All you got to do is throw it in the microwave for under five minutes and you've got a meal ready to go. You've got 40 options across eight dietary preferences on the menu each week. So it's easy to pick meals tailored to your goals. You can choose from preferences like calorie smart, protein plus or keto, whatever.

And you can do all that. And you can also add add-ons because they also offer smoothies, breakfast, grab-and-go snacks, and more as add-ons. And so Factor was kind enough to send me a whole bunch of stuff. They sent me a whole bunch of meals that I've been eating over the last week. And I wanted to call out the Stroganoff-style beef burger with Parmesan green beans and roasted mushrooms.

Here's the interesting thing about this meal. It was all tasty. It really was. But the Parmesan green beans were just particularly delicious. And in my personal opinion, if you can get a side item that's that tasty, you know that these people know what they're doing. So I really enjoyed it. They can't pay me to say that. I really did like it. So what can you do? You can eat smart with Factor. You can get started at factormeals.com slash factorpodcast.

and use the code FACTORPODCAST, all one word, to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. Again, that's FACTORMEALS.COM, F-A-C-T-O-R-M-E-A-L-S.COM slash FACTORPODCAST, F-A-C-T-O-R-P-O-D-C-A-S-T to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. Thank you to Factor for sponsoring the show.

All right, so earlier today as we record, Apple announced the final entry in the iPhone 16 family, the iPhone 16E, which was a name I did not expect. I suppose you don't read the rumors. This is one of the surprising things. This name, in case people were wondering, rumored for a long time, although most people had a capital E, so rumor.

rumor mill didn't get the lower casing and actually I was surprised by the lower casing as well but to be clear it's iPhone space one six lowercase e is this gonna be one of those things to kind of like like when they we used to do s phones where we all just put the capital s even though the Apple officially lower cases it I don't know I mean it looks it looks okay being lowercase I think people will mostly go with the lowercase but who knows like Casey just said the tagline from this like the final member of the 16 family I

And I heard that and I was like, the 16 family?

what is this 16th family you're talking about? You released a bunch of phones at phone time, and then much later, you came up with another phone and you named it similar. Is this really a family, or is this just like a long-lost relative? Well, you know, the parents, you know, had a surprise, let's say. Did, but is it? Well, anyway. Suffice it to say, they're trying to make this, the idea that this is a 16th family, and we'll talk about the possible implications of that in a little bit, but again, the...

The rumor mill so thoroughly, just even on these phones, even not like the flagship phones, so thoroughly have this phone nailed that we've been enduring weeks of people with physical mock-ups of this exact phone. And again, the 16E name leaked a long time ago. And it's just...

Boy, whoever is just doing all the leaks related to phones is just covering like every possible base. No, they're not going to get things like pricing and stuff like that, but just everything is leaking. So anyway, if you don't follow all those rumors closely, you could have been surprised, but know that all this stuff did in fact leak. But here we are. In fact, we knew it would be coming out this day and this time as well. And so, you know, here it is.

Apple today announced iPhone 16E, a new addition to the iPhone 16 lineup that offers powerful capabilities at a more affordable price, kind of. iPhone 16E delivers fast, smooth performance and breakthrough battery life thanks to the industry-leading efficiency of the A18 chip and the new Apple C1, the first cellular modem designed by Apple. That was from the newsroom post.

They did a, what was it, like a 10-ish minute intro video, which was good. No particular complaints about it. So let's talk specs, I guess. So it's got an A18, as I just mentioned, with a four-core GPU, one core is disabled. That's not one of the four. No, normally the A18 has five when they're all working, but these ones have four. And I don't think there's any option to get anything different. So these are all four-core GPUs. Yeah, and to be clear, the A18 Pro has six, right? Yeah.

Yeah, 18 Pro is a different... Yeah, this is a four-core GPU.

It has 8 gigs of RAM, as all phones seem to want to have these days, on account of Apple intelligence. This was, I guess, confirmed by Mac rumors via some Xcode spelunking. And then the C1. This is the most power-efficient modem ever in an iPhone, according to Apple, about a chip that Apple designed and built and put into Apple's iPhone. But here we are. I wonder if we're... Are we running... Are we running out of single letters and numbers? Like, there's plenty more letters and numbers, but it's, like...

we sometimes get annoyed that the, the a chip numbers are close to the phone numbers, but not quite matching or whatever. But then you've got things like the C one out here are just like, we're starting from one.

And so I guess, you know, in a few years we'll have the C2 and the C3 and the C4 and just keeping track of the all the different alphabet soup of numbers, especially as some of the numbers are going to be pushing up into, you know, the 20s and 30s while the numbers are in single digits. It's a bit of a challenge. But yeah, I mean, I guess I hadn't used about what the what the C1 what letter would be on that. But C for cellular makes sense, right?

Yeah, this is... I mean, that's huge. Like, the iPhone SE, which is now dead and now replaced by the 16E, this is not an exciting product in most ways. This is not a product that I think most tech podcasters or listeners care about or even remember exists most of the time. But this, like, the fact that they have a sell-a-modem that Apple made that is in this for the first time, like, that is...

For tech podcast people, that is probably the biggest news about this release. That's massive. And we'll see how well it works. I mean, that remains a huge question mark, but...

If this is indeed kind of like, you know, the public open beta of the cell modem, and then this falls iPhone... What number are we on? 17? If the iPhone 17 line... If the 17... I mean the iPhone 17 family. Yes, right. If the iPhone 17 family has more entrance in the Apple C modem lineage, I don't know, whatever...

This is big. As we mentioned in the past, there's a huge amount of risk associated with Apple making their own cell modem. There are substantial benefits they could reap from it. So we'll see how this goes. But that, to me, that's the story of the day.

Yeah, so the line they gave about it in the video, which Casey just quoted here, is this is what they're touting for, like, why do you care that Apple, that cell modem is from Apple? If you don't listen to ATP and haven't heard us talk about this for the past five years, why do you care? The most power-efficient modem ever in an iPhone. This cellular chip uses less power than any cellular chip we've ever put in an iPhone. Yeah.

And, you know, less power, longer battery life. We get the battery life in a little bit. So that's the pitch for this. You know, it's good. It's good for you, the consumer, that Apple is making this because we give you more battery life, which is, you know, a good pitch.

Part of the reason they're not pitching much more is because, well, this is the iPhone SE. This is the 16E. I guess the E is for economy. It's the cheaper phone, but that means it's not the flagship. And so as rumored, no millimeter wave. Their first round of Apple's first selling chip is not going to have millimeter wave. It's going to go on the SE first as a test bed so you don't ruin your flagship phones.

This is not a flagship cell modem chip. It doesn't have the fanciest of the fanciest cutting edge fastest of the fastest feature that Casey uses from his picnic table. No millimeter wave at all. They have on the spec page of like, what, what cellular capabilities does this have? And there is just such an incredible alphabet soup of numbers and letters there. I had to textually diff it against the 16 pro to confirm that

that there's no millimeter wave because i didn't know how how millimeter wave would be represented and if you do that textual diff you'll see there's other like bands that are different between them it says 5g nr bands n1 n2 n3 n5 n7 and just goes on up to like n 79 then it says ftd lte bands well these are all very complicated cellular stuff that i do not understand but they list them all and so if you diff them against the 16 pro you can see there are differences

And by the way, they list them by saying model A3212 asterisk. And then they list all the things. And they say all models and they list some more stuff.

The 16 Pro has multiple Model A something something things because they sell different versions of these in different parts of the world. And then there's a little support document saying, how can I tell if I have Model A3212? Which is weird on the 16E because I think there's only one model. I think there's only the A3212. There's no second line. But anyway, cellular is incredibly complicated. Even just in the U.S., it's complicated with all the different kinds of networks.

And so just glancing at what the C1 supports, it's not entirely clear how much less capable this is than the Qualcomm chip they're using in the 16 Pro. But I think the one thing consumers, if they care about this at all, which they probably shouldn't, but maybe Casey would care, no millimeter wave, which...

I forget what the rumors were about the 17 using this chip. I think they're saying the 17 lines, or at least the top end 17s are still going to use Qualcomm chips, which is the reason Apple renewed that contract for a couple more years, because they're probably going to still want to have millimeter wave on their top end phones, and the C1 doesn't support it, and I'm not sure they're going to have the C2 or C1.5 ready in time for the iPhone 17. So we'll see when we get to those phones. I forget what the rumors are. Maybe they're saying the

The 17 Air or the Slim whatever would use the C1 because that'll be another compromise that it doesn't need millimeter waves. It's so thin or whatever, but the other ones will use Qualcomm chips. But either way, 16E, it doesn't sell as much. It's not the flagship phone. Perfect place to roll out the first cell chip, as rumored. And here it is.

Yeah, I mean, I actually have been thinking about this, whether or not I would miss millimeter wave. And when it was rumored to be falling off of the iPhone 16 Pro before the 16 Pro was announced, I was pretty upset about it. But to be honest with you, I haven't been to my beloved picnic table in probably over a year now. And so I'll still be slightly bummed. But if I'm really honest with myself...

it's really not that big a deal. I don't think it's a big deal for anybody because it's just, it's such a limited, it has such limited applicability. It doesn't even exist anywhere near you. And if it does, you have to be so much closer and so much like, it's not, you know, it's, it's, I don't know if it's exactly line of sight, but it might as well be right. It's just very, it's,

I don't think it makes a big difference. But the thing is, it is the fastest way. And it's kind of hard to sell flagship phones that have... That support this incredibly fast protocol. And then say, well, you know what? It's not useful to enough people. So we're pulling it out of the phone. They can do that. But it seems like...

There's no way to slice it. This is moving backwards a little bit for the people who care about the fastest of the fastest speed. On the other hand, you'll get back more battery life, more space in the case because you don't need those millimeter wave antennas. There are trade-offs and reasons they might do it, but it is just, from a marketing perspective, kind of difficult to say, yeah, we got you all excited about millimeter wave, but just never mind. Another thing this thing is missing, I'm pretty sure, again, this was just announced today, but as far as I can tell, no ultra-wideband.

Which I don't understand. There's a lot of things about this phone that I don't understand. But I searched the spec page. I looked at other phones and how it is listed on other spec pages. The other phones list something called ultra-widebands with the U... What number are they on? They call it the second generation. They don't want to call it the U2 for obvious reasons. It's not the U1, but it's the second generation ultra-wideband chip or whatever. The iPhone 16E, as far as I am able to determine, does not have an ultra-wideband chip.

chip or capability? Is it built into the C1? Is that why I'm missing it? It seems really weird to me that it wouldn't have this, like, for doing, like, AirTag Find Mine with the little arrow thing or whatever, but...

That's what the spec sheet seems to indicate. I would be very surprised. I would think that would be integrated into like, you know, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio stack too. Like, I don't know. Right, but you should see it listed on the spec page. On other phones, you see the phrase ultra space wideband on the spec page and it's not there on the 16E.

right in the place where it would be it's not anywhere on the page right and i just i it's hard to tell when these things just came out the other thing is no wi-fi 7 right for the the fancy the the other members of the 16 family i believe all of them even the plane 16 has wi-fi 7 right but anyway this is wi-fi 6 right so like this is this is supposed to be the the cheaper phone i get it right um

But some of the omissions I find a little bit baffling. So millimeter wave I do not find baffling. Perfectly, makes perfect sense. Like we were just discussing it might even be dropped from the 17s. Who knows? Like fine. Ultra wideband, I start to go, did you really...

You're saving a lot of money on that. That seems like something that should be there. Well, I think it makes sense. Like when you look at all the other things that the SE line, which I guess is now the E line, maybe their S key stopped working. No, it's a 16 family. There is no SE line anymore. Right. Anyway, when you look at what these phones have lacked...

A lot of it is just like, what are some things that we can cut that the kind of casual budget or non-caring user doesn't care about and is unlikely to use or unlikely to miss if it's not there? And so, you know, there's other things like MagSafe charging missing. We'll get to that. Yeah, I think that's weird. But I think if you... What'll be interesting about this phone is...

I think Apple does not yet have a great idea of who's buying this phone because...

What the SE has been purchased for before, which this is replacing, I know it's not part of the SE family, John, but what this is replacing is a phone line in the SE that was basically, I want to hold on to the old style of phone because I don't want to change. And that has meant in the past, it meant a small phone, it meant touch ID instead of face ID and the home button instead of the swipe up.

A lot of people who were buying the SE before were buying it because they wanted to hold on to those old ways of the phone working. This phone looks and works just like all the new phones. It's the same size as all the new phones, roughly. So...

I don't know that Apple necessarily has a good idea of who's going to buy this. So they're going to find out. And so what we see now is basically for people who want to cut another $100 off the price from their other lowest end option, which is not the 16, but is actually the 15, which is still for sale, the N-1 base model phone, the

Apple still sells that typically. In some markets, they even go N-2, I think. I don't know if they still do that, but they did. No, they just discontinued the 14 and the 14+. They discontinued all the phones with lightning ports, so they don't sell any new phones with lightning ports anymore. So they can the 14, the 14+, and obviously the SE. Right. But right now, the phone lineup is you have this at the bottom, $600. For $700, you have last year's iPhone 15 model, or I guess a year and a half ago, iPhone 15 model.

Then for $800, you have the new baseline iPhone 16 and so on. So you have every $100, you have these increments. So if you look at what else can they cut to hit those price points, okay, they're going to start cutting things, like weird stuff that to nerds like us, we'd be like, I don't know if I'd want a phone with that. Or wow, that would be inconvenient to not have that. Things like MagSafe and maybe ultra-wideband, like this kind of thing. But to an average iPhone buyer...

That might not matter, and they might just want, you know, just give me the cheapest phone. But again, I think in the past, the SE line was the cheapest phone, but it was also the phone that lets me not change my habits from the old ways of Touch ID and Home button.

Those buyers are now not being served anymore, so they're going to be forced to make a decision among the whole product line. So the only people who are going to buy the SE are people who want the cheapest current model, which is different. I think it partly overlapped that, but partly not. So we'll see how this all works out. But I think most of what I'm seeing here on what it has versus what it's missing is

I think they're all pretty good decisions, and I think this is still... I think they're all pretty bad decisions. Honestly, no, I don't think so. I mean, the only thing is that I think for many people, I think buying last year's, you know, buying the M-1 model, the iPhone 15, buying it now...

for a hundred bucks more i think that for for many people that will be the better phone but a lot of people just won't care and and you know the only people who would buy this over that are either people who want to save a hundred bucks which is not a small number of people but i don't think you know i don't think that's a a massive driver because these are all expensive no matter how you look at it or people who are who want like

Apple intelligence for some reason, but I don't think that's a strong selling point right now either. Yeah.

Tim Cook thinks it is, though. Well, yeah. Their marketing sure sells it as one, but, you know, we'll see. Yeah, so the thing about the... You mentioned the SE being like the, you know, for the people who want the old stuff. Well, this is part of the Tim Cook philosophy of just continuing to sell old products, you know, as long as people will buy them. And that has been true of the SE line, and it has always lagged behind. But here's the thing. The iPhone as a product has recently gone through some major transitions.

And that what that has caused is this trail dragging behind you these older phones, right?

These older phones have been slowly being dragged up to the line where they have to cross over. We already dragged them past the line of the small phone because the SE used to be the small phone. But it turns out that one of the transitions the iPhone line has gone through recently is no more small phone. And so the SE was behind there and we were dragging it along, dragging it along. And all of a sudden one year came along and guess what? The new SE is not small anymore because it got dragged past that line. But it was still the one with the home button.

Still the one with an LCD screen instead of an OLED, you know, all that stuff or whatever. But that is another transition that the phones have gone through, too. And this year it got dragged across that line. It's not like they're doing anything new with the with the SE phone. It's just that the entire line has transitioned physically form factor wise and feature wise has gone through a transition from phones that had a home button, an LCD screen, and then were smaller to phones that have no home button OLED screens and are bigger.

And finally this year, the lowest of the low end ones that they sell got dragged along on that. Uh, often, uh, talked about in the Steve jobs era, how he couldn't tolerate once there was something better. He couldn't tolerate the older things being in existence. So if it was like some new thing, like OLED screens that were better than the old screens, it'd be like, we're no longer selling anything, any phones with LCD screens. Everything's going to be OLED. That is not the Tim Cook philosophy. Uh, much to my personal consternation, it will just keep selling the old technologies for as long as possible. Uh,

Uh, but when you have this type of transition where it's like, we had a long time in this period where we had like a button on the front of it and LCD screens or whatever. And then the iPhone 10 came along.

And here's the new era. It is somewhat nice and something that I think a lot of people were looking forward to with the quote unquote new iPhone SE to sort of get all of the iPhones across most of the important lines. They all don't have a home button. They all have OLED screens. They all are like normal, quote unquote, normal iPhone size, right? To try to make it so that like there's no there's not this bifurcation of like, well, here's the current modern iPhones.

And then if you like the old stuff, you can still buy one of those weird ones. And this year they got pulled across the line. Now, do they get pulled all the way across the line? Not really because this one has a notch and not the dynamic Island because that's the line. It hasn't dragged across the dynamic Island line yet. But still, if you look at this phone, as you noted, 6.1 inch screen, uh, it is almost exactly the same size as an iPhone 16. It's 0.1 millimeter narrower and 0.7 millimeters shorter than an iPhone 16. Um,

It's got an OLED screen, 1200 nits peak instead of 1600 or whatever. 60 hertz is not promotion or whatever. But like what people, I think a lot of people were hoping for with this is like now finally the new SE, it's not like a different, weird, worse product. And finally there is a family cohesion and resemblance. And when designing a product line, I think it's short-sighted to ditch stuff like ultra-wideband because ultimately

and this is part of the Temco philosophy, every year you keep selling one of your products that doesn't have a thing, it means that doesn't become like the baseline for your product. Oh, you have an iPhone? Well, I know you can use this cool Find My feature. It'll point an arrow to your Apple TV remote in your couch. Oh, you can't do that. But I just got a new iPhone this year. Yeah, but you got the weird one that doesn't have this. So when I look at the omissions, I say,

Does this unnecessarily prolong a lack of unity in the line for a feature that you could otherwise tout as like the baseline? Every iPhone has Wi-Fi. Every iPhone has cellular. Every iPhone has an OLED screen. Every iPhone has Face ID. Whatever like the baseline you want to be. The Tim Cook philosophy says

makes that baseline constantly be dragged behind you by many years. And people who are interested in technology and are of my, you know, of the mindset that I have for wanting to

it to be a rising tide that lifts all boats. I don't want to see older stuff being sold for a long time because every year they keep selling it is another year that we have to deal with it still being in existence and you can't just assume that everybody has this cool feature. It becomes a question of what exact model you have. And so for ultra-wideband, I look at it and I say, how much money, space, and power did you save with that specific thing? I would understand if this phone had an LCD screen more than dropping ultra-wideband because the screen is the most expensive component in the phone.

Is the ultra-wideband chip saving you that much time and energy? Even though if nobody uses it or whatever, just to say that the new baseline... I mean, they put thread radios in everything now, even though no one's using it for anything, right? Just to say every Apple product has a thread radio. And that will become important later, but you won't have to worry about it. Ultra-wideband has been so foundational to every phone that they've sold, except for the lagging behind SEs. This year, when they're finally bringing it across most of the lines...

To not have it have ultra-wideband seems like just family disunity that is... It's like Pennywise and Pound Foolish, right? Whatever you saved, whatever power and space you saved leaving ultra-wideband is not worth the family disunity that it causes. And I guess we could jump to the big one here, which is the perfect example. This is...

MagSafe. The 16E does not have MagSafe. Does that mean you can't wirelessly charge it? Oh no, you can wirelessly charge it with Qi charging, but there are no magnets in the phone, so there's no MagSafe. It Qi charges, but no MagSafe. And you can put a MagSafe case on it, I suppose, if you buy a third-party one, although Apple's ones don't have it. But boy, talk about a family, like, sacrificing family unity.

Now, I kind of get this because the magnets are probably surprisingly expensive and they do have thickness. But like an iPhone with the numbers 1-6 in the name that does not have MagSafe, part of the iPhone 16 family. I'm sorry, MagSafe was like the iPhone 12, right? Like this is not a new feature.

But they put wireless charging up, but no MagSafe is one of the best features of the iPhone. It's one of the best recent features they added to the phone to not put MagSafe on this phone. Again, I would sacrifice the screen for MagSafe. I would say, give me a worse screen. Give me an LCD screen just so I can get MagSafe because what matters more to people, the beautiful blacks of OLED on their phones or MagSafe? I feel like MagSafe will have a larger impact on people's lives just from making charging easier, be able to stick it to the phone mounts and cars and stuff.

I just, this is a baffling feature set to me. And on top of all of this, okay, so they did all these things that I think they shouldn't have done for Family Unity, but at least this phone's real cheap, right?

it's so much more expensive than the se that replaced now granted the se that it replaces was from 2022 had an a15 like i i get it wasn't it 400 bucks time marches on this is better technology it's going to be more expensive inflation yada yada like i i do see the price increase and as you noted marco like the marching up of the hundred dollars nice and uniform and make sense or whatever

But my point is they didn't strip out these features and it's like, well, we had to do this to hit this really, really low price point. It's not really, really low. It's kind of what you would expect for this phone given the specs. But no MagSafe, no Ultra Wideband whatsoever.

is just really i think it's the wrong call i think it is sacrificing family unity is sacrificing sort of the standard feature set that we expect to be in phones i think ultra wideband and especially magsafe are part of that base feature set wi-fi 7 is not part of the base feature set right millimeter wave not part of that base feature set but magsafe and ultra wideband i feel like they are part of the base feature set and they're just not on this phone

Yeah, the MagSafe is, I think, one of the weirder ones because not only has it been there since the iPhone 12, but...

I think, don't most Android phones also support magnetic charging that is MagSafe compatible in recent years also? So I feel like people who buy this phone who expect that would probably feel like the phone is broken the first time they try to put it on something magnetic and it just falls off. But that being said... Yeah, especially since it will charge. Like, it does have wireless charging, just the old bad kind. Yeah, but, you know, that being said, like,

If you wanted to add magnet charging to this, people make $8 stickers of magnets on Amazon that have... Yeah, like cases can do it. But Apple didn't even do it with its own cases. Why didn't they put magnets in their own case? But they just didn't. MagSafe is the kind of thing that you either use all the time or never. So again, for all the people who are the nevers on that...

I don't think they're going to notice or care. What is the cost in space savings versus like the baseline feature set? Maybe it doesn't get used all the time, but I feel like the whole point of like the potential... The reason a lot of people were looking forward to this phone was it would be finally a unification, right? And it's why people were not looking forward to it because they like the smaller phone. They like the home button, blah, blah, blah. But like the unification of all the phones kind of look like they're of a piece now and there's not this weird one that's kind of back there across those lines. Yeah.

And omitting features like this, that I think if we had asked beforehand, like what are the baseline features of the iPhone family that you think every iPhone should have, MagSafe would be on that list. Maybe U1 wouldn't for you. It would be for me. But MagSafe is definitely on that list. It's been around since the 12th. It should be on every single iPhone, whether people want to use it or not. Yeah, I think both of them would be on my list, both MagSafe and Ultra Wideband. I'm very surprised that both of them, we think, have been omitted.

I mean, MagSafe definitely has. But yeah, like the synergy with Apple's other products, like Apple sells like the AirTags, like that there's synergy with that product. Why would you do that? Why would you ever sell a phone in 2025 called iPhone 16 anything that doesn't give you the best feature of the AirTag, which is getting finding exactly where it is, not just like what room or what house it's in? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the ultra wide band is there and we just don't know. This could be a mistake. But MagSafe is not a mistake. This phone does not have magnets in the back of it. There is no MagSafe that's Qi charging, but not MagSafe.

Which is, again, like, I'm sure there was a good reason for that, but that is a... The omission of MagSafe is weird, because it does... It seems like it would be really cheap and not bring any major downsides. Like, you know, it'd be one thing, like, for instance, like, if the iPhone 17 Slim or Air that's rumored...

If that didn't have MagSafe, we would assume maybe they couldn't fit it thickness-wise. Still be a terrible mistake, but at least there would be a reason. Right. But this seems like there's no reason. What's good about this phone? What does it have to recommend it? One of the things that Apple doesn't really tout, but people are picking up on in the spec sheet, it has better battery life than the iPhone 16. Slightly better battery life than the iPhone 16, which ostensibly has the same processor, although one fewer GPU core, right? Yeah.

And Apple touts in its video, essentially, by leaving out stuff, there's more room for a bigger battery. What do they leave out? We haven't talked about this yet, but we might as well now. There's just one camera on the back of this phone. That's a sensible cost saving. And there's a nice symmetry. The cheapest phone has one camera. The second cheapest one has two cameras. And the third, the most expensive one, has three cameras.

And the camera that's in this is a good camera. It's this 48 megapixel slash 12 megapixel 2X, you know. Yeah, it seems like it's the same camera that's in the current base model 16. It just doesn't have the ultra-wide. And so you can't do things that require two cameras, and you can't do macro, because that's actually done by the ultra-wide. So it's the 1X camera from the iPhone 16 non-pro, which I think is, again, like...

For something that replaces the iPhone SE, that's a great pick. As you mentioned, though, I think it's important to distinguish that the iPhone SE was a lot cheaper than this. So it isn't quite directly replacing that. You're saving money. Those cameras are expensive. And you reap some benefit for it. First of all, I think the back of the phone looks nicer with just one camera. Yeah, it does. It's nice and smooth and simple. Can I say, by the way, on this point...

The rumors that we have of the 17 Pro, like big camera bar, I think look hideous. Like, I hope the rumors are wrong on that, but we're getting close enough to it in the timeline that I'm fearing that they might be right. I mean, that's, Pixel phones have been like that and so many other phones have been like that for ages. I think it's unavoidable.

I think the devil's in the details now and we'll see how it looks. But yeah, you know, it's funny because just to very quickly throw in my two cents here. I, when you told me when one would say to me, you know, or if I read, oh, there's going to be a camera bar. It's not going to be like this weird triangle thing in the back of the phone on paper. The way I imagine this sounds great. Sign me up. I'll take two.

But I agree, Marco, the renderings that I've seen, I have not really liked. The renderings don't have a lot of imagination. They just imagine the current design philosophy extended to that, especially the ones that render the 17 Pro and they just take the 16 Pro and leave the cameras exactly all while they are and make a bar across it. But if you want to see, just look at Android, the world of Android phones. Many, many Android phones have had a camera bar for ages now and they all do different treatments. There are ways to do this, so it looks reasonable. But boy, the 16E is...

The back of that phone looks so nice with just the one camera. Now, you know, and that's cost savings. Makes sense. The benefits you get from it is maybe you get a little bit more room for battery in there, which gives you better battery life. Like thinking of what this thing has to recommend, it is like if you don't care about the fanciest of the fancy specs, if one camera is plenty for you, here's a pretty good phone. And by the way, you get even better battery life than the expensive one because you don't have the extra cameras, the extra GPU for core in there, right?

But the other compromises, the lack of MagSafe, the potential lack of multi-wideband, like I would have sacrificed the SOC number. I would go with a 17 Pro or something in exchange for getting back MagSafe. Like you don't need an A18 for that. I know they did it for Apple Intelligence. Like I understand why it's the way it is. But like what do people who buy the cheapest iPhone buy?

will they will they care about apple intelligence for that matter apple cares about it or the a18 nis or any of that stuff versus what caring about magsafe i think for the people who want magsafe that feature makes so much more difference in their life than the the neural engine that's going to allow them to use the apple intelligence right and

And we're in another transition period where everyone's getting eight gigs of RAM, which is good. By the way, this is eight gigs of RAM. Like that's a thumbs up and everything. But practically speaking, like, first of all, I don't know how much money you would even save on that because the SOC is not the most expensive thing in this. And Apple makes them themselves. So it's pretty cheap. But like if I had to design, what is the feature set that you actually want to put in the lowest end iPhone?

I would probably sacrifice RAM, Apple intelligence and the SOC if I could get back the ultra wide band and MagSafe because I just feel like that's in the baseline. And I mean, again, Apple wants Apple intelligence to be in the baseline, but just I don't think that's

I don't think that's an important feature for pretty much anybody using these phones, let alone the cheapest one. So yeah, and this, you know, to get the hard numbers in this, the previous SE at 128 gigs of storage was $480, and this one is $600.

And, you know, it's a big spec bump or whatever. But then, of course, Apple storage prices mean that if you spec this thing, the 16E all up to $512, now it's a $900 phone. So you're going to sell me a $900 iPhone 16 something that doesn't have MagSafe? No thanks.

Apple is obviously, I think, in a mode now where I can't see them selling any products that don't support Apple intelligence from this point forward. That seems like that's baseline. Yeah, no, I get it. Like, I understand how it's not going to happen, right? And I thank them for the rant. Right, and the reality is, so far...

Apple intelligence does is not very compelling and so far it's a kind of thing that yeah if you can get it cool but like I wouldn't I wouldn't pay extra for a product based on today's Apple intelligence features just for that support alone but obviously that's not what Apple has in mind and when they were making these kind of decisions of like what chip is going to go in this product they made those decisions probably you know a year and a half two years ago so I

At that time, they probably thought by this date, Apple intelligence is going to be so big and so important and so good with all these different features that it's going to be a really compelling thing. And the reality is it's been hard and it's been, you know, not, it's probably been like, you know, off track and under delivered and over promised. But two years ago, they probably did think,

By this date in 2025, it's going to be so compelling. Everyone's going to want it. And, you know, their marketing seems to suggest they still think that. And maybe someday we'll get there. We're not there now. So right now in the release, this seems like a weird tradeoff. But maybe two years ago and maybe one year from now, it'll seem more logical.

It doesn't say it's not a weird trade off at all. I'm just saying that I would be willing to sacrifice that. I mean, honestly, like it's kind of like the 17 pro and the iPad mini. They they got a bunch of 18s that only have five for a GPU cores that work.

Like, this is just economically, like, it has probably cost them less. Like, they have that waste anyway. Can we put that in a product? The answer is yes. We can put it, it can go into 16A. It's better to do that than to make perfectly manufactured 17 Pros or 16s or whatever. If you've got a bunch of A18s with one broken GPU core, what else are you going to sell them at? I don't think they've ever sold one with this.

Number of cores. And so that just, it just makes economic sense. Like I understand that. And I was just promoting the whole family idea of a family unity. Apple intelligence for my lack of enthusiasm about it is part of that family unity. The baseline for Apple products period is Apple intelligence. They, they put more Ram and the M two Mac book ever crying out loud. Clearly they think this is, this is the base. This is a baseline feature of not just the phone, but of all Apple products, which obviously,

that's exactly the philosophy I'm trying to endorse for other things. That if you have something, I mean, setting aside my difference of opinion about the value of Apple intelligence, if Apple has decided,

that we just want you if you buy a new apple product you should know that it will support apple intelligence unless it's on pod uh that right so when they can do that that they bumped ram which they didn't they they're not they don't want to do that even the cheapest phone is going to have eight gigs of ram the cheapest two year two generation old uh mac is going to have 16 gigs of ram like they did it because this is the new baseline magsafe should be part of the baseline i think ultra wide band if it's not on this phone should also be part of that baseline

And again, the pricing on this being $600 and going up to $900, I feel like gives them the headroom to put in MagSafe at those prices and still have pretty healthy margins. And I'm trying to look at other places where they could save money. Like the notch is probably less expensive than dynamic island, right? So it's older tech there. One camera instead of two or three, they're saving money there. Well, I can tell you where they're saving money. And I haven't seen anyone talk about this yet, which maybe means I'm misled, but I

The going understanding was that for some devices, and there's been a lot of arguments that this is why we've never gotten a cellular Mac. The going understanding is that Qualcomm's licensing agreement or whatever requires you to give a portion of the cost of the device to Qualcomm. But there's a cap on that. We've discussed that in the past. There is a cap, and I remember talking about that, which is why I don't think it's necessarily a big deal for Macs. But...

I mean, if they're not using Qualcomm modem, then whatever the licensing fee would have been is now zero. Now, I don't know if that's a savings of a dollar. I don't know if that's a savings of a hundred dollars. I would guess somewhere between probably closer to one, but that's still a savings. Like that's still one more thing that they don't have to pay for. So that could have been where some of these savings could and should have come from.

I saw a tweet, I will probably forget to put it in the show notes, but I saw a tweet from a friend of the show, John Voorhees, earlier today, where I think he was saying it kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it's been one of those brain worms where I can't help but wonder if maybe he's right, wherein he said, I wonder if the reason you can't have MagSafe or whatever, you know, choose your

piece of internals is because the Apple C1 is physically larger than the Qualcomm equivalent. I have no earthly idea if that's true. And again, John might've been trying to, you know, crack wise and saying that,

But I can't help but wonder, what if he's right? What if that is the case? We'll crack it open. I doubt that's the case because one of the advantages Apple has with the C1, I think, is they're getting TSMC to fab it on a really good process. Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point. And so it shouldn't be bigger. It seems unlikely. Yeah, and also I think like they touted, the one thing they touted about the physical design of this thing is that there's just so much more room inside for a bigger battery. And again, obviously you save so much space by not having two more cameras in there. Like there's so much more room physically to put stuff in.

And I bet you do save space by not having the magnets. You can make the battery that much thicker, right? So I get that they're reaping some savings from it. I just think it's a foolish savings in this particular case. Anyway, so this is the new baseline. I don't mind the fact that it has a notch instead of Dynamic Island. I wish it had MagSafe. Everything else I'm mostly willing to sacrifice. You know where else they save money?

you can get it in black and white because those colors just cost too much money. Right? Which seems kind of punitive. The black and white look fine. They look nice, but it's like, the iPhone 16 comes in so many fun colors, and it's like, that's the only place where you get fun. If you get the expensive phone, well, that's too professional. We can't have fun colors there. If you get the cheap phone, oh, well, you get the cheap phone. All you get is black and white. Only exactly in the middle with two cameras.

You get fun colors. My theory on that? Teenagers. Yeah. My theory is that teenagers will not let their parents get them the boring black and white phone. They'll push them for the higher one. And they can't push them into the pro territory. Teenagers put cases on them. And Apple does sell fun colored cases. Although, interestingly, like Apple's cases for this phone, they don't...

ruin the look of it but like the back of it with the single camera looks so nice but remember you also have the flash and the whatever thingies so Apple's case has a lozenge shape opening because it encompasses the round camera and also the flash and other stuff that's to the side of it and that kind of ruins the cool look of the back of the phone but

Anyway, I'm not a small phone fan, and I think it is well past time when phones with lightning connectors and home buttons, we should move on from them. I feel for people who like them, but everyone has to deal with this. The attributes of the product they like eventually change over time, and I feel like with the Tim Cook era, those people have gotten the longest time to enjoy the features that they enjoy.

that has ever been the case. And so I don't, you know, I feel for them, but like technology marches on. Keep using your old phone if that's the thing you like. I feel especially for the small phone people because I still feel like there's room in the iPhone line for an actual small phone. Apple disagrees. Maybe they'll come back to it someday.

We are brought to you this episode by Delete.me. Delete.me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete.me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal info from data broker websites. Because here's the thing, there's these data brokers out there, and if you go and do like a web search for somebody's personal info, you can find it on all sorts of different data broker sites. Now,

If you want, you can go through these processes to try to get your stuff removed from each individual data broker, but it's a lot of work. Most people honestly won't do it, and it's kind of a pain. Delete.me does this for you. So you sign up and you provide Delete.me with exactly what information you want deleted from all those data brokers.

And their experts take it from there. They send you regular personalized privacy reports showing what they found, where, and what they were able to remove. And this is always working for you in the background. So it's constantly monitoring and removing the personal info you don't want on the internet.

Not just a one-time service, it's an ongoing thing. So this is a great thing. Nobody can remove all of their stuff from everywhere it exists, but if you remove it from the big data brokers, that does a lot of the work and it makes your personal information less easy to find and less quick to find by so many people. And so anybody who's scraping those big data broker sites and packaging up and reselling it, your data won't be in there if Delete.me has removed it.

So it's a great service. Check it out today. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete.me. Nowadays, special discount for our listeners. Today, you get 20% off your Delete.me plan by texting ATP to 64000. The only way to get 20% off is to text ATP to 64000. That's ATP to 64000. Message and data rates may apply.

Thank you so much to Delete.me for sponsoring our show.

Android users can subscribe to Apple TV Plus and MLS Season Pass using their Google Play account on Android Mobile and Google TV devices. Apple TV Plus also offers a seven-day free trial. All right, so show of hands, how many people didn't know that Android didn't already have an Apple TV Plus? That's me. Yep, I assumed it was there. I just assumed they did. The whole thing with Apple TV Plus is like this is a streaming service for everybody. It's not just for Apple users. Surely there's an Android version, but I guess there wasn't until today. I mean, I guess it was just all, you know, it's built into smart TVs these days and...

Most streaming, but like, yeah, I guess you just couldn't watch on your phone. So now Android users get to use the wonderful interface that is the Apple TV Plus app on their Android phones. And then we had, I mean, granted it's early in the year, but I think my favorite tech story of the year thus far, on Valentine's Day at just shy of 930 in the morning Eastern, there was a post on The Verge, Netflix finally decides to play nice and support the Apple TV app.

So reading from that post, some Apple TV 4K users in the U.S. are being prompted to connect their Netflix accounts to the Apple TV app. This would appear to signal an end to the streaming service's longtime refusal to have its content aggregated into third-party platforms. Users who link their accounts are able to add certain Netflix originals like Squid Game and Stranger Things to their Apple TV watch list, their Apple TV app watch list, with shows also appearing in the continue watching section.

The Verge has also verified that Netflix is now listed as a participating service within the Apple TV app alongside the apps that were already supported, though this isn't yet reflected on Apple's website. The integration appears to still be in the process of rolling out. The entire Netflix catalog isn't available yet, and only U.S.-based users have reportedly been able to get it working. Apple and Netflix both have yet to announce the update. Again, this was Valentine's Day, just about 9.30 in the morning Eastern.

and the world rejoiced. So many people were so incredibly excited, and justifiably, I'm not trying to imply that's bad. So many people were so excited about this. I am no longer a Netflix subscriber, and beyond that, I almost never use the Apple TV app. My mental model for the Apple TV app, which full stop is incorrect, but my mental model is that's where I go to watch Apple TV Plus stuff. That's really the only time I ever use it,

I cannot emphasize enough. I know that's weird and probably by any metric wrong, but that's just the way I think of it. But I can tell you, I can tell you that everyone was super excited about this during the morning of Valentine's day. Then about two 30 in the afternoon on Valentine's day this year, same day, a new post from the verge. Netflix says it's brief. Apple TV app integration was a mistake. Yeah.

Again, about 2.30 p.m. Eastern, Netflix spokesperson Momo Xu has told The Verge that this morning's window where Netflix appeared as a participating service on Apple TV, including temporary support for the watch list and continue watching features, was an error that has now been rolled back.

Stupendous work, Netflix. Just incredible job. And I think my favorite summary, which this made the rounds when it was tweeted or actually posted, but a friend of the show, Joe Rosensteil, wrote on both a tweet and a post on Mastodon and a post on his website.

Netflix deeply regrets accidentally making Netflix a better product for its customers. I couldn't even get through it with a straight face, but Joe is so right. It's so right. Ah, this stuff drives me bananas. And honestly, it's stuff like this, this, this, I guess, hubris. I feel like we use that word a lot, but the hubris of Netflix, they go, oh, we'll charge extra for 4K. You know why? Because we can.

Eat crap. Oh, we don't have to be in the Apple TV app. Why not? Because we don't want to be. Eat crap. It's just this like...

I don't know. I find this kind of behavior very off-putting and very anti-customer, anti-consumer. And so here it is. It's so funny because everyone rejoiced on the morning and early afternoon of Valentine's Day that this had finally happened. It's so clear that everyone, all of Netflix users want this integration to be a thing. And Netflix...

just doesn't want to listen. I don't get it. I just don't get it. I mean, it's easy to understand, but I think it's an interesting contrast with the other situations where there's like a battle of wills, a battle of market share between platform owners and products. So the classic one that we've talked about many times in the past has been Apple owns the iPhone platform. Amazon has a Kindle app on it. Apple does not want

you'd be able to buy Kindle books without giving Apple 30%, but unfortunately there's not 30% to give Apple in the book business, and so they were at a standoff. For customers, it would be better if you could launch the Kindle app on your phone and buy a book, and you didn't have to know that you had to go to a web page and do it and blah, blah, blah. It would be better for consumers. I think even Apple would agree this would be better for consumers.

But financially and strategically, Apple demands money that Amazon cannot give them and will not give them. And so the reality is that for customers, the experience of reading e-books on their phone through the Kindle app is worse. And in that case, it's much more cut and dry where it's like, this is just a money thing. Apple wants 30%. 30% is not available. They're at a standoff and consumers get hurt. For the Netflix thing,

I think it's a little bit different because you've got Apple who has an app called the Apple TV app on the Apple TV puck where you can watch Apple TV plus. Anyway, they have an app that tries to unify your viewing experience. Go here. Here's all your stuff. You can connect it to all your other services, unified, continue watching, watch next list or whatever. In theory, this is a unified interface to all of the streaming services that you might want to watch.

And if you have this app on your phone or on your television or on your Apple TV puck, this can unify your experience. But Netflix, because they're the biggest, most important, most popular, whatever, like said, we're not going to participate in that because we think we should be the top level destination. And it looks a lot like the Kindle scenario where you're like, wouldn't it be better for consumers?

If Netflix, the lone holdout, didn't think they were too big to be involved in this and just let themselves be subsumed into the Apple thing.

I think the situation is slightly different than the Kindle app being able to buy books in the Kindle app because what Apple is doing here is not as straightforwardly consumer benefiting as being able to buy books in the Kindle app. Like that just benefits consumers. It's like it's something you should be able to do technically and there's not really a lot of downside to it because it just makes it more inconvenient to do something. You just have to go to a webpage to do it, right? But Apple...

allowing Apple, one of the reasons Netflix doesn't do this is allowing Apple to be sort of the top level of the funnel, the interface to watching television, surrenders a bunch of control that Netflix thinks, and is probably right, that it has. Now, a lot of people, when they want to watch something, they go to the Netflix app first. And maybe it's the only streaming service they subscribe to, but there's a lot of stuff in Netflix.

Giving that up and saying, oh, they won't come to us first. We'll just be another alphabet soup of connected services. What they'll do instead is they'll go through this Apple interface and this Apple interface will essentially erase and smooth over all the services below it so that what people think they're doing is that whenever they want to watch TV, they launch the Apple TV app and there's all their stuff. Right. And that actually is a struggle for control. Right.

between Netflix and Apple. They both want to be the place where you go to begin with because that being in that position gives you power, right? Just ask Google, right?

websites exist out there but the fact that people will go to google first to get to a website to the point where instead of typing you know amazon.com they'll type amazon.com into the google search box instead of the address brother go to google.com type amazon.com into the search all right being that top level of the funnel has a huge amount of value

And in this battle between Netflix wanting to be the top level of the funnel for the people who just have one streaming service and it's Netflix and Apple wanting to be the top level of the funnel, I kind of feel like I don't want to give Apple any more control over any more funnels than they already have.

For two reasons. One, we've seen what it's like when they have control over the top-level stuff, exclusive control with the App Store. They're not very nice about it. And two, I don't like the Apple TV interface. I don't want that to be the top level to anything. I think Netflix makes it easier to find stuff and organize stuff. I have complaints about both of them.

But like, it's not as so clear cut as like, I just want to be able to buy Kindle apps in the Kindle ebook, Kindle ebooks in the Kindle app. That's just such a clear win. It's all in the Amazon family. There's no exchange of control. Amazon already controls all Kindle books like that. There's no structural change there, right? But...

So Netflix holding strong and saying, we think we have the power to not be subsumed into the Apple thing, specifically because it's Apple wanting to be the top of the funnel and specifically because their top level of the funnel, I think is cruddy. I kind of rooting for Netflix here. And I know people don't want it. Like people who use Apple TV, the top of the one and like, Oh, Netflix, you're the only holdout. Why can't you get with the program? But as someone who does not like that program,

I kind of wish more people would not be subsumed by the Apple thing because I think their interface is terrible and I don't want to give them any more power. I don't know. Maybe this is like, maybe I'm the minority here, but I kind of feel like most people, the people who are enthusiastic users of the Apple TV interface to watching stuff are specifically the very Apple-focused nerds that are in our tiny circle.

And that most people don't even know that app exists. Or if they did, wouldn't know what it's used for. And I think, Casey, a lot of them are much more like you just described. That's where you go to watch Severance or Ted Lasso. And otherwise you go to Netflix or Hulu or whatever. They don't even know.

that you can go there and watch stuff that's on Hulu or whatever. It just doesn't, because it's not like connecting the things up or whatever. It's just, I feel like that is a narrow market and I don't want that to be any more prominent than it already is. I kind of prefer the world. That's why I have my Apple TV set up. My home button thingy or whatever takes me to the big grid of apps. I launched the Netflix app.

I launched the Hulu app. I launched the Netflix app. The only reason I personally go to the little black and white TV thing, the Apple TV thing, is to watch Severance. That's how I prefer it. And that interface isn't great, but it actually is a uniform interface. It just requires you to know what services everything's on, which I understand is a weird thing or whatever, but...

I don't think this is as cut and dried as Joe seems to think it is. They deeply regret making their product better for its customers. They made their product better for some customers, potentially at the cost of giving more control to Apple, which at this point I'm not inclined to be in favor of. I don't entirely disagree with you, but I don't know. I think most people with an Apple TV...

probably leave the home button or whatever you want to call that to be the Apple TV app, which I agree with you is barbaric. I really, really dislike the Apple TV app a lot. I have complained and moaned about the information architecture on that app a thousand times, and I'll do it again right now. I think...

everything is laid out in a confusing way. It's, it's gotten better, but it's very challenging to find the thing you want to find. Maybe my brain just disagrees with the way it's designed. It's intentionally hiding it from you because it doesn't want you to continue watching the thing you were previously watching. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's,

it's preposterous, but I do think that is most people's interface to the Apple TV. So yeah, I mean, maybe you're right that maybe most people do the thing that I would suggest and that you would suggest. And I presume that Marco would suggest, which is to switch the home button to, you know, going to the grid of apps. Most people don't have an Apple TV.

That's the reality. They have a television that has an Apple TV app on it, but I think they launch it to watch Ted Lasso and Severance. I think that's how it works. Yeah, you very well could be right. Except for in our little circle where everybody has an Apple TV puck and everybody actually uses that interface. I feel like

the vast, vast majority of people who watch streaming don't subscribe to every streaming service in the world like I do. Don't have an Apple TV puck because that is just a high-end, weird, Apple nerd thing. Do have Apple TV on their television because it comes built into all their televisions, which kind of gets me to the point of the earlier story about Apple TV being available for Android. Like, Apple TV seems to be on board with the whole idea of we need to be everywhere. We need to be in every TV. Like, there should be no reason that you can't watch Apple.

Ted Lasso, which is why I was so surprised to see that you couldn't watch it on an Android phone until recently, right? So they're all signed up to that type of thing, but I feel like that's, like, that is the actual world that most people live in, that the Apple TV icon means Severance and Ted Lasso, and that so few people have

The Apple TV remote with that button, with that default, with all that stuff. It's only in our little circle. And within our little circle of people who like that interface, I feel for them. I understand you're one, you're one service away from uniformity, right? And you like the interface. Like I get it, but there is a, that comes with baggage and the baggage is, do you want Apple to be, to give Apple more top level control over streaming stuff?

I would be more inclined to give them the control if I felt like their interface was tons better than everybody else, right? But I don't like the interface, and I don't think they need more things to have control over. Yeah, see, but I think I really, the more I hear you talk, the more I strongly disagree with you here. First of all, I think that there are people in our little, you know, clique that do enjoy the Apple TV app, and I might be putting words in his mouth, but I could swear I've heard Jason talk about how... No, as I'm saying, in our circle, some people really do like that interface.

And the thing, I'm glad you brought up the Kindle because to my eyes, it's actually a very, very different situation. With the Kindle, everyone involved wants a piece of the pie. Like they all want a little cut of the money. And you can squint and say that that's still applicable with the Apple TV app. But to me, it's very different. To me, it's not about Apple getting a cut of Netflix's money. And it's not really even necessarily about them getting more of your attention.

I really think to my eyes, having everything bubble up into the Apple TV app is to just make a unified, better experience in the same way that the Apple TV hardware to me is a better experience. Again, with the caveat that I completely concur with you, John, that the Apple TV app is a dumpster fire. But if we take it, if we can put that large caveat aside and take it and go with the assumption that the Apple TV app is at least serviceable for most people.

Then I don't feel like Apple's trying to take a cut of Netflix's money or of time. Well, I mean, they are, but Netflix just doesn't sell subscriptions through. Sure. You can't sign up to Netflix through the Apple TV simply because Netflix does not want to give Apple cut anymore. Sorry, I meant in this context. You're totally right, but I mean in this context. That whole control that Apple has over that has already warped the space enormously.

in that way to drive away all of the people who did not want to give Apple a cut. That's just, we should accept that as the status quo, but just remember there was a time when Netflix actually did allow you to sign up right on your Apple TV, right inside the app, and they gave Apple 30% and they stopped doing that. All fair. But what I'm driving at is from my perspective, and I have been quick to point, as all three of us, I think I've been quick to point out a lot of ways where we think Apple's making really BS decisions these days. This smells to me like they're just trying to do right by their users. They want

their users to have one place to go that will be omnivorous and slurp up all their watch habits and whatnot, and hopefully not in a data-vendy gross way, because this is Apple. And they'll just present, here's what you were watching, and here's what the next thing is, which again, John, I agree with you, the app sucks. But leaving that aside, I think the motivation is pure. And whereas I feel like Netflix is just like, meh, we're too cool. We're too good for that.

We don't need you. And the motivation is not pure on Netflix's side. And that's what makes me feel like it's gross. It's not the purity. So unified interface is good. I'm in favor of that. I've been in favor of that for years, that whole episode about it on the whole Hypercritical podcast. Just having a single interface to television is good. But what I'm trying to say is there is power that comes associated with being that unified interface, no matter who does it.

It doesn't matter if Netflix is the unified interface, if Apple is, if Google is, if your TV vendor is, whoever presents a unified interface that subsumes all the other services, if they are successful in that endeavor at scale, it gives them tremendous power.

I don't doubt that the idea behind the Apple TV app and connecting services is to provide a better user experience. What I do doubt is if they were successful, that that power would not be leveraged to do bad things. That's my problem. And same thing with Netflix. If Netflix was able to successfully become the dominant thing and all the other streaming services went by the wayside, they would have tremendous power and probably also do bad things with it.

I think we've been spared that because Netflix is not massively dominant as it once was. The space is fairly well divided up into a couple of significant players. And I think those couple of significant players keep each other honest. That's kind of why I feel like Netflix will eventually bend on this one because they're not... It's not hubris. They're just... It is...

are correctly surmising how much power they actually have, but I feel like their power has been decreasing over time. So at some point, someone's going to look at this again and say, can we afford to continue to not be in the Apple app? At some point, I feel like that will flip.

back when they were the biggest by far and there was hardly any other popular streaming services they could afford to it was clear cut and they were like they did the apple thing which is like we don't need to go to ces why the hell would we go to ces we have our own things why would we why would we do that oh we'll just have one conference for all the technology it's a great unifying experience but all the apples like no we don't need to do that like people come to see our stuff we don't need to be subsumed into ces right it's exactly the same thing

that i don't think that's going to change with apple because they continue to not need to go to ces but netflix i think eventually if trends continue will correctly surmise that they are not big enough to stop this and i do wonder this is part of the mystery of this thing what happened like how did this integration happen clearly this integration is like one feature toggle away from happening right and

Who accidentally flicked the toggle? Like, is there a deal in the works? Like, I feel like Netflix is getting to the point where they're going to have to end up doing this anyway. And I don't doubt the motivations of the people working on this featured app. I don't doubt the motivations of creating this featured app. It's not a pure power grab. It is, this is a better experience, right?

I fear what will happen if they are successful. Even just within the little world of Apple, what will happen if they're successful? Because I've seen what Apple does with power that it happens to acquire. It kind of, not like, you know, fell blank backwards into the App Store monopoly, but like, they didn't seek out to become what they are today. But they...

did get there and when they got there everything they did with that power has been upsetting and not good for anything so that's what i'm worried about here now maybe it's silly to worry about this because again how many people even use that interface and they'll never do it and really

Netflix should just be incorporated into the Apple TV app because there's no fear of the Apple TV app ever becoming the dominant interface to streaming simply because too few people use it. And I can see that argument and it makes sense. And Joe should really have Netflix in his app that he likes because it would make his life easier and there's no real fear of it. But my instinctual reaction to this is told strong Netflix for as long as you can, because it's not going to be that much longer. And B, I just don't want to see Apple come to dominate another anything.

Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Delete Me, and Factor. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about

The recent obsession with quote humanoid robots, which seems like Apple and Meta are rumored to be working on humanoid style robots. We're going to be talking about that in overtime. You can join to listen at b.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week.

Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T. Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental. They did.

So I have some news that I know the two of you have been waiting with bated breath. I have yet another update about my status board. I am confident that you are so very excited for this. But no, I...

was kind of a very kind listener. Um, Chris R was kind enough to send me a, one of the home seer switches that they had bought a while back and didn't end up needing. And this is the thing, if you recall, sort of back up just a smidge, I wanted to have a couple of like a trio of LEDs in the kitchen or kitchen area that will illuminate when there's something going on, either the mail's waiting for us, the garage doors open or the car's charging. And, um,

I had thought I was going to put this, like, make a bespoke solution in a decommissioned RJ11 outlet, and the historical commission, otherwise known as Aaron, said, yeah, I don't think that's going to fly. And so then I went back to the drawing board, and I hadn't really come up with any good answers. And a bunch of listeners had suggested Inovelli, if I recall correctly, switches, which are similar to what I'm talking about, but basically, in addition to just a standard paddle switch, the Inovelli has, like, a single diffused...

or a single diffuser with several LEDs behind it. So I could kind of get what I wanted, but it would all kind of be visually one LED with different colors that bleed together. So I didn't really love that. And a handful of people had written about the home seer switches, H-O-M-E-S-E-E-R. And Chris R had an older one, but that did, or that would hypothetically do what I wanted to do. And he was kind enough to send it my way. And I got it about a week ago, I'd say.

And I decided, since Erin had very strong opinions about how she really didn't want any sort of status board in the kitchen, I was going to install this on the sly sometime when she was out. But she hadn't been out in a long time until last night when it was book club night. She goes to book club once a month with a handful of girlfriends.

And last night was book club night. And so I installed a home seer HS hyphen WD 200 plus Z wave plus scene capable RGB wall dimmer. Oh, for people who haven't seen this product, they should follow the link in the show notes and look at it. And I think they'll have the same question that I have. How can you, you can sneakily install something, but how can this thing with,

colored LEDs on it sneakily exist in a place where your wife does not want a thing with LEDs to exist unless the LEDs never turn on. Oh, no, no, no. She will notice and as I sit here now has noticed. This is, what is it called? Casey, you should know this. Um,

uh the uh the the robert moses uh strategy uh building thing before the permits what is that called state driving i know exactly what you're thinking of i don't recall the term it's annoying me that i can't yeah i know what you're thinking of though it's the the idea is is that if you have to like we're going to cut down these trees to make way for a parking lot and someone says you can't cut down those trees i'm taking you to court to sue about it and they take you to court and before the first court date arrives you've already cut down all the trees

So then you go to court and it's like, well, we were here to sue to stop him from cutting down those trees, but he already cut down all the trees. That was a strategy that Robert Moses, to be clear, bad guy employed. So Casey is employing that strategy, which is, I know you said that I can't install colored lights here, but while you were gone, guess what? I already installed it. Excuse me. Excuse me. This is the classic man approach, which is not good for the record, but it's the classic man approach of you told me I couldn't do it over there.

But I did it over here. That's totally different. What is the distance? It is almost none. So there is actually took, I knew you were going to ask this. Steak driving? Steak driving, maybe?

So I'm putting in the show notes and in Slack for the two of you. I have already taken an image and it will be in the show notes, like I said. It's like a one and a half. Correct. So if you look, I'll paint you a word picture. So I don't know if I ever put a picture of this publicly up until just now, but there is a blank, if you will, wall plate, which is...

not quite eye level, but a little bit higher. That's where the RJ11 outlet used to be. And just recently, which kind of started this whole process, I had taken away the RJ11, the phone outlet, and put on just a blank because there was no need for the phone outlet anymore. If you look to the right, about a foot and a half and about six inches down. So what is that? Like a half a meter and I don't know,

in several centimeters down. There is a trio, a three gang set of switches. And this one is in the middle and it is not a great picture, but you can see that there are seven LEDs on the left-hand side.

of the middle switch. Oh my God. Going from the bottom, the bottom one is currently illuminated red, then it skips one. Then the next one is illuminated white, then it skips one. And the top one is illuminated blue. It looks much better in person than this picture would lead you to believe. I hope so.

Because it doesn't look stellar here, but it does work. And so there's a few different issues here. First of all, I installed it. What did you call it? Stake driving or whatever? I installed it on the Sly last night and

Aaron got home and we chatted for a little bit before we went up to bed. And I conspicuously and conveniently stood in front of the light switch while this was going on because the white switch or the white LED. This is a scalable strategy. You'll just constantly stand there from now on. No, the thing of it was I wanted her to notice it organically. And I prefer that she notice it when the lights were not illuminated. So sometime the next morning. Because I wanted to see what she would say and what she would do.

And coincidentally, I sent an email to Chris R. about this. And I said, oh, you know, I installed this while she was gone. And I'm expecting her to give me a huge, you know, WTF when she finally realizes it. To which Chris replied, which was so great. He said, that's great. I hope the commission accepts the fact that it was already installed as enough of a hassle to not require removal for lack of proper permits ahead of time, which is very well put. So this morning, I forget when it was this morning, but it was not very long after getting downstairs that

Perhaps, maybe it was when I was gone at Wegmans studying up for the episode today. It doesn't matter when, but at some point, I'd come in or come downstairs or whatever, and the kids were like, oh, dad. And I look up at Erin, and she's pointing at the light switch saying, what? What?

Is this, and the funny thing is there's so much more to the story that I haven't told her or you guys. Uh, so you didn't pick up on the important phrase that I mentioned when I read this earlier, I will repeat myself. Home seer HS hyphen WD 200 plus Z wave plus scene capable RGB wall dimmer.

I don't have any Z-Wave devices until just now. And let me tell you, if you want to think about what it would be like for the most nerdy nerd to design a home automation or smart home kind of thing, let me tell you all the good news about Z-Wave. It is so user hostile and so awful to interact with. So what I had to do was I knew that Chris was kind enough to send this to me. And genuinely, leaving aside Aaron's opinion, which I'll come back to in a minute,

I think this is the right solution to my problem because I have up to seven LEDs that I can use. They're super easy to control within Home Assistant once you get everything wired up, which we'll talk about here in just a second. But they're super easy to control. It works really well. It's a pretty good dimmer. The button feels pretty great and pretty decent. I wouldn't say it's great, but it's decent. And so on the surface, this is a win-win-win. It's not as much of an eyesore as my three LEDs dimmer,

through a wall plate would have been. In a lot of ways, I think this is the rightest answer, if it remains, which is yet to be seen. But to get this all to work, now I have Z-Wave in my world. And let me assure you, everyone,

You do not want Z wave in your world if you can help it. Because what I had to do was I needed to get like a $30 dongle, which I will try to remember to put in the show notes. Um,

$30 dongle that will allow you to communicate via Z-Wave. And so this is a USB-A dongle. I'm sure maybe the USB-C ones exist, but it was getting plugged into my Synology anyway. So I needed a USB-A dongle that was something like $30 that I got off Amazon. But then I need more containers because Home Assistant doesn't want to natively talk to

via Z-Wave, you need to get Z-Wave JSUI, which is a combination of

I believe it's Node, a Node interface to Z-Wave, and then a user interface on top of that. So I needed all of that. And a lot of people will then also add an MQTT broker, which I happen to already have in my collection of Docker containers that run my home. But I needed that. And so now I needed to get a dongle, and I needed to get that USB device passed through to Docker, which I had never done before, and I assumed would be ruinous, but actually it was

pretty straightforward, which I was very happy about. I then need to get this Docker container talking to that dongle. I need to get all that squared away. I need to then get the Docker container talking via WebSockets, my favorite thing in the world. Here we are. Everything is full circle, baby. I needed to get the Docker container to talk via WebSockets to the Home Assistant Docker container. It was a lot. Then...

I get everything installed physically and I am running against the clock because as everything is hanging out of my wall, you know, there's two switches that pre-existed in this new one that I'm trying to plug in, including tapping a new neutral wire, which I've done before, but all everything's hanging out of the wall. And I get a buzz on my watch that, Hey, uh, Aaron has just added a new calendar event to the shared calendar for book club for next month. Oh no, that means they're wrapping up.

She's got like 15 minutes drive to get here. And this wall, everything is just hanging out of it. So now I'm trying to like quick Carl, shove everything back in the wall, put the face plate back on and then act nonchalant when she gets home. Hopefully when this is all done and be like, Oh no, nothing's weird. What are you talking about?

Just walk away whistling. Right? Exactly. Exactly. I was able to do so. Thankfully, she ended up chatting with a friend who she gave a ride to, to book clubs. So that gave me a little spare time. But then I needed to connect this device to,

to this... I needed to connect it to my Z-Wave hub thing. This terminology, I'm sure, is wrong. But I needed to get the device, the dongle that acts as like the Z-Wave hub, and this light switch to talk to each other, which you would think would be easy, but...

But have I told you the good word about Z-Wave? Everything in Z-Wave makes no f***ing sense whatsoever. And so what I needed to do was I needed to put the device and the hub in inclusion mode. Because when I think I want to add a device, I think of the word inclusion.

It makes no damn sense. And then on top of that, apparently there's like 17 different flavors of Z-Wave, not unlike USB-C. And there's like a stapled on feature called smart setup or something like that. I already forgot what it was called, where you can scan a little QR code, smart start. You can scan a little QR code and it will allegedly make things faster or better. But I did that and then basically nothing happened.

happened. So it might've been user error, but who knows, but I'm trying to like figure all this out. And you know, Aaron is now about to walk in the door and thankfully, finally, after some help from a friend of mine, I was able to put the hub in inclusion mode. I was able to figure out how to get the switch to be in inclusion mode. Cause he basically got to do this dance on both sides. The hub will only stay in, in, in inclusion mode for 30 seconds at a time. It's such a mess, but I finally got them talking to each other. And once I did that, uh,

It all ended up being very straightforward to use in Home Assistant. The only problem I really had at that point was you needed to tell the switch, oh, I would like full control over the LEDs because by default it shows like how dim or bright the lights are. And once I found that switch, then everything was good to go.

so Aaron gets home, you know, we chit chat for a little bit. We go up to bed. I stand conspicuously in front of the light switches. We are, you know, she's grabbing this stuff to bring upstairs. And then, you know, today we, we get home, I get home from Wegmans and she says, what the hell is this? And, uh,

I think at this point she has resigned herself to the fact that it's already been done. Thank you, Robert Moses. And she's resigned herself to the fact that these LEDs are very physically small. They're like a couple of millimeters across. They are very small and not very obtrusive.

Whereas if I were left to my own devices and if I had used that RJ11 panel, they would have been quite a bit larger, quite a bit brighter, and quite a bit more intrusive and obtrusive and whatnot. So –

Well, you know, people had suggested, you joke, but people had suggested there's an easy fix to this problem. Just put three full side light bulbs and basically make a traffic light. And I thought about it briefly, but even for me, that was too much. But I got to tell you, right now, at least for the next five minutes, anyhow, and before somehow Z-Wave all falls apart...

it's all working pretty well. And because my wife is a damn angel and she knows that I won't just leave this well enough alone, I think she is mostly acquiesced to the fact that this is a pretty decent happy medium. And let me remind everyone that the steady state of this whole setup is all of those LEDs are off. The garage door is closed. There's no mail waiting and the car is not charging, which is the way it typically is in the house. All the LEDs are off, so nobody's any wiser.

But I am pretty happy with myself. And I think it worked out really well. And I have learned a whole lot, which is probably the most important thing at all.

But if you two saw this, you would absolutely hate it, by the way. I'm seeing it in the picture now. I already hate it. Yeah, me too. I'm on team Aaron on this one. Although on my side, I feel like you should just have a full-fledged screen with actual text on it that explains all the things you want instead of tiny lights that you know the meaning of. No, that's too obtrusive. When this tiny light is pink, that means your car is charging. But if it's green, that means the garage door is... It's like...

but now the mail comes, the blue light turns on. But only if the red light is on at the same time as the blue light comes on. That means Mikhail's coming home from school. Oh, I thought about that. I don't think there's an API for that, but I would totally do that. And if the lights start blinking, get out of the house.